Weekly clippings #26 - Clickbait vs science, African poverty vs climate policy, ESG debt and pain

 This week in science we have the contrast between the infamous island of Tuvalu which is supposedly at risk of being flooded by rising seas, yet is actually growing in size (as are most similar islands), an article examining the enormous bias that comes when you only examine one side of a story, and a fascinating study finding that ocean microplastics are created around volcanic ocean vents.

In the category of Investment/Economics we have articles discussing the need to choose between costly and ineffective climate policies and helping actual people suffering from poverty, then news of ESG-linked debt coming under pressure.

In Absurdities, read about how if you want a study to show how EVs are cleaner than previous research, you simply make unjustified assumptions about carbon intensity.

Climate Change: A Curious Crisis  The fundamental problem with the climate crisis narrative is that it is simplistic and gives us only one side of the story. It largely expunges all the scientific complexities, unknowns, and uncertainties, all the benefits of global warming and higher carbon dioxide levels, all the serious difficulties, costs, impacts, and risks of rapidly eliminating fossil fuels – as well as expunging the option of simply adapting to living in a warmer world as an alternative (to net zero) policy response. It is as though man-made climate change had been put on trial in the court of public opinion on a charge of crimes against the planet and humanity (with a presumption of guilt) – but with only the prosecution case presented to the jury. It has apparently been found guilty, not on the basis of certainty, not on the basis of ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, not even on the basis of ‘on the balance of probabilities’ but simply on the basis of the possibility that it could be guilty, if not now, then in the future.

How Geological Forces Generate Deep-Sea Microplastics Here we show evidence that microplastics discovered in six deep ocean trenches (Jamieson 2019 ) were generated by emissions of methane gas, ethane gas, propane gas, and minerals from seabed volcanoes [pictured above], major fault zones, lava flows, and hydrothermal vents (Figure 1) and not anthropogenic activities.

My Message to Leaders at Africa Energy Week 2023 For the sake of Africans and the rest of the world, African leaders need to confidently reject the net-zero movement and embrace energy freedom–including fossil fuel freedom.

Will the World Bank Choose Climate Change Over Poverty?  Research repeatedly shows that spending on core development priorities would help much more and much faster per dollar spent than putting funds toward climate. That is because real development investments can dramatically change lives for the better right now and make poorer countries more resilient against climate-related problems such as diseases and natural disasters. By contrast, even drastic emission reductions won’t deliver noticeably different outcomes for a generation or more.

False Utopia: How Uruguay’s renewable energy “miracle” is an exception that proves many rules. If a country requires a modest amount of electricity, and a large portion of it comes from hydroelectric dams, it can accommodate enough intermittent renewable energy to mostly displace fossil fuels from its electricity grid. In doing so, substantial fossil-derived backup power will still be required, it will hardly make a dent in its national carbon footprint, and its citizens will refuse to make meaningful sacrifices to their pre-existing standards of living.

Bankers seek legal cover after backing $1.5 trillion of ESG debt Lawyers advising SLL bankers say the reputational risks associated with mislabeling such products are now too big to ignore.

Loans linked to ESG face overhaul by under-pressure banks Britain's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) warned in June of "market integrity" concerns, including weak incentives, potential conflicts of interest and unambitious goals. The FCA said banks' remuneration incentives to hit ESG financing targets may have created potential conflicts of interest, encouraging them to accept weak corporate targets.

5 actions for fund managers to overcome ESG pain points It requires juggling a growing and sometimes conflicting list of demands from regulators, clients, non-governmental organizations and others.

The Tyranny of ESG Has Run Its Course  Good companies have always thought about this stuff — just without the relentless greenwashing and grandstanding.

If you want to prove that BEVs are much cleaner than what was found in these past studies, you build a model that assumes the carbon intensity of electricity generation (grams CO2 emitted by producing a kWh) will dramatically reduce over the next two decades.