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By Jo Nova Banker warfare to destroy businesses but make the weather nicer…
It’s another emergency on the Australian Soviet-style electricity grid. An entirely profitable and law abiding operation is potentially about to be shut down, putting 4% of the national electricity supply at risk, because the bankers want to save the world, and the government is helping them. Who runs the country, is it the PM or the banker cartel?
Delta Electricity needs a bank guarantee so it can keep trading in our national electricity market, but 15 banks have refused to supply that because of their own show-pony ESG requirements, designed to impress their ski buddies at Davos. Essentially, the bankers want to decarbonize our electricity grid, and make electricity more expensive for the poor, but can’t be bothered to run for election, so they are running the country the way they want anyhow — voters be damned.
It’s even more absurd that it looks, Delta isn’t asking for a loan — it’s profitable, it has the cash. But the bankers won’t even hold the cash and promise to pay it back when needed. Delta’s current bank guarantee runs out on Dec 31, and after that it […]
By Jo Nova
Finally, the Green-left activists are starting to ask if Big Money is distorting their own environmental efforts
Twenty years too late, a few on the green patsy environmental side are starting to feel “uneasy” about the billions of dollars gifted into their accounts by the nice caring bankers and oligarchs. The money thrown at believers is so obscenely big even they are raising eyebrows.
After smearing skeptics as shills for Big Oil, a few on the left are wondering if funds 300 times larger just from one man might be a bit concentrated. The Bezos Earth Fund has $10,000 million dollars in total to give away but in the last three decades of climate debate the evil Exxon only gave skeptics a grand total of $30 million dollars. Now they worry?
They wonder if Jeff Bezos is controlling too much of the environmental charity funding, and that he really wants to set up carbon offset schemes which greens fear will be “greenwashed” corrupted and a waste of time. This is quite a rare hint that a few in the environmental circles are just starting to be suspicious that they are being used to support other money […]
Naturally the Big Bankers dress up in trees and rivers… they wouldn’t wear the Dracula Cape when people are looking, would they?
By Jo Nova
The biggest climate bullies on the planet just got a bit smaller. There are two monster climate banker clubs in the world, and yesterday, one of them, the “Climate Action 100+” lost three of the six largest asset management funds in the world, namely JP Morgan Chase, State Street and BlackRock.
State Street manages about $3.6 trillion in funds, JP Morgan Chase about $3 or $4 trillion, and BlackRock $10 trillion, so that’s something like $17,000 billion dollars that just left the ranch. The fact that this kind of money was all grouped together in a cabal of any sort is bad enough, but ponder that now, after the biggest fish have left the tank, there’s still $50 trillion left in assets on the inside.
It appears the Climate Action 100+ group had grown too big for its boots — the new Climate Action 100+ “phase 2” strategy expected asset managers to actively hound companies to cut their emissions.
An ESG Asset Manager Exodus
The Wall Street Journal
February 17th, 2024 | Tags: Bankers, Climate Action 100+, Climate Money, ESG, GFANZ, United Nations (UN) | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | |
By Jo Nova
Word is spreading openly of the awful third quarter results in wind and solar power, and in EV’s. Morningstar noted some $14 billion dollars moved out of sustainability funds in the last quarter even before the dismal results were announced. This is only a small part of the $300 billion total, but it’s a big bad shift in momentum in a sector that is supposed to be going exponential and theoretically “the next big thing”.
Two years ago funds were tagging anything they could with Sustainability. But the term has become a dirty word, and so has ESG. Funds that were enthusiastically adding these green terms to their titles are now dropping them and backing away slowly…
With major daily business newspapers now reporting the bad news it’s hard to see what will stop the slide — only massive subsidies would do that (temporarily), but the US has already done that with the bizarrely named Inflation Reduction Act.
But make no mistake, there is a $300 billion industry begging for help and a lot of politicians who don’t want to admit their renewables push was an economic disaster. The German government has bailed out Siemens, and the […]
By Jo Nova
Shh! The Monster Banker Funds are secretly saving the World
By sheer coincidence the same day the Australian Treasurer said we’d have to pump up the subsidies on climate targets, a group of largely foreign bankers called for the Australian government to “hurry up with emissions reduction plans “.
The foreign investment bankers market themselves as “Australian and New Zealand investors” but boast they have $30 trillion in assets, which is a bit of a red flag when the GDP of both nations together is $2 trillion USD. It turns out the blandly named Investor Group on Climate Change (IGCC) is only 10% Australasian:
IGCC represents investors with total funds under management of more than $3 trillion in Australia and New Zealand and $30 trillion around the world. Investors welcome the development of internationally aligned climate risk disclosure requirements in Australia. —IGCC Submission to the Australian Treasury Feb 2023
But being 90% foreign doesn’t stop them putting in submissions to Parliament or pretending to be locals. Even The Australian thinks they are Australian:
An Australian investor group representing members with more than $30 trillion in assets says plans being developed by the […]
Image by ThankYouFantasyPictures from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Kathryn Porter in The Telegraph, has compiled quite the list of failures as offshore wind projects get frozen around the world. Decisions are being delayed, contracts abandoned, auctions left without bidders and almost no new projects started. The awful truth of inflation, the maintenance cost shocks and cable failures is all too much. Then there was the problem of needing a 100 years of copper, nickel and lithium production before Christmas.
It’s all been kept quiet. Who knew there were no offshore wind investments in the EU last year, apart from a few floating projects?
After years of subsidies, wind power was meant to get cheap enough to be profitable and competitive all by itself, instead, 25 years later, it just needs bigger subsidies. When the great oil and coal price crunch came, wind power was supposed to rise through the ashes, instead we discovered that wind turbine and battery factories needed cheap coal and oil like the rest of the economy.
Right now Australia has no offshore wind turbines and is about to jump onto a burning ship:
The myth of affordable green energy is over
October 13th, 2023 | Tags: Climate Money, ESG, Renewable Energy, Wind Power | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | |
By Jo Nova
Unguarded Big-Money works like acid against democracy
Just like everywhere in the West, the money Australian’s earn may be quietly used against them to push policies they don’t want. The Australian Retirement Trust (ART) and HESTA are using their voting rights on corporate boards to push for climate action and gender diversity. They aren’t polling their members to find out if this is what they want. They are just following The BlackRock and GFANZ banker cartel modus operandi. It is coercion, done with the illusion of “good intentions”, but in reality, aggressively self-serving behaviour. The management of HESTA and ART couldn’t care less what the owners of the money want.
ART is a $260 billion fund (Australia’s second largest) with 2.2 million members. HESTA is a $76 billion fund with nearly 1 million members who are mostly working in health and community service. Just as with the US Funds, there surely is a question of fiduciary duty. Are these funds maximizing the return for investors or are they using their money to achieve political ends that result in lower income for retirees? Environmental investors lost 22% last year when energy investors made 54%.
So for directors […]
By Jo Nova
Nearly every proposal from the climate activists was struck down:
How times have changed. After the energy crisis of 2022 investors at major oil and gas firms are spurning climate activism. A year ago nearly a third of investors at Chevron and Exxon voted for the draconian “Scope 3” emissions targets. These targets are ludicrous — requiring the oil and gas giants to adopt a plan to reduce third party use of their own products. It’s like a form of corporate sabotage.
This year only about 10% of the same investors voted for these measures. And apparently there’s a similar trend on the other side of the Atlantic with BP and Shell investors rejecting activism too.
This is a very encouraging sign that the dominance of BlackRock et al is waning — they are bullying the world with other people’s money, and word is spreading as the US states fight back.
ESG Blowback: Investors Reject Climate Measures at Exxon, Chevron
By Collin Eaton and Jenny Strasburg, The Wall Street Journal
The votes were abysmal for climate activists. All but two of the 20 shareholder proposals for the two companies garnered less than 25% […]
By Jo Nova
Make no mistake, the UN “finance” cartel is the supermassive black hole at the centre of the climate-mafia galaxy.
The UN Environment Programme brags that across insurance, banking and investing, it has over 450 members representing more than $100 trillion dollars worth of carrots and sticks to beat up politicians and businesses with. These are the cogs and levers of the halls of global power.
Image by Amy from Pixabay
It’s a UN programme, but the first “target setting” rules were launched at Davos at the latest World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting — the skiing holiday for corporate rulers and their celebrity minions. The Big unelected political powers holidaying with the richest people in the world. Democracy on a barbecue.
In 2021 many Insurance giants had rushed to join the global climate activist cartel designed for their industry — the Net Zero Insurers Alliance (NZIA) — which would have turned the insurance industry into another form of climate police answerable to the UN or the WEF. But it’s all coming undone now, thanks to the 23 US States who are pressing the Antitrust button. I mean, imagine if all the competitors in an industry got […]
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By Jo Nova
The media is totally bought and sold
A bunch of giant Foundations (run by billionaires that also invest in renewable energy) gave Associated Press (AP) $8 million dollars last year to push the climate propaganda even harder than it has been running for the last 20 years.
In return AP, which calls itself a not-for-profit news agency took the grant and then ran 64 climate crisis or ESG stories in the next year. They called this surge a “sweeping climate journalism initiative”.
Sixty four stories doesn’t sound like much but AP stories are repeated in 1,300 newspapers and broadcasters. So 64 stories could really mean 83,200 stories.
The money came from the Rockefeller Foundation, Quadrivium (James Murdoch, who is son of Rupert), the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation (Walmart), and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Looks like, smells like, advertising money for Renewable investors disguised as a grant?
At least some of these Billionaires may be paying for media stories that could improve the return on their green investments. According to InfluenceWatch, two years ago Quadrivium Foundation committed to invest $250 million US in BlackRock Inc for “green energy infrastructure”. […]
By Jo Nova
Oklahoma blacklists BlackRock and 12 other banks that boycott fossil fuels
We may yet be saved by states in the US that are pulling the pin on the Big Banker Cartel. In this case Oklahoma wrote laws to investigate and ban state investments with banks that boycott the energy sector. They’ve now decided that 13 banks fail the bar, and should be banned from all public business. In response BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase are now dancing to a whole new tune, suddenly protesting that they invest billions in the energy sector. The twisted truth is, that it is no defense at all, it was part of their strategy. Often they used their major voting interest to oust directors and pressure boards to pick up more “woke” ESG policies. These are big targets. JP Morgan Chase is the largest bank in the US and BlackRock is the largest asset manager in the world.
This is excellent news, and we need more. Spread the news. But how did it get to the point where a bank that outspokenly campaigned to end fossil fuels was managing 60% of the state employees retirement funds in a state that is […]
By Jo Nova
Environmental wokeness has become a liability for investors
The backlash against ESG has hit bonds, stocks, corporates
In a recent survey, half of large investors in North America now admit to worrying that ESG exposes them to legal risk. When companies want to create a Green-Woke project they issue ESG bonds to get loans to build it, but sometime between last year and this year those Bonds have halved. Suddenly companies are not dressing up in the Big Green cloak. That’s $6 billion in ESG investments that didn’t happen.
The change in direction has been driven by Florida and Texas and the 19 or more states that have joined them. Even though the $2b in funds Ron De Santis pulled from BlackRock et al last year was a drop in the ocean for a $10 trillion dollar fund, it was the tip of a spear at the heart of the beast. The financial houses and asset managers were using other people’s money to force through political changes those same people didn’t want to vote for. If the crowd followed De Santis the whole game was up.
De Santis has just tightened the screws further today:
DeSantis […]
By Jo Nova
SVB or Silicon Valley Bank is the US’s 17th biggest bank, or it was until last week when it became the US’s second biggest bank failure instead.
Interest rate rises are supposed to squeeze out the dumbest investments, so it is fitting that one of the first casualties of this boom-bust cycle is a green banker, mostly doomed by loaning half their cash to the same bankrupt Big-Government that created the green improbable fantasy industries which SVB was largely serving.
SVB was a “Green” Banker. We know this, not because newspapers are saying that now, but because of the emergency flares released on behalf of the victims. The New York Times tells us that the collapse of SVB is going to hit green tech hard because SVB clients included 1,550 companies dedicated to “fighting climate change”.
If only SVB had served coal miners or gas frackers instead they might still be in business? The deposits they needed would have kept on coming as the profits flowed in.
David Gelles, New York Times, naturally, misses the whole point:
Silicon Valley Bank Collapse Threatens Climate Start-Ups
In reality, climate start-ups threaten the bank, and climate finish-ups threaten […]
By Jo Nova
Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock. | Bloomberg
Two wins. BlackRock has agreed to Ron DeSantis’ demands that Florida’s state pension funds can’t be used for eco-activism fantasy quests (like ESG*). Now they have to be used to make profits for the people those funds belong to. That’s not much of a win you might think, since that’s just a return to “the world we thought we were living in”, but in the World of Absurd it’s popping a very important bubble. Possibly “the” most important bubble — the loose money driving the trainwreck of stupid investments and sabotage-like-boycotts.
Secondly — Larry Fink feels hurt. The glitter-wheels are falling off the climate fund-wagon. The CEO of BlackRock was running around the world acting like the third largest nation on Earth. He was waving ten trillion dollars of other people’s money and bossing people into joining his cult. That party is coming undone.
BlackRock are the financial Climate Police disguised as a Monster Investment Fund but the anti-woke movement is gaining ground:
BlackRock’s Fink says climate and ESG-investing attacks getting ugly, personal
By Rachel Koning Beals, MorningStar
By Jo Nova
Hands up who wants to lose money?
These numbers that Rupert Darwall has put together in Real Clear Energy are extraordinary:
2022: The Year ESG Fell to Earth
The year 2022 brings an end to an era of illusions: … [it] brought environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing down to earth with a thump—for the year to date, BlackRock’s ESG Screened S&P 500 ETF lost 22.2% of its value, and the S&P 500 Energy Sector Index rose 54.0%.
Ponder how savagely poignant these losses are for the ESG doe-eyed investors. In their wildest wet dreams ten years ago they would have crawled over shards of glass naked to get coal prices up to $400USD a ton. In a year when coal and gas were obscenely expensive, the glorious cheap efficiency of solar and wind power could shine like never before.
Instead demand for fashionable random green electrons vanished. There was never a need for “random” power, and the energy crisis just peeled back the onion to reveal the true demand. Wind and solar power were just the fashion accessories that no one had to have. Coal, oil and gas were essential.
Not only did demand […]
By Jo Nova
Move over divestment and boycott — and move in activist shareholders wielding other people’s money. After naive shareholders sold out, they didn’t have much influence over a company. But if they bought enough shares instead, they could practically run the place.
Good people left their money unguarded in pension plans and it came to be used against them.
The three largest asset managers in the world are BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. They swept up the retirement money left unwatched in accounts Big-Government forced everyone to have. The Big Three now manage $20 trillion dollars combined. They also happen to want to end fossil fuel use and save the world — because they are nice people, right. So we face the dilemma — The citizens rejected NetZero, but the citizen’s money gives the power to men like Larry Fink, head of Blackrock, to harrass the boards of oil and energy companies in order to get NetZero through the back door.
To appreciate how influential these monster funds are, ponder that they are the largest shareholders in nine out of ten of the S&P 500 Index companies and lately, they have been buying up US power utilities.
[…]
By Jo Nova Vanguard abandons the UN led Net-Zero Climate Finance monster group
Only a week after Ron de Santis pulled $2 billion in Florida funds from BlackRock, Vanguard, the second biggest asset manager in the world, has abruptly pulled out of GFANZ.
Vanguard has $7 trillion in assets under management, and GFANZ is a conglomerate cabal of bankers insurers and asset managers that has snowballed into a 550 member cabal with a jawdropping, obscene, 150 trillion in assets. Together, for a moment, they almost created the illusion of a One World Government by Bankers. After all, the GDP of the United States of America is only $23 trillion. So when an organization with six times the pulling power tells the world to go Net Zero, which company, which government would say “No”? Well, Ron de Santis did — and 18 other US states are working on it too.
The key weakness to the $150,000 billion dollar GFANZ monster is — as I said last week — that it’s an illusion. They are wielding other people’s money — using their clients own pension funds to indirectly punish their own clients, and the good guys […]
Good News: The best hope of unwinding the unholy alliance between Big-Money and Big-Government comes from the US States and they are starting to sink their teeth in.
BlackRock is the defacto Global Climate Police — but disguised as a monster investment fund. The way to break it is to expose that its primary interest is not in making money for its clients but as a Woke political tool.
BlackRock are able to intimidate most of the world with $10 trillion dollars in assets. They are effectively the third biggest “country” in the world by GDP. But it’s an illusion. They are wielding other people’s money — using their clients own pension funds to indirectly punish their own clients. And once those clients figure it out and pull their funds, BlackRock will become an empty shell. Couldn’t happen to a nicer company…
It’s a scam where BlackRock target legal corporations in states that voted to use fossil fuels to effectively undo what the voters wanted. A few months ago, 19 States in the USA started asking BlackRock and the US SEC some hot and hard legal questions. West Virginia announced they would boycott firms that boycott fossil fuels, and […]
By Jo Nova
The would be King-Emperors of the world don’t just want to transform energy and change the weather, they also want to rebuild the entire financial system, no doubt to put the UN at the centre of the rivers of money.
Make no mistake, the lauded “loss and damages” fantasy plan was but a shiny bauble to distract you. The bigger ambit is to get the West to pay for the whole world to become a solar and windmill paradise and — “obviously” that means they have to rebuild the entire world’s financial system. (They actually say that).
Consider the numbers: The combined loss and damages claim for 55 countries over twenty years amounts to just $525 billion or a paltry $26 billion a year. But building all the useless renewable farms will supposedly require at least USD 4-6 trillion a year in investments.
Sensible investors will notice that it is 200 times as expensive to try to control the weather with windmills as it is to pay for all the current (theoretical) damage. Sadly, nobody is talking about sensible investments.
The UN announcement comes dressed up in a headline about the paltry Christmas fantasy payments to […]
by Jo Nova Banks suddenly threaten to abandon the Glasgow GFANZ “climate action” group
It was the massive miracle-funding coalition of Glasgow but it is already starting to unravel as the banks figure out that conspiring to force “climate action” puts them at risk of antitrust suits.
A month ago I wrote that 19 US States were pointing out that it’s not OK for asset managers like BlackRock and co to join together in cartels to block investment in fossil fuels. These corporations bragged about belonging to groups like GFANZ (the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero) as if it made them into saintly environmentalists. But belonging to the group meant they are also effectively restraining trade, reducing competition and acting against the interests of their clients and against the wishes of voters.
Don’t underestimate how important this is or how ugly these monster cartels are: GFANZ has attracted some 500 members which control $130 trillion in assets. But the carbon targets they are told to aim for are set by the UN through something called the Race-To-Zero campaign. So this is a quasi World Government in cahoots with world bankers. Like a Great White Shark meets a pod […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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