These are the top 100 ESG stocks in America: The 2022 JUST 100

The rise of ESG investing attracts strong opinions — from the positive to the skeptical to the downright dismissive. But for most CEOs at large corporations, there’s little debate left about environmental, social and governance being core to business thinking and leadership.

“The left criticizes ESG and corporate America for greenwashing … ‘it’s all just talk.’ And the right criticizes it because it’s ‘woke-ism … it’s political activism, and businesses have no business taking it on. Where they would meet in the middle is if they talked to a CEO who says ‘actually, this is in my best interest, to think about stakeholder value creation, because it makes the company more successful and society healthier. In this middle area is where we sit,” says Martin Whittaker, founding CEO of JUST Capital, which just released its annual ESG ranking of the top 100 large-cap publicly traded U.S. companies.

The 2022 JUST 100 ranking: The full list of companies

The C-suite knows that more investors have been voting with their dollars in recent years, with assets in ESG funds now reaching into the trillions, and with the rise of passively managed indexed funds, greater shareholder power being placed under the control of asset management giants such as BlackRock. No firm, no matter how large or iconic, can escape the ESG momentum. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway saw shareholder resolutions focused on core ESG disclosure receive unprecedented support last year.

“The growth of ESG investing has made all these issues a lot more common now,” said Elizabeth Levy, portfolio manager and head of ESG strategy at ESG investment firm Trillium Asset Management. “In years past, when I would ask CEOs ESG questions I would get, if they didn’t roll their eyes, they would think about rolling their eyes. I have been surprised by the extent to which companies are bringing up ESG issues with all investors now, bringing them up on quarterly calls,” Levy said.

The reasons for companies to lean into ESG aren’t limited to external communities. “In a lot of cases, it is for their own employees,” Levy said, noting that the current labor market is not one in which companies which are slow to place emphasis on ESG issues will win the war for talent.

As a new generation of investors gravitates to ESG as a core part of portfolio construction and stock selection, and the labor force goes through generational transitions, the need for ESG research continues to increase. JUST Capital’s annual analysis of corporate performance, the JUST 100, is a comprehensive ranking of the largest public companies in the U.S. on issues of importance to key stakeholder groups – workers, customers, communities, the environment, and shareholders – as well as to the American public, which the ESG researcher polls annually to weight the categories which its 241 individual ESG data points roll up to.

ESG rankings and the underlying data rely on company reporting, and this year there has been “a large increase in disclosure across many underlying data points,” according to Just Capital, as more companies face more pressure from regulators and shareholders, and vie for a larger share of the institutional and individual ESG investor class.

Here are a few of the highlights from this year’s JUST 100 list, which speak not only to what factors lead to ESG outperformance, but also where the American public is on major societal issues in 2022, and where ESG research remains still very much a work in progress as far as its ability to fully define a “just” business.

The JUST 100 is certainly tilted to the biggest of the big. Ranking a majority of the Russell 1000 Index universe of large-cap U.S. companies, the companies that make the top 100 have 5.7 times the average market capitalization of their non-JUST 100 peers —$181 billion versus $31.5 billion. They also have 3 times the average global employment size of their non-JUST 100 peers — 85,917 versus 27,970.

The top 10 in 2022 are, no surprise, mostly from among the largest technology companies in the U.S., led by 2022 No. 1 company Alphabet, which bumped Microsoft from the top spot in the ranking. The only non tech-focused company in the top 10 is Bank of America.

Some market pundits see a correlation between the rise of the ESG-focused C-suite and the lack of leadership from government, and lack of faith in politicians from the public. Whittaker doesn’t see the situation in these either-or terms.

“The reason why Paul Tudor Jones [the billionaire hedge fund founder of JUST] got behind this was because he felt the private sector can and should do more, but it’s not a question of abdication,” Whittaker said. “It’s a question of how best to…