Holly Valance takes a swipe at 'lefties' and climate alarmists in rare TV interview
Ex-Neighbours star Holly Valance has taken a swipe at 'crap lefties' and climate alarmists in shock appearance at a conservative event.
Valance attended the launch of the 'Popular Conservatism' group in London together with her property tycoon husband Nick Candy.
The group aims to reform Britain to 'allow conservative values to flourish'.
Speaking after the event, Valance revealed how she was attracted to the right after shunning 'crap ideas' from 'lefties' earlier in her life.
The mother-of-two took a swipe at climate alarmists and revealed her concern about 'the way things are going in the country'.
In an interview with GB News, Valance described how she was motivated to attend this morning's launch event in order to 'listen to good ideas'.
'I'm a citizen like everyone else here who's concerned about the way things are going in the country,' the former actress said.
'Many things worry and bother me with two little children to bring up - what they might inherit. So I want to come and listen to ideas, good ideas.'
She added: 'Everyone starts off as a leftie and then wakes up at some point after you start either making money, working, trying to run a business, trying to buy a home, and then realise what crap ideas they all are - and then you go to the right.
She told the TV news channel: 'I just think the climate crisis - or lack of - is not a crisis.
'The air is better than when I was growing up. It used to stink walking down the street when I was growing up.
'Cleaner, cheaper energy is what we need - we're perfectly able to get it and have it.
'But we're just putting all these restrictions on normal people who are just trying to go about their business and get to work, pick up their children from school, go to the supermarket.
'It's just insanity, it's like smashing your head up against a wall every day.'
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'Woke capitalism' funds COLLAPSED by $13B last year - investors fled trendy 'ESG' investments
US sustainability funds — which conservatives have derided as 'woke capitalism' — saw their worst year on record in 2023, with investors pulling $13 billion from US funds, a Morningstar report says.
That multi-billion dollar exodus in the US more than offset the inward flows seen in Europe, dragging down the market globally.
In the fourth quarter alone, investors withdrew $5 billion from funds that promote environmental, social, and governance (ESG) efforts, making the fifth straight quarter of net outflows, the report says.
According to Morningstar, a financial services firm, investors exited ESG amid fears of poor returns, a hidden leftist agenda, and 'greenwashing,' or making a firm appear more environmentally friendly than it really is.
ESG refer to standards to guide investment toward socially-conscious firms — for example, by funding wind farms to combat climate change, while pulling out of harmful oil and tobacco giants.
The strategy gets more controversial when it guides funding to firms promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) schemes, which irk conservatives, who say they help women and minorities by sidelining white men.
This has spawned a fractious debate about whether efforts to make society fairer and cut carbon emissions are in the strategic interest for investors, by mitigating the risks of climate chaos and social disorder.
Alyssa Stankiewicz, a sustainability researcher at Morningstar, said ESG investments faced strong macroeconomic headwinds last year.
Global supply constraints, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and high interest rates left renewable energy firms less profitable.
Investors walked away from ESG funds chiefly over lackluster returns. Their performance improved from 2022's lows, but they still lagged behind their traditional peers.
The median sustainable large-blend equity fund gained 20.8 percent in 2023. That's lower than the 23.9 percent gains made by all types of funds overall.
A lack of clear cross-border regulation over 'greenwashing,' when companies make false claims about their environmental standards, hurt demand, said Stankiewicz.
Questions about the future of sustainable finance persist in the US as lawmakers from more than a dozen states, from Florida to Utah, try to fight the incorporation of ESG principles into business and investing.
'Especially within the US, continued political scrutiny of sustainable and ESG strategies contributed to a chilling effect on demand for these funds,' she wrote in her report.
The weak period for ESG funds has been notable given the massive growth they've posted in recent years.
ESG investing boomed in the pandemic, when lockdowns caused energy prices to fall and buoyed portfolios that shunned fossil fuels.
Those same strategies have floundered as lockdowns ended and economic activity resumed.
The amount invested in US sustainable funds totaled $323 billion by the end of 2023, 12 percent lower than the record-setting amount invested in 2021.
'We saw such strong inflows between 2019 and 2021,' Stankiewicz told Yahoo Finance.
'It's not as though all of those investors that started allocating to sustainable funds are all of a sudden running for the exits.'
The underperformance of ESG-focused funds strikes at the heart of a core argument of ESG: that investors are rewarded by investing in do-good companies.
Advocates of ESG say it's a smarter way to invest, because it factors in longer-term concerns, such as the economic chaos from climate change and ever-more freak weather events.
While many nations are ramping up renewables and scrapping carbon-belching power stations, the transition is not smooth and near-term shocks hinder progress, the report says.
Millennials and Gen Zers are turning their backs on ESG funds faster than others, new research shows.
A survey of some 1,000 investors found that millennial and Gen Z respondents had started to allocate their money more like baby boomers, who are keener on turning a profit than lofty sustainability principles.
Prof David Larcker, of Stanford Graduate School of Business, who led the research, said support for ESG values among younger investors fell by 'double-digit percentages' between 2022 and 2023.
Previously, young investors said they were 'very concerned about environmental and social issues' and wanted their fund managers to push 'for change, even if it meant a loss of personal wealth,' said Larcker.
That 'sentiment has changed dramatically,' he added.
In the survey, preference for ESG investing among millennials and Gen Zers, who are aged between 18 and 41, fell sharply.
The share of those who said they were 'very concerned about environmental issues' dropped from 70 percent in 2022 to 49 percent last year.
The share of those who were worried about social issues fell from 65 percent to 53 percent.
Meanwhile, those concerned about social issues dropped from 64 percent to 47 percent, according to the study from Stanford University, the Hoover Institution, and the Rock Center for Corporate Governance.
The share of millennial and Gen Z investors who said they wanted their fund managers to promote ESG values also tanked — from nearly half of them in 2022 to about a quarter last year.
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Biden Strengthens US Soot Regulations, Angering Industry
President Joe Biden's administration on Wednesday announced tough new air quality standards it said were sorely needed to protect the health of vulnerable communities, though industry groups have said the move would devastate domestic manufacturing.
It comes as the Democratic incumbent faces a tough election rematch against the likely Republican candidate Donald Trump, who rolled back dozens of air pollution regulations when he was in office.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s new rule concerns fine particulate matter, commonly known as soot, a widespread, deadly pollutant linked to asthma and heart disease, and more.
Under the new standard, levels of PM2.5 (particles that are 2.5 micrometers in diameter and smaller) would not be permitted to exceed an average annual level of 9 micrograms per cubic meter, down from the current 12 micrograms per cubic meter and more stringent than current as well as proposed European Union regulations.
"Today's action is a critical step forward to better protect workers, families and communities from the dangerous and costly impacts of fine particle pollution," EPA chief Michael Regan told reporters on a press call.
Vehicles, smokestacks and fires are common sources of fine particles, which also form when gases emitted by car engines, power plants and industrial processes react in the atmosphere.
The agency estimated the action would prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and 290,000 lost workdays, and generate up to $46 billion in net health benefits in 2032, the first year that states would be required to meet the new standard.
Wednesday's announcement was hailed by environmental and health groups.
"The body of science around this pollution is so robust -- we know it takes people before their time, premature deaths from heart attacks, we know that it gives children and adults asthma and many other sicknesses," said Abbie Dillen, president of the environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice.
"We could not be more grateful on behalf of all of the clients that we've represented over the years," she added.
Industry groups have said the rule would threaten US manufacturing operations, and the issue threatens to become yet another battleground in key swing states in the 2024 presidential election.
"The standards will hinder onshoring, resulting in continued manufacturing abroad -- which is less clean than manufacturing in the US," the National Association of Manufacturers said in a statement when the rule was first mooted a year ago.
The move has also been opposed by the American Forest & Paper Association, with the pulp and paper mills large emitters of air pollution.
But the EPA has disputed the characterizations, calculating that 99 percent of the country's more than 3,100 counties will be in compliance by 2032 because of an overall downward trend in air pollution from other initiatives.
It added states could exclude exceptional circumstances arising from wildfires from the particulate matter they report -- a factor that could be important as climate change makes smoke exposure from forest blazes more common.
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Category 6 Climate Alarmism
Few people deny that the climate is and has been changing. Yet the exact reason, cause, and degree to which mankind may be affecting this change are very much up for debate. However, for the climate cultists, there is only one acceptable answer to the question of what is causing climate change. And that answer is human activity linked directly to the use of fossil fuels. Indeed, a failure to fully embrace this unassailable climate dogma will get one labeled a “climate denier.”
However, the trouble with any cult is that when its prophecies fail to materialize, its adherents begin to lose faith, and skeptics eagerly step forward to expose the failures and errors in those dogmatically held beliefs.
This is much of the reason why the Leftmedia, which has long held that anthropogenic climate change is “settled science,” must continuously prop up the climate narrative, or else people might not believe it and in turn might fail to vote for the media’s preferred leftist political party.
Therefore, the solution to this conundrum of keeping the faith despite repeated instances of climate alarmists’ dire warnings failing to materialize is to spin normal climatic weather events as abnormal and getting worse.
Are storms really getting worse? It has been a repeated refrain almost every time a significant weather event affects the U.S., be it hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, heat waves, or snow storms. The reporting on these seasonal and common weather events increasingly frames them as “more severe,” “more extreme,” “more costly,” “more frequent,” or “more deadly” than ever before.
The trouble is the historical scientific record fails to uphold that alarmist narrative.
The alarmists’ solution, then, is to continue to assert that climate change is making common weather events like hurricanes worse and then drive home the issue by making proposals like adding a “Category 6” to the hurricane power scale.
That’s right. An example of this not-so-subtle attempt at climate spin comes courtesy of two scientists, Michael Wehner and James Kossin. The two are promoting the idea, which is not necessarily a new idea, that a Category 6 designation should be added to the five-step Saffir-Simpson measurement scale of a hurricane’s intensity. The reason? Well, climate change, of course.
As Wehner asserts, “Climate change has demonstrably made the strongest storms stronger.” This is how it works: Simply declare it as an undeniable reality and then move on to a proposed policy solution. Wehner then argues, “Introduction of this hypothetical Category 6 would raise awareness of that.”
And there it is. Not enough people have bought into climate alarmism, so by adding a new “extreme” “Category 6” to the hurricane scale, the alarmist narrative can be further pressed home.
The trouble is that from a practical standpoint, adding a sixth level to the well-understood hurricane scale would likely add confusion or even blunt the public’s perception of the danger associated with lower-category storms. Furthermore, while the hurricane categories measure a storm’s maximum sustained wind speed, they don’t account for the other often more damaging aspects of a hurricane, like water or storm surge.
Everyone who lives in a hurricane-affected area already knows that a Category 5 storm is a monster to be avoided at all costs. Who needs to turn the volume up to 11?
https://patriotpost.us/articles/104204-category-6-climate-alarmism-2024-02-07
***************************************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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