Weekly clippings #14 - Nobel laureate, climate anxiety, not so green energy, divestment, polar bears

This week’s curated clips include in the Science category a recent Nobel prize winner in physics who says the subject of climate change has corrupted science (I must agree completely), in Investment/Economics green energy is neither energy nor green plus ESG assets under management are far lower than often stated, and in the Absurdity category climate activists have mostly stopped talking about polar bears after their stories blew up in their faces.

As usual, I find information all over the place that contradicts every major claim made by climate and energy alarmists, and while contemplating ESG I realized the major claim in the E portion has created a direct attack on the S portion because the advocates of net zero have already caused massive social harms all over the world merely by slowing the growth of fossil fuel energy, never mind actually decreased or (shudder) eliminating it in rapid order. Wind and solar have grown to represent about 1% of world energy and thus have displaced a tiny fraction of the 80%+ that is provided by fossil fuels, and we find ourselves in an energy crisis with high prices causing many people in the wealthy world to feel stresses, never mind those who are in the developing world who have lost the little energy supply they had or found it much more expensive. In other words, the first slice of ESG is set up to oppose the second slice, while the third slice, the one that has actually been shown to improve company results, is mostly ignored or has at least been distorted by self-harming or useless governance policies at the expense of the governance that truly matters when allocating capital. The contradictions built into a three-letter acronym continue to amaze me.

 

Nobel Laureate John Clauser Elected to CO2 Coalition Board of Directors “The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people. Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience.

Environmental knowledge is inversely associated with climate change anxiety  So the more actual knowledge you have, the less anxious you are. How much actual knowledge about this very complex subject do policy makers have? Very little in my experience.

Global mass of buoyant marine plastics dominated by large long-lived debris  Recent estimates of the oceanic input of plastic are one to two orders of magnitude larger than the amount measured floating at the surface. Most of the plastic comes from mishandling in developing countries, not from the more capitalist developed world. Do you think being wrong by more than 1000% will deter irrational and ineffective recycling mandates?

"Green Energy" is neither energy nor green  “Green energy” has 2 problems: 

1) It’s not really energy: It doesn’t provide reliable energy;

2) It’s not really green: It has a huge “environmental impact”

Divesting from Big Oil Is an Empty Gesture  

ESG investing is still largely smoke and mirrors, but not for BlackRock  Rather than taking the headlines at face value, they questioned them. They looked at the ESG credentials and weight of every stock held by investment institutions and calculated the resulting “green” or “brown” tilt. Their headline finding? “ESG-related tilts” totaled only 6% of the investment industry’s assets under management in 2021. Indeed, the green investment tilt, the authors found, was almost exclusively due to a few of the largest investment institutions.

DEI Dies in the Desert  There is perhaps a lesson here about wearing social agendas on the corporate sleeve.

Jack Mintz: Forget the 'just transition.' It's the Boondoggle Transition  The opportunity cost to this boondoggle is beyond the pale. The two governments could instead have hired 10,000 physicians over the same decade to help our ailing health care system. Or they could have reduced taxes by $3,000 per year for each Canadian family of four.

Climate activists are silent on polar bears because their doom-mongering blew up in their faces  Far from being “accidental”, polar bear specialists used the fledgling global warming agenda for their own ends: they employed emotionally manipulative narratives about starving and dying animals to boost funding for their field and ensure their job security.