ESG Advocates Have Unhinged Priorities
Without quick action, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scoring frameworks will become hopelessly embedded in our daily lives, and the people who push ESG don’t give a hoot about our well-being.
To those still unfamiliar with the ESG movement, it is, at its core, a mechanism by “which a cabal of ideologically aligned influential interests working through unelected supranational organizations are attempting to ‘reset’ the global financial system to their advantage.” Circumventing national sovereignty, free markets, and individual rights, global government organizations, the embedded bureaucrats staffing them, and the governments that fund and compose their membership are working with international corporations and financial elites to alter traditional financial methods of assessing risk and allocating capital and credit. Under an ESG system, companies, and likely soon individuals, will be assigned arbitrarily determined ESG social credit scores, which financial institutions, investment portfolio managers, and Big Tech could use to guide investment choices, decisions about who can participate in banking or get business licenses, and who can engage on social media platforms. Basically, ESG is a backdoor to a social credit score, encouraged by government, and typically imposed through regulations.
ESG is particularly interested in social justice and fossil fuel divestment, and a score can be given to your business whether you want one or not.
Companies (and eventually individuals) that do not achieve a high ESG score can be punished; banks may refuse to provide loans to, or limit capital investments available to the company. There may also be limited access to tax credits, insurance, grants, and other kinds of contracts. People with low ESG scores could also be banned from social media outlets.
Although the ESG investment framework is pitched as a caring, environmentally conscious alternative to traditional revenue-focused investment, it is actually a weapon of the deranged, prioritizing the pursuit of “woke” political ends over advancing human welfare.
Take, for example, the reaction of one analyst of a “risk intelligence” company called Maplecroft, to a recent violent coup attempt in the small island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe. In an interview with Rigzone, the analyst said “[t]he coup attempt is incredibly damaging for the country’s political and ESG credentials, and will likely deter investors in the nascent oil and gas industry[.]”
Four people are reported dead, the coup was thwarted, but an investment fad is at the top of some experts’ minds.
To regular people, this is insane—but to world leaders in government and CEOs of multinational corporations, ESG is the future. At the recent United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), the message was clear: fossil fuel use in particular has to go, and financial institutions should enforce it.
Fossil fuels and their derivatives have lifted much of the world out of extreme poverty, have vastly improved crop yields, help get clean water and transportation to the most remote regions, aid in developing medicines, provide inexpensive and clean heating, air conditioning, and thousands of other things that we take for granted. More than 4,000 items and products in everyday use in developed, and many developing countries alike, either contain fossil fuels as a necessary component, or are wholly derived from fossil fuels. Even for essential products not derived from fossil fuel, they are often developed, manufactured, and delivered through technologies that rely on fossil fuels. A strictly enforced ESG effort would halt this opportunity and development for poor nations, regardless of their political stability.
However, the damage borne by ESG won’t stop in poor nations. By limiting investments for oil and gas operations domestically, it will also continue to keep energy prices high, undermine economic growth, and leave the United States dangerously dependent on foreign sources of energy and technology.
And it’s getting worse. New regulations from the Biden administration allow ESG considerations to be a factor in your 401(k) management, and your employer can invest your money into an ESG fund as the default option.
The vast majority of people who invest in the markets, whether as individuals or as part of a private or public pension, do so in the hopes of maximizing returns to provide for a secure retirement, one that provides them the ability to not simply survive but thrive and enjoy some modicum of freedom to pursue their post-retirement dreams. By allowing ESG to be a consideration in banks, investment managers, and stock portfolios goals, the government is sanctioning these financial elites to use other peoples’ money to pursue their self-selected social and environmental goals. Under ESG, the government is undermining the fiduciary standard of using clients’ money to pursue profit as the sole legal guideline in order to maximize return to their client investors; and replacing it with whatever social or environmental goals the banks and fund managers think people should be pursuing.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management company, with more than $10 trillion under its control, is just one of many companies pushing ESG. Some colleges are creating curriculum for aspiring sustainability busybodies. To give you an example of the kind of people these careers attract, one sustainability investment website put together a list of ESG jobs, including one that contains the telling opening line, “[h]ave you ever wanted to be a bodyguard but lacked physical strength? If so, an ESG career path may be your second chance.”
Fortunately, it is not all doom and gloom. Some states have passed laws barring financial firms that have an ESG-focus from doing business with state and local contracts. Best of all, it seems to be working. After several states pulled money out of BlackRock, the company’s stock price was downgraded, and it continues to face pressure from oil producing states that are not particularly thrilled by fossil fuel divestment schemes.
ESG is the psychotic bully of the investment world, its advocates use emotional blackmail and fear about climate change to get away with becoming corporate kingmakers, while forcing companies that aren’t in lockstep with a “stakeholder capitalism” agenda out of business. They do not care that it hurts families and the world’s poor. As such, we must not let them win.
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Wind turbines offer huge rewards to already rich landowners – but rather less for the rest of us
Is Rishi Sunak already a prisoner in Number 10? Twenty four hours after giving in to backbench rebels and abolishing house-building targets he has now given into the Tory wind farm lobby, too — lifting the moratorium on onshore wind farms imposed by David Cameron in 2015.
According to the rebels, led by former levelling-up secretary Simon Clarke, onshore wind is very popular with voters. A YouGov poll published at the weekend claimed that 64 per cent of Tory voters would support the construction of a wind farm ‘near’ their home, with only 30 percent against. The crucial word there is ‘near’. What does it mean? A hundred yards away, half a mile away, 10 miles away?
A lot of Tory voters live in urban areas where they know they are not going to get a wind farm at the end of their road. Perhaps they wouldn’t mind a wind farm built on farmland several miles away. But the real test will come once the planning applications start to roll in for real — and many voters realise they will be in the shadow of turbines which have roughly doubled in height since the moratorium has been in place. The tallest onshore turbine in Scotland — where there never was a moratorium — is 600 feet, roughly as high as the North Downs.
We are rapidly going to discover just how few potential wind farm sites there are in the South East which are more than half a mile from the nearest residential property. There are more sparsely-populated areas in the North, but many of those are within national parks.
Those familiar with rural politics know that there is virtually no development you can undertake in the English countryside without inciting a protest group — around my way there was even a protest against the creation of a nature reserve on the grounds it might create more traffic. Wind farms are not going to be an exception — once they start being built many of the rebel MPs will discover that what the public tell opinion pollsters does not necessarily coincide with what they think when they find developers on their doorstep.
If windfarm-supporting Tories are hoping that onshore turbines will help solve the energy crisis they will be disappointed in that, too. The idea that onshore wind is the cheapest form of energy only holds if you ignore the cost of coping with the intermittency of wind power. Britain already has enough wind and solar power — theoretically — to meet the average 38 GW UK demand for power. Yet on a calm night last week the contribution of wind and solar fell to less than two per cent. We have a tiny capacity for energy storage — equivalent to less than an hour’s national consumption.
The only reason we can cope with lulls in the wind is by firing-up gas stations at short notice. One of the reasons gas power seems so expensive at the moment is that the market has to pay through the nose to keep gas power stations on standby for use at short notice. If we used gas power to generate a steady baseload as we used to do it would be a lot cheaper per kWh.
The lifting of the moratorium on inshore wind will delight the Tory landowning interest, who stand to make fat sums from licenses to have turbines built on their land — David Cameron’s father-in-law, Sir Reginald Sheffield, was being paid £350,000 a year from turbines on his land. There is rather less in it for ordinary Tory voters.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/12/07/wind-turbines-offer-huge-rewards-already-rich-landowners-rather/ ?
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Climate activists "waging war on the mind"
A new paper from Net Zero Watch argues that climate alarmists are waging psychological warfare on the public.
Author Stephen McMurray says that professional psychologists are using fear as a weapon to manipulate public behaviour. McMurray says:
"Psychologists are saying, quite openly, that telling people facts doesn't work, and that psychological pressure should be brought to bear in other ways. Their professional bodies seem to have no interest in preventing this shameful and completely unethical behaviour."
McMurray says that the Government and Civil Service are also quite open about using psychological warfare against the population at large. Indeed, the view in Whitehall appears to be that fearmongering, as widely applied during the Covid pandemic, was a success, and should be seen as a model for use in the drive for Net Zero.
"Civil servants seem quite happy to treat the public as lab rats for them to experiment on as they see fit. They are out of control, and nobody in Government seems to have any interest in stopping them."
"Stephen McMurray: The climate change cult and the war on the mind (pdf)"
Contact
Stephen McMurray
e: s.mcmurray1@btinternet.com
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Australia's gas cap folly
If the threat of gas rationing and blackouts on the first day of winter this year taught us anything it is that maximising the supply of reliable and baseload power is the only way to ensure the lights stay on, right?
Australia is currently facing multiple economic crises on a number of fronts.
However, there are three that the federal government is seemingly determined to exacerbate, namely Australia’s gas supply shortage, rapid rises in the cost of living, and our record low private business investment as a percentage of the economy.
The cost of living crisis is a handicap on the quality of everyday Australian life, and if private businesses are not investing in the Australian economy, then that minimises the opportunities available to Australians to help offset cost of living pressures.
These three crises are all linked to the policy of Net Zero emissions by 2050, introduced by the former Morrison government in 2021 and legislated by the Albanese government in 2022. Net Zero, by design, requires the removal of gas from the national energy market to make way for ‘green’ energy such as wind and solar.
One of the first acts of the Albanese government, when elected in May, was to legislate the Net Zero target. This has accelerated the closure of coal projects across the country, expanded the scope of green activist lawfare against critical resource projects, increased power prices, and localised a global gas supply shortage, even though Australia is one of the most energy resource-rich countries on Earth.
The consequences wrought by the policy of Net Zero emissions by 2050 fuelled the energy crisis that the east coast continues to suffer through.
And the depths of this crisis cannot be underestimated. In the year 2022, how can it be that on the first day of winter this year, the Australian Energy Market Operator warned that gas rationing may be necessary to ensure that Australians could keep their lights and heaters on? This lack of supply made electricity prices surge.
In response, the Prime Minister recently floated imposing price caps on energy companies. This was a reactionary and short-sighted response. The proposal is also evidence the federal government does not have a cogent plan to get us out of the energy wilderness that is biting into the hip pockets of mainstream Australians.
Price caps will act as a direct deterrent for companies wanting to do business in Australia’s already over-regulated energy market, with Woodside Energy indicating they will no longer invest in projects along Australia’s east coast if this policy was adopted.
Woodside’s threat of withholding new gas investment on Australia’s east coast in response to the proposed price caps would worsen Australia’s record low private business investment and exacerbate Australia’s gas supply issues.
The vacuum created by private businesses deciding that investing in the Australian energy market is all too hard, opens the door for government agencies to fill the gap. You only have to look at the proposal to re-introduce the State Electricity Commission in Victoria, which is pursuing a renewable energy target of 95 per cent by 2035. It means instead of baseload power coming back into the market, even more taxpayer dollars will be used to push the ideological obsession with unreliable and experimental solar and wind energy, proven time and time again that it cannot deliver the power we need on scale.
The federal government should be fostering policies that increase the supply of gas. Increasing the supply of gas (and coal) is the only way to meet demand, and to drive down record energy prices.
These policies include repealing the Climate Change Act 2022, saying no to Net Zero, and exiting the Paris Climate Agreement.
Unfortunately, the far more likely outcome is that baseload power will continue to be forced off the national energy market in favour of unreliable solar and wind power leaving Australians with higher energy bills, insecure supply of power, and lower levels of employment.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/12/albos-gas-cap-folly/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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