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Naturally the Big Bankers dress up in trees and rivers… they wouldn’t wear the Dracula Cape when people are looking, would they? By Jo Nova The biggest climate bullies on the planet just got a bit smaller. There are two monster climate banker clubs in the world, and yesterday, one of them, the “Climate Action 100+” lost three of the six largest asset management funds in the world, namely JP Morgan Chase, State Street and BlackRock. State Street manages about $3.6 trillion in funds, JP Morgan Chase about $3 or $4 trillion, and BlackRock $10 trillion, so that’s something like $17,000 billion dollars that just left the ranch. The fact that this kind of money was all grouped together in a cabal of any sort is bad enough, but ponder that now, after the biggest fish have left the tank, there’s still $50 trillion left in assets on the inside. It appears the Climate Action 100+ group had grown too big for its boots — the new Climate Action 100+ “phase 2” strategy expected asset managers to actively hound companies to cut their emissions. An ESG Asset Manager ExodusThe Wall Street Journal The climate alliance’s new rules would compound the legal and political jeopardy. In its withdrawal announcement, State Street said its rules “are not consistent with our independent approach to proxy voting and portfolio company engagement.” BlackRock said the rules “would raise legal considerations.” Members are supposed to “engage” 170 “focus companies” such as Boeing, Home Depot and American Airlines—that is, threaten to vote against non-compliant corporate directors and back shareholder resolutions that pressure management. Their campaign has had great success with 75% of targeted companies committing to “net zero.” But the climate left is never content. Last June the alliance impelled its members to publish information on their “engagements” and to explain how and why they voted on shareholder resolutions flagged by the outfit. The point was to embarrass asset managers that climate scolds accuse of being insufficiently committed to the cause.
Climate Action 100+ started in 2017 and the day before yesterday it had 700 investors who managed $68 trillion in assets, yet mysteriously has no Wikipedia page (like the ghost that walks?). According to InfluenceWatch it was “conceived by members of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) in 2016 at the French Mission to the United Nations.” So it was set up by the largest government pension fund in the US in cahoots with the UN in order to use workers money to boss around companies and to force left wing policies on right wing states through a back door. It’s big brother — the other climate banker cabal called GFANZ — was set up in 2021 by the UN and Mark Carney (former governor of the Bank of England). At one point GFANZ grew to an obscenely unbelievable $130 trillion in “funds under management”, giving it the financial power equivalent to a black hole. The largest 20 national economies in the world have a combined GDP of $87 trillion. So when a collective managing $130 trillion says “jump” there are not many Presidents or Prime Ministers inclined to say “No”. In October 2020, the CEO of BlackRock told the Australian government he wanted them to shut coal plants faster and three weeks later, Scott Morrison and the treasurer signed us up for Net Zero, even though the voters had picked them to do less climate action rather than more. But it was all a big bluff, as I explained — all the giant funds use other people’s money to bully and cajole boards, ministers, and global leaders into doing things that none of them might want. They were supposed to be investing pension funds to earn money for workers to retire on, instead it looked and smelled a lot like they were squandering the returns in order to prop up socialist ideologies, dodgy companies, and to coerce governments to legislate policies that the voters didn’t vote for. Larry Fink the CEO of Blackrock, and his pals, turned our pension funds into a leftist activist machine. Thankfully 19 US States fought back by asking the legal bombshell questions about whether these funds were cooperating in a way that breached antitrust laws and neglected their fiduciary duty. Ron deSantis in Florida took $2 billion of state pension funds back from Blackrock. It doesn’t sound like much, but it pulled the string on the big bluff, and threatened to unleash an exodus. Now a year later, many funds are backing away slowly. Make no mistake, the term ESG or Environmental Social Governance is a dead dog, but all these conglomerate Financial Swamp Monsters like BlackRock et al, will still be buying and leveraging up their renewables investments whenever it suits them. They’ll still be flying to Davos to consort and coordinate behind the scenes. The big funds will still be leaning on governments, but there is more risk other funds will break ranks, offering to fund the projects the cabal don’t want funded. In a free market, it wouldn’t matter a damn if one stupidly large fund said it wouldn’t fund a coal mine because some other fund surely would. That’s why these banker collectives are so profoundly undemocratic and anti-competitive. For their game to work, they have to stop all the other bankers too. It is after all, why the USA has antitrust laws. It’s why cartels are banned.So much of the pushback against the banker consortiums comes from the US States: Mary Chastain, Legal Insurrection Agricultural officials from 12 states launched probes into ESG investing practices at some big banks. The officials worry that the involvement could “impact food availability, lead to price increases, limit credit access for farmers, and have broad negative economic consequences.” Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti sued BlackRock, alleging the firm harmed consumers through ESG. “We allege that BlackRock’s inconsistent statements about its investment strategies deprived consumers of the ability to make an informed choice,” explained Skrmetti At this point in time the GFANZ cabal still say their members include ANZ, the Bank of America, Barclays, the Bank of New Zealand, Commonwealth Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, National Australia Bank, National Bank of Canada, Westpac and a hundred others. There is still so much to do. But three weeks ago Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, shifted gears — openly saying “Trump was kinda right” and that his supporters deserve respect. I asked at the time if Wall Street was shifting away from the whole poisonous left. Dimon’s statements were game-changing. We don’t need all the bankers to shift, we just need a few so we have some competition. Related Posts The dark bubble: There’s a reason everything seems to be going off the rails simultaneously
Money pile by Andrew McGill
February 17th, 2024 | Tags: Bankers, Climate Action 100+, Climate Money, ESG, GFANZ, United Nations (UN) | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | |
Victoria is just not big enough to fit all the solar and wind industrial plantsIt’s no wonder the Victorian government is desperate to begin building offshore wind turbines. Their own targets for the forced transition are so crazy-brave, they would “need” to use as much as two thirds of the state’s agricultural land instead. It sounds delusional but they told us this straight up in their own policy document released in March 2022. Thanks to Aidan Morrison at the Centre for Independent Studies, who not only reads these boring tomes, but also noticed that they quietly disappeared the Victorian Offshore Wind Policy Directions Paper. He explained in The Australian that he believes they hid it because they’ve realized how embarrassing it looks. Apparently 227,000 square kilometers is not enough land to power 7 million people in a NetZero world. Victorian planners had farmland in their sights (as if it was their own). They mapped it out and described it as “available for onshore renewables”. If farmers were not aware of the totalitarian disregard the NetZero bureaucrats have for farmers, they know now.
Think about the captive mindset it takes to publish a ludicrous document like this without blinking? These are people who never meet a skeptic. Whoever wrote and approved it didn’t even try to hide the ghastly cost of building wind and solar power onshore. And they certainly didn’t spend a nanosecond imagining what Victorian farmers might think of it. (Or checking their own maths — 70% of agricultural land is not the same as “four times the area of Greater Melbourne”.) Presumably some bureaucrats were tasked with justifying the big Offshore wind developments and it didn’t even cross their minds that “Net Zero” is a option, a frivolous quest, and that farmers, and everyone (outside the party room) might just say “No”. Billions of dollars are on the table and no one even reads the policy documents. We live in an era of distilled incompetence. The Bottom Line: Victoria is supposedly aiming to be 95% renewable by 2035, and at this point gets about 50% of it’s electricity from fossil fuels (and even more of it’s total energy). Even after the mass installation of unreliable energy for the last ten years Victoria needs to build 15 times as much to reach its target. There are no offshore wind farms in Australia, and the federal government just put a poleaxe through the offshore plans of the Victorian government. But around the world investors are running away, share prices are falling, and insurance firms are balking at the million dollar cost of repairing the cables. Now would be the perfect time for Australia to get out of offshore wind — right before it gets into it. Victoria farmers won’t be pleased, –Ruairi REFERENCES The original government source page contains the dead link. Luckily for us the Wayback Machine captured the site and the PDF. Image by Mystic Art Design from Pixabay
A new paper (like so many before it) shows that the sea started warming half a century before the first coal fired power plant was ever built, demonstrating yet again, the skeptics are right, and CO2 is irrelevant. Despite that, the world’s supposedly top science journal lauded it in excitement because it showed the world had warmed “more than we thought”, and somehow, in their brains, ipso delerium, all warming was caused by man-made CO2 even if it occurred when there were no flights, no cars, and no electricity. Life in 1820 was the ultimate “Net Zero” world: literally every flight was grounded and all petrol stations were closed for 80 years yet the world warmed. Absurdly, evangelistic headlines decreed the world was “hotter than we thought”, had breached 1.5C earlier than we thought and three hundred year old sea sponges were telling us to hurry up and install solar panels. The point that the geniuses who are 99% certain didn’t know how hot the 1800s were until last week isn’t exactly inspiring. But the political activists at Nature felt that breaching the Paris Agreement (before it was even made) was big news and said so in their first paragraph. All the major nations are failing to meet their Paris targets anyway, and if the targets were expired before they were even set, that only makes the UN look stupid. And to top that off, somehow a thousand thermometers, ship buckets and tree rings have just been superseded by some old Puerto Rican sponges. As it happens the team at Nature also seem to have forgotten they already announced in 2016 that global warming started 180 years ago. Perhaps they don’t read their own papers? (That was Abram et al). Really, this new paper makes a great study in just how bad current science communication is — every single person in the chain of nonsense failed to see the bleeding obvious. The academics, the journal, the press release team and the “media” all missed the most important message the corals were shouting from the bottom of the ocean. Humans don’t control the climate. [Nature] The world has warmed 1.5 °C, according to 300-year-old spongesBy the time that official temperature records began, global temperatures had already risen by half a degree. “We have an alternate record of global warming,” says coral-reef geochemist Malcolm McCulloch at the University of West Australia Oceans Institute in Crawley, who is lead author of the study. “It looks like temperatures were underestimated by about half a degree.” Even though the paper says the warming started in 1860, the data shows it started earlier, more like 1820. Apparently the Sr/Ca ratio is a good proxy for the temperature they say.
But 90% of human emissions have been emitted since World War II. … Source: OWID It does however look similar to graphs of rising sea levels that we’ve known about for years.
And a lot like graphs of 120 proxies from the Northern Hemisphere:
Ljungqvist et al. And other proxies from China  …. Absurdities of the modern era — that newspapers all over the world tell us CO2 is even more dangerous than we thought because of some sponges in the Caribbean. REFERENCESKeep reading → By Jo Nova Just how wise is it to have a grid dependent on all this fragile infrastructure?Nature seems to be telling us something about adding another 10,000 kilometers of vulnerable transmission lines. Yesterday six high voltage transmission lines collapsed in Victoria leaving half a million people without electricity for hours. But only a few weeks ago five towers collapsed in Western Australia putting 30,000 in the dark. And out in Kalgoorlie, when the gas backup plants failed, thousands of people went for days without power in 40 degree heat. Some people were unable to call triple zero, freezers full of food were spoilt and nearly everything left to buy had to be paid for in cash. In Victoria the towers fell at 1:10pm during a storm. Their loss triggered the shut down of 4 large coal power units at Loy B Yang taking out 2 GW of generation. It took three hours to get one turbine back on line, and eight hours to restore the second. Everyone is talking about “the coal fired outage” but about half the wind power running at the time was also lost, and over the next hour, more than half the grid scale solar power also disappeared. It was a shock to the system for a state with nearly 7 million people:
Graph from Anero.id Enery (Feb 13) The sudden simultaneous drops for wind power and coal power suggests they were both affected by the transmission line failures. Brown coal generation fell almost instantly from 4GW to 2GW, but wind power in the state fell from 1.8GW to 1GW sharply.
Graph from Anero.id Enery (Feb 13) Solar and wind power just made the storm damage worse: The renewable cheer squad is calling for “a faster transition” to somehow solve these blackouts but both solar and wind power need thousands of miles of the very same collapsible transmission lines, putting the grid at even more risk of sudden breaks. Indeed wind power fell right when we needed it. We can’t confirm yet how much of that was due to the towers collapsing, or whether it was because plants were shutting off in turbulent conditions. Grid scale solar certainly didn’t save the day even though it was the middle of the day. Perhaps the solar plants were cut off, or perhaps the clouds rolled over? Solar “farm” production was reduced from 500MW to 200MW through most of the afternoon. And while rooftop solar suffered smaller losses, by 2pm it lost about 1 GW of generation too. About the nicest thing we can say about solar power is that it won’t destabilize the grid if storms arrive at night. The things that did save the day were gas and hydro power (see below), but if Hazelwood coal power was still running, it would have helped too. Luckily, there is no drought on the East Coast at the moment. In a normal El Nino year, the hydro might not have been there…
Graph from Anero.id Enery The Victorian Energy Minister blames the weather and doesn’t seem to realize some forms of generation need a thousand more miles of power lines: But Victorian Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio said that if “catastrophic extreme weather” physically took out power lines, “then no matter what you do in terms of electricity generation or other technologies, that will cause outages”. But if all of the state ran on coal fired power or gas, less of the state would have blacked out. Grids with lots of transmission lines are vulnerable gridsThe Guardian, masters of misinformation, told us that the coal fired plants were affected by the storms, just in case you thought they might be stronger than flimsy windmills and giant sheets of glass panels.
Further information is available from WattClarity — like grid inertia, and the frequency volatility.
February 14th, 2024 | Tags: Blackouts, Renewable Energy, Victoria | Category: Renewable | Print This Post | |
By Jo Nova The global carbon market in sacred certificates-to-stop-storms now “worth” nearly one trillion dollarsRemember this number next time someone tells you fossil fuels are stopping “climate action”. The whole trillion dollar carbon market is a vested interest. It is a fake market entirely created on government whimsy. The whole absurd point of it is supposedly to slow tornadoes or floods in 2100, and reduce beach-weather in Europe. Because who likes the beach? LONDON, Feb 7 (Reuters) – The value of traded global markets for carbon dioxide (CO2) permits reached a record 850 billion euros ($909 billion) last year, analysts at Refinitiv said on Tuesday. Around 12.5 billion tonnes of carbon permits changed hands in the world’s emissions markets – 20% less than the previous year – but the value of the markets rose by 14% as prices for permits were much higher.
In a carbon market, certain favoured groups can say they produced less carbon dioxide this year than they otherwise might have. They get to sell their anointed pieces of paper to other less favoured people who have to buy credits because the government says they must. At any point in this game, industries can get exemptions added or allowances boosted. So if the bribes or post-political-life jobs on offer are good enough, the right people can arrange to divert the river of money toward their own accounts. And the insiders can buy or sell the shares as the government policy changes. It creates a vast economy of busy work and a big pile of money. The great thing about this political and fundraising tool (for criminals) is that almost anything can be “flexed”. The potential for loopholes is infinite because this is not a free market, just the illusion of one. For starters there’s no product anyone cares about at the end of the chain –there’s no cargo ship of diamonds that someone will miss. Corruption can run riot, and who would know? The carbon market is not really a carbon market at all — the largest producers of CO2 are not even in the game. The Pacific Ocean can’t pay, the phytoplankton can’t be taxed and the northern boreal forests will get plain away with it unless a friend of a friend happens to own a nice plot that can be rebadged as a carbon farm. So politicians are sitting on a gold mine of opportunity. Most carbon in the world doesn’t count, and they get to be kingmakers to decide what does. What’s an act of God? — ask the Minister. If, hypothetically, our elected representatives were less than angelic, they could tweak the terms and conditions to their donors’ hearts content. The ruling party in charge decides whether your saltbush credits are accepted, or whether your organic goats cheese gets an exception. Is nuclear power “carbon neutral”? Fifty years laters, the EU still can’t decide. If an election is coming up, the ruling party can roll out some more credits and reduce the “cost of living” at least until after the votes are in.
The Game of Carbon Leeches works because the money is stolen quietly from the people. Thousands upon millions of shoemakers, mechanics, bakers and cleaners pay higher prices for peas, beans and widgets because somewhere down the supply chain someone or several of the people involved had to buy some fairy carbon credits. Their fake costs are added to our real bills. The money is siphoned invisibly from the masses and given to the special classes. Did you get lucky? The carbon market is gradual creeping communism, but even the Soviets didn’t tax the proletariat to give their grandchildren better weather. Elephant artwork by Jo Nova adapted from Wikimedia photo: Hansm  The “hockey stick” graph as published in IPCC TAR (Figure 2-20, 2001) By Jo Nova Climate deniers must be punishedFor newcomers: Michael Mann’s hockeystick graph was wildly different from hundreds of studies of other studies and instantly became the pet graph of the IPCC. It used the wrong proxy, the wrong tree, and the wrong type of averaging. Whole books were written on how bad it was. But when Mark Steyn called it fraudulent Mann sued. Twelve long years after the case was launched, the six person jury decided that Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg have defamed Michael Mann, but awarded Mann one whole dollar in damages, because he hadn’t been able to prove he suffered any damage at all. Remarkably, though, the jurors felt the skeptics had been so malicious they added punitive damages too. Usually these are limited to a mere four or five times the compensatory damage, but this time it was decided Simberg should pay $1,000 and Mark Steyn $1 million. It sets a new record. According to Law.com punitive or exemplary damages are saved for truly dreadful acts: exemplary damages n. often called punitive damages… are damages requested and/or awarded in a lawsuit when the defendant’s willful acts were malicious, violent, oppressive, fraudulent, wanton or grossly reckless. These damages are awarded both as a punishment and to set a public example. So the jury agrees that Mark Steyn did no material harm to Mann but criticizing climate scientists is itself an unforgivably evil thing. The point is to silence youThe lawyer for Michael Mann had pushed for these punitive damages in his closing arguments (since there weren’t any real damages). John Hinderaker reported that Mann’s lawyer specifically asked the jury to deter “climate deniers” who were apparently as dangerous as “Trump election deniers”. And to a Washington D.C. jury, somehow that made sense. It took thirty years of televised propaganda to create this payday. Cheap namecalling on the news makes for a whole city of hate, ready to pass judgement. The jury probably couldn’t even imagine how anyone could believe a climate expert might be wrong. John Hinderaker points out there’s no evidence there was any malice involved:  Buy a copy at the Steyn store. In a sane world, this case never would have gone to the jury. The legal standard is actual malice, which means the defendants must have thought, subjectively, that what they said wasn’t likely true. In this case, there was no evidence whatever that Steyn and Simberg didn’t sincerely believe that what they said was true. Indeed, as Mark pointed out in closing argument, he has been saying the same things about Mann’s hockey stick for something like 21 years, and even wrote a book about it (pictured to the right). As Mark Steyn so calmly explained at SteynOnline, he will take this all the way to the Supreme Court if he has to: The latter number will likely get overturned at the United States Supreme Court, which generally reckons that “in practice, few awards exceeding a single-digit ratio between punitive and compensatory damages, to a significant degree, will satisfy due process” – and that’s when “the defamatory statements do not involve matters of public concern”. A “single-digit ratio” means four-to-one, five-to-one punitive-to-compensatory. Steyn’s jurors just set a record – a million-to-one ratio. So, under the Supreme Court guidelines, the punitive damages of $1,000,000 could in theory be reduced to, er, four dollars. Mark may likewise be reduced, somewhat mortifyingly, to waving that US constitution around. Whether his health will hold out long enough to get him before Chief Justice John Roberts and the rest of the gang is a different question. But as Mark has said in the past, the process is the punishment, and so this punishment will go on. As Hinderaker explains, with these extraordinary punitive damages, Mann’s lawyer has succeeded in turning a defamation case into a free speech one. The whole point of the damages is to deter people speaking their minds freely: … now Michael Mann’s lawyer has made it explicit: impose an arbitrary seven figure penalty on Mark Steyn, not to compensate the plaintiff Michael Mann, who didn’t suffer any damages whatsoever, but rather to deter anyone from ever again arguing that climate change alarmists are wrong, however flawed their science may be. It is hard to imagine anything more anti-scientific or anti-American. As Amy K. Mitchell points out, if the media can’t criticize a scientist, no one can:Mark Steyn is a member of the media. As such he is supposedly afforded First Amendment protections. If a member of the media is no longer protected, what do you think that means for every day citizens? And it doesn’t matter if you are in DC or Montana — anyone can file in the jurisdiction of his or her choosing. She quotes Justice Alito who accurately forecast how defamation suits in the right city could be used to silence dissent across the whole country on complex topics like climate change: …the controversial nature of the whole subject of climate change exacerbates the risk that the jurors’ determination will be colored by their preconceptions on the matter. When allegedly defamatory speech concerns a political or social issue that arouses intense feelings, selecting an impartial jury presents special difficulties. And when, as is often the case, allegedly defamatory speech is disseminated nationally, a plaintiff may be able to bring suit in whichever jurisdiction seems likely to have the highest percentage of jurors who are sympathetic to the plaintiff ‘s point of view… If citizens cannot speak freely and without fear about the most important issues of the day, real self government is not possible. To ensure that our democracy is preserved and is permitted to flourish, this Court must closely scrutinize any restrictions on the statements that can be made on important public policy issues. Otherwise, such restrictions can easily be used to silence the expression of unpopular views… The sacred graph must be protected from criticsThe HockeyStick graph underpins a trillion dollar industry. If the weather was just as warm in the medieval period then CO2 is not the control knob on Earth’s temperature dial and the models are missing some big natural drivers. Even after all these years, the HockeyStick graph still forms a core part of the IPCC’s case, even though no one seems to be able to find any tree rings from the last 50 years so they can update it. We have no trouble finding 800 year old trees, but for some reason we can’t find ones alive today to tell us the temperature in 2023. If only the planet still had trees, Mike wouldn’t need to use his Nature Trick to hide the decline. In the immortal words of Professor Phil Jones himself: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” Judith Curry has written an extraordinary exposition of the whole sorry saga of the Hockeystick, with all its gory details. Unfortunately, ain’t it the way, it was not admitted in court as evidence. It’s all at her blog. Savage. Readers, be aware the word fraud is moderated here, so best to use other terms – like misleading, inept, incompetent, and a travesty of science. There are plenty to pick from. Heartland are hosting: Mann vs. Steyn: A Disgrace to the Profession – Climate Change Roundtable #97 _________________ h/t to RickWill, David Wojick, Bill in AZ, El Gordo, Willie Soon, Joe Bastardi February 10th, 2024 | Tags: Hockey Stick Graph, Mann (Michael), Steyn (Mark) | Category: Global Warming, Lawfare, USA | Print This Post | | There’s no hiding that this is a major backflipHistory books will be written about corporate mistakes. Twenty years ago BP called itself “Beyond Petroleum” and by 2020 the company was hellbent on getting there. They pledged to reduce their own oil production by 40% by 2030, and promised to pivot into renewable power. The media was thrilled — “BP Shuns Fossil Fuels“, said Politico, and shines a light on “stranded oil and gas”. Only two years ago BP talked of “accelerating” it’s green investments. Then the price of oil and gas exploded and problems with unreliable energy started breeding. Now BP is writing off a billion dollars in offshore wind investment, and the new CEO is calling for “pragmatism”. The company has flipped from cutting oil production 40% by 2030 to increasing it instead. The new chief, Murray Achincloss said they still want to be “an integrated energy company” (presumably so it looks less like a full-reverse and more like a “tweak”), but he betrayed himself when he said: “we see growing demand for energy right now across the globe”. “It is not slowing down.” When he says energy, he means oil and gas. BP to Increase Oil Output, New Chief SaysBy Stanley Reed, New York Times BP has a plan to become what Mr. Auchincloss called an integrated energy company. But in the meantime, “we see growing demand for energy right now across the globe,” he said. “It is not slowing down.” He just wants to make oil and gas cheaper for us, really… BP is “going to invest in today’s energy system, to help make sure that prices don’t get out of control,” Mr. Auchincloss said. “So that’s investing into oil and gas,” he added, while also putting money into alternative energy sources like biofuels and hydrogen. But all those promises to cut oil production by 40% are gone with the wind: …the company’s mainstay oil and gas production rose 2.6 percent last year. Supplies of liquefied natural gas — a chilled, compressed fuel transported by ships — rose by more than 20 percent. Mr. Auchincloss said that oil output would continue to rise 2 percent to 3 percent a year through 2027 because of production increases in Abu Dhabi, Angola, the United States and elsewhere. Chasing green rainbows has been an expensive mistake: BP backs away from US offshore windpowerBy Benjamin Storrow, E&E News Call it a $1 billion mistake. BP said Tuesday it wrote down the value of its U.S. offshore wind business by $1.1 billion last year, cementing a strategic shift for the British petroleum giant as it increases oil and gas production while recalibrating its efforts to generate clean electricity from ocean turbines. It’s partnership with Equinor, meanwhile, increasingly looked like an albatross, with one company executive calling the U.S. offshore wind market “fundamentally broken. BP’s shares have flatlined, while Exxons have grown 40%Auchincloss can no doubt be only too aware of BP’s lagging share price relative to its rivals in recent years, which many blame on the company’s green agenda. BP’s shares are trading broadly in line with pre-pandemic levels, but by contrast ExxonMobil’s share price has surged by about 40% over the period. – – BP’s green agenda all at sea, Jillian Ambrose, The Guardian. Finally shareholders demand profits and sensible plansOne shareholder of BP turned activist last October and wrote an extraordinary letter to the company to pressure it to drop the “irrational” net zero target and even to sack a board member with links to BlackRock. Bluebell Capital is a hedge fund in London and it had some remarkable requests: BP attacked by investor over ‘irrational’ switch to clean energyMatt Oliver, The Telegraph In a 30-page letter, Bluebell called on BP to scrap its commitment to scale back its oil and gas business by a quarter this decade, halt investment in renewable energy schemes and rewrite its net zero targets to clarify they will be achieved “in line with society”. Bluebell argued that the targets will artificially constrain BP and leave it at a disadvantage compared to rivals such as Shell and ExxonMobil… The activist is also demanding that BP returns an extra $16bn (£12.6bn) to shareholders this decade, and urged the oil giant to sack a board director with links to fund giant Blackrock, which it branded “a world champion of ESG inconsistency and hypocrisy”. As Bluebell so aptly remarked: “And in the short term, don’t cut your own production, because you are just doing a favour to the other [oil] companies.” Bluebell Capital appear to have invested in BP because it was “undervalued” and were betting on a plan that the company could be turned around. They argued that BP would have been worth 50% more on the sharemarket but for this “ill conceived strategy” and scathingly pointed out that BP should keep out of renewable projects where it has little specialist expertise. In the long run the CEO doesn’t see windmills, he see gas and more gasIt’s surely no coincidence that the new CEO made this statement just a month ago: AI will trigger global surge in gas demand, says BP bossJohnathon Leake, The Telegraph Boom in tools such as ChatGPT means data centres require more power Mr Auchincloss said: “Gas production will probably go a little bit lower this decade and then will grow significantly as we move into the following decades… Generative AI is something that’s creating an even higher level of demand for electricity.” The amount of energy consumed by the 8,000 data centres globally is predicted to soar by 73pc to 800 terawatt hours (TWh) by 2026, according to the International Energy Agency. By comparison, the UK consumes 321 terawatt hours of electricity a year. According to research by data experts Digiconomist, in order to move its entire search engine operations to AI, Google would need as much electricity to power a country the size of Ireland. Right now BP is acting as though it has swung right back to being an oil company, but it’s still saying the recent set backs are just a delay. But any company doing a complete reversal would say that, wouldn’t they? A year ago we saw a dramatic shift in language across the company –– talking about their disappointment with renewables, and their shift back to oil and gas. So they were already starting the backflip then, perhaps the Bluebell plan was to wait for the right moment to tighten the screws? Photo by Keith Edkins |
Image by GrumpyBeere By Jo Nova Last year the acceleration in EV sales stopped accelerating. The industry was still growing they said, just not quite as fast. Now, so soon, the sales are actually falling. In the UK, EV sales dropped off a cliff, falling 25% last month. Perhaps it was just a bad month? But in California, home of global green dreams, sales have also declined, and for the last two quarters. Ominously, this is happening despite government decrees insisting every new car sold in 2035 will be an EV. Sales are supposed to be launching into orbit. Something is very wrong. Meanwhile Hertz has taken yet another step away from their EV quest — after announcing they were selling off a third of their EV fleet at bargain basement prices, now they are cancelling plans to buy 65,000 Polestars. This was a $3 billion deal, and to let them out of it, Polestar has, by golly, demanded Hertz give them the right to buy back the old Polestars that Hertz wants to sell — that way Polestar can keep the older models off the secondhard market and stop the value from falling the same dire way the secondhand Teslas have. Polestar is a Volvo spin off company, and now we understand why last week Volvo announced it would stop funding Polestar and reduce its shareholding. They knew what was coming. Not to put too fine a point on the state of the EV market, but Ford is losing $38,000 per EV. This means the more EVs they sell, the poorer the company gets. They made $10 billion dollars in profits last year, yet the balance sheet shows they lost about $5 billion just on EVs. This puts them in the bizarre position that they could theoretically give away the entire EV production line and boost company profits by 50%. It’s that bad… Indeed it’s so truly awful, that the UK Lords are calling for the government to counter the misinformation campaign filled with “mistruths”. The industry must be at deaths door. Private buyers slam brakes on electric vehiclesRobert Lea. The Times Britons appear to be turning their backs on new electric cars, with the number of zero-emission vehicles sold to private buyers falling by 25 per cent last month. The latest figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) prompted the industry body to cut forecasts on the proportion of the total market that will go electric this year. California EV Sales Go On The Decline – Has The State Run Out Of Buyers Willing To Believe The Dream?
Agent 009, Autospies Despite a sustained and seemingly unstoppable growth, the registration of battery-electric vehicles in California experienced a downturn in the last quarter of the previous year. Notably, EV sales have consecutively declined for two quarters, even as California authorities set a 2035 deadline for all new vehicle registrations to be zero-emission. California recorded 89,993 registrations for electric light passenger vehicles in the fourth quarter, marking a 10 percent decrease from the 101,151 recorded in the third quarter. What’s a free market for anyway? Perhaps to save Ford shareholders $5,000 million dollars? Ford Could Get 50% More Profit Without EVsBy Stephen Wilmot, The Wall Street Journal Ford’s “Pro” business, which comprises its sales to companies, is the engine behind Ford’s results. It made $7.2 billion of operating profit last year, and the company expects that to rise to at least $8 billion in 2024. The supersize Super Duty, which is mainly a professional product, is a key reason. It is also easier to sell software to businesses than consumers, who can get a lot for free. Meanwhile, electric vehicles lost $4.7 billion last year, and the company sees the losses deepening to between $5 billion and $5.5 billion this year. To put this another way, if Ford weren’t selling its Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning models and investing in a new generation of products to replace them, its adjusted operating profit would be 50% higher. When all else fails, and there’s no way to answer the critics, silence them insteadElectric cars: Lords urge action on ‘misinformation’ in pressEsme Stallard, BBC Baroness Parminter, chair of the committee, told the BBC that both government officials and other witnesses to the enquiry had reported reading disinformation on the subject in national newspapers. “We have seen a concerted effort to scare people… we have seen articles saying that cars are catching fire – but had evidence that the fire risk is absolutely the same as [petrol and diesel] cars,” she said. Richard Bruce, Director of Transport Decarbonisation at the Department for Transport, conceded there was a problem…”There is an anti-EV story in the papers almost every day. Sometimes there are many stories, almost all of which are based on misconceptions and mistruths, unfortunately.” The bottom line: don’t let them speak, but make them give us more money: As well as tackling misinformation the committee also called on the government to unlock funding more quickly for local authorities to install charging infrastructure. And just at this moment Australia is about to bring in rules to force Australians to buy EVs so we can save the World, or make some international bankers rich, whichever comes first. Telsa image by ben saida from Pixabay
February 8th, 2024 | Tags: Electric Cars (EV) | Category: Big-Government, Global Warming | Print This Post | | |
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