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 on a corporate board, what’s the best way to hold off the climate police and the femo-activists from voting you out? You must publicly endorse “Net Zero” and women’s rights, even if you think they are witchcraft, against the company’s interests, bad for the nation, and bad for women. Imagine what happens to board members if they dare speak their mind?
The Paris Agreement, remember, appeared to be nearly worthless at the time, yet here it is years later, being foisted in reality in corporate boardrooms. A more detailed look at boardroom politics finds that global giants BlackRock and Vanguard are voting against Australian company directors that don’t serve the multinational globalist agenda.
We all know exactly how much BlackRock and Vanguard care about Australian jobs or the energy bills Australians are paying.
This is how the wheels of evil grind:
Super fund ART plans to pressure companies to slash emissions and sets a new net-zero road map
By Paulina Duran, The Australian
Australian Retirement Trust has committed to pressuring 88 companies to slash their carbon footprint, setting a new “net zero” road map to cut emissions in its portfolio of equities, infrastructure and real estate investments by 43 per cent by 2030.
Australia’s second-largest super fund said that it would start voting on all climate-related shareholder proposals in the Australian market and would link the remuneration of its own investment team to climate change performance.
Super fund HESTA has warned the largest listed companies it intends to vote against male directors of boards with low female representation. In letters sent last week to the chairs and chief executives of the largest 292 ASX-listed companies it invests in, the $76bn fund said it would seek to engage on four “active ownership themes” ahead of the upcoming annual general meeting season. This includes influencing corporate policies on climate, “decent work” and biodiversity loss.
Thus HESTA are the climate police:
HESTA is also asking executives and board directors to work towards a goal of halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement.
It wants ASX300 companies to accelerate investment in the electrification and decarbonisation of the economy, and its voting at this year’s AGMs will “consider progress in these areas and whether board skills and composition demonstrate preparedness for the low carbon transition,” it said.
This is a rapidly accelerating phenomenon in Australia
Super funds are getting bigger, thanks to Big-Government forced rules taking even more from the workers and handing their money to the control of small management boards that hardly anyone pays attention too. These toxic funds are increasing their ownership and influence and using their voting rights more often:
Companies are under increasing pressure to consider the views of super funds, which held assets worth $3.5 trillion as of March. And funds are getting bigger with the compulsory super guarantee rate set to reach 12 per cent in 2025, up from 9.5 per cent in 2020.
Super funds’ ownership of the 10 largest companies listed on the ASX has more than doubled in the past 12 months to $60bn.
Super funds now own 6.3 per cent of Woodside, compared to 0.5 per cent in September 2022, with investments surging after a rally in global oil prices. Ownership of BHP, CSL, Wesfarmers and Westpac has almost doubled.
“It’s become more and more common for super funds and fund managers to use their votes at AGMs as an opportunity for investors to promote good governance and to endorse the actions of companies … or express concern over poor practices.
There are $3.5 trillion dollars unguarded in Australian Super funds
For Australians wondering where their money would be safe, the answer is not obvious. They may not even realize their funds are held with ART, which was only formed a year ago from the combination of Sunsuper and QSuper and the Australia Post Superannuation Scheme (APSS). The Chairman used to be a Labor politician in Queensland.
The news is not all bad. The largest fund in Australia — called AustralianSuper — was accused two weeks ago of protecting a Woodside board member that climate activists wanted to get rid of. The Guardian was unhappy:
Australia’s biggest superannuation fund helped Woodside Energy fend off a shareholder revolt over its climate policies, nullifying concerns raised by global investors, according to new analysis.
Activist group Market Forces said AustralianSuper recently voted for the re-election of Ian Macfarlane, a senior Woodside director and longtime sustainability committee member at the oil and gas giant.
The activist group noted the money pushing to get rid of Macfarlane included votes from BlackRock and Vanguard:
Market Forces said it paired its investment analysis with share voting data to identify how large shareholders voted. It found that major global investor BlackRock voted against the re-election of Macfarlane, as did several funds run by investment manager Vanguard.
So when Australian corporations or “The Business Council of Australia” speak about climate action, womens rights or Voting Yes for racist voices, (HESTA was the first fund to do so) they may merely be doing the bidding of foreign banker cartels. Who knows?
So if your retirements funds are in a politically toxic fund, where can you move them?
If readers want to help it would be very useful to compile a list of Australian Super Funds that had outspoken Woke policies (so we can avoid them) and a counter list that don’t play political games with your money. Naively, the climate activist group called Market Forces, and the Australian Conservation Foundation have done some work, but they are the financial simpletons that think investors just need to pull money out of fossil fuels and put it into renewable wizard magic to change the world. They don’t seem to realize that selling out is an old hat one-off protest. Activist funds now realize they have more influence by buying up shares and threatening to vote out Directors in order to change the corporate culture and sabotage companies from within.
We need those lists!
*For foreign readers, Australian pension accounts are called “Superannuation Funds”, like US 401k accounts.
Climate Justice looks a bit like a criminal phishing campaign.
By Jo Nova
Malware to save the planet eh?
The Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC) is asking supporters to send deceptive links out to friends and family that look like a cookie recipe but embed software cookies instead on the victim’s computer. The digital cookie then pushes green climate videos into their feeds, (as if the ABC news wasn’t loaded enough).
Look out for any links to oneminutecookie.com.
The AYCC gets about $3m in donations, and even visits schools, teaching children how to cheat and lie to save the planet, or something like that. What are good family relationships built on after all, if not deception? What is science if it is not propaganda?
These are all good questions to raise with the children in your life and the schools in your area. Don’t wait for an email to arrive, thank the AYCC for providing the opportunity to start the conversation now.
If the believers are so caring, ethical and moral why are they teaching children it’s OK to deceive family members? Is this the kind of “fair and just” world we want to live in?
Call up schools and the local P&C and ask if they are aware the AYCC — which runs programs in schools — teaches children to fool parents and grandparents and use malware. Are these the kind of family values that belong in our schools? Will the local school guarantee that they will not allow this group to manipulate children?
Reporter Joseph Lam spoke to cyber security experts at Check Point Research:
The company’s tech evangelist Ashwin Ram, one of Australia’s top 100 Innovators, said the technique was not common but was something he imagined cyber criminals would use as part of phishing campaigns.
Mr Ram said cookies were used to “enhance the user experience”, but in the case of AYCC campaign, “it looks like the goal here was to lure sceptics of climate change to oneminutecookie.com”. He adds: “While the site looks innocent, a victim’s browser will store cookies that will affect their browsing experience by displaying content to support a particular narrative.”
If the evidence for climate change is so overwhelming, why don’t they use that to win friends and influence people instead of phishing tricks that criminals might use?
The UN is morphing into the New World Eco-Cathedral and the first commandment is “Give Us Your Money”
Antonio Guterres opened the Working Group Chapter on Fire and Brimstone and dug deep:
[AP News] “Humanity has opened the gates to hell,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said Wednesday, opening a special climate ambition summit with yet another plea for action. “ Horrendous heat is having horrendous effects. Distraught farmers watching crops carried away by floods. Sweltering temperatures spawning disease. And thousands fleeing in fear as historic fires rage.”
In a reversion to the medieval era of microbiology, apparently heat itself spawns disease from the ether. We know heat is the devil itself, the source of all evil, as the IPCC has not found one single good thing that might happen with more hotness.
No one is even pretending this is science anymore, are they?
Once equilibrium climate sensitivity is at the Gates of Hell level, where can it go next? Magma level? And is that better or worse?
The developed world was put in the naughty corner, and not allowed to speak, so they didn’t turn up, or perhaps it was the other way around.
Those [major emitting] nations remained silent. They weren’t allowed to speak because, organizers said, they had no new actions to take.
Heads of state from China, the United States, India, Russia, the United Kingdom and France all skipped the summit.
The 32 national leaders who did qualify represent only 11% of the world’s carbon dioxide pollution.
Guterres was apparently performing for a different crowd — whipping up the poor brethren nations to ask God for money, or failing that, the European Commission, or John Kerry which is nearly the same thing.
Guterres called on “major emitters — who have benefited most from fossil fuels — to make extra efforts to cut emissions, and on wealthy countries to support emerging economies to do so.” They were silent.
There’s some ceremonial ritual at work here, where rich nations are banned from talking then blamed for not saying anything.
Ultimately, the main point of the summit was to feed from the trough:
He called on wealthy nations to fulfill their $100 billion pledges to help poorer countries deal with climate change. The United States is one of the countries that hasn’t done so. The U.N. chief also pushed for countries to spend even more than they’ve promised and put in money to a “loss and damage” fund agreed upon last year that are sort of payments to help nations harmed by extreme weather from global warming.
There was a call to the promised land:
Africa “can leapfrog into a fully green industrial paradigm,’’ Kenyan President William Ruto said. “Yet we cannot and must not do this on our own.”
Little does the Kenyan President know that if Kenya gets there, to the green industrial paradigm, they will be on their own, because no one else has made it. The promised land doesn’t exist. The Green Industrial Paradigm is a the place where modern economies go to die.
On Monday the UK government was insisting the ban on petrol cars by 2030 would still go ahead. Today, in a rush, it’s been delayed 5 years, along with slowing down the forced push to get rid of gas boilers. About a fifth of all householders apparently won’t ever have to buy a wildly expensive heat pump they could not afford. (Shame the other four fifths will). People won’t be getting seven different recycling bins, taxes on meat, flying and new rules on car sharing, at least not yet. Here’s hoping they’ll get delayed forever.
Naturally the PM is insisting this is “not a short term decision aimed at winning the next election” — because in a democracy, that would be a terrible thing, right. Imagine trying to appeal to voters. The Sin of it!
Labor immediately promised to undo this travesty of allowing the public to choose whatever kind of car they want for another five years. Which is good news. If Rishi Sunak really does this, and the election becomes “a climate vote”, the people of the UK might get a choice.
PM waters down ban on gas boilers and petrol and diesel cars, scraps plans for seven bins per home and says there will be no extra tax on flights or meat
The Prime Minister hosted a Downing Street press conference to confirm plans to delay a ban on new petrol and diesel car sales by five years to 2035. And about a fifth of all households will be covered by an ‘exemption’ from ever having to remove their gas boiler and replace it with a heat pump.
‘We are not going to save the planet by bankrupting the British people.’
NetZeroWatch welcomes this and points out it was inevitable given the retreat in other nations and the impossibility of it all:
Net Zero Watch has long warned that current Net Zero plans are astronomically costly, technologically impossible and politically unsustainable. As European governments have begun to retreat from their own Net Zero plans, it was just a question of time before the UK, which has even more utopian targets, had to make a U-turn, and return to the path of economic and technological realism.
Sunak, who said governments “of all stripes” had not been “honest with the public” about the costs of net-zero…
He said the debate around climate change had been charged with “too much emotion and not enough clarity” and that the approach should shift to “consent, not imposition, honesty not obfuscation, pragmatism not ideology.”
“If we continue down this path, we risk losing the consent of the British people and the resulting backlash would not just be against specific policies, but against the wider mission itself,” he said.
What consent do they risk losing? The fake one created with ambiguous polls, loaded questions and by calling people “deniers”?
It’s like the bushfires and baking heat are already here (in your mind, if not in reality)
It’s as if we’re preparing for Pearl Harbour or something — and if you are not scared, you should be, and even if this summer isn’t that unprecedented, you will feel like it is, and if the hellfire doesn’t eventuate, there’ll be no headlines saying “Oops. We panicked for nothing!”
After 150 years of Pacific Oscillation, the Pacific has oscillated again. An El Nino has been declared, and like the last 27 El Ninos since Federation, it will probably be warmer and drier “than average” in Australia. But the Merchants of Panic are already calling it a summer of severe wildfires and droughts. There’s no flames yet, but Reuters is wheeling out the photos of burnt out wrecks. SBS found experts to badger us into making a “heat wave plan” — like seriously, as if Australians need three months to remember what summer is. No really — The Executive Director of Sweltering Cities (whatever that is), says you should buy up those extra ice cube trays now and learn the signs of heat exhaustion. Prepare your home — like what, find the air conditioner remote?
Even in France, apparently the risk of an Australian bushfire and drought that might, maybe potentially happen is now worth a headline. See how this works? Even if the world were cooling, there’s always someplace that might have a hot summer coming, and when all the world shares headlines of hellfire, people will feel like climate hell is truly here, even if the weather was just exactly what it has always been.
For perspective, here are the last 147 years of Pacific variation, just so people can appreciate how extraordinary this isn’t. This is a BOM graph, made by an agency that gets a million dollars a day from Australians to understand our climate, but somehow our billion dollar public news agencies can’t find it, and the BOM forgot to mention it in the press release.
It’s just another day in the land of droughts and flooding rains:
What matters is that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is the largest short term driver of Earth’s climate, and we have no idea what makes it tick; we can’t predict it more than a few months in advance, and we have no clue at all about what it will do this time next year. (If we did, the BoM could tell our farmers useful things, like what kind of rainfall they’ll get before they put the seed in. )
Hidden in the small print on the ABC site, but not mentioned on the nightly news, is that El Nino’s don’t always create widespread drought, and that the models are sometimes wrong, and the slow development of this years event “might limit its strength”.
How to manufacture climate anxiety
SBS News really takes the cake today. The new normal is a world where you practically need a roster on the fridge to plan who does the 3pm check to see if Nana had her glass of water.
The Executive Director of Sweltering Cities, Emma Bacon, says people should have a heat wave plan.
“That means looking at our homes now and saying ‘how can I make it easier to keep cool inside? Do I need to get an extra fan? Do I need to get more ice cube trays? How can I block the heat from entering the house with extra awnings or things like that. So that’s one of the big things. it’s familiarising ourselves with the symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke to make sure if we need medical care, then we know when that needs to happen. And what we also can do is we can figure out who we’re going to check in on during a heatwave that could be a colleague, it could be grandma, it could be you know a family member who’s pregnant, you know, people who might be suffering in the heat, who we are going to check in on and let’s make a plan to do that because community connection is one of the best ways to keep safe during a heatwave.”
It’s almost like prepping for a summer blackout without saying the word “blackout”? But, silly me, in the Renewable Crash Test Zone, being NetZero or living in a blackout are nearly the same thing.
Some experts think there may be only 1,000 of these eagles left, our largest bird of prey, and yet in the last 12 years some 272 of them have been killed or injured in the vicinity of Tasmanian wind towers. That’s at least as far as the maintenance crews have noticed, and not that they were specifically looking…
So the number can only go up, and other types of birds are getting the chop too.
The Tasmanian Wedge-tailed eagle has been known to have a wingspan as large as 2.8m (9ft 3in). They mate for life, and a single nest can be 1 – 3 meters across.
Tasmanian wind farms and transmission lines have killed or injured 321 threatened eagles in 12 years, but the real figure is likely far higher, a new study finds.
The peer reviewed study, published in Australian Field Ornithology, uses data from wind farms, TasNetworks and eagle rescuers to identify the death or injury of 272 endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagles and 49 vulnerable white-bellied sea eagles.
It found that from 2010 to 2022, 268 eagles were recorded killed and 53 injured by wind and transmission energy infrastructure, with the state’s four wind farms reporting 38 deaths, TasNetworks 139 deaths and raptor rescuers 91 deaths.
Mr Pullen’s study points to estimates from some of these experts that less than 1,000 Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagles remain …
Ornithologists and conservationists (but not the Federal Greens) are calling for a moratorium on new industrial wind plants. Apparently the Australian government will try to protect migratory birds but it’s bad luck for the local residents. Some wind farms are not even required to monitor and report bird deaths anymore.
For the unwashed masses though, killing a wedge-tailed eagle is illegal.
Things just aren’t going well for the windfarms (or the eagles)
Tasmania is theoretically going to be home to the largest wind plant in the Southern Hemisphere, the Robbins Island Mega Wind Factory — but it only got approval to operate if it shut down for five months of the year so it didn’t hurt the Orange Bellied Parrot.
The other bright idea was to use a high-tech detection system to spot the eagles and shut the turbines down when birds approached. (Imagine if we had to turn off the coal plants every time an eagle visited?) But last month the news came out that the bird avoidance system at Cattle Hill Windfarm had still killed eight endangered wedge-tailed eagles in less than four years (plus some other birds too). It may not sound like much but there are plans to build nine or ten new sets of turbine “parks” across Tasmania, and if one tower misses, the next one will get them…
Sydney is getting five warm days in a row and the Sydney Morning Horror is warning that it could be deadly. Even newspapers in Belgium think their readers need to know there’s a warm spring in Australia — 10 – 15 degrees above average. It’s not even a record. Not even “the hottest in history” — just by golly, a bit warmer than a similar September heatwave, you know, nine years ago.
Sydney is due to hit 30 degrees on Sunday and Monday, but will reach new highs of 32 on Tuesday and Wednesday. The city hasn’t experienced consecutive days of 30-degree-plus weather in September since 2014. This week will be 10 degrees hotter than Sydney’s August average.
Driving a car could be deadly today too, but we don’t put it in a headline. The psychological effect is to generate fear of warm weather.
What is exciting is that Sydney didn’t even reach 32C last summer, at all, so after one of the least warm not-hottest 12 months on record, Sydney is finally getting some beach weather. But don’t mention that in 163 years there has not been a longer period where Sydney didn’t break 32 degrees C.
In the capital Canberra it can reach 28 degrees on Monday. There the record for September is at 30 degrees.
According to the meteorological institute, it is very exceptional that a heat wave is observed so early in the year. Summer is expected to be the hottest since 1996. Australia is therefore holding its breath for a summer like the one from 2019-2020. Then large parts of the country were burned to ashes by forest fires, killing some thirty.
The Sydney Morning Herald is a bigger public danger than the heatwave because they only report the half of the news that suits them:
Western Sydney University senior researcher Thomas Longden said short sharp heatwaves, like the one Sydney is experiencing, are the most dangerous because the body struggles to acclimatise and people are less likely to change their behaviours to stay cool when the weather shifts suddenly. His work has found about 2 per cent of deaths in Australia each year are heat-related.
Even in sunny warm Australia about six times as many people die of the cold as of the heat. (Cheng et al) When will the Sydney Morning Herald point out that expensive electricity in winter kills far more people than a warm week in Spring? Indeed, the best cure for heat deaths is air conditioning. What we need is the cheap coal fired power grid we used to have (the one without all the unreliable expensive generators added on).
The number of people killed by 30 degree days in Sydney is almost nothing. (Gasparrini et al). When will “journalists” do some research instead of phoning up the local tame professor of global nonsense?
The news has become a gaslighting advert to justify more subsidies and profits for industrial giants, the deep state and asset managers with $9,000 billion dollars to buy media companies.
Good friends don’t let good friends read The Sydney Morning Herald without a health warning.
Apple aims at customers with too much money and a desperate need to feel smug
You too can save the world, by spending two-grand on the latest tech-wear — not because it’s lighter, better, faster, bigger, or more useful, but because you want to look like you care about stopping bad weather and bush fires. Signal your virtue to the world! Wear your smug-watch and smile. It’s carbon neutral, and you are the leading carbon-show-off in the class. (Pretend you care about the kids mining cobalt in the Congo, or the Uighur camps in Xinjiang. Oh nevermind.)
There is a spiritual void out there in 2023 and Apple wants to fill it. But this religion is a world of shallow consumerism and point-scoring, pretending it is deeply philosophical and generous. Apple are this close to turning their brand into a teachy-preachy pagan apostle of Gaia.
And did Mother Nature say she controls the weather? Oops. What are all the windfarms for?
Mother Nature is a bossy black woman, wouldn’t you know, and the word for the advert is “cringeworthy“.
This adverts sums up everything about the motivations of the average climate acolyte. Like a Gucci handbag, it’s all for show but who cares what it can carry? Will solar panels stop the storms or wind turbines hold back the tide? Doesnt matter, as long as you can fake it.
As Heel versus Babyface says: “Best advert for android I’ve ever seen.”
…
h/t Stephen Neil, John Connor III
For most of our lives, scientists have been among the most trusted community leaders. But not any more.
For nearly fifty years, more than four out of ten Americans said they had a “great deal of confidence” in the people running our institutions of science. This was the strongest possible answer people could give. But all that has changed in the last few years with public opinion on science now splitting along political lines. Faith in the institutions of science has collapsed among conservative voters.
The goodwill, the trust and esteem built by things like The Manhattan Project and the Moonshot carried on for decades, but when Covid arrived, and science was the number one public topic of debate, many scientists sat silent on the sidelines. The lab leak theory came and went and then turned out to have been true all along. When ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine could have saved lives, scientists said nothing. When vaccines were sold as “safe and effective”, researchers who knew there were risks, sat on their hands. When borders could have been shut to stop bioweapons, Trump was left on his own. When universities failed the nation, scientists mostly sided with the academics.
The price for spineless silence is that now among Republicans, half the confidence is gone. It was the greatest hour of need, and scientists were missing in action. Wait til the public finds out about climate science…
It’s a remarkable fall among conservative voters in the US: dropping from 45% in 2018 to just 22% in 2022 who still “have a great deal of confidence” in the scientific community.
While Democrats were more likely than Republicans to trust science before the pandemic, what was a 10% point gap in 2018 is now a 31% gap between different groups of voters. During the pandemic Democrat voters briefly became more confident in the scientific community, but that returned to the baseline the following year. The fall in Republican faith shows no sign of leveling off.
It’s hard to believe the effects of this will not translate to other areas like climate change. Once people have admitted scientists can be politicized, bought, blind, or wrong on one topic, it’s hard to see how “Trust the Science” rings true in any other arena.
The General Social Survey was started in 1972, is run by NORC at the University of Chicago every year, and surveyed 3,500 people in 2022.
For fifty years, science was trusted
While faith in medicine, education and “the press” had been eroding over the last fifty years, science had maintained its position. The latest collapse in trust is a marked change from the long term steady trend line.
Faith in medicine also fell, and a partisan gap emerged:
While Democrats confidence in medical institutions did not change, Republicans saying they had a great deal of confidence dropped from 40% to 26%. For most of the years of the survey there was no political divide. This is a new phenomenon.
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