Recent decades have seen an increasingly awareness of climate changes, putting a pressure on companies to do more to deal with carbon emission. One of the popular measures used in assessing how well a company commits to sustainable development and reduces carbon emissions is ESG ratings. Given the importance of both ESG ratings and carbon footprints on our society and the target of net zero by 2050, we explore the relation between carbon emission and the Refinitiv ESG scores for the US sample from 2005 to 2018. Our findings indicate that high ESG‐rated or environment‐rated firms do not have lower carbon emissions. It appears that these firms are not incentivized to do more for environment, as they have already been awarded with good publicity for being environmentally friendly. Finally, our findings also support the ‘cheap talk’ concept, greenwashing hypothesis and legitimacy theory. Companies are not genuinely committed to climate action.

中文翻译：

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绿色清洗、碳排放和 ESG


近几十年来，人们对气候变化的认识日益增强，迫使企业采取更多措施应对碳排放。 ESG 评级是评估公司致力于可持续发展和减少碳排放的常用指标之一。鉴于 ESG 评级和碳足迹对我们社会的重要性以及到 2050 年实现净零排放的目标，我们探讨了 2005 年至 2018 年美国样本的碳排放与路孚特 ESG 分数之间的关系。我们的研究结果表明，高 ESG-评级或环境评级公司的碳排放量并不较低。这些公司似乎没有动力为环境做更多的事情，因为它们已经因环保而获得了良好的宣传。最后，我们的研究结果也支持了“廉价谈话”概念、洗绿假说和合法性理论。公司并未真正致力于气候行动。