Over the past decade, increasingly more companies have adopted environmental, social, and governance metrics. ESG is a kind of social credit scoring system that is designed to move the entire U.S. economy further to the left, by forcing businesses to promote social justice and environmental causes, like battling climate change.
Over the past summer, my team of researchers at The Heartland Institute investigated the ESG policy platform for nearly all of the presidential candidates, from Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump to Nikki Haley and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They also investigated past statements made about ESG and voting records . In cases where presidential candidates hadn’t said much about ESG in the past, I or members of my team reached out to the candidates directly to request more information.
The resulting study is the most in-depth ESG review of the presidential candidates ever made. While some of the findings likely won’t shock readers interested in this important topic, others will almost certainly come as a surprise. The following is a quick overview of the results. If you’re interested in reading the full report, you can find it here.
Bottom of the Barrell The two candidates with the lowest scores are Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Joe Biden . To his credit, Kennedy has been very critical of some of the biggest supporters of ESG on Wall Street, including Blackrock, as well as many large corporations who use ESG as a way of virtue signaling. But Kennedy’s policy platform is full of regulations and environmental policies designed to expand the size and influence of government.