Weekly clippings #12 - New IPCC Chair, unsustainable investing, disasters, ESG backtrack, electric vehicles

Included in this week’s clippings under the absurdity category comes the news that the new IPCC Chair has walked way back from the claim that 1.5 degrees of warming since the industrial revolution is catastrophic or an emergency. "We should not despair and fall into a state of shock" if global temperatures were to increase by this amount, he said. In the science category we see research showing that sustainable investing can actually be counterproductive and that the world continues to be less and less vulnerable to the naturally dangerous climate. In the investment/economics category we have Canadian money managers backtracking on ESG, a couple of articles on the failures of ESG and two articles about how electric vehicle mandates are irrational.

Counterproductive Sustainable Investing: The Impact Elasticity of Brown and Green Firms Sustainable investing that directs capital away from brown firms and toward green firms may be counterproductive, in that it makes brown firms more brown without making green firms more green.

Global Weather and Climate Disasters 1H 2023 With respect to weather and climate, the world continues to see the positive effects of decreasing vulnerability and across all extreme weather and climate phenomena. 

Canada's money managers mirror ESG backtrack on Wall Street  Canadian managers' portfolios are similarly misaligned with net-zero goals as those of U.S. managers

 

ESG Movement Fails at the Scene of Its Greatest Triumph  Thank goodness for this week’s repudiation of ESG. Investors understand that letting corporations seek profits—rather than forcing them to engage in politics—is the most efficient path to fueling, sheltering and feeding a hungry world.

 

ESG Investing Is Dying Its Inevitable Death One of the most significant problems with ESG is that applying un-measurable factors on companies, such inevitably leads to poor decisions. Environment or social issues may sound great as a talking point, but delivering on those goals can be extremely costly.

It’s Time To Admit It: EVs Are EVIL

Electric vehicles, carbon taxes, supply and demand, virtue signals, and China  If you use less gas, someone else uses more. EV subsidies just shift who uses the gas. The same supply just goes somewhere else.

Damaged electric cars ‘quarantined’ over fears they will explode. Just two damaged electric cars can fit into the same space that would otherwise fit 100 petrol or diesel cars, under current the DVLA and Transport Department guidelines.

IPCC Chief's Plea for Reason Runs Smack Into Mr. 'Global Boiling' New IPCC Chair: Skea warned against laying too much value on the international community's current nominal target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared the pre-industrial era. "We should not despair and fall into a state of shock" if global temperatures were to increase by this amount, he said.