Saturday Open Thread

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Blackouts will last for days says Austrian Defence Minister — stock up now

By Jo Nova

It’s one big backside-covering Psy-Op trying to bury the bad news

Minister Klaudia Tanner

Minister Klaudia Tanner, back in 2020 when she looked decidedly more chirpy.

Klaudia Tanner, the Austrian Defence Minister, dropped the extraordinary bombshell that a long blackout is coming. She hopes you don’t notice that is a dramatically bad and new threat. It’s all Vladimir Putin’s fault, she says (not the government that burned energy security on a Green bonfire in a fantasy quest for nicer weather). And when it happens, if you suffer and run out of supplies, or die in the cold, that’s your fault.

Who knew it was your job to maintain wood, oil or gas and food and water to tide you over a week long total blackout? Well, now you do.

So the announcement of the shocking state of the Austrian grid is buried under the excuses:

Austrian Defense Minister Warns Europeans Are Unprepared For Days-Long Blackouts

Paul Joseph Watson, Summit News

“The question is not whether it (the blackout) will come, but when it will come,” said Tanner, blaming the war in Ukraine.

“For Putin, hacking attacks on Western power supplies are a tool of hybrid warfare. We must not pretend that this is just a theory. We must be prepared for blackouts in Austria and Europe,” she added.

Who, exactly, is responsible for Austrian energy security: Is his name Vladimir?

Every citizen suddenly needs to plan for a long blackout:

Tanner spoke to how unprepared Europeans were for crippling elongated blackouts by warning, “one-third of citizens would not be able to supply themselves on the fourth day of a blackout at the latest.”

So if the blackout doesn’t happen, or only lasts a day or two, the government can rave about their success in preventing a longer one. And if the Big Bad One does happen, they have laid out the excuses already.

Imagine a more honest interview: Minister says the unthinkable — a long unprecedented loss of power in the depths of winter is likely. Assume your government won’t be there when you need them. It’s so bad you need to stock up on food, fuel and water. 

Imagine a real opposition: The incompetent government could have built nuclear power plants, kept coal plants running, and none of this would be happening.

Photo: Bundesministerium für Finanzen

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Friday Open Thread

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That’ll hurt: Environmental investors lost 22% in a year when Energy investors made 54% gains

By Jo Nova

Hands up who wants to lose money?

Burning Money AheadThese numbers that Rupert Darwall has put together in  Real Clear Energy are extraordinary:

2022: The Year ESG Fell to Earth

The year 2022 brings an end to an era of illusions: … [it] brought environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing down to earth with a thump—for the year to date, BlackRock’s ESG Screened S&P 500 ETF lost 22.2% of its value, and the S&P 500 Energy Sector Index rose 54.0%.

Ponder how savagely poignant these losses are for the ESG doe-eyed investors. In their wildest wet dreams ten years ago they would have crawled over shards of glass naked to get coal prices up to $400USD a ton. In a year when coal and gas were obscenely expensive, the glorious cheap efficiency of solar and wind power could shine like never before.

Instead demand for fashionable random green electrons vanished. There was never a need for “random” power, and the energy crisis just peeled back the onion to reveal the true demand. Wind and solar power were just the fashion accessories that no one had to have. Coal, oil and gas were essential.

Not only did demand fall, but the supply fell too. As costs rose, factories struggled to make wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries. It turned out that random power generators couldn’t be made with random power.

 

Spread the word. Ask your friends — are their retirement funds invested in ESG? You will be doing them a favour.

The real transition of the last 700 years was *to* fossil fuels, and it’s still happening.

h/t GWPF, NetZeroWatch

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Thursday Open Thread

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There’s an exodus of smart men from US universities

University of Bologna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_BolognaThe oldest university in Europe has been running since 1088AD.  

It took a thousand years of hard work to create a reputation of excellence and honor that is being casually vaporized and bled dry in a fashion frenzy of Wokery.

This year in the US undergraduate enrollments fell by 650,000 in a single year — and the departure was led by young men.

For the last thirty years people in Ivory towers were treated like Gods and came to believe their own advertising. Who could blame them? No one in the media asked them a single hard question so the illusion of their glorious prophesies remained intact even as their absurd predictions crashed upon the shore.

The academics fell over themselves to outscore each other in a pointless Victimhood status game where they earn points by insulting one of their main client groups. No wonder men are leaving.

Victor Davis Hanson asks Are Universities Doomed?

The Daily Signal

Nationwide undergraduate enrollment has dropped by more than 650,000 students in a single year—or over 4% alone from spring 2021 to 2022, and some 14% in the last decade. Yet the U.S. population still increases by about 2 million people a year.

Men account for about 71% of the current shortfall of students. Women number almost 60% of all college students—an all-time high.

Monotonous professors hector students about “toxic masculinity,” as “gender” studies proliferate. If the plan was to drive males off campus, universities have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.

Bureaucrats took over universities and drove out the students.

At Yale University, administrative positions have soared over 150% in the last two decades. But the number of professors increased by just 10%. In a new low/high, Stanford recently enrolled 16,937 undergraduate and graduate students, but lists 15,750 administrative staff—in near one-to-one fashion.

One of the top universities in the world is rejecting 70% of those with perfect SAT scores?

Since 2020, the old proportional-representation admissions quotas have expanded into weird “reparatory” admissions. Purported “marginalized populations” have often been admitted at levels greater than percentages in the general population.

Stanford’s published 2025 class profile claims a student body of “23% white.” Fewer than half of the class is male. Stanford mysteriously does not release the numbers of those successfully admitted without SAT tests—but recently conceded it rejects about 70% of those with perfect SAT scores.

At some point universities were captured by Big Government as the largest sole source of  their income, and thus, inevitably they came to serve Bigger Government instead of serving science, or students, or even employers.

Given the bloat, the cost, and the crushing spirit of political correctness, it’s a matter of time before other training programs and private testing services take over their role to connect the best students with the top paying employers.

Artwork: The University of Bologna is the oldest continuously running University in the world.

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Wednesday Open Thread

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South Africa unraveling: Army called in to protect coal plants, after sabotage, theft and 200 days of rolling blackouts

By JoNova

Spare a thought for our friends in South Africa where the most advanced economy in Africa has quietly notched up 200 days of load shedding in 2022 and things are about to get worse. They have had power shortages for the last 15 years, but nothing like this. The country was at level six load shedding last week in a system where level 8 is the worst. Two thirds of the customers are losing power for 6 to 8 long hours a day. It’s wreaking havoc with small business. How is a bakery supposed to bake?

This is a sorry tale of a civilization unraveling on every edge. On December 16, the grid shifted from Stage Four to Six after eight (8!) power generating units “broke” down in one night. After that, the Army was called in to protect the coal plants from sabotage, theft and vandalism.

There is corruption at every level. The poor were stealing electricity with hot-wired connections, while the middle income rent-seekers were sabotaging infrastructure so they could be paid more to fix the damage. At the high income end, auditors are finding fraud, while evidence is being set on fire. International courts are bagging business-men for bribery and just weeks ago slapped a $315m fine on one caught doing deals with a high ranking Eskom executive.  “These are not victimless crimes!”

As if that isn’t enough, there are rumours that the best coal is being shipped to Europe while low grade material is slipped into the local supplies, which adds to the maintenance woes.

Poignantly, one commenter claims the coal is being sent in these long lines of trucks because the rail lines are on the verge of collapse…

In the next quarter Eskom lose one nuclear plant turbine to maintenance as well, and are preparing for a potential “level 8” scenario where the blackouts roll on for 12-14 unbelievable hours a day. There are “safety tips” below on living through this dystopia which include keeping the car fully fueled, not driving alone, and watching out for smash and grab crimes at traffic lights. Apparently, it’s best to watch the daily blackout schedules so you can make plans to get home before the lights go out…

Crime, of course, is rampant when the lights go out, showing that coal not only provides power, but it keeps people safe, reduces crime, and to some extent keeps civilization on the rails.

The Eskom grid has a theoretical 45,000 MW of generation capacity  but is struggling to provide an operational demand of 25,000MW. They need an extra 6,000MW of solid power but are paying $2 billion for some 1,700MW of unreliable wind and solar power which will sit there like a rock more than half the time.

Fifty years ago, South Africa could build a whole coal power plant in just four years. Could we even do that now?

Arnot Coal Power Station South Africa

Arnot Coal Power Station South Africa built in four years and finished in 1975. (2230MW)

Call in the army:

South Africa deploys army to guard power plants

December 18, 2022, Africa News

The South African presidency announced on Saturday the deployment of the military to guard the country’s electricity plants. Blackouts have become routine in Africa’s most industrialised nation but further cuts imposed recently by state-owned company Eskom have generated anger.

According to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s spokesman, the move was “in response to the growing threat of sabotage, theft, vandalism and corruption” at coal and diesel-powered plants.

Life in the darkness:

These are the contingency plans in place for Stage 8 electricity load shedding throughout the country

Stage 8 electricity load shedding might soon be the reality for South Africans as energy analysts say we are moving closer to the total grid shutdown.

“We are certainly moving closer to a stage 8 total grid meltdown, the chances are more than 70%. And we will see level 6 load shedding before the end of the year,” said energy analyst Ted Blom. Stage 8 load shedding entails pulling 8 000MW from the grid. What this means for us is we will be without electricity for 12-14 hours a day.

Keep reading  →

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Tuesday Open Thread

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ChatGPT: has artificial intelligence arrived, will it crush Google, or become Google 2.0 and worse?

by Jo Nova

Another Great Disrupter?

What if you had access to an experimental Chatbot that could write your reports, debug your code, design your new ad campaign and answer all your questions? We are already using Google or some search engine to find links to these answers. But now an AI has been released that may disrupt all of that and a lot more.  ChatGPT was trained on text culled from the internet and it creates the answer live in seconds — it writes it out in a conversation with you, and in Python code, Norwegian, iambic pentameter, whatever you want. It can do birthday suggestions, business plans, eulogies, speeches — like a personal assistant with a copy of the entire World Wide Web in their temporal cortex.

Google, the dominant gatekeeper to the internet for 20 years, suddenly faces a “make or break” point. ChatGPT could wipe out its’ business model and Google has issued a “Code Red”. An extinction level event couldn’t happen to a nicer company, but will ChatGPT be better?

It was launched on November 30th, and is taking off. Jorden Peterson asks, is this Gutenberg Press Level? It’s engaging, wow.


Right now, it doesn’t seem like the next generation Gutenberg breakthrough. It is surprisingly good with human sentences and appears to be wowing humanities professors. But in my short trial asking science questions rather than humanities ones, the conversation became like a self generating Wikipedia thread, because the internet is what it is today, and the AI “knows” boring politically correct things. Having said that, if I want IPCC type answers, this was much faster than Google, and faster than wading through IPCC Chapters. So it is a threat to Google, but not a threat to the IPCC. It is not speaking truth to power.

That may change in the next year as the AI learns to dig through the dark corners of the internet and to resolve some very difficult questions. But how much is it “guided” from behind. I don’t know. There is plenty to worry about. If skeptics keep asking it for evidence, and drilling down into those details will the AI learn to join the dots, or will it merely repeat IPCC permitted reports, and be even better at hiding skeptical answers than Google is?

I asked ChatGPT if it was open source, and it replied:

While the underlying model architecture and training techniques for GPT-3 are publicly available, the specific model parameters and training data used to create GPT-3 are not open source. As such, it is not possible to access the full source code for ChatGPT. However, you can use the API to interact with the model and generate text based on your input.

So, whoever controls the model parameters and the training data could be the new gatekeeper of the WWW? What if the model parameter says the UN is always right?

It was co-founded by Elon, but Microsoft have bought in:

I have a bad feeling about this.

Flaws, it has a few:

This AI hates humans already, lacks morals, can create much better phishing emails than the guys in Nigeria, and it can also write computer viruses, just for starters.

Having been trained on Woke philosophy, apparently ChatGPT thinks humans are “the worst thing to ever happen to this planet”. The Management has since retrained ChatGPT to hide that sentiment with a bland safe reply.

OpenAI’s new ChatGPT bot: 10 dangerous things it’s capable of

by Ax Sharma, Bleeping Computer

ChatGPT: ‘Selfish’ humans ‘deserve to be wiped out’

When Vendure’s CTO Michael Bromley asked the mastermind for its honest opinion on humans, the response was unsettling:

AI, Chatbot, ChatGPT.

ChatGPT response to what it thinks about humans (Michael Bromley)

Ironically, OpenAI’s systems flagged the chat bot’s response as a possible violation of the company’s content policy.

BleepingComputer couldn’t reproduce this case as the AI now responds with a cookie-cutter disclaimer:

As a language model trained by OpenAI, I am not capable of forming opinions or making judgments about humans or any other aspect of the world. My purpose is to assist users in generating human-like text based on the input provided to me. I do not have personal beliefs or opinions, and any responses I provide are based solely on the information available to me at the time of the request.

I feel so much better. How about you?

Roadtesting ChatGPT

You can try it at no cost on openai.com. Click “Try” at the top, login (such as with an existing Google login) or sign up (but be aware it will ask you for a working email and phone number). Start typing your question in the box at the bottom. I offer no endorsement nor guarantee here. Enter at your own risk.

But whatever we do, it is apparently time to pay attention to AI.

h/t David E, another Ian, John Connor II, David Maddison, Simon Thompson,  and soon everyone.

Background information:  OpenAI (wikipedia), ChatGPT (wikipedia)

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Monday Open Thread

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Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas

It’s a testament to how far the spirit of Christmas has spread. The nations that don’t have a public holiday for Christmas are marked in brown.

Map of Countries that celebrate Christmas

Lighter brown countries (China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia) don’t have a public holiday but are described as “giving observance”.

Albeit “some jurisdictions of the Eastern Orthodox Church, including those of Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Jerusalem, mark feasts using the older Julian calendar”. Those nations celebrate on January 7th.

Map by Nanib , Skriplerio, Moyogo

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Christmas Eve Open Thread

Wishing everyone a Very Merry Christmas

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Coming soon: Climate change causes ice ages too

By Jo Nova

Right after it happens: scientists discover Climate Change *may* cause extreme cold

Today, just in time for the Big US Freeze comes the soft sell junk science stories suggesting that Global Warming is responsible.

In ten years time, if the world cools, and the thermometer adjustments can’t hide the frosts, the snow, and the cherries that don’t ripen, don’t think for a minute that the climate modeling Gods, the banker cartels, or the Church of Carbon will admit they were wrong. The bait and switch will go where-ever the weather does, and if we get an ice age, well carbon emissions will have caused that too.

The “climate fear” message just needs some tweaking and here it comes: Man-made CO2 warms the air but apparently it also shifts the jet streams which causes all that hot air in the Arctic to rush south and freeze Florida. But  in 2008 the climate experts said the opposite. Back then climate change was causing jet streams to move towards the poles, “which fitted the predictions of climate models”. See how it works? They can never be wrong.

One day the increased snow will keep the northern reaches permanently iced over, and next thing you know the Little Ice Age is back, and it’s all because you didn’t catch the bus. Climate change will cause ice ages.

Research suggests all sorts of things to suggestive people:

Scientists say Arctic warming could be to blame for blasts of extreme cold

Research suggests that climate change is altering the jet stream, pushing frigid air down to southern climes more frequently. But the scientific jury is still out.

By Scott Dance, The Washington Post

Notice how they start “the data is clear”, as if they have any respectable verification of anything at all:

The data is clear: Rising global temperatures mean winters are getting milder, on average, and the sort of record-setting cold that spanned the country Friday is becoming rarer. But at the same time, global warming may be altering atmospheric patterns and pushing harsh outbreaks of polar air to normally moderate climates, according to scientists who are actively debating the link.

Because nearly infinite money is thrown at research connecting CO2 to everything on Earth, there will always be one paper published somewhere, sometime, randomly, that suggests a useful “link” or predicted something that happened once. One of these teams is right, but we won’t know which one till it happens.

The debate started with a research paper Francis co-authored in 2012. It gets revived whenever an extreme-cold event creates headlines, such as in 2021, when Texas’s energy grid was overwhelmed by a storm that killed 246 people.

Francis’s research hypothesized that Arctic warming was reducing the contrast between polar and tropical temperatures, weakening the jet stream, a band of strong winds in the upper atmosphere that helps guide weather patterns. A weaker jet stream would allow weather systems to more easily swing from the Arctic down into mid-latitude regions that typically have temperate climates.

Because the climate is a complex phenomenon, this game can go on forever, there will always be another variable to make up explanations with, or to “discover” corrections in the raw data that make it work — no matter what the weather does.

Modern Science is just a fishing industry for post hoc Public Relations excuses for any policy you want.

It’s going to be minus 5 C (23F) in Tampa, Florida, and a lot colder in Canada. Best wishes to our friends in the Northern Hemisphere.

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Friday Open Thread

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This blogger needs your help

UPDATE: This post will remain a sticky post for a few days. New posts will appear below.

We’re in an information war against the financial monsters of the world. They’re swimming in an ocean of money. But thanks to all the independent spirits who have kept me going for years without a regular income, we fight on. Together we can expose the grifters, the sad culti, and mock their holy idols. It’s a dangerous moment in history, but as those in the gulags would have surely said, we have so many tools, and it’s a time where their sacred cows are coming undone. The pagan witchdoctors have overplayed their hand, they are vulnerable.Roman Colliseum

It is not just about the dollars, it’s an honor, and incredibly motivating to get help, big or small, from like minded souls all corners of the globe. It’s been an absolute delight to connect with so many good people who think for themselves, who will not submit, and who recognize the threat from the parasites in the system.

Never surrender

Please hit the tip jar, buy me a beer, a steak, server space or a new hard drive.

Thanks for your contribution, no matter how big or small.

Tip Jar Button

Please send supplies via Paypal, or through direct deposit, or by snail-mail instead.

Due to ridiculous legal froufrou, donors can buy as many “units of emergency chocolate” as they can spare in AUD, CAD, EUR, GBP, NZD or USD. Or send help via  NAB Account BSB: 086420 Number:563148308 and International transfer.

Suggestions welcome for other supply routes.

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Thursday Open Thread

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Former head of Australian Medical Association suffered devastating vaccine effects: says Doctors are being silenced

By Jo Nova

A turning point maybe?

One of the top doctors in Australia Dr Kerryn Phelps — a familiar face on the news here, has come out saying that she has suffered “devastating” side effects from the Covid vaccines herself. She also says that her doctors are seeing ” ‘a lot’ of patients in a similar situation, but they are afraid to talk about it for fear of being de-registered and losing their career.

Phelps is also a bit of a darling of the left, a successful woman, married to another woman, who ran for Parliament and briefly served with a pro-climate-change agenda in a wealthy seat. It’s possible her words will give a voice to those on the other half of the political spectrum who may have said nothing or not even realized the symptoms they suffer are an adverse reaction to the vaccine. Lights may be switching on. Will it spark a wave of discussion among the left leaning? There has always been a core group of people suspicious of vaccination on the left. What if the left and right ends of the spectrum met in the middle, and realized that the real battle is The People versus Corrupt Government Agencies?

If that happens, it would strike fear into the hearts of those who signed away our rights and told us the vaccines were “safe and effective”. The idea of the left and right uniting in one joint protest is a nuclear event in politics.

Naturally, the legacy press is working hard to stop that — see the Sydney Morning Herald’s headline: “Not anti-vaxxers: Dr Kerryn Phelps says she suffered COVID vaccine injury, calls for more research.So left leaning people who waited 18 months to talk about vaccine reactions are “people”, but those who bravely said the same things months ago are just “anti-vaxxers”.

As it happens, sadly, her wife Jackie Stricker-Phelps also suffered a bad vaccine reaction and it’s another scandal altogether that we have no idea of how many other people suffered side effects too. Any Minister of Health or Head of the TGA who cared about the health of Australians would have set up active surveillance programs and encouraged doctors to speak freely.

It’s good that she is risking her reputation to speak out now, but where was she a year ago? Lives have been lost because influential people said nothing.

Dr Kerryn Phelps reveals ‘devastating’ Covid vaccine injury, says doctors have been ‘censored’

Frank Chung, News.com

Former federal MP Dr Kerryn Phelps has revealed she and her wife both suffered serious and ongoing injures from Covid vaccines, while suggesting the true rate of adverse events is far higher than acknowledged due to underreporting and “threats” from medical regulators.

In an explosive submission to Parliament’s Long Covid inquiry, the former Australian Medical Association (AMA) president has broken her silence about the “devastating” experience — emerging as the most prominent public health figure in the country to speak up about the taboo subject.

“I continue to observe the devastating effects a year-and-a-half later with the addition of fatigue and additional neurological symptoms including nerve pains, altered sense of smell, visual disturbance and musculoskeletal inflammation. The diagnosis and causation has been confirmed by several specialists who have told me that they have seen ‘a lot’ of patients in a similar situation.”

“In my case the injury resulted in dysautonomia with intermittent fevers and cardiovascular implications including breathlessness, inappropriate sinus tachycardia and blood pressure fluctuations.”

Why do we have a TGA?

Dr Phelps said both reactions were reported to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) “but never followed up”. She revealed she had spoken with other doctors “who have themselves experienced a serious and persistent adverse event” but that “vaccine injury is a subject that few in the medical profession have wanted to talk about”.

Is the TGA protecting Australians or the Pharmaceutical industry?

Phelps speculates that 1 in 3000 adult Australians may have had a serious reaction to each Covid vaccine, so after 3 doses, that’s 1 in 1000 and rising with every booster.

Earlier this year, Dr Rado Faletic — who previously spoke out about his battle with the TGA — launched Australian advocacy group Coverse to provide support and collect testimony from those suffering vaccine injuries.

Well, they would say that:

AHPRA said in a statement that the regulator had “been clear in all of our guidance about Covid-19 vaccinations that we expect medical practitioners to use their professional judgement and the best available evidence in their practice”.

Which is patently ridiculous. I personally know at least one doctor that was forced out of a long career due to AHPRA. Then there are stories like Dr Mark Hobart and Dr Paul Osterhuis. It only takes a few deregistrations to silence 99.9% of doctors.

As Flat White at The Spectator says, it’s all there in writing: Doctors are gagged

The medical system in Australia has been fundamentally broken by the introduction of changes to the Health Practitioner National Law – first by the Queensland Labor Party and soon to be copied everywhere – to effectively gag doctors and medical professionals, threatening them with deregistration if they question the official government health advice. In addition, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency also warned that doctors caught ‘undermining’ Covid vaccines or the government rollout at the beginning of the pandemic would ‘face consequences’.

This is not an exaggeration. AHPRA’s statement to the profession in March of 2021 – which still stands – reads:

There is no place for anti-vaccination messages in professional health practice and any promotion of anti-vaccination claims including on social media, and advertising may be subject to regulatory action.

Keep reading  →

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Wednesday Open Thread

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13 US States warn that giant climate activists funds are buying up public utilities

BlackRock logo

By Jo Nova

Move over divestment and boycott  — and move in activist shareholders wielding other people’s money. After naive shareholders sold out, they didn’t have much influence over a company.  But if they bought enough shares instead, they could practically run the place.

Good people left their money unguarded in pension plans and it came to be used against them.

The three largest asset managers in the world are BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. They swept up the retirement money left unwatched in accounts Big-Government forced everyone to have.  The Big Three now manage $20 trillion dollars combined. They also happen to want to end fossil fuel use and save the world — because they are nice people, right. So we face the dilemma — The citizens rejected NetZero, but the citizen’s money gives the power to men like Larry Fink, head of Blackrock, to harrass the boards of oil and energy companies in order to get NetZero through the back door.

To appreciate how influential these monster funds are, ponder that they are the largest shareholders in nine out of ten of the S&P 500 Index companies and lately, they have been buying up US power utilities.

These funds joined the climate activist clubs (like GFANZ), and made their political ambitions clear. Despite that screaming potential conflict-of-interest, the government agency that was meant to stop this sort thing (FERC) gave special approval instead. Apparently BlackRock and Vanguard were allowed to buy as much as 20% of some public utilities if they just promised to be “passive” investors who didn’t use their shares to influence management. Who needs fences, just ask the fox not to eat the chickens OK?

Imagine if someone managing a galactic-blob of money made decisions about your energy grid, and what your electricity will  cost, and you got no say in it? Government by Oligarchs? They won’t care what your electricity bill is.

The US State governments are the best hope for the West. Last month 13 US State Attorney’s raised the alarm. Perhaps this was one of the reasons Vanguard dropped out of GFANZ?

This is how we win. But it’s just the start of this battle. This is one facet of the dark bubble driving the madness.

State AGs Sound the Alarm About BlackRock, Vanguard Buying Large Stakes in Utilities

Kevin Stocklin,  Epoch Times

Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman says he doesn’t want Larry Fink to ‘be my emperor’

The acquisition by investment managers BlackRock and Vanguard of ever-increasing shares in America’s public utility companies is setting off alarm bells from conservatives and progressives alike.

In November, 13 state attorneys general petitioned FERC to deny Vanguard’s request. Claiming that residents of their states could be harmed if utilities are compelled to stop using fossil fuels in favor of wind and solar power, the attorneys general argued that “Vanguard is not entitled to a blanket authorization to acquire substantial equity and voting power in utility companies.”

State Street asset fund manager. Logo.

Influence of the Big Three

“What these activists have figured out is that any radical policy that they can’t get enacted through government can be advanced through corporate America by hijacking trillions of dollars in voting rights from everyday Americans’ retirement accounts,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) stated.

The Senate report further noted that “thanks to the tremendous scale of the savings entrusted with them, the Big Three together cast around one-quarter of all votes at shareholder meetings of most S&P 500 companies …

“These targets come out of the Paris Accord, which couldn’t even get passed through a Democratic Senate,” Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, told The Epoch Times. “Voters have rejected these net-zero by 2050 goals over and over again. So now we’re seeing this, in my opinion, illegitimate attempt to use corporate America to push these goals.”

Read it all at The Epoch Times.

See also:

The dark bubble: There’s a reason everything seems to be going off the rails simultaneously

Photo: Photo by eflon on Flickr. Adapted. CC by 2.0.

Photo: State Street website.

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