Why Have the Big Banks Wet their Pants About Climate Change?
There’s an excellent article in Spiked by Telegraph columnist Andrew Orlowski that puts the suspension of HSBC’s Stuart Kirk into perspective. As readers will recall, Kirk was suspended last week after giving a heretical presentation at an investors’ summit organised by the FT entitled “Why investors need not worry about climate risk”. But why did some green members of the audience complain – and why did HSBC rush to placate those activists? It’s all about the current fashion for basing investment decisions on a company’s ESG rating, which stands for ‘Environmental, Social and Governance’, Orlowski explains.
ESG is essentially a rating tool which punishes companies and fund managers for activities that are deemed sinful, such as investing in fossil fuels. BlackRock chairman Larry Fink – perhaps the most influential capitalist in the world – is one of the driving forces behind the adoption of ESG. In 2020, he wrote that “the evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance… In the near future – and sooner than most anticipate – there will be a significant reallocation of capital”.
Fink’s firm, BlackRock, is in a position to make that reallocation happen, as one of three investment managers that effectively “owns the market”. As the Wall Street Journal explained last week: “In 90 per cent of public companies, one of the Big Three is the largest shareholder” Companies that fail to comply with ESG demands are effectively bullied into doing so. Activists can vote out directors who disagree. ESG has gone largely unchallenged, as the response to Kirk’s presentation illustrates. ESG assets are now worth over $50 trillion. Mastercard recently linked its executive pay to ESG targets on “carbon neutrality, financial inclusion and gender-pay parity”. Long-term investment in fossil-fuel extraction has declined markedly thanks to ESG.
Yet no one can really agree on what is actually ‘ethical’ in ESG. Last week, Elon Musk’s electric-car firm, Tesla, was ejected from the S&P500 ESG list. In response, Musk called ESG a “scam” that had been “weaponised by phoney social-justice warriors”.
For anyone hoping that ESG’s inexorable rise will continue, radically redirecting capital allocation towards supposedly ‘ethical’ firms, the weeks since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have been tough. ESG advocates, until recently, could argue that ESG equities were outperforming ‘sin stocks’ like fossil fuels. But this relied largely on the performance of Big Tech stocks, such as Amazon and Alphabet (Google), which are all ESG compliant. In recent weeks, their big gains during the Covid pandemic have gone into reverse.
“There are essentially two core components of the ESG mantra,” notes the Telegraph’s Ben Wright. “The first is that ethically sound companies will perform better in the long run. The second is that disinvestment creates the economic pressure for change. Both claims are unproven at best.”
As author Rupert Darwall explained in a recent paper, the use of public companies as a vehicle for pursuing a narrow, dogmatic agenda raises deep questions of legitimacy. And the divestment from fossil fuels has already come at an extremely high cost, driving up energy and food prices, and fuelling inflation.
Worth reading in full.
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That’s rich coming from Musk who’s entire business empire is built on the lie that is climate change.
Apart from his massive use of rocket fuel of course. There was a publicity shot of a Musk rocket with a tank of H2 in the foreground with the implication they use Hydrogen when it’s actually petroleum powered.
I still can’t find out what this “Net Zero” thing is all about. How can you have an industrial society running on no carbon? Impossible, but maybe that’s the point. Cold dark and hungry for the peasants – it will help them die off quicker.
“Net Zero” ? It is about screwing us all into the ground. Nothing more “Net Zero”?That will be us!
Oh dear, another Elon Musk critic. He will prove to be one of the greatest men who lived on this earth.
Infantile headline, so article does not get read!
I’m sure the headline writer will be full of remorse and do better next time…
Excellent. We can expect not to hear from you. Only we just did.
Shame.
It isn’t that they are wetting their pants, it is that they stand to make enormous gains from this scam and they don’t want anyone undermining The Science™ before they have an opportunity to make out like bandits.
Isn’t this bank a facilitator and launderer for the South American marching powder cartels? Yet on the green agenda – another massive ponzi scheme they proudly demonstrate their credentials. Pointing to a company policy, to stupid virtue signalling and bully all round for them. Meanwhile out and away from the boardroom in ivory towers, in the real world, the green agenda cripples the economy – really Of course it’s all planned, deindustrialization – bankruptcy, economic disaster and impoverishment aka ‘the great reset’ and oblivion will make you happy.
It isn’t difficult to decode. It has been an elite obsession for thousands of years. Some od it is simple numbers. They know that if we continue to grow in numbers as a species then we will be out of their control on a numerical level. If you owned some palace surrounded by thousands of acres of land then the last thing you would want is a growing and encroaching population. We need to resist these tendencies. To understand that at this moment in time. the more incarnations of human souls the better.
It isn’t difficult to undestand the mindset of the top corporatists. They sold out long ago and yet they still have the vestige of their intelligence. If a ten percent levy were put on corporations for the damage that hey have inflicted then they would pull away from the environmental movement in a second. In a sense they are just the distillation of all the sorry compromisies that we have all made over the last fifty years.
Take a look at the globalists who were funding/pushing Net-Zero in 2015. Trump halted this during his Presidency. The elites are now rushing to catch up with their stated plans, hence the pain being felt.
It has all already fallen apart. The globalists plans aren’t our issue at all. It is the scar or aftermath that we need to contend with. It won’t be some frivolous discussion in a few weeks time. So understand the commitment.We bring the best to the table or we don’t.
There is one thing to say to almost everyone – you haven’t thought it through. A time can come where you might seek death but you will be unable to find it. Understand the ramifications of this force. It is no joke. It doesn’t matter what you believe in we need to stand united against this force.
I can’t spell it out and I wish I could but I know that we are moving into a time where we will all have to be more open about the secret teaching. Rudolf Steiner was asked by some of his acolytes, how do we attain knowldege of higher worlds? And he said go to an old people’s home and take some of the residents out for a walk. The only way to higher worlds is through the heart.
In the thick of it you will be asked the deepest questions, Just build on what you have and look after the people around you. By that very action things will move in the right direction.
So who are these 3 companies that have influence over 90% of the publicly traded companies?
we know Black Rock
who are the other 2?
Vanguard and……..I forgot the third. I’ll get back to you when the neurones finish their nap.
State Street.
Whoever they are they need to be broken up. The world’s capital markets ‘owned’ by just three companies is unacceptable. Whatever happened to the idea of preventing monopolies or cartels? The worst thing is they are doing it with the money the masses invested through their pension funds, ISAs etc.
Nobody has pissed their pants. We are nice normal people. We think and act in certain ways. But there are other ways of the world. It isn’t difficult to understand or to imagine. When such forces come into conflict then the winner is obvious. Did they rape us or did we allow them to rape us? Is it acceptable to rape someone if they don’t object? This is the very nature of our existence in western countries for seventy years in terms of the rest of the world.
Apparently Fink is massively into all the woke perversion as well which is why it is running rampant in the corporate world.
Oy vey, do people like Fink ever learn?
The positive side of ESG is that the money shovelled into it by the likes of Fink will simply dribble down the drain and he’ll be able to do nothing but watch as Blackrock goes under.
Fools and their money are easily parted.
A recent theme of my posts has been that almost all of the “narratives” the masses believe are true are actually false … or at least dubious. Just about everyone who visits The Daily Skeptic would agree that almost all of the Covid narratives are false. But when I go further and say this is just the tip of the Narrative Iceberg, I probably start to lose readers and my “like” votes go down significantly. This particular story might be an example where some might say I’ve gone a Narrative Too Far. I say this because when I read this story, my first thought was: “See, the stock markets are rigged.” Clearly, this conclusion goes against the narrative as most people think the stock markets are “free” and are NOT rigged. Well …. This story (citing the Wall Street Journal no less) tells us that BlackRock is one of just three firms that effectively “owns the market.” From the article: “In 90 per cent of public companies, one of the Big Three (which includes BlackRock) is the largest shareholder.” This tells me that just three investing firms are the 900-pound Gorillas in the stock market. If these mega investment firms… Read more »
The driving force behind ESG is Carney who whilst BoE Chair spent most of his time chairing a working party at the BIS that set up and promoted ESG.
Like Johnson he has a green fanatic as a wife.
“A significant reallocation of capital” Is that the day when they come to confiscate all our money and property and give it to Fink and Bill Gates?
Larry Fink is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Board of Trustees. The World Economic Forum is open about it’s “Great Reset”. The Great Reset is essentially a restructuring of Capitalism – i.e. the destruction of Capitalism, and it’s replacement with a system with more in common with 1930’s European fascism. Assets will be owned by large “ESG” conscious corporations (like Fink’s Blackrock), and the rest of us “will own nothing and be happy”. And we’ll be forced to comply or be unable to buy necessary commodities. (The plan includes a global digital currency – check out Blackrock’s investment in Circle). A few years ago I’d have thought such ideas were conspiracy theories, but unfortunately I’m forced to accept that’s not the case. Blackrock is a massive asset manager and is using it’s key holdings in many companies to try and force companies to ditch fossil fuels and adopt ESG metrics. For example, recently a rail company in the USA that has Fink as a major shareholder, forced one of its major customers to reduce fuel shipments by 30%. The customer controls 25% of the diesel fuel market in the US. This is leading to rapid price rises in… Read more »
Simply this ESG rating is just another subtle tool used to control what we do, and in this case invest in, furthering an agenda.
Bill Winters, thank you.
Evidence of climate risk – what evidence? The only so called evidence is inaccurately developed computer models, which are wrong as they have been in every prediction they have made.
Larry fink, Blackrock, esg’s. What happened to the good old days when you strolled over to your neighbourhood bank and applied for a home/car loan that required you to produce a co-signatory if you were too young or a decent down payment. Oh I do long for those times. Larry fink, Blackrock, esg’s didn’t even exist then.
Carbon credits, carbon credit trading, carbon taxes etc. mite have something to do with it.
Colossal hydrocarbon volumes are required on an ongoing basis for the energy and advanced composite materials needed for mining, assembling, operating, maintaining, and endlessly replacing wind and solar contraptions.
Rystad Energy – a Norwegian energy consultancy – estimates that global oil discovery in 2021 was the lowest in 75 years, and that commercial oil firms are within 15 years of exhausting their reserves.
Even without considering the thermodynamic impossibility of powering with low gradient energy sources a global industrial civilisation dependent on high gradient energy sources, their plan is completely unworkable — we’ll run out of the fuel necessary to sustain their machines.
It’s important to realise that none of these people involved in these Ponzi schemes understands how the energy system works.
In case you missed it, the YouTube video “Intended consequences: energy price rises & inflation” linked to in the materials is extremely good.
(Full disclosure – I am retired from the oil and gas industry),