By Wirestock @Adobe Stock
Hypocrisy for the Masses
Planning on investing according to your political leanings? Well, make sure you factor in not making money down this slippery slope. Perhaps that’s why, with the Northern Hemisphere of Europe already under more snow cover in the first week of December than in any year for more than a decade, our climate nannies choose Dubai in December to bring to the world’s wards their warnings on climate change.
We’re Going to Fry Soon
From the WSJ: what appeals to left-wingers or right-wingers might be good or bad investments, but “being, on current politics, clean and union-friendly for the left or oily and gun-friendly for the right is neither here nor there.” What matters is an investment’s ability “to make money and how highly (it is) valued.”
This has been rammed home for environmentally-minded investors in the past year, as a coordinated selloff in anything with green credentials crushed the idea of making money while doing good.
It turns out that the real world is tougher than advocates of ESG—environmental, social and governance—investing claimed. The lessons have been hard, but should remind investors in the sector of some of the basic facts of investing. The fall in prices has improved the outlook for the stocks.
At Odds with Reality: God’s Wicked Sense of Humor
The “planetary rescue elite” were stranded in Munich under 17 inches of snow, reports Gerard Baker in the WSJ. The white stuff made escaping to the sunny skies of Dubai impossible. Hundreds of flights were cancelled, it was reported, with promises of nothing moving till Sunday, Officials sounded the alarm for potential avalanches in Switzerland and Austria.
A Coordinated Green Selloff
This provides the first lesson: Debt, warns James Mackintosh, also in the WSJ. The clean-energy sector, dependent on vast amounts of borrowing, really gets hammered by high-interest rates.
Roman Boner, who runs a clean-energy fund at Dutch fund manager Robeco, points out that major projects are typically financed with 80% debt, so rises in financing costs have a big impact on competitiveness.
A Good Cover Story
Mr. Baker, who admits to not having checked in with the usual alarmist suspects on their explanation for this deep and crisp, and even landscape, is also sure they have a good story.
The climate propaganda is so well-rooted now in the West’s media that we are given to understand that everything is the result of global warming: So doubtless historic snowfall, like drought, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, migration patterns, the scarcity of certain foodstuffs, racial discrimination, seasonal temperatures with partly cloudy skies—all, in the fanatic’s taxonomy, the work of climate change.
Cold winter is not enough to prove the mendacity of the climate-change thesis and its proponents, agrees Mr. Baker, who is aware that global temperatures have on average risen.
(And) there’s a plausible case that man’s carbon dioxide emissions are a significant factor. But the awkward persistence of normal weather continues to remind us of how at odds with realities the extremism of the global climate lobby is.
So there we are in Dubai, where scientist, theologian and no less than philosopher King Charles III, with his taste for public intervention, is already retesting, barely a year after his sainted mother’s death, the wisdom of hereditary monarchy. The Earth faced “existential threats,” he said. “How dangerous are we actually prepared to make our world?”
Mr. Baker’s Answer to the King’s Query:
We’ll elect governments to make those decisions, thank you, not submit to the half-baked scientific claims of a man whose heating bill for his half-dozen castles, palaces and mansions is probably larger than the budgets of several small nation-states.
Why Dubai Was an Excellent Pick (for the high priests of hypocrisy)
The United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is a member, is not only one of the most intensive producers of fossil fuel in the world. It is looking to increase its output. The state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. said last year it planned to raise production capacity to five million barrels a day by 2027, a 25% increase from 2020. The host of the summit is the Emirates oil supremo, which is a bit like putting Donald Trump’s sons in charge of the World Wildlife Fund’s annual meeting.
The Emiratis are only doing on an industrial scale what all climate alarmists do—preaching one thing while doing another. When they were eventually able to take off from snowbound Europe, the various chief executives, nonprofit officials, green lobbyists, bureaucrats, and others flew the several thousand miles in their private jets, churning more carbon into the air in a week than the average American, whom they like to lecture about his evil ways, does in a year.
Thundering On
John Kerry, the U.S. climate czar, will repeat the British monarch’s warnings, and talk up some grand new partnership with a China that is starting to resemble one giant coal-fired power station, and they’ll all doubtless commit to some “ambitious” goal that they will tell us still won’t be enough to save the planet.
Pray Their Unattended Pipes Haven’t Frozen
The real work—developing technology that runs on more sustainable energy, continues to cut the carbon footprint of traditional energy production, and mitigates the effects of climate change—will get done by the capitalists whose economic system many in this crowd like to denounce as incompatible with a sustainable environment.
