Followers of our new CTUP report on proxy voting by large financial investment firms (www.PensionPolitics.com) know that many of these companies managing trillions of dollars are biased toward ESG and climate change craziness.

We were pleased to see that at the latest JP Morgan shareholder meeting, CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon was asked by Craig Rucker of CFACT, a fact-finding group on environmental issues, why the bank is directing so much of their client’s money into low-return climate change investments. Here is the brief interchange and it’s a classic:

Rucker: “JPMorgan Chase’s annual ESG report says that it has a $2.5 trillion sustainable development target. What exactly is this targeting, and wouldn’t all that money be better spent improving good returns for shareholders rather than squandered on showcasing woke priorities?”

Dimon: “Well you’re completely wrong. Almost all of that is positive business, meaning that it’s financing solar, it’s financing wind, it’s financing grids, it’s financing R&D, it’s financing battery plants, it’s financing car companies, it’s financing a huge amount of companies who are doing a great job of reducing the CO2 and clean carbon capture. It’s financing the agricultural companies. It’s all of that, It’s all almost for profit.”

CFACT’s Craig Rucker schools… Jamie Dimon

This is incredibly disingenuous. The only reason most solar and wind and battery plants have any “profit” — by their own acknowledgment — is that the government subsidizes them in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The social benefit is close to zero because even if the United States were to reduce our carbon footprint to zero – an economically ruinous course – it wouldn’t matter because of China’s massive pollution levels.