On the subject of straight talk and hard data, we note that Morgan Stanley just bailed on Mark Carney’s Net-Zero Banking Alliance. As did Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. Bloomberg blames the Republican Party. But give reality some credit. We’re not sure what they were thinking when they joined, given that corporate public relations sometimes descends almost to the level of the political kind when it comes to sincerity and plausibility. Probably some executives, even senior ones, genuinely believed it could be done and we’d all get rich in the process. Others may just have been trying to buy cheap goodwill. But we’re confident that both groups realized they’d been deceived, the former in thinking that it could be done and the latter that the goodwill would be cheap or even forthcoming. And the closer we get to those famously ambitious climate targets, the more people are going to do the math and discover that it doesn’t say what they expected or wanted it to.
According to Bloomberg, the GOP made them do it:
“The defections are playing out against a tense political backdrop in the US, as the country’s biggest financial firms find themselves the targets of Republican campaigns that have characterized net zero groups as climate cartels.”
Whereas all that was happening was corporations getting together to engage in coordinated conduct that would raise costs and prevent competition. Er, which really does constitute a dreaded “cartel” against which antitrust legislation has been enacted in the United States since John Sherman was a senator from Ohio. And he was the brother of Civil War General William T. Sherman, so we’re talking rather a long while, and for most of that time, with a First New Deal NRA time out, progressives hated giant corporations colluding to make money by changing public policy. But these are mere facts.
So, alas, is it that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. have also bailed on the NZBA, speaking of jargon. Of course the PR department keeps it up; as Bloomberg says:
“All said they remain committed to their own net zero emissions goals and to helping clients reduce their carbon footprints. ‘We will continue to report on our progress as we work towards our 2030 interim financed-emissions targets,’ Morgan Stanley said by email.”
Sure you do. It’s just that you realized that the people who wanted you to keep promises firmer than the ones you thought you’d half-made were actually serious, that they believed their beliefs, and you couldn’t possibly do it and should have been even more evasive in your commitment-like objects than you were.
We do not condemn environmental activists for being sincere. We just wish they were also sensible. But we’re happy with them being sincere that anyone who makes a promise should mean it and keep it, for instance to get to Net Zero by 2030. Though we add that anyone who realizes they made a foolish promise, one they not just should not keep but cannot, should make a sincere and complete admission of error and a change of course.
The simple truth is that vague promises of better things to come sounded good when they didn’t have to come soon. But the whole green transition is unraveling because it never was workable, wasn’t properly thought through, and is now colliding with the brick walls of physics and economics.
P.S. Bloomberg also says “Daniel Storey, a spokesperson for NZBA, declined to comment.” Possibly because any comment fit for the occasion would have been unfit to print.
One more tidbit of dirt against the heir apparent to Trudeau along with recent photos emerging showing Carney along side Ghislaine Maxwell (I know, not climate related but anything Carney is climate hysteria related).