Anticipating Senate majority, Republicans warn ESG law firms to ‘preserve relevant documents’ of ‘collusive effort’ to restrict American energy production in violation of antitrust
By Robert Romano
“Over the coming months and years, Congress will increasingly use its oversight powers to scrutinize the institutionalized antitrust violations being committed in the name of ESG, and refer those violations to the [Federal Trade Commission] FTC and the Department of Justice.”
That was Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), anticipating an imminent Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate on Nov. 8, in a letter co-signed by Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), being sent to 51 law firms whose clients utilize Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investment initiatives to attract so-called woke and green capital by emphasizing climate sustainability goals in an anticompetitive manner to artificially restrict investment into carbon-based energies including coal and oil in violation of federal antitrust laws.
The Senators alleged these firms and their clients are engaged in a “collusive effort to restrict the supply of coal, oil, and gas, which is driving up energy costs across the globe and empowering America’s adversaries abroad.”
Sen. Cotton and company warned the 51 law firms to preserve any and all records in anticipation of House and Senate oversight and subpoenas should Republicans reclaim majorities: “To the extent that your firm continues to advise clients regarding participation in ESG initiatives, both you and those clients should take care to preserve relevant documents in anticipation of those investigations.”
ESG investing has increased dramatically in the past two decades via private retirement funds regulated under the Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) thanks to a regulation by the Obama Labor Department in 2015 allowing ESG investments into tax-exempt retirement savings accounts, and also by individually directed tax-free retirement accounts. A 2020 regulation by the Trump administration to water that down was promptly overturned by the Biden Administration.
In addition, the $762 billion federal Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) for federal employee retirees began investing in ESG funds in 2022, following state government employee retirement funds in California, New York, Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland and Oregon.
As a result, ESG is said to be worth $41 trillion this year globally, and $50 trillion by 2025, about one-third of all assets under management, according to Bloomberg.
U.S. corporations appear to be all in on BlackRock’s investing scam, with a recent KPMG survey finding 82 percent of U.S. corporations are touting ESG sustainability goals in their corporate filings. I’d add, even though doing so by no means guarantees inclusion in hedge funds’ ESG funds like BlackRock, Vanguard, etc.
In other words, ESG investing is so successful in shifting companies to the stakeholder capitalism model that companies are adopting ESG goals of their own accord — in mere hopes of getting some that investment money by virtue signaling — without necessarily even boosting their companies’ capitalization.
ExxonMobil, the largest producer in the U.S., announced that it would produce about 3.7 million barrels of oil a day — about 18 percent of all U.S. consumption — from its facilities throughout the world, a level which would remain relatively unchanged through 2025. This year, the estimate for 2022 was up slightly to 3.8 million barrels a day, only expected to rise to 4.2 million barrels a day by 2027.
Chevron, the second largest U.S.-based producer, it currently produces about 3 million barrels a day, expected to rise by just 500,000 barrels per day by 2025 to 3.5 million barrels per day.
To lock in the cartel’s purposeful production slowdown — which artificially drives up prices — BlackRock has placed green activists onto the board of Exxon. Other hedge funds like Vanguard also make significant ESG investments.
In his annual shareholder letter to investors Fink said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the supply crisis and the inflation would all lead to even more green energy in the future: “Longer-term, I believe that recent events will actually accelerate the shift toward greener sources of energy in many parts of the world.” Particularly, the inflation of carbon-based energy would make green energy more price competitive: “Higher energy prices will also meaningfully reduce the green premium for clean technologies and enable renewables, EVs and other clean technologies to be much more competitive economically,” Fink said.
In other words, the inflation we’re all experiencing right now is the point in order to drive more green investment and bring about the zero-carbon future — all at the expense of domestic energy production in what could be the worst winter in decades as the world runs short of natural gas and fuel oil for heat.
And Senate Republicans have noticed, including Cotton and Grassley, the latter of whom will once again be Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee should Republicans pick up a net one seat in the Senate on Nov. 8 in Nevada, Georgia, Arizona or New Hampshire while holding seats in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida and elsewhere.
The Senate letter comes after a group of 19 Republican Attorneys General led by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich and Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson have threatened the $10 trillion hedge fund BlackRock with antitrust legal action in an Aug. 4 letter to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink accusing the company of “intentionally restrain[ing] and harm[ing] the competitiveness of the energy markets” with its market dominance of retirement investments.
Brnovich and Peterson added, “coordinated conduct with other financial institutions to impose net-zero [carbon emissions by 2050] … raises antitrust concerns. Group boycotts, restraining trade, or concerted refusals to deal, ‘clearly run afoul of’ Section 1 of the Sherman Act [according to the Supreme Court]. Section 1 prohibits ‘[e]very … combination … , or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce.’ Regarding the definition of a ‘combination,’ the Supreme Court has held that this language prohibits ‘concerted action.’”
The fight against ESG is now being waged on multiple fronts. With anticipated House and Senate majorities, and state Republican Attorneys General on the case, Republicans here are strongly signaling they finally intend to rein in ESG’s stranglehold on American energy production, but it will not be easy. In addition to the 2015 Labor Department regulation for employer-based retiree plans and federal and state retiree investments, tax-free individual retirement accounts make up the bulk of investments.
To turn off the spigots, a GOP Congress and Republican-led states will have to be willing to address all of the government incentives, regulation-based, tax-based or otherwise — even and especially if they irk Wall Street — that are restricting American energy production when prices are rising and we need to boost our long term supply — before it’s too late.
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Green zealots are threatening real conservation
MATT RIDLEY
Environmentalists are increasingly finding themselves at odds with conservationists. Last week the head of the National Grid said the planning process will need to change because net zero requires the building of many new lines of pylons across the country. People in East Anglia are objecting to 110 miles of pylons scarring rural landscapes and ancient woodland to connect North Sea wind farms to the grid.
“We had to destroy the village to save it,” a probably apocryphal American general said in Vietnam. It is now clear that we are destroying the planet to save it from climate change. Many of the policies being pursued in the service of decarbonisation are not just economically damaging, but ecologically harmful too.
Wind farms kill hundreds of birds every year; so do cats, but these are rare species like golden eagles on land and red-throated divers offshore. They also kill bats by the thousand. If you or I killed an eagle or a bat we would go to jail. They spoil landscapes and require vast quantities of steel, concrete and rare earth metals, the mining of which is a source of pollution.
Then there’s the burning of wood by Drax power station in Yorkshire to generate electricity. Not only does wood produce more emissions than coal per unit of energy, this reverses a centuries-long trend of moving away from stealing the lunch of beetles and woodpeckers for our energy needs (nothing eats coal or gas). Much of Drax’s wood is imported from North Carolina because we don’t grow nearly enough timber in Britain. There, locals are horrified by the devastation to their woods. Yet it’s subsidised by you.
All over Wales, Scotland and northern England biodiversity-rich hills are disappearing under ecologically sterile monocultures of alien Sitka spruce thanks to government incentives to plant more trees to soak up carbon dioxide. Not only do grasslands and blanket bogs on moorland soak up CO2 almost as well, and sometimes better, they also hold back flood water and support rare birds like curlews.
In the south more and more fields are covered in futile solar “farms”, generating trickles of power when least needed – mostly on June afternoons. Sheep graze on the grass that grows under them, say their fans. Er, grass needs sunlight: the panels cut down the productivity of the land by around 90 per cent. They also displace food crops to other land elsewhere at the expense of natural habitats.
Biofuels, grown instead of food, put upward pressure on food prices and on the amount of land we need to grow food, while saving little or no emissions. On my local river, a new hydro plant generates a tiny quantity of power but threatens the migration of salmon smolts. The refusal to incinerate trash has led to it being fly-tipped in the countryside, or shipped to Asia for “recycling”, where it gets dumped in rivers or the sea. And don’t forget the diesel scandal, a worsening of urban air pollution as a direct result of a policy to reduce CO2 emissions by subsidising diesel cars.
Money available to save the red squirrel, the white clawed crayfish, or the water vole, is negligible; it all goes on decarbonisation. I once asked an ecological consultant why Natural England appeared to have lost interest in improving plant biodiversity on moorland. “You don’t understand,” she replied: “Carbon emissions are the only thing that count now.”
Climate change has become a convenient excuse for doing nothing about real conservation problem.
Where’s the outrage from environmentalists about the rape of the planet by the lucrative crony capitalists in the renewable industry? Silence. Real conservation can go hang, so long as we are seen to fight climate change.
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You can have green or growth -- but not both
Just think of all the important world leaders that Rishi Sunak could persuade to join the UK in the great “net zero carbon” campaign when the British PM makes the trip this week that he originally said he didn’t have time for: to the Cop 27 climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. The leaders of China and India, whose combined refusal at the Cop26 meeting in Glasgow to agree any date for abandoning coal use reduced Alok Sharma, the British president of the event, to tears; the leader of the world’s second-largest exporter of coal, Australia; the leader of Canada, where oil production has reached record levels of more than five million barrels a day; the leader of Russia, the planet’s biggest exporter of hydrocarbons.
Except not one of those countries’ leaders will be present. Admittedly President Putin is too busy terrorising and murdering Ukrainians to find time. But Messrs Xi, Modi, Albanese and Trudeau also have more pressing engagements in their diaries. A chap might be forgiven for wondering if they are less than fully committed to playing their part in the great cause, and don’t want to be publicly lectured on the matter by Greta Thunberg.
Though it turns out that the world’s most feted environmentalist isn’t attending either, having denounced the whole process as “greenwashing”. However, Ms Thunberg did show up last week in London to promote the latest publication bearing her name: The Climate Book. She took the opportunity to explain to her adoring audience that “the climate crisis has its roots in racist, oppressive extractivism”.
This will come as a bit of a blow to the European car industry, which under the orders of governments notionally committed to the same cause as Thunberg is switching from the internal combustion engine to power from batteries. Not that such power is inherently green: in China, for example, those electric cars will, in effect, be vehicles powered by coal. But if it’s “oppressive extractivism” you are bothered about, let me introduce you to the miners — many of them children — of the Democratic Republic of Congo, holder of the bulk of the world’s known reserves of cobalt, used in the batteries that power most electric vehicles.
In fairness to Thunberg, she doesn’t think we should be driving any sort of vehicle at all: her vision of life in accord with our moral duty “to the planet” is a kind of reversion to the Garden of Eden, or perhaps something akin to the way the Amish live. Funnily enough, she does somewhat resemble a member of that fundamentalist religious movement.
But she, at least, does not delude herself that it is possible to become more productive — the source of all economic progress and prosperity — while “going green”. At the heart of the transformation of mankind’s prospects over centuries is the growing efficiency with which energy is produced. What Thunberg denounced as “extractivism” is the very process that has done most to lift the world’s inhabitants out of abject poverty. The more of our resources required to generate energy, the more that progress is reversed.
So, for example, according to the late Professor Sir David MacKay, who was chief scientific adviser to the British government’s energy department, if you wanted onshore wind power to meet all our domestic energy requirements, it would be necessary to cover half the land mass of the British Isles with turbines.
Only, as he also pointed out, the laws of physics would stop this working even if any government were crazy enough to attempt it. Wind power is inherently unreliable, because it is unpredictably intermittent. And it cannot feasibly be stored. Therefore, the more a country is reliant on wind power, simultaneously the more it requires gas, as that is the most flexible backup fuel. In the past it would have been coal, which can be stored easily and at almost zero cost.
Now look at Germany, whose Energiewende policy trailblazed the switch from fossil fuels to wind power. On one day in 2019 wind power supplied almost 60 per cent of the country’s demand; on another day it could muster only 2.6 per cent. Cheap Russian gas seemed to be the ideal backup, but then ... well, you know the rest. Result: the German government has just authorised the removal of a wind farm that sits over untapped coal reserves, which the country now desperately needs to keep its industry going (and voters warm). RWE, which owns both the wind farm and the coalmine, explained: “We realise this comes across as paradoxical. But that is how matters stand.”
Matters, however, are not standing but developing apace — and most unfavourably for Europe’s leading economy. America enjoys, through the development of vast reserves by the process known as “hydraulic fracturing”, gas prices about a fifth of those in Europe. So some of Germany’s industries have now gone west: literally. Ten days ago the country’s biggest chemicals company, BASF, said it would have to downsize “permanently” in Europe.
And what of our country, home to deliciously taxable onshore gas reserves that, even if only 10 per cent were recoverable, could provide 50 years of domestic demand at the present rate? For purely political reasons Rishi Sunak reversed Liz Truss’s decision to lift the moratorium on UK shale gas production, though last week a group of Conservative policymakers advocated lifting a similar block on new onshore wind. When you consider that to generate the same amount of energy over 20-25 years as a five-acre, ten-well shale gas site you would need a wind farm 725 times the size, you see just how politics conquers reason (and indeed the landscape) in UK energy strategy.
Our likely next government has set out a “green growth” plan hatched by its former leader — now shadow climate change secretary — Ed Miliband. He declared at the Labour Party conference six weeks ago that his plan would “make Britain the first country in the world to achieve the target of zero carbon power”. Not just “net zero”, but no carbon-based energy at all. Blackouts, here we come. Or, to put it another way, it’ll be green but there will be no growth. On the contrary.
No one seemed to pay attention to Gary Smith, leader of the GMB (the union whose large donation to party funds was cancelled out, in effect, by one from a renewable energy firm): “What’s your message to workers in the vital chemicals manufacturing sector who depend on imported fracked gas as feedstock for the industry?” He also urged Labour to stop bowing to the “bourgeois environmental lobby”.
Too late: that’s taken over policy across Europe. It’s only the rest of the world that understands what makes economies grow.
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Climate scepticism is rising across the globe'
A HUGE international survey measuring public concern about the threat of climate change appears to indicate growing scepticism across the globe.
The Gallup Risk Poll, which questioned 125,000 people in 121 countries, reported that less than half of those surveyed saw anthropogenic climate change as a very serious threat. There is now, it appears, a consensus of sceptics.
The most sceptical countries in the survey were China, where only 20 per cent view climate change as a clear and present danger, the Middle East and North Africa (27 per cent) and South East Asia (39 per cent). At the other end of the spectrum was the US, where ‘climate change awareness’ has grown, albeit slightly, since the survey was last undertaken.
To see the results, click on this link. From there, go to Report 1: A changed world. Perceptions and experiences of risk in the Covid age. You will then be able to access the survey results for every country in the report. One of the questions on Page 1 relates to perceptions of the risk of climate change.
The results have been collated by region, compared with the previous report, and are summarised in this syndicated article.
The overall survey result represented a 1.5 per cent drop in belief in climate change as a very serious threat. In a year of often hysterical headlines and saturation coverage of devastating floods, hurricanes and wildfires – and in the UK at least, spontaneously combusting houses and hedgerows, all blamed squarely on humans and their wicked fossil fuel ways – this is surely a significant outcome.
There are signs too that growing public questioning of the orthodox narrative may be starting to influence governments. The survey comes soon after the Swedish government declared it was scrapping its Environment Ministry and throwing its weight behind nuclear energy.
Sweden is not alone: Japan has fallen back in love with nuclear too after a ten-year hiatus induced by the Fukushima earthquake crisis, as has even Germany to some extent. In the UK, the government is expected to grant up to 130 new North Sea oil and gas licences and has, via Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has been critical of climate alarmism in the past, initiated a review of the whole Net Zero project.
The most obvious cause of all this is the focusing of minds and reordering of priorities precipitated by the war in Ukraine and ensuing energy crisis. With the looming possibility of being unable to heat your home or to cook, a more quizzical attitude quickly evolves.
Even the faith of the usually implacable green super-elite has been shaken. Greta Thunberg, no less, has distanced herself from the most diehard of her fans by acknowledging, in a ‘say it ain’t so’ interview, that under present circumstances nuclear power may have a place in the future energy mix of Germany.
But could there be a bit more to it than simply panicky self-interest? Climate change sceptical voices have been growing in confidence and becoming organised for some time now.
In September 2019, the European Climate Declaration (now the World Climate Declaration) was presented to challenge the orthodox apocalyptic narrative. It now has 1,400 signatures and is led by Nobel Laureate Ivar Giaever. And in Italy in January, four leading scientists produced a major study which concluded that the ‘climate crisis’ was not supported by evidence.
There may also be a spillover from the after-effects of the last two and half years of Covid-induced fearmongering. Growing suspicion of the relationship between Big Government and Big Pharma – witness the recently-launched official investigation into the EU’s vaccine procurement – could mirror similar disquiet of the ties between politicians and the green economy.
And Professor Neil Ferguson may have done climate sceptics a huge favour by permanently discrediting the use of computer-based modelling informing government policy, as exemplified by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Inconvenient truths have also played their part in stalling the green juggernaut, causing great difficulty for its media outriders. Even the avowedly climate-orthodox BBC had to admit, albeit at the very end of a long article, that the Sri Lankan government’s attempt to ban fertilisers had been the cause of a calamitous economic and food crisis.
Likewise, it has been hard to put a positive spin on the Dutch government’s plan to expropriate farms in a bid to reduce nitrogen emissions, which has met fierce resistance.
Signs of growing public dissent were seen when Sky’s Daily Climate Show was moved from its prime-time slot and reduced from 30 minutes to just ten. Sky had to admit that according to its own research, two-thirds of Brits don’t think climate change affects them and a quarter were unwilling to change a single habit to ‘save the planet’.
Over on the BBC, the previously untouchable David Attenborough has been criticised for overdoing the catastrophism and for basic factual inaccuracies in his recent wildlife documentaries.
One last factor is simple disgust. We may also have reached a tipping point in our tolerance of extreme climate activists. The death of two women caught up in a Just Stop Oil protest in London was as tragic as it was wearily predictable. The public patience at the infantile and dangerous antics of conspicuously privileged and idelologically possessed activists may have been exhausted.
If one good thing ever comes out of the last two and a half years, it is a return of healthy scepticism in the face of a relentless monotonous government/media barrage pushing one narrative and brooking no dissent. This survey appears to show evidence of such a renaissance. Some would say it’s not before time.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/at-last-sceptics-are-shunning-the-climate-scaremongers/
***************************************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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