Honey, Joe Biden Just Shrunk Our Pension
President Biden recently issued his first veto since taking office on January 20, 2021.
Mr. Biden rejected a bipartisan bill that would have required investment fund managers to take politics out of their investment decisions and to stay focused on providing the best return to their clients as much as possible.
Why should you care? Because Mr. Biden was, in effect, saying it was permissible for fund managers, who have control of trillions of dollars in pension accounts, to take into consideration a company’s ESG score (related to how it stands on racial justice, climate change and LGBT issues) when they decide where to invest the money.
Workers and retirees are angry about this decision — as they should be. ESG is effectively a tax on your retirement funds, and it means you will have a smaller nest egg when you retire than if the money managers simply bought the top-performing stocks. Workers don’t want politics diluting the returns on their 401(k) plans and other pension accounts.
Let’s step back a minute. Social investment funds have been around for decades. I’m fine with it. As a matter of conscience, if people want to avoid investing in pro- or anti-abortion causes, divest from products made with child labor or avoid owning any fossil fuel companies, gun manufacturers, plastic companies or firms that don’t have enough transgender bathrooms — it’s a free country. These funds normally underperform the market, but that’s a decision of personal conscience.
I try to be a socially conscientious investor myself. I don’t like the politics of Ben and Jerry’s, for example, so I try not to buy their ice cream. But to be honest, I love their ice cream, so sometimes I give in to temptation. The Left tried to stage boycotts against Chick-fil-A because of some of the owner’s social policy views, but the chicken sandwiches are so popular that the crusade failed miserably.
This new fad of ESG investing is entirely different and more nefarious. ESG stands for environmental and social justice governance. The idea is to promote racial equality, save the planet from climate change, and advance gay rights and a whole host of other related trendy and mostly left-wing causes.
ESG investing is perfectly appropriate when the investors are making their own decisions with their own money on where and what to invest in. But the scandal arises when fund managers that make investment decisions with other people’s savings, or pension plans start injecting their own political biases into the investment portfolios and choose company stocks they should or shouldn’t buy.
Fund managers, such as Fidelity and Blackrock, that pool their clients’ investment dollars and pick (hopefully) high-performing stocks have what is called a fiduciary duty. They are legally required to get the best return they can. Their duty is not to save the planet.
Biden said in his veto message that ESG is good for investors and offers high returns to workers and pensioners. Wrong.
A recent analysis by Bloomberg found that last year, ESG funds severely underperformed the market — in some cases by well more than 10 percent. Many ESG funds were divested from oil and gas companies, even though Exxon, Conoco Phillips and others were among the highest-return stocks.
In other words, if you bought the stocks that ESG funds sold, and sold the stocks that ESG funds bought, you’d have made a lot of money in recent years. And by the way, given that more than 70 percent of our energy now comes from fossil fuels, how does it advance our well-being as a nation by closing these energy sources down?
Another study by Boston College professors in retirement policy examined the performance of ESG funds and found “the average annualized return for those with a state ESG mandate would be 20 basis points lower than for those without a mandate.”
My estimate is that ESG has cost the public billions of dollars of reduced returns on their retirement nest eggs. This comes atop the $30,000 or so that people have lost on average in their 401(k) plans after Biden came into office, and the combination of high inflation and lousy stock market returns overall.
The good news is that more than a dozen Republican governors are fighting back to protect pensions from “political influences.” They are telling fund managers in their states that ESG is a violation of their duty to workers whose money has been placed in their trust. ESG should only be allowed with the explicit approval of the investor.
In other words, politicians and community activists aren’t very good stock pickers. So keep your grubby hands off our pensions.
https://www.nysun.com/article/honey-joe-biden-just-shrunk-our-pension
******************************************************John Kerry's Defense of Climate Change Activists' Private Jet Use Is Beyond Comical
John Kerry is mailing it in right now. This green warrior envoy gig is the last post he’ll hold in public life, and it shows. The man is saying the quiet part out loud about new environmental policies and an absolute lack of caring regarding perception when he drops remarks that make these folks like total hypocrites. They don’t care because they’re the political class—wealthy, entitled, and damn near untouchable. It’s been a years-long swipe at this activist class who whine, moan, and scream about carbon emissions but then utilize a fleet of private jets for traveling to elite gatherings, like Davos, to ironically discuss the end of the world via global warming.
When asked about this, Kerry took a zero-care approach, saying these folks’ private jet use “offsets” because they’re on the right side of the issue and doing good work or something. In other words, we can take private jets because we’re not in the oil and gas industry and believe in green energy. It’s a laughable pivot that again exposes this administration's lack of serious people.
‘We can do it, but you can’t’ is a grade school talking point. Never mind how the Democrats’ environmental agenda is tantamount to regional genocide, where numerous coal-mining communities have been irreparably crippled under the Obama administration. Gas stoves are next to be outlawed, and that is a policy initiative that will come in waves at the state and local levels. Democrats know they don’t have the votes for a federal ban, so the orders were given to like-minded governors, city councils, and state legislatures to carry out Order 66.
And please, stop talking about job retraining. A working man in his 50s or 60s cannot learn a new task that coastal elitists think is easily transferable; these people cannot become code writers or aces in tech. Even the late Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO knew this was a Trojan Horse position, seeing it was a miserable failure when NAFTA was being debated.
Of course, liberal America has a graduated scale on what is permissible regarding shamelessness and hypocrisy based on the issue and whether they’re on the right side. The more left-wing you are, the more you can be an insufferable sanctimonious clown. Ketchup man is just a byproduct of his politics and his party. It’s not a shocking revelation, but this defense of private jets is as weak as his 2004 presidential run. It’s almost as bad as the ‘they’re not supposed to do that’ when pressed about Iran using funds that were once frozen to subsidize their terrorist operations post-Iran nuclear deal.
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Italy looks to slow green transition drive to shield local firms
In power for just five months, Italy's right-wing government is pushing back on an array of initiatives aimed at greening the economy, arguing that local business can ill-afford previously agreed transition goals.
Since the start of the year, Italy has demanded that the European Union water down a directive aimed at improving the energy efficiency of buildings, re-write plans to phase out combustion engine cars and questioned a drive to slash industrial emissions.
Last week it unexpectedly reneged on a 2021 pledge to stop financing international fossil fuel projects, arguing that the energy crisis sparked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine meant the government had to be more cautious with its objectives.
"The problem is that we cannot help the environment by destroying our industries," Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni told reporters on Friday at the end of an European Union summit in Brussels.
"The road to a green economy must be socially and economically sustainable," she said.
Climate activists have denounced the erosion of green ambitions and warned that the backtracking in Italy could persuade other nations to follow suit.
"It is shocking," said Simone Ogno, a campaigner with the Italian environmental group ReCommon. "The government is using the recent energy crisis to justify everything, but we are talking here about the future of the planet."
Italy's reticence to sign up to green directives has also annoyed the European Commission, which has warned that Italian industry will end up losing out if it does not lead the drive in developing new, climate-friendly technologies.
"The transition is (aleady) here. You have to work on how to make it feasible and gain leadership in this process," said Paolo Gentiloni, the European Economic Commissioner and a former centre-left Italian prime minister.
"You don't have to be the last wagon in the train trying to hold the others back," he told an audience in Milan last week.
While Italy is still in discussion with the European Union about the fate of a number of green directives, it unilaterally walked away from a pledge made at the 2021 Cop26 summit in Glasgow to turn off the funding taps for foreign fossil fuel projects by the end of last year.
The country's export credit agency SACE said in a statement that it would continue to support oil distribution projects until January 2028, and oil storage and refining programmes until January 2024.
It declined to set any timetable to withhold funding for gas projects in these three areas.
"The Italian Climate Policy takes into account both climate objectives ... as well as the current energy crisis," SACE said, adding that further investments maybe needed "to diversify sources of supply, in particular in relation to gas".
The U-turn was announced just two days after the United Nations urged wealthy nations to slash emissions sooner than planned after a new assessment from scientists said there was no time to lose in tackling climate change.
Prior to the 2022 war in Ukraine, Italy imported 40% of its gas from Russia. Over the past year it has sourced alternative supplies from other nations, including Algeria, and is looking to become a major energy hub in its own right, carrying gas from North Africa and Mediterranean to the rest of Europe.
Critics say this will take a massive investment in new infrastructure and warn that by the time the pipelines are operational, the gas would no longer be wanted because of European caps on fossil fuels.
The European Union has among the most ambitious climate change policies of major emitters, having committed to cut its net greenhouse gas emissions 55% by 2030, from 1990 levels, and eliminate them altogether by 2050.
Luca Bergamaschi, co-founder and executive director of the Italian climate change thinktank ECCO, said the risk was that Rome would invest heavily in old technologies and fail to build the sort of industrial network needed to take advantage of the ecological transition in areas such as batteries.
"The government is trying to protect things for a short while, but this is ultimately destructive because it is not creating anything new," he said.
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Wind farms can simply ignore agreed contracts and cash in big time, FOI reveals
Net Zero Watch has accused the wind industry and the government of colluding to mislead the public about the true cost of wind energy.
The Government has repeatedly assured us that energy bills would soon fall as a result of much lower prices for offshore wind power, set at recent Contracts for Difference (CfD) auctions.
However, a new Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (now Department for Energy Security and Net Zero) and the Low Carbon Contracts Company (LCCC) has revealed that offshore wind farms and other generators are under no obligation whatsoever to take up their CfD options.
What is more, the Government has no power to either enforce them or impose penalties on those who don’t.
It is therefore almost certain that wind farm operators will simply not trigger their contracts. Instead, they are sell electricity on the open market at much higher prices, as two offshore wind farms are already doing. They are selling electricity at prices nearly double than they agreed in their contracts.
A series of research papers published by Net Zero Watch and others has shown that the true costs of offshore wind power are much higher than claimed, and that the low prices contracted at recent CfD auctions are simply nonviable.
Net Zero Watch is calling on the Government to impose a 100% windfall tax on all generators who refuse to honour their contracts.
Climate and energy analyst, Paul Homewood, said: "The Contracts for Difference scheme has been badly designed since the outset, and has already cost energy users £5.7 billion. For offshore wind farms, it is Heads I win, Tails you lose."
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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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