ESG comes undone — BlackRock, JP Morgan abandon “Climate Action 100+”

Naturally the Big Bankers dress up in trees and rivers… they wouldn’t wear the Dracula Cape when people are looking, would they?

By Jo Nova

The biggest climate bullies on the planet just got a bit smaller. There are two monster climate banker clubs in the world, and yesterday, one of them, the “Climate Action 100+” lost three of the six largest asset management funds in the world, namely JP Morgan Chase, State Street and BlackRock.

State Street manages about $3.6 trillion in funds, JP Morgan Chase about $3 or $4 trillion, and BlackRock $10 trillion, so that’s something like $17,000 billion dollars that just left the ranch. The fact that this kind of money was all grouped together in a cabal of any sort is bad enough, but ponder that now, after the biggest fish have left the tank, there’s still $50 trillion left in assets on the inside.

It appears the Climate Action 100+ group had grown too big for its boots — the new Climate Action 100+ “phase 2” strategy expected asset managers to actively hound companies to cut their emissions.

An ESG Asset Manager Exodus

The Wall Street Journal

February 17th, 2024 | Tags: , , , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Foreign investment bankers *Really* want Australia to meet Net Zero Targets

By Jo Nova

Shh! The Monster Banker Funds are secretly saving the World

By sheer coincidence the same day the Australian Treasurer said we’d have to pump up the subsidies on climate targets, a group of largely foreign bankers called for the Australian government to “hurry up with emissions reduction plans “.

The foreign investment bankers market themselves as “Australian and New Zealand investors” but boast they have $30 trillion in assets, which is a bit of a red flag when the GDP of both nations together is $2 trillion USD. It turns out the blandly named Investor Group on Climate Change (IGCC) is only 10% Australasian:

IGCC represents investors with total funds under management of more than $3 trillion in Australia and New Zealand and $30 trillion around the world. Investors welcome the development of internationally aligned climate risk disclosure requirements in Australia. —IGCC Submission to the Australian Treasury Feb 2023

But being 90% foreign doesn’t stop them putting in submissions to Parliament or pretending to be locals. Even The Australian thinks they are Australian:

An Australian investor group representing members with more than $30 trillion in assets says plans being developed by the […]

Giant Australian retirement funds are being corporate Climate Bullies with your money

By Jo Nova

Unguarded Big-Money works like acid against democracy

Just like everywhere in the West, the money Australian’s earn may be quietly used against them to push policies they don’t want. The Australian Retirement Trust (ART) and HESTA are using their voting rights on corporate boards to push for climate action and gender diversity. They aren’t polling their members to find out if this is what they want. They are just following The BlackRock and GFANZ banker cartel modus operandi. It is coercion, done with the illusion of “good intentions”, but in reality, aggressively self-serving behaviour. The management of HESTA and ART couldn’t care less what the owners of the money want.

ART is a $260 billion fund (Australia’s second largest) with 2.2 million members. HESTA is a $76 billion fund with nearly 1 million members who are mostly working in health and community service. Just as with the US Funds, there surely is a question of fiduciary duty. Are these funds maximizing the return for investors or are they using their money to achieve political ends that result in lower income for retirees? Environmental investors lost 22% last year when energy investors made 54%.

So for directors […]

Global Climate Police Thwarted: US Republican States win against Net Zero Insurance Cartel

Octopus in the city image by Эльвина Якубова

By Jo Nova

23 US state Attorneys General blocked the insurance wing of the global climate police

After the States fired the first “Antitrust” volley across the bows, the largest insurance giants in the world ran for the exits. Within weeks, what was a 30 member alliance became a shell of a dozen minor insurance companies. The NZIA has effectively admitted defeat — announcing that members won’t need to set or report on their carbon targets. Phew.

In 2021 many stars of the insurance world rushed to join the global climate activist cartel — the Net Zero Insurers Alliance (NZIA) — which would have turned their industry into another branch of the global UN and WEF climate police. The plan was to make it hard for unfashionable businesses to get insurance unless they went “Net Zero” and followed the policies the UN and WEF billionaires wanted. Democracy be damned. This effectively would have dragooned the coal miners, airlines, farmers, and publishers — practically everyone who needs insurance, into setting “Net Zero” targets above and beyond their legal requirements. All businesses would have to say the right prayers to the […]

“These guys run the world” — BlackRock recruiter caught boasting about buying Senators “cheap”

By Jo Nova

James O’Keefe formerly the soul of Project Veritas is back — he’s set up O’Keefe Media Group (OMG News). One of his insiders filmed Serge Valay, A recruiter at BlackRock, bragging about how they work.

“It’s not who the President is, it’s who controlling the wallet of the President.” “Who’s that?” she asks. “The Hedge Funds, BlackRock, the banks. These guys run the world.”

..you take a big f– ton of money and then you can start to buy people. Obviously we have this system in place. First, there’s the senators. These guys are f***ing cheap. You got ten grand? You can buy a senator.

BlackRock don’t want people to notice them:

“BlackRock don’t want to be in the news. They don’t want people to talk about them. They don’t want to be anywhere on the radar.”

“Why not?” she asks.

“I don’t know … I suspect because it’s easier to do things when people aren’t thinking about it.”

What kind of things are easier to do in the dark? Things other people won’t like.



News – he says, is propaganda. If you hear […]

It’s War: 19 US States fight back against the Woke Banker Cartel

 

By Jo Nova

Oklahoma blacklists BlackRock and 12 other banks that boycott fossil fuels

We may yet be saved by states in the US that are pulling the pin on the Big Banker Cartel. In this case Oklahoma wrote laws to investigate and ban state investments with banks that boycott the energy sector. They’ve now decided that 13 banks fail the bar, and should be banned from all public business. In response BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase are now dancing to a whole new tune, suddenly protesting that they invest billions in the energy sector. The twisted truth is, that it is no defense at all, it was part of their strategy. Often they used their major voting interest to oust directors and pressure boards to pick up more “woke” ESG policies. These are big targets. JP Morgan Chase is the largest bank in the US and BlackRock is the largest asset manager in the world.

This is excellent news, and we need more. Spread the news. But how did it get to the point where a bank that outspokenly campaigned to end fossil fuels was managing 60% of the state employees retirement funds in a state that is […]

Peak ESG is behind us: They’ve stopped bragging about environmental wokeness.

By Jo Nova

Environmental wokeness has become a liability for investors

The backlash against ESG has hit bonds, stocks, corporates

In a recent survey, half of large investors in North America now admit to worrying that ESG exposes them to legal risk. When companies want to create a Green-Woke project they issue ESG bonds to get loans to build it, but sometime between last year and this year those Bonds have halved. Suddenly companies are not dressing up in the Big Green cloak. That’s $6 billion in ESG investments that didn’t happen.

The change in direction has been driven by Florida and Texas and the 19 or more states that have joined them. Even though the $2b in funds Ron De Santis pulled from BlackRock et al last year was a drop in the ocean for a $10 trillion dollar fund, it was the tip of a spear at the heart of the beast. The financial houses and asset managers were using other people’s money to force through political changes those same people didn’t want to vote for. If the crowd followed De Santis the whole game was up.

De Santis has just tightened the screws further today:

DeSantis […]

Head of JP Morgan says governments could seize property to build wind and solar farms

by Jo Nova

Bankers are just nice people

A major banker, worth $2 billion, says the government needs to take land away from poorer people and build machines on it to change the weather.

CEO Jamie Dimon says he “is a red-blooded, patriotic, free-enterprise and free-market capitalist” while he promotes government control of markets, land, clouds, wind and rain. ” We simply are not getting the adequate investments fast enough for grid, solar, wind and pipeline initiatives” he complains, suddenly unhappy with the free-market, and sounding like a red-blooded communist on steroids instead. Even the Soviets didn’t try to micromanage the planet’s weather.

Dimon’s annual letter to Shareholders starts with all the right catchphrases. He comes in “defense of democracy and essential freedoms, including free enterprise”, but he doesn’t seem too interested in private property rights. He’s exasperated with people who won’t consider a carbon tax to stem climate change, though he doesn’t say anything about people who have considered it and think it’s Shamenistic VooDoo.

h/t To John Connor II, Climate Depot and Marc Morano

Seize property to build wind and solar farms, says JP Morgan chief

by Simon Foy, The Telegraph, UK

The […]

“Climate change” suddenly seems irrelevant: Bank of England drops it, and Biden drills for Big-oil

By Jo Nova

Strange things are happening in the calm before the storm…

Thanks to NewZeroWatch

This week the financial world balances on the edge, and all the old rules have broken. Joe Biden is signing off on an oil drilling program on US soil which he said he’d never do — and it’s one of the largest ever — like building “66 new coal plants”. At the same time the Bank of England is apparently cutting the sacred climate change spending, and has leaked this news to the world.

As someone said on Twitter, “last week was a different country”.

After all these years, climate change has fallen out of the Weekly Hit Parade of Panic.

Bank of England Headquarters, London, photo by Елена Пехчевска

Bank of England Will Cut Spending for its Work on Climate Change

By Ellen Milligan and Philip Aldrick, Bloomberg

Climate programs will slip lower on the central bank’s agenda so officials can focus more on the core operations such as financial stability…

As Dr Benny Peiser of NetZeroWatch says “the risk of costly climate and Net Zero policies have become a bigger threat to the UK’s economy and […]

Silicon Valley Bank was a Big Green Government Ponzi Scheme

By Jo Nova

SVB or Silicon Valley Bank is the US’s 17th biggest bank, or it was until last week when it became the US’s second biggest bank failure instead.

Interest rate rises are supposed to squeeze out the dumbest investments, so it is fitting that one of the first casualties of this boom-bust cycle is a green banker, mostly doomed by loaning half their cash to the same bankrupt Big-Government that created the green improbable fantasy industries which SVB was largely serving.

SVB was a “Green” Banker. We know this, not because newspapers are saying that now, but because of the emergency flares released on behalf of the victims. The New York Times tells us that the collapse of SVB is going to hit green tech hard because SVB clients included 1,550 companies dedicated to “fighting climate change”.

If only SVB had served coal miners or gas frackers instead they might still be in business? The deposits they needed would have kept on coming as the profits flowed in.

David Gelles, New York Times, naturally, misses the whole point:

Silicon Valley Bank Collapse Threatens Climate Start-Ups

In reality, climate start-ups threaten the bank, and climate finish-ups threaten […]

How Larry Fink turned your pension fund into leftist activist machine

 

By Jo Nova

By forcing people to put money into pension funds in a form of investment that they weren’t necessarily comfortable with, governments created vast piles of money that was essentially left unguarded on the beach in a bay with a hundred pirate ships. Sure, there were regulatory agencies and accountants up the kazoo, but money is also power: the paper dollar would get returned to the owner, but the whole time it was out of his hands, its power was being used against him.

In a free market, millions of voters can vote with their wallet. It’s a form of democracy. But for hapless sleepy investors in a pension plan — sometime in the 1980s that power to choose the kind of industries and values they wanted to support was silently given away to a guy called Larry Fink and a few of his colleagues.

Snoozing-at-the-wheel, citizens voted for cheap energy every two years, while their money voted for “ESG” every day. And ESG is the expensive Environmental, Social, Governance kind of electricity which freezes your peas AND corrects the weather (in theory).

The size of the pension funds managed by the likes of BlackRock, Vanguard […]

The Climate Money Monster Cabal may be starting to unravel… Vanguard flees GFANZ

By Jo Nova Vanguard abandons the UN led Net-Zero Climate Finance monster group

Only a week after Ron de Santis pulled $2 billion in Florida funds from BlackRock, Vanguard, the second biggest asset manager in the world, has abruptly pulled out of GFANZ.

Vanguard has $7 trillion in assets under management, and GFANZ is a conglomerate cabal of bankers insurers and asset managers that has snowballed into a 550 member cabal with a jawdropping, obscene, 150 trillion in assets. Together, for a moment, they almost created the illusion of a One World Government by Bankers. After all, the GDP of the United States of America is only $23 trillion. So when an organization with six times the pulling power tells the world to go Net Zero, which company, which government would say “No”? Well, Ron de Santis did — and 18 other US states are working on it too.

The key weakness to the $150,000 billion dollar GFANZ monster is — as I said last week — that it’s an illusion. They are wielding other people’s money — using their clients own pension funds to indirectly punish their own clients, and the good guys […]

Naughty! World’s 30 biggest Funds go “Net Zero”, but invest $550 billion in oil, gas, coal anyhow

So much for stranded assets then.

Is there any better proof that “believing” in climate action is just a fashion statement? For all the talk of the end of fossil fuels, the biggest and most powerful funds in the world sign up for their “Net Zero” clubs but pour money into oil, gas and coal, hither thither, anyway.

The 30 biggest funds in the world manage €42.5 trillion in assets. These funds are so big, they can move markets if they want too…

Soak in that hypocrisy

Larry Fink starred at Davos and other events pontification for years on the importance of “tackling climate change”, how it’s an investment risk, and on how “climate change will upend” the way we do business, and how we need to do “long termism“. But he’s the CEO of BlackRock, the largest asset management fund in the world and they don’t mind at all they profit from all the fossil fuels. They joined the Net Zero Asset Manager Alliance, but do almost nothing. Indeed, vocalizing about what bad investments fossil fuels are while investing in them, is like a reverse pump and dump. They’re just scaring off the competition.

In 2020 BlackRock virtuously promised […]

Well that explains everything: Bankers bullied Australia into Net Zero

Hands Up: It’s Net Zero now or a 1.5% interest rate hike?

So Australia is adopting Net Zero because the Global Financiers, who only want to save the world, would have refused to lend us money without jacking up our interest rates by 1.5%. The banker punishment would have meant a “17% investor exodus”. Fancy a stock market collapse?

This remarkable admission comes in the modeling released today by the Morrison government. No one is even trying to hide it.

At least we can stop pretending this has anything to do with science or the voters. Just cut out the IPCC and go straight for the BlackRock Temperature Tax, eh?

Note the “penalties” are imposed by global financiers:

Modelling shows real cost of no net-zero carbon emissions

Greg Brown and Geoff Chambers, The Australian

Businesses and households would have faced interest rate hikes of up to 1.5 per cent under expected penalties imposed by global financiers if the government had failed to adopt net zero emissions by 2050, modelling for the Glasgow climate package shows.

The penalty regime would have sparked a 17 per cent investment collapse by the middle of the […]

What if the media was just the lobbying agency for bigger profit making ventures?

Much of the Media’s true business model is probably not ads or customers or even profits. Controlling the narrative is power in itself. Those who hold the strings that give a party or candidate a ten point advantage, to some extent, control the party.

If it serves an industry to get one candidate elected, those that control the megaphone can describe said candidates flaws with the best possible spin, or not at all. If this is the major driver of media ownership it explains the Fox paradox. Tucker Carlson and Fox are scoring super high ratings, and competing on uncontested territory. Why does no one seems to want to mimic that and compete for those viewers?

Probably because Big Business doesn’t want “Power for The People” or small government or, euwh, competition.

So Big Business owns Big Media, and they both like Big Government. Nearly every big business benefits from big regulation by “friendly” regulators. They get a net of red tape that catches little fish competitors and a river of subsidies that make life sweeter for Big Fish.

And if Big Media hold the key to swing voters, then Big Government likes Big Media, so it’s a perpetual self […]

ANZ bankers kneel to carbon God, betray Australian farmers, miners — “don’t deserve a banking licence”

How to incense whole industries ANZ style The ANZ bankers declared this week that they are really in the business of saving the Earth, even if Australians didn’t vote for it. They declared some law abiding businesses were unworthy of their loans, and thousands of Australians in the steel industry, farming, and manufacturing are livid. The bank is now telling its customers that interest payments are not enough, and those with 50% or more of their operations in coal must diversify. They may well diversify right out of ANZ — a boycott is being discussed. And for shareholders this preening would seem like a dumb way to lose customers. But in Australia it’s worse than that. The right to earn interest by loaning money they mostly don’t have (by creating paper currency from thin air) is a glorious gift bestowed on them by an Australian banking license. It’s a perpetual money making machine, granted by a government group called APRA. ANZ is one of The Big Four Banks in Australia. It is supposed to provide an essential service, and in return APRA protects it by using the power of the state to run any new competitors off the ranch and […]

Worlds “Largest Shadow Bank” wants Australia to shut coal plants faster

Because Big Bankers really want to save the Earth, right?

BlackRock, the 10 trillion dollar “global investment fund” is urging the Australian company AGL to shut Bayswater and Loy B Yang Coal Plants much sooner than planned. BlackRock is a NY based and as wikipedia says “Due to its power, and the sheer size and scope of its financial assets and activities, BlackRock has been called the world’s largest shadow bank.”

The move only got 20% support from investors. Australian investors largely said “no thanks”. Where are The Greens in exposing multinational powers that want to influence Australia — they’re part of the Big Banker Promotion Team.

BlackRock turns up the heat on AGL’s coal exit plans

Nick Toscano, Sydney Morning Herald

AGL faced an investor revolt on Wednesday, as more than 20 per cent of the company’s shareholders backed a resolution for the board to align the retirement of the Loy Yang A power plant in Victoria and its Bayswater station in New South Wales with a strategy to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.

This would mean shutting Loy Yang A, the largest brown coal fired power plant in Victoria, […]

Goldman Sachs pledges $750 billion on climate change — bankers just want to save the world too

Just when you think banks are only in it for the money, along comes Goldman Sachs to advise us on the planetary atmosphere:

“Goldman Sachs released a 34-page analysis of the impact of climate change. And the results are terrifying.”

All these nice banks want to save Earth too.

Yusef Kahn, Business Insider, Sept 2019

For some reason (what could it be?) a few months ago the Goldman Sachs investment bank was gripped with a sudden urge to repackage the IPCC report. Perhaps they were afraid their clients didn’t watch CNN, the BBC, or, pick-any-channel, maybe they couldn’t afford a television?

A Goldman Sachs report on the impact of climate change on cities across the world makes for grim reading. The bank warned that “consequences of a warming world may well play out over several decades to come, even if efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions are successful today.” Rising temperatures would lead to changing disease patterns, more intense and longer-lasting heatwaves, more destructive weather events, and pressure on the availability and quality of water for drinking and agriculture.

“Despite the uncertainty around the timing and scale of the impact, it may be prudent […]

Giant Spanish Bank spends €100 b on Earth’s weather, cos they are nice people

This absolutely definitely is not about profits or money.

Giant Spanish bank announces €100 billion plan to fight climate change

BBVA, the second largest bank in Spain, has launched a major new financing initiative to support sustainable development and combat climate change in the coming years.

Only gas and oil companies are “vested interests” seeking to profiteer from our demise. Banks are charities:

BBVA Group Executive Chairman Francisco González said, “At BBVA, we want to play a key role in mobilizing resources to halt climate change and promote sustainable development. It is an ambitious, long-term goal in line with our purpose of ‘bringing the age of opportunity to everyone.’”

Apparently, the bank’s role is to change Earth’s climate, and “bring the age of opportunity to everyone”.

Do their shareholders know, I wonder?

Can anyone see an elephant?

Warning — Meaningless acronym coming — SBTI:

BBVA has also become the first Spanish bank to commit to the Science Based Targets Initiative. The campaign helps major corporates work out how they have to cut emissions to prevent the impacts of climate change.

The group’s new strategy is called Pledge 2025…

If you wanted […]

Most of Asia’s bankers ignore climate risks. Hmm. Rich and dumb, or rich and skeptical?

A survey in Asia found that 69% of financial institutions there don’t bother with assessing climate change risks when considering financing projects. Either these bankers have missed the last 20 years of IPCC messaging (careless inattentive bankers), or they’ve seen it and they know it’s baloney (skeptical bankers). Hmmm. What’s more likely?

Looks like two thirds of Asian banks don’t believe the IPCC:

[The new survey] …undertaken by Asia Research and Engagement with support of Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited, … found that 31 per cent of the institutions factored climate change risks into their financing operations, with 61 per cent of banks referring to green products and 56 per cent providing some quantification of their exposure.

It said financial institution were factoring climate change risks into their policies and offered green finance products. But only over a quarter of banks referred to climate change factors as a reason to limit financing .…

The bottom line is always where the money goes.

So over two thirds of financial institutions couldn’t care less about those forecasts of beachside apartments sinking under the waves, or cities becoming unlivable, nor of coal mines supposedly going broke. Nor […]