Don't Mention Profit

ESG funders dole out the woke dosh to eager virtue signallers

The number of ESG (woke for business) funding organisations seems to be growing - supplying funds to eager young (and diverse) virtue signallers.  Case in point is Carbon 13 that's actively spaffing out dole-money to organisations whose purpose is utterly perplexing.  This organisation is partnering with Barclays - which, recently, was in receipt of £12m of government money to run a ‘growth programme’ for eager young start-ups. 

And the message this ‘partnership’ puts out is that the only way to get funding these days is to do stuff that’s completely unrelated to making profit or creating wealth or providing products and services that people actually want to buy. Instead - it’s all about spurious ‘climate emergency’ targets.  

Carbon 13 states on its website:

460 Million tonnes of CO2e – the potential annual mitigation of Carbon13 ventures.

Why not knock that target out of the park Carbon 13?  Who’s going to be able to check?  Will the 0.04% CO2 in the atmosphere change much as a result of the effort?  

The means by which this great carbon virtue will be achieved, apparently, is to fund ventures like “Seed Culture” (2 employees) which promises to “Embed sustainability into your culture with our gamified sustainability training and engagement platform.”  Whatever that means.  

Others include businesses that do seem to be doing things that might result in some profit and improvement of the environment (such as reprocessing waste).  But the entire focus of Carbon 13 is on “reducing humanity’s emissions”.  I’m not sure if the organisation has enough humour about it to even understand the double entendre.  

We’re setting a very, very bad standard that we’re expecting young entrepreneurs to bear.  No longer, it would appear, should businesses be nurtured based on their potential to be successful in any real sense. Rather, they should be supported (until they go bust) based on their claimed ability to “save the planet” - potentially destroying all potential for value and wealth creation in the process. 

Of course we should be building businesses that operate ethically and respect the environment.

But promoting businesses that are focused on one, ludicrous and unachievable metric is anti-scientific nonsense that works against an entrepreneurial culture that the UK so badly needs.