I think it's to forget about this ESG label.
Here's the problem with ESG: It bundles everything under the ESG umbrella in the same way. However, some of these things overlap and some of them don't, so it's important to consider them separately.
What is one thing where the impact on society comes back and benefits the company's profits? It's human capital. Some of my early work is on how treating your worker well ultimately leads to greater profits down the line. That is something I call an internality. Even in the absence of government regulation, a company bears the consequences of its human capital investments.
Something like climate change is an externality through which you benefit wider society and might benefit other companies, but if you're a fossil fuel company, it is costly to reduce production significantly.
Those are the cases in which, if you are to tell a company to produce less or do this, it may well be at the expense of financial returns, and remember that financial returns don't just go to nameless, faceless capitalists: They could go to pensioners and they could go to depositors, if you're a bank, so we do need to consider financial returns, and when there are trade-offs, we need to acknowledge them rather than think that everything is going to be a win-win.