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Vivek Ramaswamy, the anti-woke entrepreneur running for president in 2024, cautioned skepticism Monday in response to Vanguard’s decision to withdraw from a major Environmental and Social Governance initiative.
“I’m proud to see at least some iota of movement which would not have existed without, bluntly, my efforts at Strive,” Ramaswamy told The Spectator. “So I take it as a positive sign.”
Vanguard CEO Tim Buckley pulled out from the $59 trillion Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, an alliance that asks asset managers to invest only in companies that committed to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2050. Buckley insisted that Vanguard cannot abide by its fiduciary duty while refusing to invest in traditional energy sources and the companies that use them. In short, the Net Zero initiative was costing their clients money.
Ramaswamy, who co-founded Strive Asset Management to provide Americans with a non-political index fund to invest in, cautioned that Vanguard should still not be seen as a leader in the anti-ESG space.
“The reality is they’re trying to distinguish themselves with BlackRock by doing as little as possible to make it happen,” he explained. “They’re still signatories of the UN Principles of Responsible Investing. They still embrace the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board. They’re still part of the Task Force on Climate-Related Disclosures and so on. They voted for the Scope 3 emissions cap at Chevron in 2021. So I think they’re trying to have their cake and eat it, too.
“I think they’re trying to placate the ESG movement by signaling incremental differentiation, but not by enough to lose CalPERS [The California Public Employees’ Retirement System] and the state of New York and others who require them to abide by a lot of these commitments. And so I think it is mostly a farce.”
“It’s a clever attempt at a PR ploy,” he concluded.
Ramaswamy launched his presidential campaign in the 2024 Republican primary race last week. The author of Woke, Inc. credits himself as one of the first voices railing against woke corporatism in America. He also challenged his fellow GOP candidates to commit to his “Anti-Woke Policy Pledge,” which includes abandoning “climate religion in all forms.”
