On Wednesday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) revealed that he would be taking steps to ban the influence of the globalist concept of “environmental, social, and corporate governance” (ESG) from Florida’s institutions.
Fox News reports that DeSantis’ new plans focus particularly on the Florida State Pension System, which will now implement a “flat ban” on incorporating the ESG demands into its investments. DeSantis said in an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that those who try to force ESG guidance onto others, ostensibly in the name of “environmentalism” and fighting alleged “global warming,” often like to “wiggle around” certain definitions and change the meaning of certain words to achieve their goals.
“It’s basically a way for them to do politics,” said DeSantis. “So we’re going to make sure that that fiduciary duty is defined very clearly and that they stick to that. We also want to provide protections for people in the financial marketplace from being discriminated against based on ideology.”
DeSantis acknowledged that some Wall Street companies are already forcing such politics into their investments, and that this will lead to a direct clash between environmental standards and the company’s fiduciary duties.
“They will require ESG. The companies themselves will do it,” DeSantis continued. “I think there’s a couple of reasons. I mean, I do think part of this is there’s woke employees in these companies and the inmates have basically run the asylum. So some of the CEOs bend to that.”
But, DeSantis warned, a widespread implementation of ESG would inevitably lead to chaos in the American economy and society as a whole, since it would “take power away from the American people and lodge it into these international corporate titans.”
“And that’s not, I think, what our Founding Fathers ever intended,” DeSantis concluded.
Other countries around the world have attempted to implement ESG rules on a large scale, often to severe political backlash. In Sri Lanka, ESG-encouraged bans on chemical fertilizers led to widespread shortages and economic instability, which eventually culminated in President Gotabaya Rajapaksa being forced to flee the presidential palace after protesters began storming the capital city of Colombo.
In the Netherlands, after Prime Minister Mark Rutte imposed similar restrictions on the nation’s agriculture sector – the second-largest exporter of food in the world, only behind the U.S. – mass protests saw farmers repeatedly blocking roads with their farming equipment, leading to even greater instability in the nation’s infrastructure.