A powerful echo chamber of academics, wealth managers, bankers, regulators, celebrities, politicians, and CEOs who talk up climate threats has emerged. They create feedback loops in which media attention justifies bank regulation, which supports green investing, which supports research grants, and so on until the world is thoroughly convinced that a climate catastrophe is real.
It’s not real, but the narrative thrives.
Consumers will bear the costs of the scam
One of the most potentially damaging developments is the creation of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), an elite group using climate alarm as a Trojan horse to pursue global financial control.
The head of GFANZ is Mark Carney, previously the head of three central banks — Canada, the UK, and the Bank for International Settlements — and de facto leader of the global financial elite. His co-chair is Michael Bloomberg, multibillionaire of the eponymous information network and prominent climate alarmist.
The GFANZ principals list includes the usual suspects: Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America; Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock; Jane Fraser, CEO of Citi; Nili Gilbert, board member of the David Rockefeller Fund; and their ilk.
The complete membership controls more than US$130 trillion in assets. GFANZ’s convening power was the United Nations.
GFANZ plans to pressure central banks and bank regulators to issue rules that will steer asset allocations and bank lending away from oil and natural gas providers. Also, ancillary businesses such as pipeline and crude oil shipping toward unreliable energy sources such as wind turbines, solar modules, and batteries built from poisonous chemicals.
The real purpose of these efforts is centralised control of global finance by an elite group.
Climate alarm is a convenient platform.
What better way to impose global control than to rely on a global catastrophe, even an invented one?
GFANZ is just the beginning of a series of steps to employ unified financial control to squash dissenting voices and push unpopular agendas such as gun control, population control, world money, and world taxation.
These efforts will fail, as they always do, but not without damage in the meantime. Predictable results include higher energy prices, energy shortages, disruptions in transportation logistics, and tax burdens imposed on reliable sources of oil and natural gas.
Consumers will bear the costs.
In light of unsettled real science, what conclusions can be drawn? The following appear:
- The climate is changing. It always has and always will. There’s plenty of room to disagree with the climate alarmists without falling into the trap of being a ‘climate-change denier’. Yes, climate changes, yet it’s a slow process and quite complex. What’s needed is observation and experimentation, not hysteria.
- Carbon emissions are increasing. These emissions consist mainly, but not exclusively, of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). The quantity is small relative to the composition of the atmosphere: nitrogen (N) and oxygen (O) together make up 99% of the atmosphere; argon (Ar) makes up over half the remaining 1%, but the reflective heat-trapping qualities of carbon dioxide and methane are significant. So, humans are contributing to carbon emissions, but they are not the sole source, and the impact on total warming is unclear.
- Sea levels are rising. This is true, but they have been rising for 100 years at about the same pace, and there’s no evidence of the impact of global warming on sea levels. The current pace is about seven inches per century. That’s far from an existential threat, and, no, cities will not be underwater.
- Solar modules and wind turbines can contribute renewable energy to the grid to reduce carbon emissions. Yet they are not a substitute for oil and gas. They are intermittent sources and, therefore, unreliable. Battery storage is too expensive and causes its own increase in the use of poisonous chemicals. Even as solar and wind capacity increases, global demand for energy will increase faster. EVs have limited range and charge with electricity provided by oil, gas, and coal and therefore do not reduce overall emissions.
Far from the hysterical claims of climate alarmists, the prospect of climate change is straightforward.
Climate change will continue despite efforts to reduce emissions. Wind and solar power will grow, yet they will not replace oil and gas. The more extreme remedies of the climate alarmists, such as global carbon taxes, caps on carbon emissions, and a ban on oil and gas exploration and development, will fail. This is because they lack popular support and are unnecessary, according to the best available science.
Shutting down the Keystone XL Pipeline project is a high-profile political theatre, but it won’t change anything. Alberta tar sands oil will still arrive in the US. It’s just that it will come by rail instead of pipeline. (By the way, Warren Buffett owns the railroad that will carry most of this oil.)
Rail transportation is dirtier than pipeline transportation. The alarmists don’t care — they just want the show of shutting down a pipeline. So, there will be costs imposed and inefficiencies locked in because of political posturing.
In the end, CO2 emissions will continue to rise but at a slower rate. Sea levels will rise for reasons unrelated to emissions, but at such a slow rate as not to be noticeable. Average global temperatures may rise slightly for reasons that science does not fully understand, although we could just as easily flip to a cooling trend.
Energy demands will increase as developed economies continue to grow in order to support aging populations. Developing economy energy demands will grow even faster to support a youth cohort looking for at least a middle-income lifestyle.
Oil and gas are not going away. They are too important, have too many embedded structural advantages, and have huge economies of scale.
Once politicians and the media become more aware of the real science of climate change and distance themselves from climate alarmists, the oil and gas industries will regain their footing. While climate alarm may fade, the damage to the economy will not.
Regards,
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Jim Rickards,
Strategist, The Daily Reckoning Australia
