The place to determine climate policy is in legislatures, not C-suites, however much Kerry and other climate fundamentalists might dislike it.
To claim that somebody is (or is not) on the “right side of history” is an argument resting on the belief, popularized by Karl Marx and other determinists both before and after him, that history moves in a certain pre-ordained course. It doesn’t. History zigs and zags. It lurches in one direction, and then another. It has no goals, no purpose, no destination, no sense of right and wrong. Those who talk about its “right side” have (for the most part) either run out of rational arguments or are trying to convince their audience that, to borrow a phrase, resistance is futile.
The Financial Times reports that, criticizing money managers who have been turning away from climate-policy groupings such as Climate Action 100+ (I wrote about this topic in a recent Capital Letter), John Kerry had this to say:
Anyone who is pulling away today is turning away from the science and responding to political and ideological pressure that is not based on facts, not based on science. . . . They’re not in my judgment acting on the right side of history.
What these asset managers are doing is rediscovering their obligation to focus solely on generating financial return for their clients (unless those clients have specified otherwise), and that’s how it should be. Kerry maintains that there is “not one scientific fact that suggests that [investors] should be pulling back at this moment in time,” a comment that shows how little he understands (or pretends not to understand) about financial markets. Investors must pay attention to financial facts and market facts as well as scientific facts, and the three do not always coincide.
Kerry asserts that “we” (whoever “we” may be) “need these [asset management] companies to be acting on the right side of history. We need them to be helping lead the charge in the way that they were.” Well, that might be what Kerry’s “we” needs, but that will not necessarily be true of many of those companies’ clients. They may well prefer that the asset managers they have hired concentrate on their day jobs — making them money.
Using investment companies — and the influence that they wield as a result of managing (mostly) other people’s savings — to advance climate policy in the way that Kerry advocates is a way of bypassing democracy. As such, it is profoundly political. That this effort is now facing opposition from democratically elected politicians is not a politicization of the investment process, but an attempt to depoliticize it. It was long overdue.
Kerry refers indignantly to the “the science” (it never seems to be just “science”), but however much the science of climate change may be settled, the best policy response to it most certainly is not. The place to determine climate policy is in legislatures, not C-suites, however much Kerry and other climate fundamentalists might dislike it.