"Green grifting opportunities, not ideology or science, are driving what may well be the world’s all-time greatest scam on energy consumers and taxpayers.
It’s easy to believe the global warming cause adopted by so many politicians and other members of the ruling class is about ideology or, even more naively, about science.
The science excuse, for anyone serious about the matter has been effectively demolished by the likes of Steve Koonin, Greg Wrightstone and Bjorn Lomborg.
Ideology is much more difficult to dismiss.
Anyone who has followed the issue finds the fields of discontent from which rise the cries of “climate change is going to kill us” are filled with true believers and absolutists treating it as their religion.
It’s about neither of these, though.
It’s about the money—trillions of dollars—to be made from green grifting.
What is green grifting?
It is a particular form of corporatism; the merger of big business with big government to create big opportunities to profit at the expense of energy consumers and taxpayers on a gigantic global scale.
It is the very opposite of capitalism and is reflected in the “woke” actions of companies less interested in earning money the old-fashioning way than in scamming the government in a multitude of ways.
It is what author Stephen Soukop so articulately explains in his new wonderful book “The Dictatorship of Woke Capital.”
Green grifting is why, Soukop indirectly explains, so many big companies are signing on as supposed climate change warriors.
It’s about the money.
He goes into the recent history of the left to make a case that ideology is, perhaps the greater part of it.
Nonetheless, the evidence he dishes out, particularly with respect to Larry Fink, the billion chairman and CEO of BlackRock, proves it’s all about the money, with head fakes toward the ideology.
BlackRock is an investment firm so large it has more than $8.6 trillion in assets under management, giving the firm enormous power over the entire globalist financial enterprise,
making Fink the world’s kitchen cabinet Secretary of the Treasury on behalf of elites everywhere.
Undoubtedly, he’s enjoying the power, the thrill of being the wise man among many, the man who uses his influence to set morals for the rest of us
by demanding “environmental, social and corporate governance” (ESG) policies from those with whom he does business.
But, he couldn’t realize his dreams of replacing God without the money to buy respect and it is ever more money and ever more power that is the fruit of his engineered wokeness.
Soukop explains, in great detail how it works.
Fink and BlackRock are, effectively, the Federal Reserve’s Lord Protector.
They make it possible for the Fed to cover the rapidly expanding debt of the government.
Fink is the “go to guy” for crisis money management and has, via this power,
created the conditions for green grifting by imposing ESG as a fundamental prerequisite to obtain financial capital in the markets he controls, which is virtually all markets.
Along the way, he conned the Fed, for the first time ever, into buying corporate bonds, for example.
The excuse was the pandemic and “restoring liquidity,” of course, but the tell was in the fact BlackRock was selected by the Fed to manage the program,
giving the company the ability to demand ESG programs requiring investment in green energy and create a whole new source of green eggs and scam—the Fed itself.
The program, while temporary, sets a precedent for future Fed buying of corporate bonds to finance corporatist green rent programs under the guise of dealing with a climate emergency.
BlackRock has created a playing field with the future potential to suck in trillions from energy consumers and taxpayers.
It could hardly be more corrupt or disgusting; global corporatist elites stealing from the common man under the guise of capitalism, which, in fact, is it nothing like.
If it were, these investments would be good not only for BlackRock whose profits come from handling the money, but also those whose money it is, but they are not.
Check out this data from BlackRock regarding the performance of its ESG corporate bond funds and you’ll find data on three such funds.
The best of three returned $5.70 on an investment of $1,000 on September 1, 2020 by the end of February, 2021.
That’s 0.57% or about 1.4% annualized.
The other two ESG funds lost $4.40 and $16.20, respectively.
If you were invested in the last, you would have lost a 1.6% of your investment in five months (about 3.9% annualized) but BlackRock would have made money just the same as if earned you money.
Worse, BlackRock, while it was making money losing it for you was making additional money investing big-time in China where ESG is considered the rope they successfully sold to a United States they hope to hang from it.
And, hang we will if we keep buying into ESG.
New York City, run by a Marxist mayor and a Marxist comptroller named Scott Stringer has demanded the city’s pension funds be invested politically correctly in climate friendly companies:
New York City comptroller Scott Stringer is at again…
“Creating a national movement on the green economy.
That’s what Sunrise has been all about,” Stringer earlier declared at a virtual People’s Assembly on BlackRock in May.
It’s one thing to have Sunrise Movement activists agitating for a far left Green New Deal that Congress is highly unlikely to pass.
It’s quite another to have a climate activist running the $150bn of the city’s pension funds—the nation’s fourth largest…
Putting a longtime climate activist in charge of running city pension money has turned out to be financially disastrous.
According to an American Council for Capital Formation report by Tim Doyle, since Stringer first joined the NYCERS board of trustees in 2006, its funds have consistently underperformed its own benchmark.
At the same time, annual fees more than doubled, from $61.5m in 2006 to $154.7m in 2017.
Before becoming comptroller, Stringer had led a kill-the-drill campaign to ban fracking in upstate New York.
Becoming city comptroller the same day as Bill de Blasio took over as mayor, Stringer promised to turn the job, defined in law as custodian of the NYCERS pension funds,
into a “think tank for innovation and ideas”—read: making NYCERS a vehicle for left-wing causes.
Stringer sprang into action…
Twelve percent of the total NYC pension funds’ assets were invested in a Developed Environmental Activist asset class…
When, in January 2018, de Blasio announced that the city pension funds would be divesting $5bn worth of equity in fossil fuel companies, Stringer justified the move by claiming that retirees’ financial future “is linked to the sustainability of the planet.”
In reality, retirees’ financial security depends on Stringer’s performance as a fund manager, not his record as a climate activist…
While having activists running city and state pension funds is bad news for retirees, BlackRock, the world’s largest fund manager, stands to gain.
Its traditional low-cost index investing business has become cutthroat and does not appear to be generating fees for anyone, including BlackRock, says corporate governance expert Bernard Sharfman.
The solution to BlackRock’s profitability problem?
Persuade state and city pension bosses to switch into fashionable “sustainable” investment funds, which, Sharfman explains, command “higher fees to cover expenses such as identifying stocks to exclude and the purchase of virtue ratings to tell them which companies are politically correct.”
Indeed, we’re told “the 12 worst-performing private equity funds in the New York City Retirement System in 2016 focused on renewable and clean energy assets.”
But, BlackRock wants more of the same.
So, there you have it.
Green eggs and scam is all about the money.
Yes, ideology plays a role, but only as a precursor and an excuse to manipulate government and markets to enrich our global elites; enrich them by trillions from our pockets.
Want to learn more?
Read Soukop’s outstanding book ... "
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Sunday, August 1, 2021
"Green Grifting, Not Ideology, Drives Global Warming Cause"
Note: My favorite energy article this week. Ye Editor
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