Weekly clippings #1

 This is where I started sending weekly clippings to a fund company executive.

This week I have provided a touchpoint in three areas:

  1. Science – arctic temperature over the last decade which shows no trend, stubbornly contrary to alarmist claims the arctic is melting, which has been claimed and repeatedly shown as wrong for a few decades now.
  2. Investment/economics – where we see Companies are laying low on ESG as backlash intensifies. This is only a small sample of what can happen when people realize how they have been misled and their funds misused for political goals by asset managers.
  3. Absurdity – where another report claims “Relentless rise in sea levels has turned the coastline into an apocalyptic landscape. The Atlantic Ocean advances an average of six meters a year in the small town.” That’s 18 feet a year, just 300 km up the coast from Rio de Janeiro where, as NOAA’s Tides and Currents page reports, the sea level  has been rising for the past 60 years at a rate of… 0.77 inches per century. And zero inches per year over the past 40 years.

My concern is that a company I have trusted to manage some of my clients’ assets is promoting ideas that are demonstrably false, harmful to billions of human lives and open the company to all manner of reputational damages. From falsehoods to adopting political propaganda as both true and virtuous, to investment and economic fallacies, the ESG movement is filled with errors. As I’ve said, it is one thing to provide products that follow such an ideology and another to promote such ideas across the company and other management teams. If you think a data breach is damaging, imagine if the whole company was identified as knowingly promoting false and immoral ideas, the harm this create from regulators, advisors, investors and the media is immense and needs some serious consideration by leadership.

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