Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law Tuesday a bill banning state agencies and local governments from taking climate change and diversity factors into account when investing money.

The Government and Corporate Activism Act targets ESG, or environmental, social and governance standards, derided as “woke” by DeSantis and the GOP-led Legislature in their culture war battles.

Democrats and some business owners say the law could cost the state money and impact municipal bonds.

At an event in Jacksonville, DeSantis called ESG “an attempt by elites to impose ideology through business institutions, financial institutions, and our economy writ large. … They want to use economic power to impose this agenda on our society. And we think in Florida, that is not going to fly here.”

The bill, which passed both the House and Senate along mostly party lines, also bans banks from applying a “social credit score” and denying services to people based on political opinions or speech, which is defined to include religion, ownership of a firearm, being involved in “fuel-based energy, timber, mining, or agriculture,” or supporting the “combating illegal immigration.”

“You’ll actually hear from some folks today who’ve kind of been caught up in this morass where they’ve been discriminated against by financial institutions, just basically because they’re not toeing the ideological line,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis introduced Laura DiBenedetto, the owner of firearms store Sovereign Ammo in Flagler County, who quoted from George Orwell’s 1984 and claimed her industry was “already under totalitarian rule” because they were denied funding by lenders “because our profession didn’t pass muster for an acceptable business.”

The state pension fund has already started pulling out of investments in companies with ESG practices, including $2 billion from BlackRock, the largest asset-management firm in the world. The money was dispersed to other asset managers that also support ESG, however.

State CFO Jimmy Patronis, who pushed for pulling out of BlackRock, railed Tuesday against the company and fellow “globalists.”

“We can’t force Washington to do what we want them to do,” Patronis said. “But what we can damn sure do is we can put up a fight, we can keep it on the front burner.”

Democrats have criticized Patronis for pulling the state’s money out of profitable companies.

“The people that we’re trying to attack are not in the business of losing money and giving it away,” Pizzo said.

Greg Hershman of the Principles for Responsible Investment, a United Nations-supported network of financial institutions, said in a statement Tuesday that the bill “means more confusion and less freedom for investors.”

“This legislation does not change the fact that investors find factors related to climate risks or corporate governance failures material to the value of their investments — it just undermines their freedom to consider those factors,” Hershman said.

Winter Park banker Kenneth LaRoe, who created Climate First Bank, said last month his company may cease to exist if the law passed. It specifically lists it won’t do business with those in fossil fuels, for-profit prisons and gun sales or manufacturing.

“It’s like they took our list and put it in their bill,” LaRoe said. “It feels like the bill is aimed at us.”