Business
ESG Is Collapsing And Net Zero Is Going With It

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By David Blackmon
The chances of achieving the goal of net-zero by 2050 are basically net zero
Just a few years ago, ESG was all the rage in the banking and investing community as globalist governments in the western world focused on a failing attempt to subsidize an energy transition into reality. The strategy was to try to strangle fossil fuel industries by denying them funding for major projects, with major ESG-focused institutional investors like BlackRock and State Street, and big banks like J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs leveraging their control of trillions of dollars in capital to lead the cause.
But a funny thing happened on the way to a green Nirvana: It turned out that the chosen rent-seeking industries — wind, solar and electric vehicles — are not the nifty plug-and-play solutions they had been cracked up to be.
Even worse, the advancement of new technologies and increased mining of cryptocurrencies created enormous new demand for electricity, resulting in heavy new demand for finding new sources of fossil fuels to keep the grid running and people moving around in reliable cars.
In other words, reality butted into the green narrative, collapsing the foundations of the ESG movement. The laws of physics, thermodynamics and unanticipated consequences remain laws, not mere suggestions.
Making matters worse for the ESG giants, Texas and other states passed laws disallowing any of these firms who use ESG principles to discriminate against their important oil, gas and coal industries from investing in massive state-governed funds. BlackRock and others were hit with sanctions by Texas in 2023. More recently, Texas and 10 other states sued Blackrock and other big investment houses for allegedly violating anti-trust laws.
As the foundations of the ESG movement collapse, so are some of the institutions that sprang up around it. The United Nations created one such institution, the “Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative,” whose participants maintain pledges to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and adhere to detailed plans to reach that goal.
The problem with that is there is now a growing consensus that a) the forced march to a green energy transition isn’t working and worse, that it can’t work, and b) the chances of achieving the goal of net-zero by 2050 are basically net zero. There is also a rising consensus among energy companies of a pressing need to prioritize matters of energy security over nebulous emissions reduction goals that most often constitute poor deployments of capital. Even as the Biden administration has ramped up regulations and subsidies to try to force its transition, big players like ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell have all redirected larger percentages of their capital budgets away from investments in carbon reduction projects back into their core oil-and-gas businesses.
The result of this confluence of factors and events has been a recent rush by big U.S. banks and investment houses away from this UN-run alliance. In just the last two weeks, the parade away from net zero was led by major banks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and, most recently, JP Morgan. On Thursday, the New York Post reported that both BlackRock and State Street, a pair of investment firms who control trillions of investor dollars (BlackRock alone controls more than $10 trillion) are on the brink of joining the flood away from this increasingly toxic philosophy.
In June, 2023, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink made big news when told an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Aspen, Colorado that he is “ashamed of being part of this [ESG] conversation.” He almost immediately backed away from that comment, restating his dedication to what he called “conscientious capitalism.” The takeaway for most observers was that Fink might stop using the term ESG in his internal and external communications but would keep right on engaging in his discriminatory practices while using a different narrative to talk about it.
But this week’s news about BlackRock and the other big firms feels different. Much has taken place in the energy space over the last 18 months, none of it positive for the energy transition or the net-zero fantasy. Perhaps all these big banks and investment funds are awakening to the reality that it will take far more than devising a new way of talking about the same old nonsense concepts to repair the damage that has already been done to the world’s energy system.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Business
‘The DNA Of Our Foreign Policy’: How USAID Hid Behind Humanitarianism To Export Radical Left-Wing Priorities Abroad

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Thomas English
Behind the veil of humanitarian aid, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) doled out billions in taxpayer dollars to engage in left-wing social engineering abroad — from rampant LGBT advocacy to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and tech censorship.
President John F. Kennedy established USAID in 1961 to, in his words, “provide generously of our skills, and our capital and our food to assist the peoples of the less-developed nations to reach their goals in freedom.” The agency, though, has reinterpreted Kennedy’s mission statement to mean that Ecuador suffers from a lack of drag shows, that Peruvian comic books are too light on transgender representation, that the Serbian workplace is insufficiently welcoming to the homosexual community — while also offering social media platforms a host of creative tactics to suppress those who disagree with USAID’s social agenda.
“It’s probably one out of every three grants is totally insane left-wing nonsense … USAID has always been somewhat left, but when the Biden administration started, you can clearly see a huge uptick in spending,” Parker Thayer, who researches federal spending at Capital Research Center, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The amount of lunatic, fringe grants goes up dramatically. For example, if you go to USAspending[.gov] and search for the keyword ‘transgender,’ the graph is basically a vertical line when you hit 2021. It’s kind of remarkable.”
He also emphasized his discovery of a $13 million grant for an Arabic-language translation of “Sesame Street,” calling it “something else, man.”
Other programs include a $2 million grant for funding sex-change procedures in Guatemala, $500,000 for LGBT inclusion in Serbian workplaces, $70,000 for a DEI-themed musical in Ireland, a transgender clinic in Vietnam, a similar clinic in India, $46,000 in HIV care for transgender South Africans, $1.5 million more for South African children to “learn through play,” $20,000 Bulgarians to enjoy a vaguely-defined “LGBT-related event” — programs for which former USAID Administrator Samantha Power said “a big pot of money” wasn’t enough.
These and other programs were the vehicle through which Power went about “working LGBT rights into the DNA of our foreign policy,” a priority she emphasized to Harvard students in 2015 during her tenure as U.S. Ambassador to the United States.
“One of the most common complaints you will get if you go to embassies around the world — from State Department officials and ambassadors and the like — is that USAID is not only not cooperative; they undermine the work that we’re doing in that country,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who assumed control over USAID on Monday, said. He condemned the agency’s more questionable programs as not only a waste of taxpayer dollars, but a diplomatic liability.
“They are supporting programs that upset the host government for whom we’re trying to work with on a broader scale,” he said.
Beyond pro-LGBT funding, former President Joe Biden’s USAID offered social media platforms a “disinformation primer,” a 100-page document providing guidance for countering “disinformation” through increased fact-checking and censorship — policies it said would make platforms more “democratically accountable.”
The document credits some of its content suppression tactics to the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a now-defunct agency that operated under the State Department. To “counter disinformation,” GEC recommended ginning up “moral outrage” against content that “violates [the] sacred value” of what it considers “the truth.”
Biden seemed to heed GEC’s guidance on moral outrage during the height of the pandemic in 2021, accusing Facebook of “killing people” by insufficiently censoring anti-vaccine content on the platform. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recalled during his Jan. 10 appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience” an instance when the Biden administration pressured him to censor a satirical meme about vaccine side effects. Biden later walked back his accusation against Facebook in an interview with CNN.
The USAID-funded primer also recommended “advertiser outreach,” a strategy that would financially throttle agency-disfavored informational outlets by informing advertisers of potential damage to brand reputation.
“[Advertisers] inadvertently are funding and amplifying platforms that disinform. Thus, cutting this financial support found in the ad-tech space would obstruct disinformation actors from spreading messaging online,” the Disinformation Primer reads. “Efforts have been made to inform advertisers of their risks, such as the threat to brand safety by being placed next to objectionable content.”
The document further characterized the legacy media’s recent decline “leading to a loss of information integrity,” which thereby justifies USAID’s efforts to combat those “casting doubt on media.”
“It leads to a loss of information integrity. Online news platforms have disrupted the traditional media landscape. Government officials and journalists are not the sole information gatekeepers anymore … Because traditional information systems are failing, some opinion leaders are casting doubt on media, which, in turn, impacts USAID programming and funding choices,” the document continued.
USAID also faced intense congressional scrutiny in 2023 after allegations emerged that its PREDICT program and subsequent grants to EcoHealth Alliance potentially funneled U.S. taxpayer funds into gain-of-function coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — which raised questions about USAID’s possible role in contributing to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul complained that USAID refused to hand over documents pertaining to the allegations and the agency’s funding habits.
“The response I got from your agency was: ‘USAID will not be providing any documents at this time.’ They’re just unwilling to give documents on scientific grant proposals — we’re paying for it, they’re asking for $745 million more in money. We get no response,” Rand said. “We’re not asking for classified information. We’re not asking for anything unusual. 20 million people died around the world … and you won’t give us the basic information about what grants you’re funding — should we be funding the Academy of Military Medical Research in China?”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed Rand’s transparency concerns after announcing he was the USAID’s new acting director Monday, calling the agency “completely uncooperative.”
“They’re one of the most suspicious federal agencies that exists,” Thayer told the DCNF, suggesting the agency’s reputation for being opaque is justified. “It’s kind of a character trait for USAID to be less than transparent.”
Thayer explained that, in his research, USAID is selective in its transparency. The grants he called “complete nonsense,” such as the “Sesame Street” translation, “are very specific about what they’re doing. And the ones that are vaguely humanitarian-sounding are usually written like someone put a sociology textbook through a word randomizer then just took whatever it spat out and put it on the page. They are so full of jargon words that they’re basically incomprehensible, even to people who understand what the jargon words are supposed to mean.”
“I got $1.1 million for a study of youth rural migration in Morocco,” he added. “I literally — I cannot help you in understanding what that could possibly mean. I have no idea what that means.”
Elon Musk, the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), claimed that he and President Donald Trump agreed to shutter the agency entirely during an X Spaces conversation early Monday morning. Rubio emphasized in a Tuesday interview with Fox News that he does not intend to “get rid of foreign aid,” but is considering whether USAID ought to be housed under State Department or remain an autonomous agency.
“This is not about getting rid of foreign aid,” Rubio said. “There are things we do through USAID that we should continue to do, that make sense. And we’ll have to decide: Is that better through the State Department, or is that better through a reformed USAID? That’s the process we’re working through … but they’re completely uncooperative. We had no choice but to take dramatic steps to bring this thing under control.”
Business
Things Are Going From Bad To Worse For The Permanent Bureaucratic State

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Morgan Murphy
Welcome to the D.C. Thunderdome.
Thanks to DOGE and four wunderkind coders in Treasury’s basement, Americans learned this week that their government sent millions to fund a “DEI musical” in Ireland, a “transgender comic book” in Peru, electric vehicles in Vietnam, and an Anthony Fauci exhibit at the NIH Museum.
Faster than Ludicrous+ mode on a Tesla, the Trump admin’s new code bros are sifting through the financial ledger of America’s spending. Just 20 days in office and the new administration has saved the American taxpayer billions of dollars — exactly what Trump promised on the campaign trail. And as the president’s third week unfolded, news worsened for Democrats and America’s permanent bureaucratic state.
It seems the permanent bureaucracy borrowed the U.S.S.R.’s media playbook, funneling millions to left-wing news organizations such as The New York Times, Politico and Reuters. Evidently it wasn’t enough that a Republican in the newsrooms of our state-run media outlets, PBS and NPR, is rarer than a cogent sentence from Kamala.
Democrats, meanwhile, have decided that this Deathstar boondoggle of government spending at its worst is the hill they want to die on. Conservatives watched with glee as Rep. Maxine Waters, Sen. Chuck Schumer, et al, led the Charge of the Lightweight Brigade to USAID’s former headquarters. Cue dopey chant: “wE Will wiN!” (2025 update—no, you didn’t).
Before all the spending porn (as the great Louisiana wag, Senator John Kennedy dubbed it), Democrats’ opinion polls were in the gutter, with a disapproval rating of 57%.
Do the Dems think rushing to the barricades to defend out-of-control spending will earn them the respect and admiration of the American public? Expect their approval ratings to continue to sink like the Hindentanic.
USAID is just the beginning.
Wait until DOGE bites into the Department of Defense, which has never passed an audit.
In 2019 while on reserve duty at the Pentagon, I was thrown into yet another meeting chockablock with PowerPoint slides, so beloved by our military. This particular meeting was to cover the results of a service-wide audit. To summarize about 187 slides and 2 hours: we failed.
All the top brass in the room somberly listened to the auditors describe $5 billion worth of missing aircraft engines, leases for buildings and land that did not exist, accounting systems closer in age to the abacus than a modern spreadsheet, and miles of missing debits and credits.
As the most junior officer in the room, I kept quiet but closely studied the faces of my superiors. They too, kept quiet, only murmuring “next slide” as disaster after financial disaster was flashed across the screens.
My inner fiscal hawk prayed that the service chief would flip the table over and channel Col. Nathan “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH” Jessep. But he remained impassive and the meeting dissolved with a whimper and no plans for reform.
That night leaving D.C., I happened to bump into a very senior republican senator at Reagan National Airport and thought it my civic duty to share the (unclassified) events of earlier in the day. I told the venerable appropriator that the audit had revealed billions in waste, fraud, and abuse, and even suggested he should make a request to see the failed audit for himself.
(In the hindsight afforded by three years working in the U.S. Senate, I now know how utterly naive this moment was).
He paused a moment, then said, “Well, you know how these things are. That’s Washington for you.”
I felt sick at the time, which is likely the same feeling many Americans are having this week as they see the grift laid bare in our nation’s capital.
But the good news is that Trump and his DOGE team have restored the hope that government might be right-sized and returned to solid financial footing.
On Friday, when he was asked about the job Elon Musk is doing, the President remarked, “I think we’re going to be very close to balancing budgets for the first time for many years.”
What a tantalizing prospect — a government that spends within its means may truly bring about the golden age of America promised in the president’s inaugural address.
Morgan Murphy is military thought leader, former press secretary to the Secretary of Defense and national security advisor in the U.S. Senate.
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