Was gonna post this. That said, this is not what Levine is writing about. Levine is writing about how you can restructure your portfolio to gain exposure to fossil fuels _without_ lowering your ESG metrics by simply investing in companies with fossil fuel holdings (since then your ESG is calculated by the carbon emissions of the holding firms and not the assets themselves). Here, the authors are essentially concluding that ESG ratings are actually poorly correlated w/ the actual emissions of the firms being rated. This is probably because the environmental metrics of ESG scores are forward-looking (thus you can offset current pollution by aggressive reduction projections), but I'm not in this field so I don't know anything more.

Also, there's evidence that moving investment from polluting to non-polluting industries at best has almost no impact, and potentially makes things worse:

https://www.icpmnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Count...