Climate Policy Is a Money-Making Opportunity for the Elite
It would be more difficult to be skeptical about all the Left's causes if it weren't for so many of them profiting from them.
It would be more difficult to be skeptical about all the Left's causes if it weren't for so many of them profiting from them.
“The climate transition presents a historic investment opportunity,” says BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. “What the financiers, the big banks, the asset managers, private investors, venture capital are all discovering is: There’s a lot of money to be made in the creation of these new [green] jobs,” chimes in presidential climate envoy John Kerry. Fink concedes that the economy remains “highly dependent” on fossil fuels. He also asserts that BlackRock is “carbon neutral today in our own operations.” It’s a claim open to challenge. “If a company or individual says to me they are net-zero, I know it is complete crap,” tweeted Glen Peters, research director of the Oslo-based Center for International Climate Research.
Peters was taking to task former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, who had claimed that investments in renewable energy offset emissions from fossil-fuel investments. Carney quickly backed down, but the spat reveals the fissure in the climate movement that first became visible with Michael Moore’s 2020 movie Planet of the Humans, which pitted true believers on one side against those positioning themselves to reap profits from the climate money pouring into decarbonization.
Carney is a leading light of the climate-finance oligarchy, positioned at the nexus of politics and finance. He is a climate adviser to British prime minister Boris Johnson and serves as UN secretary-general António Guterres’s special envoy on finance and climate action. He is also vice-chair of Canadian alternative asset manager Brookfield, heading its ESG and impact-investing business. One privilege of being a climate savior: any concerns over conflicts of interest don’t apply when the interests of the planet are at stake.
Carney has written a book, Value(s): Building a Better World for All, and the BBC gave Carney the prestigious platform of the 2020 Reith Lectures. Net-zero investments are “turning an existential risk into one of the greatest commercial opportunities of our time,” Carney declared in his Reith lecture on climate. There’s little doubt who will do best out of building this better world. If you’re solving an existential risk, Carney told the World Economic Forum’s Radio Davos in January, it becomes a “tremendous opportunity” that “turns into the greed, or the opportunity part of the equation.”
In normal times, before the Climate Emergency, it would be up to financiers and investors to ask the tough, unsentimental questions, such as: What’s the return on investment? How long is the payback period? But not when it comes to climate change. In its 2018 1.5℃ Special Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declined to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the net-zero target. The target, the IPCC declared, implies “risk assessments and value judgments” – as if this nullified the need to assess whether the benefits of net-zero outweigh the costs.
At the end of his Reith lecture, Carney was asked by historian Niall Ferguson if he’d read Bjorn Lomborg’s most recent book, False Alarm. Lomborg calculates that each $1 spent on cutting greenhouse gas emissions yields only 11 cents of future climate benefits. With trillions being spent on climate change, this estimate implies that a colossal burden is being placed on the current generation – especially those who can least afford to bear it – for little climate gain. Ignorance is no defense; nonetheless, Carney tried it. No, he hadn’t read Lomborg’s book, Carney answered Ferguson. He dismissed Lomborg’s as a “classic economic approach,” though he offered no data or evidence to show why Lomborg was wrong. “I want to say it’s 15 or 20 years ago when he first came out with his ‘Don’t worry about the climate.’ How’s that working out for us?”
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Peters was taking to task former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, who had claimed that investments in renewable energy offset emissions from fossil-fuel investments. Carney quickly backed down, but the spat reveals the fissure in the climate movement that first became visible with Michael Moore’s 2020 movie Planet of the Humans, which pitted true believers on one side against those positioning themselves to reap profits from the climate money pouring into decarbonization.
Carney is a leading light of the climate-finance oligarchy, positioned at the nexus of politics and finance. He is a climate adviser to British prime minister Boris Johnson and serves as UN secretary-general António Guterres’s special envoy on finance and climate action. He is also vice-chair of Canadian alternative asset manager Brookfield, heading its ESG and impact-investing business. One privilege of being a climate savior: any concerns over conflicts of interest don’t apply when the interests of the planet are at stake.
Carney has written a book, Value(s): Building a Better World for All, and the BBC gave Carney the prestigious platform of the 2020 Reith Lectures. Net-zero investments are “turning an existential risk into one of the greatest commercial opportunities of our time,” Carney declared in his Reith lecture on climate. There’s little doubt who will do best out of building this better world. If you’re solving an existential risk, Carney told the World Economic Forum’s Radio Davos in January, it becomes a “tremendous opportunity” that “turns into the greed, or the opportunity part of the equation.”
In normal times, before the Climate Emergency, it would be up to financiers and investors to ask the tough, unsentimental questions, such as: What’s the return on investment? How long is the payback period? But not when it comes to climate change. In its 2018 1.5℃ Special Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declined to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the net-zero target. The target, the IPCC declared, implies “risk assessments and value judgments” – as if this nullified the need to assess whether the benefits of net-zero outweigh the costs.
At the end of his Reith lecture, Carney was asked by historian Niall Ferguson if he’d read Bjorn Lomborg’s most recent book, False Alarm. Lomborg calculates that each $1 spent on cutting greenhouse gas emissions yields only 11 cents of future climate benefits. With trillions being spent on climate change, this estimate implies that a colossal burden is being placed on the current generation – especially those who can least afford to bear it – for little climate gain. Ignorance is no defense; nonetheless, Carney tried it. No, he hadn’t read Lomborg’s book, Carney answered Ferguson. He dismissed Lomborg’s as a “classic economic approach,” though he offered no data or evidence to show why Lomborg was wrong. “I want to say it’s 15 or 20 years ago when he first came out with his ‘Don’t worry about the climate.’ How’s that working out for us?”
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