Aberdeen’s Ditching of ESG Proves the Green Finance Revolution is Dead
“When a man knows he is to be hanged, it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” Samuel Johnson famously quipped. It would not be too much of a stretch to fit this to the case of the investment fund manager: nothing brings about the wonderful concentration of his mind so much as a combination of poor returns and the threat of legal suits.
In what reads like a parody, an article in the Telegraph this week cited the Chairman of investment giant Aberdeen Sir Douglas Flint telling a conference that fund managers had made “ridiculously extravagant claims” about “saving the world” instead of focusing on profits.
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I do wonder if the corporate realisation of this folly is maybe a little late for the plebs. The politicians and so called elites are relatively immune from the coming fallout. As I mentioned elsewhere on the admirable Daily Sceptic today, the AI/robotics juggernaut is thundering down the tracks and will make contact with reality in the very near future. My estimate of the precarious situation we are in is that the problems caused by the core message of this article are so embedded in the system, ie processes and people in power that in the near term will will be impossible to correct. Our systems are simply not capable of dealing with the problem because they are here because of an ideology based on dealing with inequalities prevalent in the19th century. Our politicians are about 100 or more years behind the curve and since 1997 have doubled down to make it even worse. The wake up call is the imminent defeat of the outdated imperial ambitions of western powers in Ukraine. People like Johnson, Starmer, Miliband, Biden and the unelected EU have simultaneously, destroyed our energy security whilst waging a proxy war against the very country that is a… Read more »
“The so called elites should hang their heads in shame at what they have done.”
The so-called elites should hang … (for) what they have done.
There, fixed that for you.
The thought did cross my mind.
From the nearest lamppost or tree. Quite a few of them in Westminster.
I think investing should focus on the basics. It is government policy hopefully properly and democratically informed, which should tax polluters and non sustainable processes to make them unprofitable. They then won’t get invested in. ESG is investment managers trying to do the governments job. Obviously I realise that my ‘hopefully properly informed ‘ is currently for the birds.
That’s exactly what governments have been doing!
No it’s not. Their whole policy is distorted by the fact that they think CO2 is a pollutant which does not stand up to even a cursory scientific glance . As a result they are allowing all sorts of other pollutants and unsustainability and also undermining true conservation initiatives. We now have massed bird choppers, disorienting mico waves and land use altered to solar rather than organic. Absolutely mental.
The world has completely lost its marbles. Honestly. We’ve reached the point where people genuinely believe that shipping their pollution to someone else’s backyard somehow makes them “green”. I mean… what? Let’s take a minute to appreciate the staggering hypocrisy here. Some bloke in Surrey, clutching his organic soy latte in his solar-powered garden shed, thinks he’s saving the planet — because he’s just bought a shiny new electric car. Lovely. Except — and here’s the bit he seems to have missed — that very car was built in a coal-belching Chinese factory that makes Mordor look like a yoga retreat. And the batteries? Ah yes, those glorious lithium-filled, rare-earth-guzzling batteries. Dug up in vast open mines, smelted in furnaces powered by fossil fuels, and then strapped into your smugmobile so you can whizz down to Waitrose feeling morally superior. Bravo. And don’t get me started on hydrogen. Oh yes, hydrogen! The fuel of the future! Except… where exactly do you think it comes from? The Hydrogen Fairy? No. It comes from fossil fuels. A whopping 15 tonnes of the stuff burned into oblivion just to make a single ton of hydrogen. That’s not saving the planet — that’s setting… Read more »
Thank you for a great post! It articulates what I know to be true but far more eloquently- and there are a lot of electric vehicles in Surrey, just not outside our house.
Millband will never come clean any more than Chris Whitty or Anthony Fauci will; they serve dirty masters, over and above their national governments, and especially over & above those whom they purport to represent. Think George/Alex Soros, Klaus Schwab, Davos, and the host of other networked self-proclaimed “elite” who are on a mission to destroy the western Middle Class, impoverish the working class and usher in a new feudal society where they run the world with an entrenched technocracy in control.
Democracy & accountability are made redundant in the system they envisage; we already see how far they have progressed in suppressing dissent and contrary views with their ad hominems of “far-right”, “climate-denier”, “anti-vaxxer”, “Putin apologist” etc. drawing on the rising Nazi party in the Thirties using the ad hominem of “communist or “Bolshevik” to silence debate.
Whenever someone comes up with these cliches & slogans I point out two things to them:
a) you are following directly in the footsteps of the Nazis.
b) if you had a science background, you would understand that science not only does not suppress contrary views, it THRIVES and has advanced precisely because contrary views are essential, they are science’s lifeblood.
“Smugmobile”…..great stuff !
This is another example of how the ‘older generation’ has failed the younger one. We have failed to educate and train them. In our generation anyone coming up with such stupid crackpot ideas would have been laughed at and told in no uncertain terms to go and play with them selves. But today the whole management seems to be ‘all ears’ and no one has the guts or experience to put a stop to it. There are many examples:- The other recent one is the sending of Scottish land fill to England! I dispare!
Dare I also mention DAB radio?
Doomed as we appear to be to a future of electricity brown and blackouts, how crackers is replacement of the 365/24/7 always available PSTN telephone network with VOIP delivered via a telephone handset? What could possibly go wrong?
The absurdity of ESG has always been that by any rational assessment wind and solar are unsustainable, not sustainable, as well as being fundamentally incompatible with how the electricity grid was designed to operate. What’s more, their protagonists have never had any sort of realistic plan for coping with possibly prolonged periods when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. One way or another, we are doomed to future power cuts until we get rid of these things.
Dunkelflaute ! One of the few good things to come out of Germany..
Can someone tell the BBC
You could tell something was up when the name changed to the bullshit abrdn.
CSR morphed into ESG
Now it is time for ESG to be changed to WEC
After all it is all really a white elephant con.
S,urely Aberdeen would be the laughing stock of the financial world if they pursued an ESG agenda,