September 22, 2022 American Thought Leaders Live chat

ESG Could ‘Become Part of Our Credit Scores’: W.Va. State Treasurer Riley Moore on Ending Contracts With Companies Adopting ESG

JAN JEKIELEK
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“So, there’s a big game kind of going on here, but they’re making a killing off of these ESG products. And why are they able to do that? Well, they’re charging you a little bit more to make you feel better and you’re doing something about the environment. … But they’re raking it in.”

ESG stands for “environmental, social, and governance”: a collection of corporate performance criteria that exist outside of fiduciary responsibility. Money managers such as BlackRock, arguably ESG’s biggest champion, are increasingly using them to determine investment. Riley Moore, treasurer of the state of West Virginia, sees ESG as a destructive force. He is leading a movement of state governments that are terminating contracts with companies that adopt ESG policies, and blocking them from bidding on them.

“For us here in West Virginia, it is something that would ultimately destroy our economy, our people, and our way of life,” Moore says.

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Jan Jekielek:

Riley Moore. Such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Riley Moore:

Thank you so much for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:

So you’re the State Treasurer in West Virginia, and your work has come to my attention because you’re taking a unique or leading approach in terms of how you deal with ESG policy coming in from large companies that function within West Virginia. So let’s talk about this.

Mr. Moore:

ESG is, to me, one of the scariest movements that we have going on in this country, and for us here in West Virginia, obviously, it is something that would ultimately destroy our economy, our people and our way of life. ESG, environment, social, governance standards that are out there, for us, the E is the most near term immediate threat because it’s the rapid transition to green energy. We are a fossil fuel State in West Virginia. And what they’re doing, it’s happening across all facets of the financial services sector. So the asset managers, the rating agencies, the banks, they’re all coordinated in this effort.

So for instance, you have rating agencies that are giving ESG scores out to states and municipalities as it relates to their environment, social standards and governance. You have banks that have adopted ESG policies that have prohibitions on lending to the fossil fuel industry, coal, gas, and oil. You have the asset managers that are pushing capital away from these very important industries like coal, gas, and oil that are also espousing these very left wing social policies and standards such as diversity, equity, and inclusion, for instance.

But it really boils down to, the thrust here, where they’re able to make their mark is in the energy space because of this coercion of capital that they’re pushing through their ESG ratings, standards and guidelines for investment. So it is something that is affecting everybody in this country, by the way. It’s like, well, who’s part of this? Everybody. Your 401k, your pension plan, they’re using your money to push their goals, and people need to wake up to this and figure out exactly what they’re invested in, whether it’s State Street, or Vanguard or BlackRock. If you’re in one of those funds, you’re likely helping fund this entire ESG movement

Mr. Jekielek:

On the surface, ESG sounds attractive. As if there’s these greedy capitalists that will focus everything on just making money, the environment be damned, the social realities be damned, governance be damned. So why not have these guidelines to benevolently try to get corporations to do good?

Mr. Moore:

So what we have here really is a collusion of corporate power and left wing ideology that has manifested itself in the form of ESG. So ESG is, at the end of the day, these publicly traded companies have a duty to their shareholders, but they’re not talking about shareholders now, they’re talking about stakeholders; disparate groups and organizations that somehow have some influence over the way that they’re going to invest their dollars. The end of the day, they’re going to end up having some level of monopolistic power in the ability to shape society as it relates to the moral and policy questions of this country through the power of their capital.

You got to remember, State Street, Vanguard and BlackRock combined have $20 trillion assets under management that’s larger than the GDP of the entire United States, larger than anybody else in the world. More money than anybody. And so sure, we want the environment clean and stand up for human rights surely sounds like a nice thing, but shouldn’t that be things that are left to policy makers to debate? Should it not… Look, we live in a constitutional republic here in the United States, so are we going to cede our ability to solve these problems at the ballot box, or are we going to allow a bunch of corporate dollar guards to make these decisions for us? Now, I think it should certainly be the former, not the latter, and that’s why I’m in this fight.

Mr. Jekielek:

So there’s one example that just comes to my mind, which maybe is illustrative to some extent, and that is Tesla. When Elon Musk gets involved in buying Twitter, starts talking about reducing censorship on Twitter creates a firestorm. A lot of people… A lot of the Twitter staff are panicking for some reason, and around the same time, Tesla’s ESG score somehow drops as I understand it.

Mr. Moore:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

So did you notice that? What do you make of that?

Mr. Moore:

Of course, I noticed it. And so S&P dropped them from their S&P/ESG/ETF that they had out there. Tesla’s out, Exxon’s still in. ExxonMobil apparently that’s okay. If you don’t think this is political, it’s very obviously political. Now ExxonMobil, though by background, just people need to understand, BlackRock is a major shareholder in ExxonMobil. Last year they were able to push a vote on the board that they voted to reduce oil production by 20 percent last year and increase investment in green energy by 20 percent.

Certainly probably could have used that oil production right about now as we’re in an energy crisis, which is an energy crisis of their making as they’ve diverted and coerced capital away from investment in the fossil fuel industry. But that is why you know that this is not real. To take Tesla off of the S&P/ESG/ETF, what are we talking about here? So you know it’s political, it’s driven by political agendas, and that was a very, very clear example there as it relates to Tesla.

Mr. Jekielek:

Effectively, it allows these massive, admittedly corporate players to exercise power outside of the bounds of their fiduciary responsibility. Would you describe it that way?

Mr. Moore:

Oh yes, I’d certainly describe it that way. Look, we have these things… I’ll give you an example. In pension funds that are called pecuniary factors. Risk and return, those are the things that they should solely be taking under consideration. But it’s not, they have things such as social risk and environmental risk. And people need to ask the question at the end of the day, how do greenhouse gas emissions affect the maximization of return on someone’s pension plan for that beneficiary? How do greenhouse gas emissions affect the quarters of a given company? It doesn’t at the end of the day. That’s just not a real thing. So what we need here is for the free market to remain free, we need people to solely focus on the maximization returns for their shareholders, for pension plan beneficiaries here and sweep this nonsense out of the way because this is going… This is a huge distortion in the marketplace, and we’re all going to end up paying the price on this down the road.

Mr. Jekielek:

I’m just also recalling, I believe that BlackRock is a major stakeholder in PetroChina, and it seems like it’s not applying those similar approaches as is applying to Exxon to PetroChina. Are you aware of this?

Mr. Moore:

Oh yeah, absolutely. And what you have going on right now, China’s building 55 brand new coal-fired power plants. We haven’t built a new coal-fired power plant in this country since the 1970s. So it’s okay in China. It’s bad here in the United States. And don’t forget the ESG and the S, social where we talk about human rights and things of that nature, they have slave labor going on over there in China right now. They have Uyghurs in concentration camps, but apparently that’s not a problem when it’s in China. By the way, BlackRock is the only wholly owned subsidiary that is not have an ownership stake within as part of the Chinese government. So I guess the question is at the end of the day for these American companies, what’s your duty? What’s your patriotism? What about your people? What about the country that made you so powerful? Where’s your sense of duty and patriotism to them? Obviously it’s not. It’s towards their globalist, left wing ideology and their agenda and the maximization of their influence in the world in politics.

Mr. Jekielek:

So I believe that you described this as a Trojan Horse?

Mr. Moore:

Yes, I did. And it’s a Trojan Horse because once you start to agree to some of these standards, like, “Oh yeah, climate change, it’s a terrible thing. We need to do something about climate change, environment.” Don’t forget, there’s the S and the G in there, and this is where you get into the very, very deep left wing social policies; diversity, equity, and inclusion in the G—that’s the governance side of it. So instead of it being decisions being made, who gets on a board, who’s the head of a corporation, it comes down to immutable characteristics such as people’s skin color and things like. Look, this United States, this is meritocracy. So if you buy into that first part of it, the E, let’s do something about the climate, you’re buying the other parts, the S and the G. You’re buying into corporations paying for people to be flown into other states in America to be able to get abortion services. You’re buying into this transgender ideology, you’re buying into the whole thing. And that’s why the E in ESG is really the Trojan horse.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes. That’s fascinating. And basically you’re saying that the stakeholders now, because it’s not shareholder capitalism, it’s stakeholder capitalism. The stakeholders become these ideological organizations that are pushing these radical left or progressive values.

Mr. Moore:

I will use their own words. When I spoke with them, when they were appealing my decision to put them on the restricted financial institution list in West Virginia that barred them from all state contracts, five of the largest ones in the world, I said… They’re going through all of this social risk, climate risk, this and that and they kept talking about stakeholders. And so at the end of it, I asked, “I’ve not heard you mention shareholders one time.” They’re like, “Well, they’re one of the stakeholders. They’re important stakeholder, but they’re one of the stakeholders.” Their sole fiduciary duty is to the shareholders, not these outside organizations that are the stakeholders. The stakeholder capitalism is a total distortion to the free market, and it’s something that needs to be stopped.

Mr. Jekielek:

Now, what do you make of the fact that these, let’s call them the stakeholders, the progressive stakeholders, are also disproportionately embedded in the administrative state? There’s a lot of concern about the fact that there’s this deep embedding in the corporate world, especially these giant corporations, or at least an alignment around values and at the same time in the administrative state. What do you make of that?

Mr. Moore:

Well, yeah, look, this has been a long road for the left to be able to take over. They’d always been in the administrative state, but have become much more vocal and active. You saw President Trump trying his best and he did a very great job, but trying his best to dismantle aspects of the administrative state in Washington, DC. But at the end of the day, they’re so embedded. Obviously we’re going to need some level of reform, but these same types of civil servants that live in the administrative state, the deep state, are the ones that are also colluding with these corporate organizations that are out there in terms of their goals around ESG.

Now, they have been working for decades to be able to get their own people onto the various different publicly traded companies, onto their boards to be able to influence the way that they do business, but more importantly, to be able to push their political agenda. And unfortunately, they have been successful in that. But that is why I am doing what I am doing in West Virginia to be able to push back against this and say, “Enough is enough.”

Mr. Jekielek:

So let’s talk about that. Okay. You’ve done a number of unprecedented things in this country, certainly in your state. One of them is this restricted financial institution’s list that you were just speaking about moments ago and there’s five companies on that. So first of all, what are the criteria to get on the list? And second of all, what does it really mean for those companies?

Mr. Moore:

Yes. So the criteria is that they have a prohibition on doing business with the fossil fuel industry. Sometimes this could be many times a lending prohibition. For instance, some of them had a prohibition on financing of thermal coal, coal mining, coal-fired power plants, et cetera, expansion of coal mining activities. Secondarily, they’ll have a prohibition on natural gas pipeline construction, oil exploration in certain parts of the country. That is a boycott of the fossil fuel industry. If they are boycotting the fossil fuel industry, they will get put on that list because it’s a conflict of interest for us to be doing business with financial institutions and handing them tax dollars when they’re trying to diminish those dollars at the exact same time, through their ESG activities. So to avoid that conflict of interest, we put them on the list.

And to answer your second question, when they’re on the list, it means if they have a contract with us, that contract is terminated and they will not have the ability to bid on any contracts in the State of West Virginia moving forward until they lift their boycott. So we put BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo on the restricted financial institutions list. Those were the institutions that we were authorized to do business with or currently did business with in the state, but we’re certainly going to be looking to see what other ones are out there.

Now, I sent out six letters, but I only put five on, and this is the interesting part. We put five on because US Bank reversed their policy, they lifted their prohibition on lending to the fossil fuel industry. Might be in part because they have a rather large contract with them, but they did that. That’s how we’re going to win here. That’s how we’re going to win. And this is no small win. US Bank is the fifth largest bank assets under management in the country, and then they went on to win contracts in South Carolina and then they won one in Missouri as well. We just need to continue to push back on this. All we want is these guys to get back to neutral, focus on profits and stop playing politics.

Mr. Jekielek:

So couldn’t a bank officially reverse the policy but unofficially continue the policy full force?

Mr. Moore:

Well, to obviously borrow the overused phrase, trust but verify. Certainly that is what we are going to do here. They have certified to us in writing that they have done this, but we’re not going to just take folks on by their word. We’re certainly going to be looking out there to ensure that they’re doing that. Now, I’ll tell you this, after I put this list out, we got a flood of requests and interest and proposals from various financial institutions from all over the country that wanted to pick up this business that said, “We’re not involved in this and we want to do business with you.” And secondarily, Texas has put out their list, then on top of that, we have Tennessee, Kentucky, and Oklahoma, they’ve passed their legislation, their list will come out likely next year, and I think we’ll see as many as 12 states around the country adopting the same or similar type of legislation in the next legislative sessions.

Mr. Jekielek:

And are all these states, states that are fossil fuel rich? Is this the…

Mr. Moore:

No, not all of them. Not all of them are. We have some real patriots out there that just see this as a huge problem as it relates to energy prices in this country, which obviously we are in an energy crisis. I started a coalition last year and led a letter with 15 other states from around the country, and a lot of those states that are adopting these types of policies are the ones that were in my coalition. And look, we’re going to keep pushing on this full force because we need to save our country, save our energy independence, and also save our free market.

Mr. Jekielek:

So some, let’s say more libertarian types might say, “Well, why are you interfering with what these companies want to do? These are independent companies. They can do what they want to do. You as a government guy shouldn’t be telling them what values they should or should not have.”

Mr. Moore:

Oh, yes, certainly. Look, they can have any values that they want, but if they have these standards that are hurting our industries, we’re not going to do business with them. You have to remember here, I’m a market participant in this, I’m not a regulator. I’m not the U.S. Treasury and I’m not the SEC, I’m the little old State of West Virginia and what I am doing is speaking on behalf of the taxpayers of my state, my constituents. And so this is a free market solution. I’m not the distortion in the marketplace—unfortunately, they are.

Mr. Jekielek:

We have to go back to talking about BlackRock a bit here, because you’ve shifted your board of treasury investments away. So tell me about this whole scenario and how it came about.

Mr. Moore:

Yes, so first in January under my predecessor, he had contracted with BlackRock as our liquidity fund. We had an inflow and outflow about one and a half billion dollars annually with BlackRock and that liquidity fund. And I terminated it, obviously due to their stance on the fossil fuel industry, the coercion of capital that they’ve been undertaking in terms of trying to minimize investments in those very, very important industries, they have a standard as it relates to companies they’ll invest in and their exposure to thermal coal.

Secondarily, it’s obvious that they’re one of the most destructive forces out there as it relates to moving jobs over to China and investment in China who have been taking our jobs in the State of West Virginia now for decades. We used to be a huge steel state, we made a lot of steel in West Virginia. And for me, and by the way, it’s been rumored that there’s an involvement in terms of investment with them with the Chinese military. There’s so many conflicts of interest here that run counter to our values in the State of West Virginia, but also our economy and our tax dollars, that it just made no sense to continue that relationship.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re talking about the national security element, it’s certainly state security involved here as well. But something that a number of guests on this show have talked about, the military Thrift Savings Fund is still investing through some index funds into actual PLA adjacent companies, so to speak. So what happens when ESG runs counter with U.S. national security priorities?

Mr. Moore:

We need to stop this activity. We need to stop this activity that is hurting us here at home that they are undertaking with their investments and the things that they are doing to support, which is obviously our most near term enemy that we have out there, which is the communist government of China.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, and the other piece, and we started talking about this earlier, is the E part is China is not strong on at all, whether we’re talking about greenhouse gas emissions. There’s frankly raw pollution and output. How many clear sky days does Shanghai have? Very few actually. It’s for this reason. So where does the E fit in here when we’re looking at countries other than the U.S.?

Mr. Moore:

Oh, well, no, it doesn’t. It certainly doesn’t. And speaking of China, look, the ESG, I think this is where this is going to go eventually if we don’t stop, it’s going to go to the individual basis where ESG will eventually become part of our credit scores, our individual credit scores. It started with rating securities and things like that. Now S&P global is giving states and municipalities ESG scores. Eventually it will come down, I believe, as part of our individual credit score.

The only difference between us and China is that China doesn’t have a social credit score that includes the environment. So we’re certainly going to be worse off here, I think in the United States than individuals over there in China, which is why I need to continue to push against it. But the construction of the coal-fired power over there in China, one might think they’re doing that perhaps because they’re in some long term strategic struggle with a country, maybe the United States, and they’re trying to ramp up for some massive military production and want to be able to have co-located manufacturing with cheap, reliable energy like coal.

Mr. Jekielek:

I just want to go back to something we mentioned earlier. So you’ve reduced, you’ve taken basically 9 billion, is it away from BlackRock?

Mr. Moore:

Well, they’ve lost their ability to invest in that. And so the inflow of the fund was one and a half billion dollars annually. Our state treasury funds is $9 billion and now they’re not able to manage any of those dollars, which is we move them and invest them, they’re able to make money off of all of them.

Mr. Jekielek:

And so why focus on just this one company?

Mr. Moore:

Well, we went after those other ones as well. JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs.

Mr. Jekielek:

The ones on the list.

Mr. Moore:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes.

Mr. Moore:

So those were the ones we were authorized to do business with or were currently doing business with. We are certainly going to be taking a look at others, but this was our near term threat. This is our biggest threat to our tax dollars right now. So we had to take care of that immediately after legislation passed. But we are going to look at other financial institutions around this country here in the near future.

Mr. Jekielek:

I want to talk about this briefly, because what you just said raises this other question that these funds, these massive funds with however many 30 trillion between the three or four biggest…

Mr. Moore:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s just an astronomical number. They’re exerting massive power and pressure with not their own money, but effectively they use it as if it were, And that’s fascinating and disturbing at the same time, to me.

Mr. Moore:

Certainly. Look, anybody who’s watching this, if you have a 401k, you get a pension plan, you’re helping support this, you’re paying for this. Now don’t divest out of your retirement funds, it’s not what I’m telling you. Go talk to your asset manager, go talk to your plan manager. All of these guys are using our money to push these objectives. So I’ll give you a great example on pension plans. You buy into BlackRock, like an iShare, things like that. You contract away your proxy votes. So what’s in that say, index fund, all of those different publicly traded companies, those votes go to BlackRock. So now they control those. And so that’s how they’re able to use your money to push these agendas on these corporate boards. State Street, Vanguard and BlackRock, the three of them, control 25 percent of every vote cast on every publicly traded company in the country. That’s a huge amount of leverage and power to have, and that’s why we’re also looking at reclaiming our voice and vote in West Virginia as many other states are, and getting back control of our proxy votes.

Mr. Jekielek:

You were talking about the S&P now incorporating these ESG scoring systems. It reminds me of the ratings companies pre 2008 crash, going out… And this isn’t a direct analogy, but it just reminds me of these structured products that in the end were completely toxic. But these rating companies came out and just because they were so packaged that you couldn’t understand what was in there anymore with these derivatives, rating them highly, and then these things were traded and precipitated a massive crash. Do you see any connection here?

Mr. Moore:

Oh yes. Look, that’s certainly happening. One of the things you got to keep in mind is why do the asset managers like ESG securities? It’s because of the administrative fees that are built into it. So a large cap S&P 500 ETF on average, maybe like 14 basis points, something like that.

Mr. Jekielek:

For the benefit of our viewers. What does that mean?

Mr. Moore:

Yes So that’s the expense ratio that you’re going to pay to be able to trade one of those; it’s 14 basis points. So think, that’s 0.01 or 0.014 percent. So a hundred basis points, 1 percent. So 14 basis points. Now the ESG ETFs, there’s some of them that are trading as high as 90 basis points, and the asset managers love them because they’re making a killing off of this stuff. So there’s a lot of this green washing that they talk about too. Are some of these things really ESG or not? So there’s a big game going on here, but they’re making a killing off of these ESG products and why are they able to do that? Well, they’re charging you a little bit more to make you feel better and you’re doing something about the environment and standing up for reproductive rights and things of that nature. It’s all that stuff. But they’re raking it in on all this stuff. And it is questionable on some of these ESG ETFs that are out there, how ESG compliant they actually are to their own standards.

Mr. Jekielek:

And so what is packaged in these products in this case?

Mr. Moore:

Well these ETFs, it depends how they decide to form them together, it’s made of various different kinds of companies that they have rated with ESG scores to say, “Well this one’s good. We’ve scored out all these different securities. This is a good security to be able to buy this ETF.” And so it’s a pretty complex system that goes into it because you got ISS and some of these other guys handing out ESG scores, like Glass Lewis. Who by the way, Glass Lewis and ISS represent 96 percent of all the proxy advisory out there. Talk about a duopoly.

Mr. Jekielek:

Like Fannie Mae and Fred Mac back in the day.

Mr. Moore:

Yes. It’s the same thing, and you’re getting to this, there’s a monopolistic aspect to all of this, and we saw that in the financial crash in 2008. If we don’t do something about this, we’re probably heading towards the exact same type of issue. And you’re seeing it in the energy markets, people’s utility bills going up, and the price of gas at the pump. Why is your food more expensive? The grocery store, while got there on a truck so it’s all passed down to the consumer. They’re distorting the market. It’s going to end up hurting a lot of people and a lot of working class people in this country.

Mr. Jekielek:

And we’re seeing some massive distortions happening in Europe right now. What can we learn from Europe from the situation in Europe?

Mr. Moore:

Well, the situation in Europe’s fascinating because folks are like, “Well, what is ESG going to look like, especially environmental investing in five to 10 years from now?” It’s like, “Well, I can tell you it’s Germany right now.” And people would say, “Well no, it’s a war in Ukraine that’s caused this issue.” All the thing… The war in Ukraine, all it did was pull the curtain back on the fragility of this type of energy, which moved 35 percent of their electrification in Germany, their power generation to green energy, which in turn caused immediately their power bills to go up by three x [times] . Now with the war in Ukraine and the reliance on green energy this winter, you’re likely to see their power bills go up eight, nine x. Look, that’s like paying a hundred bucks here now, it’s $900 a month. Who can afford that?

But it’s a crisis they’ve created on their own. They shutted their nuclear plants, they moved into green energy, but it was a little bit of a farce, because they were still importing natural gas and coal from Russia. And that’s what I’m saying, it’s pulled back this curtain. Now you’ve seen Germany fire up coal-fired power plants again for the first time in a very long time. United Kingdom has just brought coal-fired power plants back online trying to avoid blackouts and brownouts throughout these winter months that we’re fastly approaching.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s incredible actually, because not only did they not activate this Nord Stream 2, but now Russia is saying, I don’t know what the reality is that, oh, we had some accidents. So I guess we have to turn off the flow of Nord Stream 1. It feels like an existential issue for Germany. If they’re not… Because that’s their major source of reliable energy.

Mr. Moore:

It is. And they’ve done it to themselves and we’re doing it to ourselves. Energy independence is a huge thing—it’s energy sovereignty, it’s energy security. Every country to the extent they can need that and if they can’t have that, then they need to be able to rely on their allies. The United States needs to be able to rely on Germany. Well, the problem is we have environmentalists here preventing us from building natural gas pipelines in this country. So we can’t get the LNG out to port to be able to send it and be able to supplement the loss of Russian gas in Germany and the other countries of Europe.

We are doing some of that now, but nowhere to the extent that we can. You had the Atlantic Coast pipeline that was going to come out of West Virginia and go to port and we’re going to be able to pump LNG out of there. It got closed. Why? Because of a federal case as it relates to, and I’m not joking, flying squirrel populations that they were trying to protect. The pipeline, by the way, is going to be underground. And so the flying squirrels are okay and Europe’s not. So I don’t know. That’s how that all worked out.

Mr. Jekielek:

There is a model state in America right now that shows what to some extent, what extreme ESG type policies might look like. I think that’s California? Now, do you agree?

Mr. Moore:

Yes, I certainly agree with that. And their pension plan CalPERS have gone the opposite direction, said “We’re going to divest of all fossil fuel energy investment in our pension plan.” And look, they’re going to get rid of all gas powered vehicles by 2035. All of this ends up being a tax on the working American. Look, if you’re a millionaire in Silicon Valley, what do you care? You can afford all this stuff. But at the end of the day, that’s who’s going to foot the bill on this. And look, you see it happening now. Black ads in California, turn your thermostat to 80 degrees. They’ve shuttered nuclear power plants, coal-fired power, all of this. They created this, they’ve done this to themselves. No one should feel bad for them. And it’s the greatest example of when you just let this thing go and you don’t stand up against it, what’s going to happen? And it’s hurting the average American.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, the concern though is that there may be an attempt, even by the present administration to implement that policy at a federal level.

Mr. Moore:

Yes, that’s what ESG is. That’s what they’re trying to do. And we see this through the SEC right now trying to implement a role on carbon footprint, essentially, where publicly traded companies will have to report how much carbon they’re emitting. And then not only that, all the way down through their supply chain, they’re going to have to report it. So it’s the compliance that is going to kill them alone. And it’s like, why do we need all this? The end of the day, look, this is a solution in search of a problem and it misses the real problem, which is human flourishing in this country. That’s what we need to be focused on. Because there’s a real crisis in American life and it doesn’t have anything to do with greenhouse gas emissions. And say you believe that that is a big problem, the United States represents just over 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the whole world. What in the hell are we talking about here? This doesn’t make any sense.

Mr. Jekielek:

So how do states like West Virginia avoid these, for lack of a better term, the California-cation of the country?

Mr. Moore:

Well, I can promise you West Virginia will never be like California, one. Two is people got to stand up and they got to voice their opinion on this. And I just don’t mean politicians because politicians talk enough. What they need to do is put things into action like we’re doing in West Virginia. But the actual people, if you got retirement plans and things like that, talk to your fund manager, talk to your plan manager, ask them about ESG, just individually, start putting the pressure on. But people need to stand up against this and realize how destructive that this could actually be to their everyday lives if we don’t do something about it.

Mr. Jekielek:

Any final thoughts as we finish?

Mr. Moore:

No, I just really appreciate you having me on. Appreciate the time and conversation.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Riley Moore, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Moore:

Thank you so much for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:

Thank y’all for joining Riley Moore and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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