Given a paragraph and a claim, classify it this way: If the claim contradicts the evidence present in the paragraph, classify the claim as '0'. If the claim has multiple supporting *AND* contradicting evidences, classify the claim as '1'. If the claim has supporting evidence and the paragraph is in overall favor of the claim, then classify the claim as '2'.

Paragraph: Such hedge funds, often cast as villains of the piece because they bet against share prices, scent a profit from company valuations they believe are unduly inflated by ESG promises or which they say ignore risks that threaten to undermine the company’s prospects. The fact short-sellers, who look to exploit information gaps, are targeting the ESG sphere underlines the complexities facing investors in accurately gauging companies’ sustainability credentials. Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg last week spoke of CEOs masking inaction with “creative PR”. Against a backdrop of growing public and political concerns about climate change and economic inequality, companies are under increasing pressure to show they are taking greater responsibility for how they generate their profits. Investments defined as “sustainable” account for more than a quarter of all assets under management globally, according to the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance. About $31 trillion has been invested, buoyed by analyst reports that show companies with strong ESG narratives outperform their peers. Some short-sellers, including Carson Block of Muddy Waters, Josh Strauss of Appleseed Capital and Chad Slater of Morphic Asset Management, argue share prices can be bolstered by corporate misrepresentation about sustainability, or so-called “greenwashing”. “Greenwashing is absolutely rampant now,” says Slater, whose fund bets on both rising and falling share prices. If companies fail to engage with long-term investors, he sees a red flag. “From the short side, it’s quite interesting.”  Analytics companies that provide corporate ESG ratings use a combination of company disclosures, news sources and qualitative analysis of third-party data. They are a major source of information for investors, but it is not an exact science. Hedge funds have various strategies for selecting targets, often focusing on those they think show both ESG and more traditional financial or operational weakness. A high ESG rating can attract short interest. A Reuters analysis of data from financial information company Refinitiv and national regulators in Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Italy shows the five companies in each country with the best ESG scores collectively were being shorted more than those with the worst scores. The short positions against the companies deemed to have the best ESG credentials were 50% greater in size than those placed against the worst-performers. (Graphic: ESG shorts - UK:  here)  For an interactive version of the graphic, click here tmsnrt.rs/2RwpBDj. For additional graphics covering the other countries mentioned, see related content. ESG data providers compile ratings based on a slew of  measures ranging from energy usage to board gender make-up, salary gap data and the scale of negative press reports on the company from newspapers across the world. Refinitiv, part-owned by the parent company of Reuters News, factors in more than 400 ESG measures for each company, taken from a range of sources including company reports, regulatory filings, NGO websites and news articles. A key problem, though, is scant regulations governing what ESG measures and risks companies must disclose and their patchy nature, said Diederik Timmer, executive vice president of client relations at Sustainalytics, a major ESG data provider. “When things go well, companies report quite well on those, when things don’t go so well it gets awfully quiet,” he added. Some policymakers, largely in Europe, are pushing for standardized disclosures to help investors better gauge the risks, something which will leave less wriggle room for companies and make scores even more reliable. Two leading global asset managers interviewed by Reuters,  who manage nearly $1 trillion in assets but declined to be identified, said they had tested their portfolios using several data providers and found the correlation between ESG ratings to be so low, they are building their own ranking system. Peter Hafez, chief data scientist at RavenPack, which helps hedge funds analyze data to get a trading edge, agreed. “There’s no perfect ESG rating out there,” he said. The influence of news flows on investor sentiment was underlined by a Deutsche Bank study here published in September that mapped 1,600 stocks and millions of company announcements and climate-related media reports over two decades. It found companies that had a greater proportion of positive announcements and press over the preceding 12 months outperformed the MSCI World Index by 1.4% a year, on average, while those with more negative news underperformed by 0.3%. For graphics of the data, click here tmsnrt.rs/2ncsFY0 and here tmsnrt.rs/2nd5hcT. Short-sellers borrow shares, pay the lender a fee and sell them on, betting the price will fall before buying them back and returning them to the original lender - pocketing the difference, minus the fee. But it is not for the faint-hearted. If funds trigger a share price fall, they can earn millions, but the downside, should shares rise, is unlimited. The perils of the practice were shown by the shorts burnt by a 17% surge in the shares of Elon Musk’s Tesla (TSLA.O) in October after a surprise quarterly profit. Short-sellers suffered paper losses of $1.4 billion, erasing most of their 2019 profits, according to analytics firm S3 Partners. And in a decade-long stock market bull-run, short-selling can be tricky. Morphic’s joint chief investment officer Slater said the Sydney-based money manager’s standalone short positions in its Trium Morphic ESG long-short fund had weighed on the portfolio over the past 12 months. Niche activist short-sellers, who can torpedo company valuations by publishing negative reports on targets - often alleging fraud or serious failures - are often criticized for undermining long-term company objectives and blurring the lines between whistleblower and market manipulator. Short-sellers agree they are biased, but argue no more than long investors, the banks that raise money for the company and the company’s management. Carson Block, founder of American short-seller Muddy Waters, who shot to prominence spotting wrongdoing in some Chinese-run companies, is now seeking a “morality short” on ESG - branching out from a traditional focus on corporate governance issues to targets whose success he says hinges on secretly harming society. As an example of what he is seeking, he points to the U.S. opioid crisis, which has triggered around 2,500 lawsuits by authorities seeking to hold drugmakers responsible for stoking a scandal that has claimed almost 400,000 overdose deaths between 1999 and 2017. “I’m really skeptical of ESG,” he says, likening the use of the acronym by the corporate world to the token straw slipped into a large plastic cup with a plastic lid. “ESG is the paper straw of investing,” he says. “I definitely want to find companies like that because I know they’re out there and I want to help put them down.” Claim: Villains or visionaries? Hedge funds short companies they say 'greenwash'.
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Paragraph: "Sen. Elizabeth Warren loves to tout her plans for any and all policy questions, including climate change, child care and especially health care. This became a point of contention during the Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas on Feb. 19, where she criticized her rivals over a lack of specificity in their health plans. Warren said a proposal from Pete Buttigieg is ""not a plan. It's a PowerPoint."" Then she turned to Senate colleague Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. ""And Amy's plan is even less,"" Warren said. ""It's like a Post-It note, 'Insert Plan Here.'"" After some additional digs and discussion, Warren and Klobuchar had this exchange: Warren: ""So I actually took a look at the plans that are posted. … Amy, I looked online at your plan. It's two paragraphs. Families are suffering, and they need …"" Klobuchar: ""OK, that's it."" Warren: ""You can't simply stand here and trash an idea to give health care coverage to everyone without having a realistic plan of your own. And if you're not going to own up to the fact either that you don't have a plan or that your plan is going to leave people without health care coverage, full coverage, then you need to say so."" Warren’s campaign told PolitiFact that she was referring specifically to Klobuchar’s plan for ""universal health care."" Her campaign pointed to the two paragraphs at the end of a Klobuchar campaign web page that specifically follow the heading ""Propose legislation to get us to universal health care."" However, this is a selective reading of the health care policy pages that Klobuchar posted on her website. Klobuchar supports building on the Affordable Care Act and adding a public option that expands Medicare and Medicaid. By contrast, Warren initially joined rival candidate Bernie Sanders in supporting a wholesale switch to a single-player plan — a more aggressive approach than Klobuchar’s — then later eased off. Warren currently backs two bills, one for a public option and another for a single-payer plan. The problem with Warren’s attack is that it focuses on two paragraphs, which ignores most of her rival’s health care plan. There is quite a bit of detail in Klobuchar’s plan. Klobuchar’s website has no fewer than four different web pages that address the topic — a main health care policy page, a more detailed sub-page, a sub-page on prescription drugs and a sub-page on mental health. Some of Klobuchar’s bullet-pointed priorities include: • ""Immediately suspend the Trump Administration’s efforts to eliminate the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions."" • ""Develop best models of care to address disparities in maternal and infant mortality and address the shortage of maternity care health professionals in underserved rural and urban areas."" • ""Expand Medicaid reimbursement for people receiving mental health or substance use treatment."" • ""Expand the open enrollment period for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act so more people can get insurance coverage."" • ""Stop Trump sabotage of the ACA by ending workarounds that allow states to raise premiums for sicker people and shift ACA premium subsidies away from lower-income enrollees."" All told, the four Klobuchar web pages by our count have 64 paragraphs, not counting overlap — far more than two. Warren said, ""Amy, I looked online at your (health care) plan. It’s two paragraphs."" Warren’s campaign said she was referring to just the paragraphs that specifically addressed universal health care. That wasn't clear on stage, where she dismissed Klobuchar's health policy ideas as small enough to fit on a Post-It. Klobuchar's two paragraphs on universal health care are just one part of a four-webpage policy statement that collectively runs 64 paragraphs long." Claim: Amy, I looked online at your (health care) plan. It’s two paragraphs.
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Paragraph: "Newly installed CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert tangled, politely, with Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, on his Sept. 21 show regarding the legacy of President Ronald Reagan. Colbert asked Cruz, who’s running for the Republican presidential nomination, whether he could agree with Reagan’s support of ""amnesty"" for undocumented immigrants and the late president’s willingness to raise some taxes amid budget shortfalls. Cruz said ""of course not"" before pivoting to Reagan’s most conservative accomplishments, one being that he ""signed the largest tax cut in history"" and spurred economic growth. ""When (Ronald) Reagan came in, from 1978 to 1982, economic growth averaged less than 1 percent a year,"" Cruz said. ""There’s only one other four-year period where that’s true. That’s true from 2008 to 2012."" His point was that Reagan rescued the U.S. economy from the ravages it suffered under his Democratic predecessor, President Jimmy Carter, and that the only other equivalent economic distress occurred under Carter’s fellow Democrat, Barack Obama. Colbert responded, ""But when conditions changed in the country, he reversed his world’s ‘largest tax cut’ and raised taxes when revenues did not match the expectations. So it’s a matter of compromising."" We wondered if Cruz was correct about the periods of low GDP growth. (In a separate fact-check, we explore Colbert’s rejoinder.) Excepting the unusual post-World War II period of 1945 through 1949 -- when the nation was demobilizing from an all-encompassing war -- Cruz has put his finger correctly on the two general periods in which the annual average growth of gross domestic product over four-year periods has sunk below 1 percent. They are the late 1970s era of ""stagflation"" (that is, stagnant growth combined with rapid inflation) and the aftermath of the Great Recession. The full annual data can be found here. But there were actually three distinct four-year periods during and after the Great Recession that fit Cruz’s criteria, rather than one -- that is, the four-year periods starting with 2006, 2007 and 2008. (With every four-year period beginning after 2009, average annual GDP growth has exceeded 1 percent.) Here’s the rundown of the four post-World War II periods that fit Cruz’s criteria: First year Second year Third year Fourth year Average annual GDP growth 1979 1980 1981 1982 0.2 percent 2006 2007 2008 2009 0.3 percent 2007 2008 2009 2010 0.4 percent 2008 2009 2010 2011 0.4 percent So Cruz overlooked two additional four-year periods. Also, the implication of his comment -- that Democrats bear the primary responsibility for these periods of poor economic growth -- is not so clear. For starters, as we’ve discussed previously, economists say it’s hard to determine how much credit or blame a president deserves for successes or shortcomings in the economy at large on their watch. Factors outside their control, from energy-price shocks to technological changes to pure luck, can have a significant impact on the nation’s economic record. In addition, Cruz’s groupings suggest some contradictory standard-setting. For the 1979-1982 period, Carter was in office for the first two years and Reagan was in office for the third and fourth years. But in the next two periods -- 2006-2009 and  2007-2010 -- George W. Bush, a Republican, was president for at least half of the time. In fact, Bush was in charge for the first three years in 2006-2009, and the first two years in 2007-2010. If Carter, Democrat, is to take blame for the slow growth in the first period, then logically Bush, a Republican, should shoulder the same blame in the next two four-year periods. By the same token, if Reagan, a Republican, escapes blame in the first example, then so too should Obama in the second and third four-year periods. And the 2005-2008 period -- which occurred entirely on Bush’s watch -- barely escapes inclusion on this list, with an average annual growth rate of 1.13 percent. (During the 2008-2011 period, Obama was president for the final three of those years.) Gary Burtless, an economist with the Brookings Institution, said he doesn’t blame either Reagan or Obama for the economic shortcomings early in their tenures that fall under Cruz’s statistical claim. Still, he sees a logical inconsistency in Cruz’s comparison as stated on Colbert’s show. ""It seems doubtful whether poor economic performance early in any president's term can be attributed to the impact of his administration's policies,"" Burtless said. ""If you take office when economic output is plunging, it does not seem legitimate to attribute the economic plunge to the person who just took office."" He added a footnote: Unlike Obama, who unquestionably inherited a recession already under way, the economy actually grew through the first couple of months of Reagan’s first term. GDP grew in the third and fourth quarters of 1980, right before he was elected, and continued to grow during the first quarter of 1981 after he was in office, before a ""double-dip"" recession hit. Cruz spokesman Phil Novack told PolitiFact that our analysis misses the point. ""The focus on who exactly held office in each of those individual time periods is not as important as the contrast between the two periods in terms of how quickly the economy was growing before and after those identified time periods, which is the point Cruz was making,"" Novack said. ""His point was obviously referring to policy results, and we know the results of the policies that followed those slow-growth years of below 1 percent growth that Sen. Cruz identified. Reagan's policies brought us a boom, and Obama's policies have been a bust."" For what it’s worth, we also compared Carter and Reagan on their economic records and found them more similar than one might expect. During Carter’s four years in office, the growth rate averaged 3.23 percent a year. If you take the first four years of Reagan’s presidency, it averaged 3.34 percent. Essentially, each president had two good years and two bad years, which more or less averaged out. Our ruling Cruz said that ""when (Ronald) Reagan came in, from 1978 to 1982, economic growth averaged less than 1 percent a year. There’s only one other four-year period where that’s true. That’s true from 2008 to 2012."" Cruz missed two other four-year periods that fit the criteria. In addition, his implication -- that Democrats are largely to blame for those conditions -- doesn’t stand up to logical consistency, particularly when he excluded the period beginning in 2006 (which included three years solely under Bush) and 2007 (which included two years solely under Bush). This goes on top of general uncertainty about how much blame to assign presidents for poor economic conditions." Claim: When (Ronald) Reagan came in, from 1978 to 1982, economic growth averaged less than 1 percent a year. There’s only one other four-year period where that’s true. That’s true from 2008 to 2012.

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