Market advocates have always claimed that policy advice from business should be treated with suspicion. The road to economic and political hell is paved with corporate welfare and national champions (SNC-Lavalin anyone?).
Communists and the “progressive” left were much more harsh, claiming that since big business sought only monopoly and plutocracy, the state at least required “countervailing” power, if not absolute power.
Since command of economic resources was deemed synonymous with political power, some of the greatest businessmen and philanthropists all time — such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Cornelius Vanderbilt — were reflexively dubbed “Robber Barons.”
A remarkable change has come over the view of the left in recent decades. With the collapse of socialism (in fact, if not in theory), big business was no longer an automatic enemy.
Indeed it was to be co-opted as a partner in “social responsibility” and “sustainable development.” Some of the world’s wealthiest business people eagerly sought to start knitting the rope of Global Salvationism.
The bizarro modern counterparts of the Robber Barons might be called the Climate Barons, those billionaires and capitalist foundations that seek to kill the fossil-fuelled industrial age in order to save mankind from manmade environmental catastrophe.
While America’s Koch brothers are ritually condemned as funding “denialism,” a far more substantial group is supporting NGO thuggery and misinformation, promoting lawsuits and other pressure tactics to euthanize fossil fuels.
They also seek to hide the huge economic and social costs of the allegedly essential “transition to a low-carbon economy.”
This group includes U.S. billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg and the British hedge-fund billionaires Jeremy Grantham and Chris Hohn. It includes a raft of multi-billion-dollar foundations bearing names such as Rockefeller, Hewlett, and Packard.
The Climate Barons present themselves as promoters of “Climate Philanthropy,” but insofar as their promised low-carbon transition involves forcing the adoption of expensive and unreliable energy, they are both responsible for destroying jobs (Alberta being perhaps the most prominent victim), and exacerbating poverty in poor countries. Their activities might more accurately be described as Climate Malanthropy.
Here’s the good news: Bill Gates, the world’s most prominent philanthropist, has broken ranks. Although the Microsoft co-founder still outsources his thinking on catastrophist science, he has acknowledged that intermittent renewables are the last thing to be forced on poor countries. He has also castigated the Climate Barons’ strategy of killing fossil fuels via financial pressure.
During a recent onstage Q&A at Stanford University, when interviewer Arun Majumdar, a “Google Scholar,” suggested breezily that people were “optimistic” that the costs of renewables and battery storage were coming down, Gates got visibly agitated.
“That is so disappointing,” he said, tearing into the misplaced priorities of such feeble optimism. While he supported nuclear, he said battery technology was woefully deficient and renewables needed “a miracle.” They certainly weren’t the solution for India or Africa right now.
Gates revealed that he had recently been at a New York conference of financiers backing the fashionable demand of “climate disclosure,” whereby corporations are required to offer up highly unlikely climate-risk scenarios so as to unnecessarily worry investors and increase their cost of capital. Gates claimed that the idea that finance or investor pressure could provide a solution was “madness.”
So was, he said, the demonization of electrical utilities. And in this low-carbon transition, he asked, where would steel and plastic come from? What would power the airplanes? Most dramatically, he claimed that those who suggested that the climate problem was easy to solve were a bigger problem than the climate deniers are.
It is intriguing to compare the Gates interview with another video, made around the same time, in which Majumdar also appears. It was touted as a “Giving Pledge Learning Session” designed to boost “Climate Philanthropy.” One especially intriguing aspect was that Gates and his wife founded the Giving Pledge, in the vain hope of convincing people billionaires aren’t evil. This video suggests that some just might be.
The video features hedge-fund billionaire Jeremy Grantham, who has established several climate foundations that spread alarmism and seek to silence deniers. The chair of Grantham’s main climate foundation is Lord Nicholas Stern, author of 2006’s outrageously perverted Stern Review (officially titled: The Economics of Climate Change).
Grantham also employs Bob Ward, perhaps the U.K.’s main attack dog when it comes to trying to silence media skepticism. “Everybody needs to be in on this (transition)” said Grantham. Meaning everyone needs to agree with him.
Another Climate Baron making an appearance was Julie Packard, vice-chairman of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, which has committed US$1 billion to climate over the past 10 years. And there was Larry Kramer, head of the Hewlett Foundation, which has also devoted massive amounts to the climate-alarm crusade.
Chris Hohn, another British hedge-fund billionaire, asserts in the video that “solar and wind are cheaper than coal.” He might try running that past Gates. Hohn also claimed that there was a need for a “massive step up” in climate philanthropy — but we might note that spending is pretty stepped up already.
Hohn funds a charity called the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, CIFF. CIFF oversees a portfolio of multi-year grant commitments worth more than US$800 million. Of that total, almost US$300 million is dedicated to climate change, more than 10 times the amount committed to “child protection.”
CIFF is also a big supporter of “carbon disclosure.” It’s hard to see what that has to do with children who are suffering poverty, malnutrition or abuse right now.
CIFF’s website maintains that “A low-carbon world will help secure a healthy and prosperous future for children.” Again, Bill Gates — or indeed any objective observer — would mostly disagree.
Now that Bill has seen the light on the “transition,” maybe there’s hope he’ll turn his analytical mind to just how “settled” climate science really is.
h/t GWPF
Read more at Financial Post
On big burden of American industry is complying with all of the government requirements. The last thing our industry needs is an additional item in the form of climate disclosures. Of course the purpose of advocating climate disclosures is purely political. The assumption is that they would show a negative impact from anthropological climate change. If these disclosures were accurately filled out they would show the negative impact is from the climate change movement. Paying the renewable energy power costs would be huge. The company I work for is struggling. Power at an excessive cost would drive it out of business. Renewable power also means unreliable power. In some industries there are tests and processes that have to be started over after a power outage.
The steel company I worked for stopped producing during the day, when Ontario Hydro charged top dollar. We made steel at night.
Many enviroementalists Groups get donations from many leading buisnsses like BP donating to The Nature Conservancy and Clorox donated to the Sierra Club and the long defunked Enron was a big contributer to many Eco-Wacko groups Greenpeace still fuels its ships and zodiacs with Fossil Fuels and Robert Kennedy Jr wants Global Warming contributers listed as War Crinimals
The Stanford interview took place November 30th, long before AO-C’s GND joke. We know that the GND is the culmination of years of propaganda. AGW /Climate Change junk science could lose fans if more people like Bill Gates did the right thing. Tell it like it is. Green energy will not satisfy society’s needs.
Gates has put his money where his mouth is but more importantly he is not a self serving coward . Reliable , affordable energy is one of the best ways to ensure people pull themselves out of poverty .
The PC eco- con artists have 2 main goals .
1. Enrich themselves by weaponizing climate fear to fleece tax payers through favored government policy .10’s of thousands of fuel poverty deaths are a cost of doing business . Corporate welfare supporting largely nonviable businesses .
2.Virtue signalers honestly believe population culling is essential to save the planet and one world socialist government control is the answer .
Their are a host of other band wagon jumpers , book writers , left wing media , universities ,and climate con-men pushing the narrative .
Micro soft wasn’t a con game it changed the world . How people like Bill Gates could sit back and watch this hijack of values for so long is another story .
Time to call bullshit on this over blown fraud so some real problems can be
focused on .
Oh, my!!! Bill Gates must be taking money from Big Oil !
What fantastic news in this misanthropic mess that the uninformed call ‘climate change’, but is, in reality, a modern day scourge of humanity. Thank you Bill Gates for turning your energies and reason in the face of ‘the herd’ to rationally approach this foolishness that history will regard as the biggest blunder of the modern era. Since teachers are graduating climate paranoics and socialist dreamers, perhaps a textbook and better teaching materials need to be created to explain natural climate change to them. They’re far more powerful than an insignificant 130ppm increase in CO2.