ESG is the latest craze. It reminds me of the exotic instrument craze of the mid-2000s that resulted in the 2008 financial fiasco. Similar to the early 2000's hedge fund craze. Back then there was something like 45,000 hedge funds. They were completely unregulated and all but 3000-4000 survived. I remember some hedge funds were nothing but a fella betting on horses or some craziness like that.
..or the carbon trading craze.
Point is, ESG is a fad that will go away as soon as the next "big thing" which I think the GameStop situation might be. You see, everyone has figured out how to "shake a tree" on the way down. Now, there aren't that many methodologies to "shake the tree" on the way up. So far, the only trick guaranteed to work when market is going up is illegal(look up the definition of "Ponzi scheme").
I am a data scientist. I work with ESG data. What makes ESG more evil than everything that came before it is the fact that there is NO regulation as to what attributes to assign to entities(stocks, countries, or companies). For example, who do you think assigns to every Israeli company an attribute "supporting apartheid"? Not the bankers! They BUY the data from data firms that are not regulated in any way or using any form of a common methodology. For example, I just spent a week trying to combine ESG data from 4 data provider companies so I could have a full picture. Today, I found out that next week we are getting two more "ESG data providers". I wouldn't be surprised if one of these "data providers" is a Kremlin entity.