The Briefing with Albert Mohler - Wednesday, January 28, 2026

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

This is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.Part I (00:14 – 11:13)The Dead End of ESG: It Was Big Talk, But the Big Players Never Lived Up to Their Own Pledges, and It’s a Big StoryHow Wall Street Turned Its Back on Climate Change by The New York Times (David Gelles)Part II (11:13 – 13:00)Wall Street’s Climate Change Pledges Were Fake: The Financiers of Climate Change Activism Had No Intention of Following Through on Their PromisesPart III (13:00 – 22:28)The Worldview Behind Climate Change: These Issues Really Matter, Including the Ideological Agenda Behind Many of These ProposalsPart IV (22:28 – 27:31)Target’s Finds Itself A Target: By Moral Signaling, It Sowed the Seeds of Its Own Current PerilsSign up to receive The Briefing in your inbox every weekday morning.Follow Dr. Mohler:X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTubeFor more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.To write Dr. Mohler or submit a question for The Mailbox, go here.

It's Wednesday, January 28, 2026. I'm Albert Mueller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. If you were to rewind history, just about half a decade, go back five or maybe even six years, and you compare that moment with this moment, one of those interesting things you would note in America and, furthermore, you could go beyond the United States and global culture, is that certain initials that were absolutely prominent five years ago, are now a bit embarrassing. And frankly, many corporations and other institutions are moving as quickly away from some of these initials as possible. But most of them don't want to acknowledge that's what they're doing. So, you know, three of these initials are DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. These initials became an agenda, or the agenda became initials. And when you had the American political left, and again, it's not just in the U.S., but let's just think about North America, as you think about the cultural landscape, you had so many on the cultural left, pushing agendas, and it was an

enormous array of issues that came under the category of DEI. Basically, it was identity politics. It was preference based upon categories of people who were declared to be oppressed in one way or another. It included intersectionality, the idea that there are overlapping identities in which you could have ever-increasing oppression. So just to make the matter very clear, intersectionality worked in terms of leftist theory this way. If you were a woman, you were oppressed. If you were an ethnic minority woman, you are doubly oppressed. If you are an ethnically minority woman who's also a lesbian, then you are triply oppressed. And on the left, you actually had the kind of contest, and I'm not making this up, that came down to who's most oppressed, or I'm more

oppressed than you are. And of course, the answer to that in terms of policy was preferential treatment. But you see many institutions and organizations that now claim we're no longer for DEI, or we actually are embarrassed to say we ever were, but in any event, we're not now. What we have to notice and what conservative Christians need to watch very, very carefully is the fact that many major corporations and many college campuses, the DEI office has disappeared, but it's just been relabeled as something else. And sometimes you have Christians who think we want to battle only to find out we love, lost it in the longer run. We have to watch this kind of thing very, very carefully. And you now

have many major universities and at least some corporations and other groups saying, no, we're not abandoning DEI. We're just kind of updating it for present needs. Okay. So let's leave DEI, however, for a moment, because more Americans know about DEI. Fewer Americans know and are able to talk about ESG, which is environmental, social, and governance policies adopted, particularly by many fortunate, 500 corporations, and that was with the effort to try to push it through the entire corporate community, it again was an activist agenda, and it was basically driven by the left. It's very much alike, DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. In this case, it's environmental, social, and governance. And the basic demands were that you had to have a green revolution,

that corporations had to sign on to a carbon-free future and to the idea of reducing carbon emissions, whatever the cost, and joining the environmental revolution, they had to join social equity agendas. And so that's the direct intersection between ESG and DEI. And in governance, they had to ensure that their corporations and their structures included diverse representations for governance and adopted what were defined as best practices. And once again, that very much demonstrated and required the overlap with DEI. And now you're saying, well, that sounds like alphabet soup, what difference does it make? Well, it makes a lot of difference. Now, we have talked in recent weeks about the Davos meeting. That's the World Economic Forum, and it was held in Davos,

Switzerland, a gathering of the elite of the elite, and they're glad to tell you they are the elite of the elite. But one of the things I mentioned in setting up our understanding what was going on at Davos again this year is that Klaus Schwab, who had put together that meeting and basically run it for years, was removed, and new leadership has been. place. And that new leadership is none other, most importantly, than Larry Fink, who is the chief executive of Black Rock. Now, in case you're wondering what that corporation is, it is identified as the largest asset manager in the world. So we're talking about one of the most powerful corporate figures in the world. And one of the most interesting things is the in one person,

not just in one organization or one meeting, but in one person, the ESG agenda evidently has fallen apart. And the New Yorker. The York Times, to its credit, took notice of this. The report is written by David Gellis, and it begins this way, quote, in January 2020, Larry Fink, the chief executive of BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, stunned the business world by declaring that he intended to use the trillions of dollars managed by his firm to address global warming. Now, just days after saying that, he went to Davos to make the very same statement.

Listen to this. quote, every government, company, and shareholder must confront climate change. He called for what he defined as, quote, a fundamental reshaping of finance, end quote. Now, once again, we're talking about the world's largest asset manager, the CEO of that firm. So this is a man with enormous outsize, almost incalculable influence in the financial world. And if you think that's remote from where you live, just understand the groceries you buy, the policies of your bank, the basic health of the economy, have a lot to do with the policies that are put in place and the management of giant firms like

this. That's what those elitists at Davos understand. Now listen to this. Again, this was January at 2020, so just about six years ago. After making that announcement about the fact that every business was going to have to make a priority of confronting climate change, he went to Davos and there, quote, donning a scarf featuring a design of the warming stripes, a pattern that depicts 150 years of rising global temperatures. He went to Davos and made what was described as, quote, an impassioned call to address climate change. And the New York Times says that was the unofficial start of a movement. Quote, nearly every major financial institution was soon pledging to reduce emissions, joining high-minded alliances, designed to phase out fossil fuels, and promising

to support clean energy. ESG went big. And it went big with what was declared to be an absolute moral mandate. If you don't sign on to this moral mandate, then you are immoral. You are a threat to the environment and thus a threat to human flourishing. You're on the wrong side of history. ESG pioneers were very, very clear in ardently pressing this, not only in corporations, but also in terms of not only government, but intergovernmental kinds of organizations, and in particular international organizations, such as the United Nations, which, by the way, was set up in large part for just this kind of foolishness. Now, when I say that, I don't mean that any conversation about these things is foolish. What I do mean is that here you had one of the major corporate figures in the entire

world. By the way, an American company when we talk about Black Rock, who stood before the fellow elitist there at Davos, Switzerland back in 2020, and the fashion statement was amazing. Here you have an American CEO, a man who showed up wearing a scarf that quite, well, I don't even have a good adjective for it, quite ludicrously demonstrated what was called to be the stripes that mark 150 years of rising global temperatures. Now, by the way, one of the things that is often important about such symbolic acts, in this case a symbolic scarf, the point is, if no one knows what it means, it doesn't matter. But let's just drop that for a moment and move on. Okay, the bigger point is this, as the New York Times quite accurately reports just about the time that Larry Fink made this declaration, ESG, quote, became a defining feature of Wall Street investing. Okay, so why is the New York Times revisiting this in 2006? It's because just about every one of these major corporations and just about every one of these major figures, including Larry Fink, is now trying to act like 2020 didn't even happen. Here's what the New York Times says, quote, but six years later,

of those Wall Street institutions have walked back or abandoned their commitments. The alliances like the Net Zero Banking Alliance and the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative that were meant to steer investments towards clean energy and away from fossil fuels have largely fallen apart. Investors have withdrawn tens of billions of dollars each quarter from ESG funds, end quote. Now, money speaks and sometimes money walks. So money talks and money walks. When money walks, guess what?

the financial markets pay a lot of attention. You say you're committed to this agenda. You are committed to it eagerly. You are morally invested in this agenda. And yet your customers say, well, we're not. And so they walk. And when you're talking about money here, this is a lot of money, tens of billions of dollars each quarter, four times a year, tens of billions of dollars walking out from some of these funds that had announced this agenda. Now here's another thing to watch about the elites. They avidly make these kinds of declarations. They congratulate one another. They wear the stupid scars and stand up in front of fellow elitists at Davos. But when they have to go back and actually run their businesses, it turned out over a period of time,

the biggest proponents of ESG found out, by the way, it doesn't work. And it doesn't work with customers. It doesn't work with the people whose money is entrusted to these individuals and these corporations. Okay, so Larry Fink is now back at Davos, or he was just in recent days with the Davos meeting, and this time he is back basically running the thing because of the displacement of Klaus Schwab. And when Larry Fink was playing such a big role in the 2006 Davos meeting, the World Economic Forum, guess what? ESG basically disappeared. What was declared to be the giant, unquestioned moral mandate for the future just a matter of six years ago?

it's now an embarrassment. And that's worth some attention. That's worth some worldview attention for sure. Why did you have this massive change? Well, for a number of reasons. The New York Times refers to this as a dynamic of change. It certainly is that. You also had direct activism. Conservative activists, Republican leaders began to press back on these agendas, but so did Wall Street. And so did a lot of investors, big investors. And so did, by the way, lawyers. Why? Well, it is because these big firms act in so many ways with what's called a fiduciary interest, which is to say they hold someone else's money and they hold the responsibility to preserve that money and not only that, to gain as much in terms of investment gains as possible. And these firms are judged on that basis.

And it turns out that you can basically have that ESG agenda or you can have the kind of predictable, stable returns on investment. It turns out you really can't have both. and it turns out that a lot of investors actually figured that out pretty fast, even if they were quite slow to admit they weren't on the bandwagon. Now, one of the things I often like to point out is that when you're looking at these vast funds, you're looking at these vast firms handling these massive investment funds, one of the things to note is that some of their biggest clients have names that people don't immediately recognize. One of the biggest investors in the world, period. You just take a singular unit, one of the biggest investors in the world,

world is the pension fund for California public school teachers. It is so big that it, again, ranks in the very top of the client funds. But notice that California school teachers who tend in their labor unions to vote in a very, very liberal pattern, they expect that the market performance of their retirement fund is going to do quite well. In other words, when faced with the choice that you can actually have the money or you can have the agenda, there are a lot of of people on the left who want to have both. Now, there are contradictions, certainly among people on the right. But it is interesting to note that you had many people who were clamoring for ESG policies until they began to undermine their own portfolio, or at least there was the sense

that that was about to happen. Furthermore, you also have in this in worldview analysis, a reminder of the fact that these massive cultural preoccupations and obsessions change and sometimes change pretty quickly. Now, one of the things you had here was that over a period of time, you had conservative activists and others, including some in the scientific community, he began to just press back. The bigger issue here wasn't somewhat scientific. It was simply financial. But here's where Christians understand, if you say financial, you're saying moral. Because as the Bible makes clear, how we handle money, and frankly, how we consider the entire array of what we could call economic and financial issues. That's a true test of what we actually believe. And this is something

that is reflected very much, by the way, in classical economics in the Western tradition. You take many of the economics associations, particularly in Britain and in the United States, and specifically in the United States, many of the founding members, by some kind as many as a third of the founding members of some of these major groups, were actually Christian clergy. The overlap of applied theology and economics, that was actually quite an overlap, and there was a lot of substantial common ground. Okay, so now let's look again at what's happening that was so revealed in terms of the 2006 World Economic Forum. Listen to this. Quote, speaking of those who pressed back, and that includes those who had a financial interest

and those who were worldview concerned, quote, in short order, their efforts succeeded in beating back an environmental movement on Wall Street, which from its incentives, was defined more by idealistic rhetoric than substantive changes to business practices. End quote. Okay, that's massive. That's massive. It's massive in so many different ways. It's massive because here you have the admission that so many of these people who made these massive declarations, Larry Fink, BlackRock, at the front of them, they actually were committing themselves publicly to something they didn't follow through on. And furthermore, it was impossible that they follow through on them. But they didn't come back to say,

you know, that was really stupid. That was an impossible statement. That was an impossible principle. That was an impossible promise. But this statement also is very important because there's a moral dimension. In other words, many of these people who made these pledges actually, evidently never intended to follow through with them. That's another thing we have to watch. When it comes to these big, big social movements, and in particular, the ones that come, and this is from the left. From the right, we have to be concerned about people who are falsely saying they agree with us. But on the right, you had all the institutions, the elites, the media, the academics, you had all the rest clamoring. You have to do this.

So many corporations said yes, but when they actually got down to business, evidently they never intended to follow through on this. That's made pretty clear in a statement from another executive at BlackRock cited in the Times article. This man is Terrence Keeley identified as a senior executive at BlackRock who oversaw sovereign wealth funds, pensions, and central banks back at the time that pledge was made. Quote, here's what he said. All of these ESG funds are wrong. He went on to say, they weren't going to generate better returns. They are not going to make the world a better place.

ESG, as an investment thesis, should be entirely shut down, end quote. By the way, this man says that even as his company was, quote, pushing ESG funds, he was telling his own clients that they should not. the Times tells us invest in them. Speaking of the larger context, and that includes politics, the Times cites one authority. Speaking of Larry Fink, said, quote, Larry decided to be a leader in the bandwagon.

By the way, this is Lindy Luber, identified as chief executive of Saras, a nonprofit organization that works with companies to address climate change. Here's what she said again. Larry decided to be a leader in the bandwagon, and then she concluded, quote, it worked out until it didn't, end quote.

The Times is also pretty honest that some of the big banks, including J.P. Morgan, made big promises, or at least appeared to, let me just read to you this paragraph. Quote, for a bank like J.P. Morgan, which regularly ranks as the biggest U.S. funder of fossil fuel projects, that, meaning the S.G. commitment, quote, would have meant rapidly winding down a lucrative line of business. J.P. Morgan did not reply to a request for comment. End quote, I just bet they didn't. Mark Carney, another man mentioned in the article who, one time was governor of the Bank of England. And by the way, you recognize the name, because right now he is the Prime Minister of Canada. He was brought in, quote, to convene a new UN-backed group

that would encourage the private sector to reduce omissions. Quote, Mark Carney pitched this as a money-making opportunity. There were trillions to be made. The statement then says, quote, Mr. Carney did not reply to a request for comment. Again, I bet he didn't. Another figure, you'll recognized this thing cited in the article as John Kerry, former U.S. Senator, former United States Secretary of State during the Biden administration U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate. He said, and I quote, the largest financial players in the world recognize energy transition represents a vast commercial opportunity as well as a planetary imperative, end quote. The article then goes on to say that, again, the big story is many people, particularly in the

corporate elites, joining academic and cultural elites, and some in the political left, of course, those elites as well. They acted as if they meant that. And for all I know, John Kerry may have meant that. But the fact is, an awful lot of companies signed on to this agenda, and at least their behavior says they didn't ever mean that. And, you know, as this report makes very clear, politics does play a role. And included in that political climate, of course, was the election of Donald J. Trump to a second term as president in November 2004, the New York Times article basically concludes this way, quote, after President Trump's re-election in November 24, almost every major American bank and financial institution withdrew from the net zero banking alliance causing the group to fold.

Speaking of the wave, the craze of ESG, you had one observer say, quote, it was a bunch of empty promises from a bunch of Wall Street types who abandoned their pledges when it was no longer convenient. This person had formerly been with Black Rock, and he said in retrospect, quote, we marched up the hill and we marched back down it, end quote. Now, as we think about this in worldview analysis, at least one point, honestly, and in humility we need to make, is that this story underlines the fact that it is so difficult to have an honest conversation about these very issues. So take climate change, the threats to the environment, the role of carbon emissions, and all that. it's just very difficult to have an honest discussion about these things, especially when you have

so many people playing into these agendas. ESG is in many sad ways just the start of it. But you also rarely have a conversation that's honest in saying, look, we have competing goods here, we have competing goals here. Yes, I think just about any sane person would think that reducing carbon emissions would be a good thing over the long haul. And it's likely, by the way, that's going to happen, but it's likely to happen because of scientific innovation and investment opportunities that are actually, oh, I don't know, legitimate. But the other thing is that people never acknowledge that when you're looking at these kinds of, say, energy issues, the question comes down to whether or not people are going to be able to drive their cars and work, an economy is going to

be able to be functional. People are going to have warmth in their homes. They're going to have clean water, just all the basics. The fact is that many people who were pushing this kind of environmental agenda, they actually wanted to undo civilization. And, you know, some of them were actually honest enough at the extremes to admit they wanted to return the planet to a state of nature. And, you know, again, that's the kind of thing that might sell in terms of academic circles and political ideological circles on the left. But, you know, the moment. The moment you know, the moment what the American people, just people with common sense hear that kind of statement, they're going to recognize exactly what's going on. And that's why, by the way, it's not just for convenience

sake that you take these slogans and reduce them to just a few words, and then you reduce the words to initials, to an acronym. And it's because the average person is going to have no idea what you're talking about when you talk about ESG. It takes concerted effort to help Americans who are busy raising their families and working and going to school, taking classes, it is a big effort to help conservative Christians to pay attention to these things and understand that these issues really do matter. These proposals, these ideologies really do matter. In the case of both DEI and ESG, those acronyms, those letters really do matter. But all right, as we're thinking about these big issues and the intersection of economics and morality,

And again, Christians have always understood that morality is the most basic issue in economics. That's something I think that we understand, would be very biblical. But when you're thinking about these moral dimensions of economics, you sometimes think of certain brands, certain companies that have tried to make a statement one way or the other. And one of those companies, of course, was Target, formerly known as the Dayton Hudson Corporation. the entire firm is now known as the Target Corporation. And you'll recall that it's been in trouble, particularly with conservatives for a long time. 2016, it offended many customers by trying to come up with a very progressive

bathroom policy in favor of allowing transgender individuals to use the bathroom of their choice. Conservatives protested and in some cases boycotted, and Target, frankly, just really tried to get it. out front on the left on this. And they paid a price for it. But they didn't learn anything evidently because in 2023, and to a lesser extent in subsequent years, they came back with an enormous pride merchandise display, which, by the way, included merchandise for children and even infants, a onesie, as I recall.

That came out in 2023. The conservative pushback was massive and make no mistake. The Wall Street Journal and others reported very directly. that that action by conservative Christians led to a big impact, a negative impact, on the Target corporation's bottom line. Target felt the pain. And that pain was reflected in the fact that at least in terms of some political messaging and posturing and displaying, the company at least backed off a bit.

But of course, when they did that, they offended the LGBTQ community. The left was offended that they backed off of a bit of their leftist agenda. and then, well, things have gone from bad to worse for Target. And just think about the fact that so many of the headlines coming out of the news right now are coming out with the datelines from St. Paul or Minneapolis, Minnesota. And Minneapolis happens to be the national headquarters, the founding headquarters,

of what's now known as the Target Corporation. And Target is in trouble with the leftist activists. So what you look at with this is the fact that even again, the New York Times runs an article in this case on Target, quote, Target finds itself once again mixed up in America's latest rancorous political divide as it faces pressure from residents, clergy, and others to respond after immigration agents tackled a store worker and shoved him into an SUV. Now, the fact is that that person was in a Target store,

and so the left is arguing that Target now ought to be taking a very activist position against ICE, immigration and customs enforcement, and against the Trump administration's push. And so once again, you have a company that is in big trouble, mostly because it decided to start taking sides. And in this case, lamentably, it took a leftist side. And then it drilled down even harder after 2016, coming back on a bigger scale in 2023. And they paid for it with the bottom line. They haven't fully recovered since. But now they've been. They're getting hammered from the left, and it's because they won't join now. All of a sudden, they've said, we're not joining in some of this activism.

In other words, when you make a mistake like Target made, and that goes back to its original virtue signaling, when you make a mistake like Target made, it's virtually impossible to undo that kind of mistake. The current troubles at Target go well beyond ESG, DEI, and all of these things. And some of those have to do with just changes in the economy. But the fact is, when you have a customer base, that customer base is going to make moral judgments. And if you take sides in such a way that you decide that corporate activism, like we saw with Larry Fink and Black Rock at Davos in 2020, well, the fact is eventually time is going to run out and, you know, your customers are making moral decisions when they decide what they're going to buy

and from whom they're going to buy it. And it turns out that a lot of Americans, including millions and millions of Christian Americans, actually do keep that in mind. Thoughtful Christians will understand the economy itself is not simple, and thus some of these decisions, even consumer decisions, are not always simple. But we do understand one profound fact. Those economic decisions are always, unavoidably moral. Thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website at Albertmuller.com. You can follow me on X or Twitter by going to X.com forward slash Albert Moller. on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.

For information on Boyce College, just go to voicecollege.com. I'm speaking to you from Atlanta, Georgia, and I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing.