Joseph Stalin’s war on farmers gets recycled and reimagined for the 21st century…and ESG rebrands as “transition investing.”

Let’s start with a recap of ESG, from Investopedia:

ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance. ESG investing refers to how companies score on these responsibility metrics and standards for potential investments. Environmental criteria gauge how a company safeguards the environment.

The ESG metric was a way for the private sector to “screen” investments (rack and stack how woke a company is) and “encourage companies to act responsibly” with “responsibility” being how religiously the company embraced the agenda of the globalist left—ESG as a buzzword really came to mainstream recognition after being vigorously promoted and spoken about by Larry Fink of BlackRock.

Naturally, this garnered protest, enough so that the movement has been forced into abandoning the term ESG, now opting to use “transition investing” instead. From Kevin Killough’s new report at Just the News:

BlackRock began renaming environmental, social and governance (ESG) earlier this year. It’s now calling it ‘transition investing.’

The company recently updated its climate and decarbonization stewardship guidelines. The document makes no mention of ESG, but it shows in many ways, the world’s largest investment manager with $10 trillion in assets under management is still pursuing many of the same goals.

For a little context, in March of this year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission finalized new “climate disclosure” rules which included language from BlackRock’s own climate “guidelines” document, implementing what BlackRock and the SEC call “Scope 1” and “Scope 2” emissions reporting. From the SEC “Fact Sheet” on the new climate rule:

Further, to facilitate investors’ assessment of certain climate-related risks, the final rules require disclosure of Scope 1 and/or Scope 2 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions….

Killough also reports that what didn’t make it into the final rule (for now) was “Scope 3” emissions reporting; and like any and all committed leftists with political power, the biggest target appears to be the farmers:

Scope 1 emissions are direct greenhouse (GHG) emissions that occur from sources that are controlled or owned by the company, and Scope 2 emissions are indirect GHG emissions associated with the purchase of electricity, steam, heat, or cooling.

Scope 3 are those emissions along the entire supply chain that indirectly impact its products or services. For example, if a bank provided agricultural loans, Scope 3 emissions might include the emissions from a farming operation that receives a loan from that bank. To comply with such standards, a bank might require farmers that receive loans to implement ‘sustainability’ initiatives to lower the farm’s emissions.

What might “sustainability initiatives” for farmers look like? Gee, I don’t know…

In other news, here’s this from last year:

Ireland Proposes Culling 200,000 Cows to Help Meet Climate Goals, Farmers Push Back

And this:

Irish farmers say they will be forced to cull cows to meet climate targets

Government plan to cut agriculture emissions by 25% by 2030 will drive many farms into bankruptcy, say critics[.]

Not to mention, the food supply would be severely impacted, driving prices even higher; this is just one nation, now imagine a coordinated global agenda.

Would farmers be forced to buy battery-powered farm equipment? Prohibited from using oil or gas for fuel? Mandated to plant GMO seed exclusively and forced to use Big Pharma’s pesticides and herbicides? Could “sustainability” mean land “reforms” for the sake of “reparations” and “justice?”

Yes, to all of the above, because nothing is out of the question for the power-hungry leftist enamored with their cult of control and death.

There’s a war on farmers, because there’s a war on food. (Crickets and mealworms, anyone?) Why, though? Because controlling the food means controlling the people. Now where have we seen this before?

Stalin’s Soviet Union… Chairman Mao’s China… Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe… Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge... Castro’s Cuba (a situation that exists to this day)... oh and of course, the America of progressive Democrats.

Image: Public domain.