Net Zero Samizdat

16 February 2024

1) JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock drop out of massive UN climate alliance in stunning move
Fox Business, 15 February 2024
 


JPMorgan Chase and institutional investors BlackRock and State Street Global Advisors (SSGA) on Thursday announced that they are quitting or, in the case of BlackRock, substantially scaling back involvement in a massive United Nations climate alliance formed to combat global warming through corporate sustainability agreements.
 
In a statement, the New York-based JPMorgan Chase explained that it would exit the so-called Climate Action 100+ investor group because of the expansion of its in-house sustainability team and the establishment of its climate risk framework in recent years. BlackRock and State Street, which both manage trillions of dollars in assets, said the alliance's climate initiatives had gone too far, expressing concern about potential legal issues as well.
 
The stunning announcements come as the largest financial institutions in the U.S. and worldwide face an onslaught of pressure from consumer advocates and Republican states over their environmental, social and governance (ESG) priorities.
 
"The firm has built a team of 40 dedicated sustainable investing professionals, including investment stewardship specialists who also leverage one of the largest buy side research teams in the industry," the bank said in a statement shared with FOX Business. "Given these strengths and the evolution of its own stewardship capabilities, JPMAM (JP Morgan Asset Management) has determined that it will no longer participate in Climate Action 100+ engagements."
 
BlackRock, meanwhile, withdrew its U.S. business from Climate Action 100+, shifting involvement in the alliance to BlackRock's smaller international entity where a majority of clients are pursuing decarbonization goals, the Financial Times first reported Thursday. A spokesperson for BlackRock confirmed to FOX Business that the move had been made in recent weeks. 
 
And State Street said its exit from the alliance was made because Climate Action 100+'s "phase 2" commitments conflicted with the firm's internal investing policies. 
 
Full story
 
 
2) Meta, Amazon and Google shed 3,000 do-goody ESG staff as backlash over 'woke capitalism' intensifies
Daily Mail, 14 February 2024 
 


Meta, Amazon, Google, and other US firms are shedding staff with environmental, social and governance roles (ESG), research shows, in the latest sign of the backlash against what critics deride as 'woke capitalism.'
 
More people left ESG jobs than started them for much of 2023, marking the reversal of a once-mushrooming sector, according to Live Data Technologies, which tracks the employment market.
 
US firms saw 3,071 ESG departures in December 2023, compared with 2,897 arrivals — a net loss of 174 roles, says the review of more than 360,000 US-based ESG professionals that was published in The Wall Street Journal.
 
Meta Platforms, Amazon, and Google had the largest ESG job outflows among US firms last year, the data show. The pattern was visible across other technology, financial-services and consulting firms.
  
Those firms have not commented on the exodus. 
 
'2023 saw a real cooling in chatter around ESG and in some quarters, quite a pronounced attack on what ESG was about,' Joe Dubbin, managing director at Cripps Leadership Advisors, a recruitment firm, told the Journal.
 
'It has certainly filtered through into the hiring requirements that we've been tasked to go do.'
 
Full story
 
 
 
3) An ESG Asset Manager Exodus
The Wall Street Journal, 16 February 2024
 
Has the tide turned on environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing? It appears so. JPMorgan Asset Management, BlackRock and State Street Global Advisors on Thursday retreated from the Climate Action 100+ investor compact because they don’t want the political and legal liability.
 
Climate Action 100+ describes itself as the “largest ever global investor engagement initiative on climate change.” Its 700 or so institutional investor members manage more than $68 trillion in assets (before Thursday’s exits). Their goal is to force companies to zero out CO2 emissions by 2050.
 
Members are supposed to “engage” 170 “focus companies” such as Boing, Home Depot and American Airlines—that is, threaten to vote against non-compliant corporate directors and back shareholder resolutions that pressure management. Their campaign has had great success with 75% of targeted companies committing to “net zero.”
 
But the climate left is never content. Last June the alliance impelled its members to publish information on their “engagements” and to explain how and why they voted on shareholder resolutions flagged by the outfit. The point was to embarrass asset managers that climate scolds accuse of being insufficiently committed to the cause.
 
Asset managers have been walking a fine legal line. GOP Attorneys General in 2022 warned that they might be violating their fiduciary obligations and antitrust laws. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan in December subpoenaed BlackRock and State Street Global Advisors for documents and communications related to their involvement in “collusive” agreements.
 
The climate alliance’s new rules would compound the legal and political jeopardy. In its withdrawal announcement, State Street said its rules “are not consistent with our independent approach to proxy voting and portfolio company engagement.” BlackRock said the rules “would raise legal considerations.”
 
All true. But perhaps their customers have also begun to realize that ESG and net-zero mandates are political crusades that accomplish little except politicizing investment. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink noted correctly last year that ESG has been “entirely weaponised.” But asset managers should have known that bowing to the left would invite pushback from the right.
 
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander lambasted the trio on Thursday for “caving to climate deniers.” “We are in the process of reviewing how well our managers are aligned in that approach and will consider our options for the management of our public market investments,” he warned.
 
What does it say when the climate left believes it can achieve its goals only by intimidation and coercion?
 
 
 
4) European Central Bank tells staff: If you’re not green, you’re not wanted
Politico, 14 February 2024
 


FRANKFURT ― A top European Central Bank official stunned employees by saying people who don’t buy into the institution’s green objectives aren’t welcome to work there.
 
Frank Elderson, one of six members of the ECB’s executive board, told an internal meeting: “I don’t want these people anymore.”
 
His comments, verified by POLITICO, have sparked outrage among ECB staff, who described them as “authoritarian” and said they showed a free and open discussion about climate change ― and the role the bank should play in tackling it ― was no longer possible at the Frankfurt-based organization. 
 
At the meeting earlier this month, Elderson asked employees ― some in person, some online ― “Why would we want to hire people who we have to reprogram?  Because they came from the best universities, but they still don’t know how to spell the word ‘climate.’
 
Anyone already working at the ECB should be retrained, Elderson added. He insisted he was "not threatening anyone," and did not expand on what he meant by being able to "spell" climate.
 
The Dutchman’s remarks have broader significance because the ECB is embroiled in a debate ― internally and among Europe’s politicians ― over how much its policies should steer toward making the economy "greener," or whether it should just stick to its main goal of keeping eurozone prices stable.
 
Diversity and inclusion
 
The comments drew an angry reaction from employees who took to a private chatroom for bank staff. Their responses were also seen by POLITICO.
 
Elderson, who is the bank’s climate czar and vice-chair of its supervisory arm, “killed the ideal of diversity and inclusion in one sentence,” said one member of staff. “I thought these underpinned the culture of this institution.” They described the Dutchman’s comments as “authoritarian.” 
 
Others warned his comments risked fostering “groupthink,” which would impair the ECB’s decision-making.
 
Full story
 
 
5) Paul Taylor: Farmers are in revolt and Europe’s climate policies are crumbling. Welcome to the age of ‘greenlash’
The Guardian, 16 February 2024
 


Brussels is ditching green measures as EU leaders panic over rural protests, upcoming elections and the threat of the far right
 
Ursula von der Leyen surrendered to angry farmers last week faster than you could shake a pitchfork or dump a tractor-load of manure outside the European parliament. The European Commission president, expected to announce her candidacy for a second term heading the EU executive next week, told lawmakers that the commission was withdrawing a bill to halve the use of chemical pesticides by 2030 and would hold more consultations instead.
 
The proposed measure was a key plank in the commission’s European Green Deal and its Farm to Fork strategy, intended to make the EU carbon-neutral by 2050, make agriculture more environmentally friendly and preserve biodiversity.
 
Von der Leyen’s sudden U-turn on one of her signature policies was not just an attempt to defuse a spreading continent-wide rural revolt over rising fuel costs, burdensome environmental regulations, retailers’ price squeezes and cheap imports. It was also a sign of growing panic among the EU’s mainstream parties over the seemingly inexorable rise of far-right nationalists ahead of the June elections.
 
Von der Leyen, a former German defence minister, is vying to lead the centre-right European People’s party’s campaign for the elections even though she is not herself seeking a European parliament seat. Her coronation at a party congress on 6-7 March as the EPP’s Spitzenkandidaten (lead candidate) to run the commission from 2024 to 2029 is a formality, since there is no other contender. But she has had to water down her green policies to placate a party so spooked by the “greenlash” against net zero legislation that it is rushing to reposition itself as the voice of gradual adaptation at a pace that citizens can accept and afford.
 
EU leaders tried to take another contentious issue off the table by agreeing in December on a long-stalled migration pact that includes stricter external border controls, faster procedures for processing asylum seekers and expelling those whose applications are rejected, and sharing the burden of the refugee crisis among EU countries. But populists such as the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, continue to rail against being forced to choose between admitting unwanted migrants and paying for other countries to take them in under the new system.
 
I have seen unpublished opinion polling conducted for the European parliament in January that showed Eurosceptic, sovereigntist or populist parties have taken the lead in eight of the 27 EU members, and are in second place in four more. Moreover, the countries where the far right polling most strongly include those with the most seats in the legislature – Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Romania and the Netherlands.
 
This is getting scary, and events such as the farmers’ furore are playing into the hands of populists such as France’s Marine Le Pen, Germany’s Alice Weidel and Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, who thrive on grassroots grumbling against the metropolitan elites.
 
“The (pesticides) proposal has become a symbol of polarisation,” von der Leyen admitted to parliament in Strasbourg. “To move forward, more dialogue and a different approach is needed.” She may have been slamming the stable gate after the horse has bolted.
 
Farmers have traditionally voted for mainstream conservative and Christian Democratic parties, while the socialists and social democrats had their bastions in industrial urban areas. Remember former president Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist farmers’ friend, jovially slapping the hindquarters of cows in his southwestern Corrèze constituency or at the annual Paris agricultural fair. Nowadays, those voters are more likely to vote for Le Pen’s National Rally, recent polls suggest.
 
In France, the centre-right Republicans, Chirac’s heirs, are polling at barely 8%, while the National Rally stands above 30% in latest surveys, and anti-Islam ideologue Éric Zemmour’s even further right Reconquest! bags another 6-8%. Le Pen’s list is led by the charismatic 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, already an MEP and party president, while Zemmour’s is topped by Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal, 34, a favourite of US far-right political strategist Steve Bannon.
 
In the Netherlands, farmer discontent over curbs on nitrogen emissions led to the sudden rise of the Farmer-Citizen Movement, a party that came from nowhere to win the most votes in regional elections last March. Many of those protest voters have since switched to Wilders’ Freedom party, which topped the poll in a general election in November and has gained more ground since then.
 
Appeasing rural revolt may stop farmers blockading motorways or burning bales of hay outside government offices, but it is unlikely to herd them back towards the mainstream centre-right, given the depth of their discontent.
 
 
  
6) With help from Democrats, House votes to overturn Biden’s freeze on new LNG exports
The Washington Times, 15 February 2024
 


The House passed legislation Thursday to overturn President Biden’s moratorium on new liquefied natural gas exports, marking the latest instance of centrist Democrats joining Republicans to buck the president’s green energy agenda.
 
The bill, led by Rep. August Pfluger, Texas Republican, passed on a 224-200 vote, with nine Democrats joining the Republicans. It would lift the moratorium on new exports but faces an all-but-certain blockade in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
 
Last month, the Department of Energy stopped granting new applications for LNG exports pending a review to determine whether such projects are in the public’s best interest and how the agency can better factor climate change mitigation efforts into its approvals.
 
Proponents of the House measure said the administration’s freeze would become a de facto ban on new exports of an American energy source that allies need. The U.S. quickly ascended to become the world’s largest LNG exporter after European nations stopped importing Russian gas in response to the invasion of Ukraine.
 
“This ban will harm the American economy, jeopardize good paying jobs, weaken our energy security, and it threatens the security of our friends and allies,” said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Washington Republican. “President Biden’s ban sends a signal to our allies that we’re no longer a dependable energy partner.”
 
Democrats who support Mr. Biden’s policy say the halt on new export permits helps prevent American LNG from going to China and insulates domestic natural gas prices from increasing because of higher prices from exporters elsewhere.
 
Full story
 
 
7) Trade Union urges Scottish Labour Party to oppose heat pumps and pursue hydrogen
The Herald, 15 February 2024
 


Labour delegates attending its [Scottish] party conference this week will be urged to support the Scottish Government turning its back on Patrick Harvie’s heat pumps strategy and instead press ahead with using hydrogen to heat homes.
 
Bosses at the GMB union, who have been publicly hostile to the Scottish Government’s strategy to clean up how buildings are heated, are calling on Scottish Labour to oppose heat pumps and other renewable heating systems being pursued by [Scottish minister] Mr Harvie, and instead turn attention to hydrogen – believing it will help safeguard jobs.
 
But Mr Harvie has told The Herald that hydrogen “is not expected to play a central role in heating buildings”.
 
An independent study commissioned and published by WWF Scotland last year concluded that using hydrogen for heating was a “distraction” and called for the focus to be put on other methods, primarily heat pumps. […]
 
Bosses from the GMB union, which represents energy workers in Scotland, will table a motion at Scottish Labour conference on Friday, calling for more focus to be put on hydrogen for heating.
 
The motion to be tabled at Scottish Labour’s conference in Glasgow this weekend, seen by The Herald, will back “deep concern” over the Scottish Government’s heat in buildings plans, claiming the strategy “proposes banning gas boilers and forcing onto households untested systems such as heat pumps which come with higher installation and running costs”.
 
It adds that “the existing, vast and skilled gas workforce and 280,000km gas network” could be “be reskilled and repurposed to provide low and no-carbon hydrogen to homes”.
 
Mr Harvie, the Scottish Government’s Zero Carbon Buildings Minister, has launched a consultation that will phase out fossil fuel gas boilers by 2045, when Scotland has pledged to become net zero.
 
Full story
 
 
 
8) Ross Clark: Decarbonisation is Labour’s next green policy disaster
The Spectator, 17 February 2024
 


Keir Starmer isn’t even in Downing Street yet already his government-in-waiting is in danger of being defined by its £28 billion green spending pledge, just as Tony Blair’s administration was defined by ‘45 minutes’ – the claimed deployment time of Saddam Hussein’s fabled weapons of mass destruction.
 
First, Starmer promised to spend that sum on green initiatives in every year of the next parliament. Then it was revised down to spending £28 billion in the last year of the next parliament. Last week he dropped the pledge and said instead that £4.7 billion a year would be spent on green investment.
 
But in the melee a more rash policy has been overlooked: Labour’s pledge to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030 – which brings the present government’s target forward by five years. This is one of the five great ‘missions’ laid out in the party’s pre-manifesto pitch, along with the creation of a state-owned company, Great British Energy, to achieve it. Not only will it save carbon emissions, Labour claims (without any evidence or published workings) but it will also save us an enormous amount of money, taking ‘up to £1,400 off the annual household bill and £53 billion off energy bills for businesses’ within six years. This is quite a boast, considering the average household pays £1,928 a year in energy bills.
 
A large part of Labour’s decarbonisation plans are laid out in a document called ‘Make Britain a Clean Energy Superpower’. Labour says it wants to quadruple offshore wind and double onshore wind by 2030, as well as to triple solar capacity. But this is likely to be impossible, not least because the National Grid won’t be able to get hold of enough subsea cables to plug in the required number of extra offshore wind turbines. There are four suppliers of such cables in the world – all of them have full order books until 2030.
 
Would Labour’s plan be doable even if it could get the required kit – and would it really save households money? Labour’s case is based on the idea that wind and solar energy are the cheapest forms of energy around. It repeats an often-quoted conceit that, at one point in 2022, ‘renewable energy was nine times cheaper than gas’ and asserts that it remains much cheaper.
 
But the ‘nine times’ claim was never true. It was made by CarbonBrief, a green energy advocacy website. They arrived at the figure by taking the prices paid for gas power at the very peak of the market in the summer of 2022 – £446 per megawatt-hour – as European countries rushed to fill their gas storage facilities ready for winter, following the loss of Russian gas after the invasion of Ukraine. It then compared them with the long-term, guaranteed ‘strike prices’ offered to operators of wind and solar farms over a 15-year period. In an auction in 2022, wind and solar farms agreed to a strike price of £48 per megawatt–hour.
 
It was like comparing the cost of a bus journey using a season ticket to that of hailing an Uber in rush hour. If you take the average price of gas power over the past 15 years, it is considerably less than wind or solar power.
 
Since 2022, the economics have changed sharply again: the price of gas has come down, but the price of renewable energy has jumped. Last July, the Swedish energy company Vattenfall pulled out of a North Sea wind farm project, complaining that the strike price it had agreed to the previous year was no longer enough. When the government held another auction for wind and solar power two months later, setting a maximum strike price of £44 per megawatt-hour for offshore wind, it didn’t receive a single bid.
 
The price of wind energy was on a downward trend while commodity prices were falling and interest rates were near zero (most of the costs come upfront, so these projects are especially reliant on cheap credit). That trend has now been firmly reversed. No one knows what wind will cost in 2030. It’s impossible to predict if commodity prices or interest rates will return to levels that make it the cheapest form of energy. Any claim to save consumers money is therefore spurious.
 
Full post
 
 
9) Andrew Montford: Two windfarms share £80 million to switch off
Net Zero Watch, 15 February 2024
 
The cost to consumers of so-called windfarm constraint payments is rising quickly.
 
Regular readers will know that I have long been concerned over the extraordinary level of payments to windfarms to switch off. These so-called ‘constraint payments’ are deemed necessary when the wires in the transmission grid have inadequate capacity to get a generator’s power to market. When that happens, the windfarm (and it is always a windfarm) is paid to switch off, and a gas-fired power station is paid to switch on so that the end user of the electricity is not left short.
 
This is particularly a problem for windfarms in Scottish waters, because there is relatively little transmission capacity running across the border to England, where most of the power users are found. In 2022, I noted that the offshore windfarm called Moray East had spent 25% of the previous year switched off. The suspicion is that there may be perverse incentives for developers to build windfarms in Scotland precisely so they receive constraint payments.
 
With a large new offshore windfarm called Seagreen coming on stream in 2023, I was interested to see how things had developed. The data, taken from the Renewable Energy Foundation, is revealing.
 
Figure 1 shows that the total payments to windfarms has risen to £303 million, off a constrained volume of 4.3 terawatt hours. That’s roughly four days’ electricity demand thrown away entirely.
 

Figure 1: Windfarm constraint payments
 
And if we break down the 2023 bill, we can see that once again it is the canny Scots who are the big beneficiaries (Figure 2), with Moray East getting an extraordinary £43 million, and Seagreen (as expected) not far behind at £39 million.
 

Figure 2: Windfarm constraint payments 2023
 
Moray East’s constrained volume is 590 GWh, which will represent something like 20% of its output. Seagreen’s is 759 GWh, which will be somewhat higher.
 
Interestingly, payments to Moray East’s neighbour, Beatrice, have fallen away sharply, from £33 million in 2022 to just £9 million in 2023. I don’t know why this is.
 
In summary then, the rip-off continues, and indeed is getting worse.
 
 
 
 

10) And finally: European Union expected to order brands to make cheap electric cars to take on China amid 'price war' fears
GB News, 14 February 2024
 


Car brands are expected to be told to get better at making cheap EVs and produce more batteries
 
The European Union is expected to instruct major car brands to make cheap electric vehicles to fight back against the expected market dominance from China.
 
Experts have warned the automotive industry that China poses the biggest threat to the established Western market thanks to cheap production costs and access to key components needed to make electric vehicles.
 
Chinese brands like BYD and NIO are already making major headway in disrupting the EV market across Europe and North America.
 
They have captured the attention of consumers and industry leaders with entry-level electric car models that have significantly cheaper ticket prices than their competitors.

Thierry Breton, Internal Market Commissioner at the European Union, is expected to tell car industry representatives that Europe needs to make major strides to protect its own interests.
 
He will tell key players across the sector that Europe is “at a pivotal moment … in our green ambitions”, according to Politico Playbook.
 
The Frenchman said more needed to be done to ensure the EU is in a position to offer electric vehicles as a viable option to all drivers across the continent.
 
Breton is expected to issue a warning to manufacturers about massive job losses, saying: “We will leave the market to Chinese and other manufacturers.
 
“We will become net importers of vehicles and will lose jobs, here in Europe.”
 
Full story