"We see that strong ESG practices make for better businesses," says Lucas Moreno, a vice president at Argos USA, which has started making low-carbon cement in Alabama, West Virginia, South Carolina and Florida. The company recently opened a new mill in Kentucky, and it's building plants in Alabama and West Virginia. Nucor says it's spending almost half a billion dollars adding a new production line at its steel plant in Berkeley County, S.C. And the Republican-controlled states leading the anti-ESG charge, despite their rhetoric, have benefitted from those investments. are working to protect their operations and profits in a hotter world. So far, Republican politicians have left alone the companies those firms are investing in, such as Nucor, which are trying to operate more sustainably.Īs conservatives strive to make ESG a wedge issue in American politics, many industrial companies in the U.S. The backlash tends to be directed at big financial firms that consider ESG factors. The attacks on ESG in South Carolina are part of a national campaign that's being waged by conservative politicians and activists, who accuse companies of using their investments to push a liberal agenda. The legislation was introduced after South Carolina's treasurer, Curtis Loftis, said last year that he was pulling $200 million from BlackRock because of the investment firm's consideration of environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) factors. In South Carolina, lawmakers are considering a bill that would bar managers of state retirement funds from considering environmental issues when they're making investment decisions. They say investors who reward those sorts of corporate initiatives are focused on advancing "woke" policies instead of making money. Republican politicians, including in the Palmetto State, are deeply skeptical of the actions that companies like Nucor are taking to manage the risks and opportunities from climate change. "We can continue to grow our business and take share because we have something that differentiates us from our competition," Greg Murphy, an executive vice president at Nucor, says as a furnace at the plant thunders nearby, turning scrap metal into molten steel.īut Nucor's efforts to cut its planet-warming emissions put it at cross-purposes with some of South Carolina's political leaders. It wants to be the go-to company for low-carbon steel. Recently, the steel industry's customers, including automakers, have been pushing for a greener product. And producing it is a major driver of global warming, accounting for up to 9% of all the carbon dioxide emissions that humans generated in 2020. Steel is a building block of modern society. Back in the woods of South Carolina's Lowcountry, at a factory spread across thousands of acres near the Cooper River, a company called Nucor is trying to solve one of the thornier challenges of climate change: making steel with the least greenhouse gas pollution possible.
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