How fear and ignorance drives the green doomsday cult
In this newsletter:
1) Age of Unreason: How fear and ignorance drives the green doomsday cult
Stop These Things, 31 October 2020
2) First Dutch climate refugees fleeing wind turbines: “The noise is unbearable”
Edwin Timmer, De Telegraaf, 31 October 2020
3) After nearly a decade away, La Niña weather system is back…
UN News, 29 October 2020
4) Ancient society adapted & flourished in face of climate change, archaeologists discover
Cornell University, 30 October 2020
5) James Woudhuysen: Why the next financial crisis could be green
Spiked Online, 2 November 2020
UN News, 29 October 2020
4) Ancient society adapted & flourished in face of climate change, archaeologists discover
Cornell University, 30 October 2020
5) James Woudhuysen: Why the next financial crisis could be green
Spiked Online, 2 November 2020
6) Terence Corcoran: Tricks and treats from Peter Foster
Financial Post, 30 October 2020
Financial Post, 30 October 2020
Full details:
1) Age of Unreason: How fear and ignorance drives the green doomsday cult
Stop These Things, 31 October 2020
The new ‘green’ religion is a world where the naïve and gullible seek salvation through the veneration of wind turbines – as if crucifixes – belief in “the science” has supplanted Scripture and ‘scientists’ peddling doomsday tales garner rapt attention, like the fire and brimstone preachers, of old. Those who question “the science” are branded “deniers”, with all the vehemence that was once reserved for Spanish Inquisitors rooting out heretics.
What’s dressed up as “progress” these days seems more and more like a drift back to our Dark Age of misery, poverty and ignorance.
Anyone who thinks that wind turbines and solar panels equate with mortal salvation, is more than just a little confused. But that’s the very point and purpose of those pushing the so-called inevitable ‘transition’ to an all wind and solar powered future.
As in days gone by, the model rests on invent new forms of fear and firmly instilling them. And then following up with the promise of redemption through sacrifice and worship; albeit worshipping wind turbines and solar panels, instead of saints and idols.
The faithful readily subscribe to the myth and the mantras – and merrily provide buckets of cash – all for a chance to get up close and personal with one of these whirling wonders (see above) and to otherwise signal their supreme virtue, to all and sundry.
Prager University poses the the following: Has environmentalism become more than just a good faith effort to protect the Earth? Is it now tantamount to a religion? And if it is, is that a good thing or a bad thing?
PragerU’s latest short documentary, hosted by Will Witt, explores the origins, agenda, and motives of today’s environmental movement. What he finds raises some challenging questions for anyone who sincerely cares about the future of the planet.
Click on image to watch Prager University's brilliant video
2) First Dutch climate refugees fleeing wind turbines: “The noise is unbearable”
Edwin Timmer, De Telegraaf, 31 October 2020
AMSTERDAM – The first Dutch climate refugees are a fact. Not because of wet feet, but because citizens cannot cope with the noise of wind farms.
Residents close to biomass power stations also complain bitterly. Are health and the environment in the Netherlands subordinate to our climate goals? “I do see a similarity with the Groningen gas and the Limburg mines: energy interests outweigh other interests.”
Every time he sent his Connexxion public transport bus across the Haringvliet Bridge, Claus aan de Wiel looked to the northwest with concern. Towards five windturbines two hundred meters high, ten kilometers away, near Piershil. “How’s the wind? Isn’t it too windy? What will it be like when I get home? ” Will it be another evening where the turbine noise rumbles like a rolling, roaring surf above the TV? “I never slept a wink. Sometimes I got back on the bus after only three and a half hours of sleep.”
Windfear
Windfear. The bus driver and his partner Ine van den Dool suffered from it after the Spui wind farm was set up five hundred meters from their house. The initiator still boasted about the Rolls-Royce among the windturbines – so quiet. “But we were shocked. The noise was unbearable. The house was built by my parents, I grew up there and thought I would only leave between six planks, but we could not stand it ”, says Aan de Wiel. Sound waves banged on the facades from three sides. Even the moles disappeared from their garden.
Van den Dool loved the greenery and space in the Hoeksche Waard. “It was a heavenly, healing place. Where we sat in the garden with friends until late. The wind farm has distroyed that. It was as if a jet plane kept circling overhead. I developed severe asthma and could not stop coughing at night. As if my body was screaming: this is not safe, you have to get out of here. ” And so the pair left. As a climate refugee in their own country.
Turbine noise
It is the compression of air when a wick sweeps past the mast that makes the typical turbine noise. “Our noise standards for wind turbines are much more flexible than in neighboring countries,” says Fred Jansen from Schagen. Ten years ago, as chairman of the National Critical Platform for Wind Energy, he already opposed the cabinet’s new noise standards. According to Jansen, they only work in favor of wind farm builders. “Local residents are the victims.”
The World Health Organization recommends that the wind turbine noise for local residents be kept below an average of 45 decibels per day (45 L-den). Louder noise “is associated with adverse health effects,” according to the 2018 report “Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region”. However, Dutch law allows an average of 47 decibels during the day, and peaks well above 50 decibels. Since every three decibels means a doubling, that saves a sip on a drink, Janssen believes.
Sound expert Marcel Blankvoort confirms the Dutch exceptional position. Our country works with averages, where other Western European countries, apart from Norway, allow a maximum peak load on the facade. “And we don’t include background noise. Elsewhere, a turbine in an industrial estate is allowed to make more noise than in the countryside, because there is more noise there anyway. Here, the same standard applies everywhere. That is why wind turbines in a previously quiet polder are more likely to be perceived as a deterioration in the living environment. ” In the ‘Nijpelsian landscape’ (named after the architect of the Dutch climate agreement), full of wind farms, those sound waves hit more and more citizens.
It is not only wind energy that the government is helping, on paper, to halve CO2 emissions by 2030. Subsidizing the burning of woody biomass also helps the accountants in The Hague to comply with the Paris Agreement. Billions of euros in subsidies have already been promised for hundreds of biomass plants. But the nuisance for local residents has caused a fierce social debate about wood burning.
“Recently our bedroom was full of smoke again,” says Rini Ruitenschild from Ede. He lives with his family at a distance of one hundred and eighty meters from one of the local biomass plants, which does not burn gas but wood for district heating. “It is not the first time. My wife has a lung problem. If your whole house is full of dirty air again, then you will become unruly.”
Full story
This is expected to result in sea surface temperatures between two and three degrees Celsius cooler than average, said Dr. Maxx Dilley, Deputy Director in charge of Climate Services Department at WMO.
“These coolings of these large ocean areas have a significant effect on the circulation of the atmosphere that’s flowing over them. And the changes in the atmosphere in turn affect precipitation patterns around the world.”
Uneven effects
The likely results of La Niña vary around the globe, but indications are that the Horn of Africa will see below average rainfall, as will Central Asia.
Elsewhere, WMO’s weather models forecast above-average rainfall for Southeast Asia, some Pacific Islands and the northern region of South America.
The UN agency also warned that East Africa is forecast to see drier than usual conditions, which together with the existing impacts of the desert locust invasion, may add to regional food insecurity.
WMO says that there is a 90 per cent chance of tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures remaining at La Niña levels for the remainder of the year, and a 55 per cent chance that this will continue through March next year.
This is important because La Niña contributes to temperatures, rainfall and storm patterns in many parts of the world.
Full story
4) Ancient society adapted & flourished in face of climate change, archaeologists discover
Cornell University, 30 October 2020
An examination of two documented periods of climate change in the greater Middle East, between approximately 4,500 and 3,000 years ago, reveals local evidence of resilience and even of a flourishing ancient society despite the changes in climate seen in the larger region.
A new study – led by archaeologists from Cornell and from the University of Toronto, working at Tell Tayinat in southeastern Turkey – demonstrates that human responses to climate change are variable and must be examined using extensive and precise data gathered at the local level.
“The absolute dating of these periods has been a subject of considerable debate for many years, and this study contributes a significant new dataset that helps address many of the questions,” said Sturt Manning, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Classical Archaeology in the College of Arts and Sciences, and lead author of the study, which published Oct. 29 in PLoS ONE.
The report highlights how challenge and collapse in some areas were matched by resilience and opportunities elsewhere. The findings are welcome contributions to discussions about human responses to climate change that broaden an otherwise sparse chronological framework for the northern part of the region known historically as the Levant, which stretches the length of the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea.
“The study shows the end of the Early Bronze Age occupation at Tayinat was a long and drawn out affair that, while it appears to coincide with the onset of a megadrought 4,200 years ago, was actually the culmination of processes that began much earlier,” said Tim Harrison, professor and chair of the Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Harrison directs the Tayinat Archaeological Project.
“The archaeological evidence does not point towards significant local effects of the climate episode,” he said, “as there is no evidence of drought stress in crops. Instead, these changes were more likely the result of local political and spatial reconfiguration.”
Read full story
5) James Woudhuysen: Why the next financial crisis could be green
Spiked Online, 2 November 2020
States, banks and big business have gone all in on ‘sustainable’ funny money.
Green finance. Climate finance. Sustainable finance. These phrases no doubt fill most people with a kind of existential dread, but I fear we will all have to learn a lot more about green finance in the years to come.
For one reason why, take a look at Elon Musk’s electric-car venture, Tesla. In just the first nine months of 2020, it received a whopping $1.2 billion in regulatory credits – from California and other states in America, from the US federal government and even from the European Union.
That’s $1.2 billion without making a single extra car – just for making cars that aren’t based on fossil fuels. Mr Musk sells his credits to Honda, General Motors and Fiat Chrysler (FCA) – car giants that haven’t got out of gasoline and into electric fast enough, as far as the US authorities are concerned.
In a 21 October earnings call to Wall Street analysts, Tesla’s chief financial officer, Zachary Kirkhorn, conceded that much of the company’s success was due to its regulatory credits business being ‘stronger than expectations’ and ‘tracking to more than double this year compared to last’. In 2019, Tesla’s credits business was only worth 2.4 per cent of its revenues. But, more vitally, between 2018 and 2020, regulatory credits added between two and five percentage points to Tesla’s gross profits.
Indeed, as the US business editor of The Times observed after Kirkhorn had made his call, although Tesla had been profitable for five consecutive quarters, ‘it would have lost money in the last four had it not sold hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of “green” credits to other car manufacturers’.
If elected president, Joe Biden plans to raise federal penalties on conventional carmakers. But with or without this policy, it will still take a very long time to really displace the internal combustion engine from the roads. That means that old Elon will go on enjoying state subsidies for his cars – which are sold for a whopping $38,000 to $200,000 each – for years and years to come. Meanwhile, the US state gives buyers of many other, rival electric cars a $7,500 tax credit for each that they purchase.
Green finance is conquering all before it. At the start of this year, I noted that ‘the woke war on fossil fuels’ had ‘reached central banks and financial regulators’. But in the same nine months that Musk got his payoff for not using gasoline, things have gone much further than that.
As spiked contributor and financial journalist Daniel Ben-Ami tells me, green finance is ‘no longer a niche proposition’. ‘Finance is redefining itself as a key institution with which corporations and governments can pursue the agenda of ESG’ (environmental, social and corporate governance policies), the successors to our old friend, corporate social responsibility.
These ESG policies have been adopted by the car industry and many others. They are shaped by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the World Economic Forum. They are tracked by ratings agencies, institutional investors, asset managers, financial institutions and other stakeholders, as well as by Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters and the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. There are also special ESG funds and portfolios offered by BlackRock, BNY Mellon, Fidelity, JP Morgan, Prudential and others. Their structures and their language are impenetrable, but these big names confirm that green finance is no longer the tail wagging the dog of mainstream finance: it is the dog.
What these big banks really know about the tugging, durability, insurance and disposal of offshore wind turbines, for instance, is anybody’s guess. But it’s the same with all the global great and the good. The EU now seems to consider sustainable finance on a par with consumer finance, while at the prestigious OECD, the Centre on Green Finance and Investment boasts countless green-finance initiatives.
From green bonds to feed-in tariffs for consumers, from capping, taxing and trading CO2 to offsetting it – you name it, green bean-counters will want a percentage of it. Green finance is also running amok with dubious financial instruments such as derivatives – remember those from the 2008 crash? There are even specialist ESG-friendly derivatives. Green finance is also ‘making tracks into the wonky world of foreign-exchange markets, highlighting the lengths Wall Street will go to broadcast an environmental angle on investments’, writes the Wall Street Journal.
Just as with the rest of the City of London, green finance comes with plenty of funny money attached. The European Union’s €14 billion Emission Trading Scheme (ETS), which the EU Parliament now wants to extend, has lost at least €5 billion through fraud.
Full post
Through more than 20 years as FP Comment editor and columnist at the National Post, one of the many pleasures and challenges has been my role as mentor and sage to upcoming young columnists in need of guidance. Andrew Coyne. Jonathan Kay. Jack Mintz. Many others. Coyne and Kay have often strayed and wandered into the climate wilderness. But that is certainly not the case with Peter Foster.
For each of those 20-plus years, Foster has held firm to the basic principles of market economics and to the enlightenment ideas of Adam Smith. In the introduction to his 2014 book, Why We Bite the Invisible Hand: The Psychology of Anti-Capitalism, Foster wrote that “Smith is my constant reference point throughout the voyage of investigation and reflection.”
Smith makes a few appearances in Foster’s new book, How Dare You!, but the 18th-century economic theorist and moral philosopher is only called in occasionally but effectively to skewer a long list of Halloweenish characters who for two decades have dominated key areas of public policy, from climate change to corporate social responsibility and sustainable development.
Lined up for tricks are the likes of Al Gore, David Suzuki, Tim Flannery, Maurice Strong, Mark Carney, Justin Trudeau, Klaus Schwab, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, the Pope — and Greta Thunberg, the teen climate activist whose 2019 emotional “how dare you!” speech before the United Nations explains the title.
Foster says the phrase “reflects the self-righteous authoritarian intolerance of the climate industrial complex and its mouthpieces.”
How Dare You! is Foster’s 10th book, but his first collection of non-book writing. Book-length assemblies of daily newspaper columns run the risk of reading like stale records of yesterday’s events. Not so with How Dare You!, a collection of the best of Foster’s columns craftily organized chronologically within different subject chapters.
A good example is the chapter that relates to Thunberg, titled “Pre-teen traumatic stress disorder.” The chapter opens with a July 1999, column — before Greta was born — headlined “Save the children from green education,” in which Foster goes after Agenda 21 and the Rio Earth Summit for proposing that all children should be indoctrinated about the environment and sustainable development “throughout their schooling.”
In 2007, Foster wrote of his daughter and her Grade 6 class being shown Al Gore’s apocalyptic PG movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Another column explores a Morgan Stanley Investment Foundation use of children to stage a policy session at a G8 meeting in Germany. “The political manipulation of children is age-old and disgraceful,” wrote Foster in 2007. “It has become particularly egregious during the modern age of environmental hysteria.”
Foster has more fun with Pope Francis, Mark Carney and David Suzuki than with Thunberg. A chapter sub-section, titled “Pope Francis: Papal Bull,” contains pointed commentary on assorted Papal declarations and concludes with the idea that the Pope sounds like “the theological wing of the Occupy movement.” A 2014 column asks “Is God green?” and in 2015 Foster declared the Vatican’s climate encyclical “The Pope’s Eco-munist Manifesto.” […]
As a bonus, How Dare You!, which is published by the London-based Global Warming Policy Forum, enhances Foster’s wit with a collection of original and equally cutting illustrations by Josh, the British cartoonist, who cleverly captures the spirit of the columns — including the caricature below of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Illustration by British cartoonist Josh from Peter Foster’s new book, How Dare You! PHOTO BY JOSH
Full post
Stop These Things, 31 October 2020
The new ‘green’ religion is a world where the naïve and gullible seek salvation through the veneration of wind turbines – as if crucifixes – belief in “the science” has supplanted Scripture and ‘scientists’ peddling doomsday tales garner rapt attention, like the fire and brimstone preachers, of old. Those who question “the science” are branded “deniers”, with all the vehemence that was once reserved for Spanish Inquisitors rooting out heretics.
What’s dressed up as “progress” these days seems more and more like a drift back to our Dark Age of misery, poverty and ignorance.
Anyone who thinks that wind turbines and solar panels equate with mortal salvation, is more than just a little confused. But that’s the very point and purpose of those pushing the so-called inevitable ‘transition’ to an all wind and solar powered future.
As in days gone by, the model rests on invent new forms of fear and firmly instilling them. And then following up with the promise of redemption through sacrifice and worship; albeit worshipping wind turbines and solar panels, instead of saints and idols.
The faithful readily subscribe to the myth and the mantras – and merrily provide buckets of cash – all for a chance to get up close and personal with one of these whirling wonders (see above) and to otherwise signal their supreme virtue, to all and sundry.
Prager University poses the the following: Has environmentalism become more than just a good faith effort to protect the Earth? Is it now tantamount to a religion? And if it is, is that a good thing or a bad thing?
PragerU’s latest short documentary, hosted by Will Witt, explores the origins, agenda, and motives of today’s environmental movement. What he finds raises some challenging questions for anyone who sincerely cares about the future of the planet.
Click on image to watch Prager University's brilliant video
2) First Dutch climate refugees fleeing wind turbines: “The noise is unbearable”
Edwin Timmer, De Telegraaf, 31 October 2020
AMSTERDAM – The first Dutch climate refugees are a fact. Not because of wet feet, but because citizens cannot cope with the noise of wind farms.
Residents close to biomass power stations also complain bitterly. Are health and the environment in the Netherlands subordinate to our climate goals? “I do see a similarity with the Groningen gas and the Limburg mines: energy interests outweigh other interests.”
Every time he sent his Connexxion public transport bus across the Haringvliet Bridge, Claus aan de Wiel looked to the northwest with concern. Towards five windturbines two hundred meters high, ten kilometers away, near Piershil. “How’s the wind? Isn’t it too windy? What will it be like when I get home? ” Will it be another evening where the turbine noise rumbles like a rolling, roaring surf above the TV? “I never slept a wink. Sometimes I got back on the bus after only three and a half hours of sleep.”
Windfear
Windfear. The bus driver and his partner Ine van den Dool suffered from it after the Spui wind farm was set up five hundred meters from their house. The initiator still boasted about the Rolls-Royce among the windturbines – so quiet. “But we were shocked. The noise was unbearable. The house was built by my parents, I grew up there and thought I would only leave between six planks, but we could not stand it ”, says Aan de Wiel. Sound waves banged on the facades from three sides. Even the moles disappeared from their garden.
Van den Dool loved the greenery and space in the Hoeksche Waard. “It was a heavenly, healing place. Where we sat in the garden with friends until late. The wind farm has distroyed that. It was as if a jet plane kept circling overhead. I developed severe asthma and could not stop coughing at night. As if my body was screaming: this is not safe, you have to get out of here. ” And so the pair left. As a climate refugee in their own country.
Turbine noise
It is the compression of air when a wick sweeps past the mast that makes the typical turbine noise. “Our noise standards for wind turbines are much more flexible than in neighboring countries,” says Fred Jansen from Schagen. Ten years ago, as chairman of the National Critical Platform for Wind Energy, he already opposed the cabinet’s new noise standards. According to Jansen, they only work in favor of wind farm builders. “Local residents are the victims.”
The World Health Organization recommends that the wind turbine noise for local residents be kept below an average of 45 decibels per day (45 L-den). Louder noise “is associated with adverse health effects,” according to the 2018 report “Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region”. However, Dutch law allows an average of 47 decibels during the day, and peaks well above 50 decibels. Since every three decibels means a doubling, that saves a sip on a drink, Janssen believes.
Sound expert Marcel Blankvoort confirms the Dutch exceptional position. Our country works with averages, where other Western European countries, apart from Norway, allow a maximum peak load on the facade. “And we don’t include background noise. Elsewhere, a turbine in an industrial estate is allowed to make more noise than in the countryside, because there is more noise there anyway. Here, the same standard applies everywhere. That is why wind turbines in a previously quiet polder are more likely to be perceived as a deterioration in the living environment. ” In the ‘Nijpelsian landscape’ (named after the architect of the Dutch climate agreement), full of wind farms, those sound waves hit more and more citizens.
It is not only wind energy that the government is helping, on paper, to halve CO2 emissions by 2030. Subsidizing the burning of woody biomass also helps the accountants in The Hague to comply with the Paris Agreement. Billions of euros in subsidies have already been promised for hundreds of biomass plants. But the nuisance for local residents has caused a fierce social debate about wood burning.
“Recently our bedroom was full of smoke again,” says Rini Ruitenschild from Ede. He lives with his family at a distance of one hundred and eighty meters from one of the local biomass plants, which does not burn gas but wood for district heating. “It is not the first time. My wife has a lung problem. If your whole house is full of dirty air again, then you will become unruly.”
Full story
3) After nearly a decade away, La Niña weather system is back…
UN News, 29 October 2020
According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), La Niña is back in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, after nearly a decade’s absence.
UN News, 29 October 2020
According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), La Niña is back in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, after nearly a decade’s absence.
“These coolings of these large ocean areas have a significant effect on the circulation of the atmosphere that’s flowing over them. And the changes in the atmosphere in turn affect precipitation patterns around the world.”
Uneven effects
The likely results of La Niña vary around the globe, but indications are that the Horn of Africa will see below average rainfall, as will Central Asia.
Elsewhere, WMO’s weather models forecast above-average rainfall for Southeast Asia, some Pacific Islands and the northern region of South America.
The UN agency also warned that East Africa is forecast to see drier than usual conditions, which together with the existing impacts of the desert locust invasion, may add to regional food insecurity.
WMO says that there is a 90 per cent chance of tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures remaining at La Niña levels for the remainder of the year, and a 55 per cent chance that this will continue through March next year.
This is important because La Niña contributes to temperatures, rainfall and storm patterns in many parts of the world.
Full story
4) Ancient society adapted & flourished in face of climate change, archaeologists discover
Cornell University, 30 October 2020
An examination of two documented periods of climate change in the greater Middle East, between approximately 4,500 and 3,000 years ago, reveals local evidence of resilience and even of a flourishing ancient society despite the changes in climate seen in the larger region.
A new study – led by archaeologists from Cornell and from the University of Toronto, working at Tell Tayinat in southeastern Turkey – demonstrates that human responses to climate change are variable and must be examined using extensive and precise data gathered at the local level.
“The absolute dating of these periods has been a subject of considerable debate for many years, and this study contributes a significant new dataset that helps address many of the questions,” said Sturt Manning, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Classical Archaeology in the College of Arts and Sciences, and lead author of the study, which published Oct. 29 in PLoS ONE.
The report highlights how challenge and collapse in some areas were matched by resilience and opportunities elsewhere. The findings are welcome contributions to discussions about human responses to climate change that broaden an otherwise sparse chronological framework for the northern part of the region known historically as the Levant, which stretches the length of the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea.
“The study shows the end of the Early Bronze Age occupation at Tayinat was a long and drawn out affair that, while it appears to coincide with the onset of a megadrought 4,200 years ago, was actually the culmination of processes that began much earlier,” said Tim Harrison, professor and chair of the Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Harrison directs the Tayinat Archaeological Project.
“The archaeological evidence does not point towards significant local effects of the climate episode,” he said, “as there is no evidence of drought stress in crops. Instead, these changes were more likely the result of local political and spatial reconfiguration.”
Read full story
5) James Woudhuysen: Why the next financial crisis could be green
Spiked Online, 2 November 2020
States, banks and big business have gone all in on ‘sustainable’ funny money.
Green finance. Climate finance. Sustainable finance. These phrases no doubt fill most people with a kind of existential dread, but I fear we will all have to learn a lot more about green finance in the years to come.
For one reason why, take a look at Elon Musk’s electric-car venture, Tesla. In just the first nine months of 2020, it received a whopping $1.2 billion in regulatory credits – from California and other states in America, from the US federal government and even from the European Union.
That’s $1.2 billion without making a single extra car – just for making cars that aren’t based on fossil fuels. Mr Musk sells his credits to Honda, General Motors and Fiat Chrysler (FCA) – car giants that haven’t got out of gasoline and into electric fast enough, as far as the US authorities are concerned.
In a 21 October earnings call to Wall Street analysts, Tesla’s chief financial officer, Zachary Kirkhorn, conceded that much of the company’s success was due to its regulatory credits business being ‘stronger than expectations’ and ‘tracking to more than double this year compared to last’. In 2019, Tesla’s credits business was only worth 2.4 per cent of its revenues. But, more vitally, between 2018 and 2020, regulatory credits added between two and five percentage points to Tesla’s gross profits.
Indeed, as the US business editor of The Times observed after Kirkhorn had made his call, although Tesla had been profitable for five consecutive quarters, ‘it would have lost money in the last four had it not sold hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of “green” credits to other car manufacturers’.
If elected president, Joe Biden plans to raise federal penalties on conventional carmakers. But with or without this policy, it will still take a very long time to really displace the internal combustion engine from the roads. That means that old Elon will go on enjoying state subsidies for his cars – which are sold for a whopping $38,000 to $200,000 each – for years and years to come. Meanwhile, the US state gives buyers of many other, rival electric cars a $7,500 tax credit for each that they purchase.
Green finance is conquering all before it. At the start of this year, I noted that ‘the woke war on fossil fuels’ had ‘reached central banks and financial regulators’. But in the same nine months that Musk got his payoff for not using gasoline, things have gone much further than that.
As spiked contributor and financial journalist Daniel Ben-Ami tells me, green finance is ‘no longer a niche proposition’. ‘Finance is redefining itself as a key institution with which corporations and governments can pursue the agenda of ESG’ (environmental, social and corporate governance policies), the successors to our old friend, corporate social responsibility.
These ESG policies have been adopted by the car industry and many others. They are shaped by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the World Economic Forum. They are tracked by ratings agencies, institutional investors, asset managers, financial institutions and other stakeholders, as well as by Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters and the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. There are also special ESG funds and portfolios offered by BlackRock, BNY Mellon, Fidelity, JP Morgan, Prudential and others. Their structures and their language are impenetrable, but these big names confirm that green finance is no longer the tail wagging the dog of mainstream finance: it is the dog.
What these big banks really know about the tugging, durability, insurance and disposal of offshore wind turbines, for instance, is anybody’s guess. But it’s the same with all the global great and the good. The EU now seems to consider sustainable finance on a par with consumer finance, while at the prestigious OECD, the Centre on Green Finance and Investment boasts countless green-finance initiatives.
From green bonds to feed-in tariffs for consumers, from capping, taxing and trading CO2 to offsetting it – you name it, green bean-counters will want a percentage of it. Green finance is also running amok with dubious financial instruments such as derivatives – remember those from the 2008 crash? There are even specialist ESG-friendly derivatives. Green finance is also ‘making tracks into the wonky world of foreign-exchange markets, highlighting the lengths Wall Street will go to broadcast an environmental angle on investments’, writes the Wall Street Journal.
Just as with the rest of the City of London, green finance comes with plenty of funny money attached. The European Union’s €14 billion Emission Trading Scheme (ETS), which the EU Parliament now wants to extend, has lost at least €5 billion through fraud.
Full post
6) Terence Corcoran: Tricks and treats from Peter Foster
Financial Post, 30 October 2020
Peter Foster’s book How Dare You! skewers a long list of Halloweenish characters who for two decades have dominated key areas of public policy
Financial Post, 30 October 2020
Peter Foster’s book How Dare You! skewers a long list of Halloweenish characters who for two decades have dominated key areas of public policy
Peter Foster’s new book, How Dare You! is a collection of the best of his columns craftily organized chronologically within different subject chapters.
Through more than 20 years as FP Comment editor and columnist at the National Post, one of the many pleasures and challenges has been my role as mentor and sage to upcoming young columnists in need of guidance. Andrew Coyne. Jonathan Kay. Jack Mintz. Many others. Coyne and Kay have often strayed and wandered into the climate wilderness. But that is certainly not the case with Peter Foster.
For each of those 20-plus years, Foster has held firm to the basic principles of market economics and to the enlightenment ideas of Adam Smith. In the introduction to his 2014 book, Why We Bite the Invisible Hand: The Psychology of Anti-Capitalism, Foster wrote that “Smith is my constant reference point throughout the voyage of investigation and reflection.”
Smith makes a few appearances in Foster’s new book, How Dare You!, but the 18th-century economic theorist and moral philosopher is only called in occasionally but effectively to skewer a long list of Halloweenish characters who for two decades have dominated key areas of public policy, from climate change to corporate social responsibility and sustainable development.
Lined up for tricks are the likes of Al Gore, David Suzuki, Tim Flannery, Maurice Strong, Mark Carney, Justin Trudeau, Klaus Schwab, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, the Pope — and Greta Thunberg, the teen climate activist whose 2019 emotional “how dare you!” speech before the United Nations explains the title.
Foster says the phrase “reflects the self-righteous authoritarian intolerance of the climate industrial complex and its mouthpieces.”
How Dare You! is Foster’s 10th book, but his first collection of non-book writing. Book-length assemblies of daily newspaper columns run the risk of reading like stale records of yesterday’s events. Not so with How Dare You!, a collection of the best of Foster’s columns craftily organized chronologically within different subject chapters.
A good example is the chapter that relates to Thunberg, titled “Pre-teen traumatic stress disorder.” The chapter opens with a July 1999, column — before Greta was born — headlined “Save the children from green education,” in which Foster goes after Agenda 21 and the Rio Earth Summit for proposing that all children should be indoctrinated about the environment and sustainable development “throughout their schooling.”
In 2007, Foster wrote of his daughter and her Grade 6 class being shown Al Gore’s apocalyptic PG movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Another column explores a Morgan Stanley Investment Foundation use of children to stage a policy session at a G8 meeting in Germany. “The political manipulation of children is age-old and disgraceful,” wrote Foster in 2007. “It has become particularly egregious during the modern age of environmental hysteria.”
Foster has more fun with Pope Francis, Mark Carney and David Suzuki than with Thunberg. A chapter sub-section, titled “Pope Francis: Papal Bull,” contains pointed commentary on assorted Papal declarations and concludes with the idea that the Pope sounds like “the theological wing of the Occupy movement.” A 2014 column asks “Is God green?” and in 2015 Foster declared the Vatican’s climate encyclical “The Pope’s Eco-munist Manifesto.” […]
As a bonus, How Dare You!, which is published by the London-based Global Warming Policy Forum, enhances Foster’s wit with a collection of original and equally cutting illustrations by Josh, the British cartoonist, who cleverly captures the spirit of the columns — including the caricature below of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Illustration by British cartoonist Josh from Peter Foster’s new book, How Dare You! PHOTO BY JOSH
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The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
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