human actions, global climate change, global human solutions
POSTED BY: 1kiki
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 19:38
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Altho it comes from ZH, the article heavily links original source material (ie. Bloomberg etc). I've only included two links. If you want to backtrack to all of the original articles, you'll have to go to ZH.
Quote:
Green Bubble Burst: US ESG Fund Closures In 2023 Surpass Total Of Previous Three Years
Friday, Sep 22, 2023 - 03:55 AM
For years, green and socially responsible investments, aka ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), have dominated the investing world. However, according to Bloomberg, a seismic shift is underway as BlackRock and other money managers unwound an increasing number of 'green' products amid soaring backlash and investor scrutiny.
Data from Morningstar shows State Street, Columbia Threadneedle Investments, Janus Henderson Group, and Hartford Funds Management Group have unwound more than two dozen ESG funds this year. The latest unwind comes from BlackRock, who told regulators last Friday it plans to close two ESG emerging-market bond funds with total assets of $55 million.
Source: Bloomberg
So far this year, the number of ESG funds closing is more than the last three years combined. This trend comes as investors pull money out of these funds as the ESG bubble has likely popped.
We asked this question in early summer: Is The ESG Investing Boom Already Over?
In January, BlackRock's Larry Fink told Bloomberg TV at the World Economic Forum in Davos that ESG investing has been tarnished:
"Let's be clear, the narrative is ugly, the narrative is creating this huge polarization. "
Fink continued:
"We are trying to address the misconceptions. It's hard because it's not business any more, they're doing it in a personal way. And for the first time in my professional career, attacks are now personal. They're trying to demonize the issues."
By June, Fink's BlackRock dropped the term "ESG" https://www.axios.com/2023/06/26/larry-fink-ashamed-esg-weaponized-des
antis following billions of dollars pulled out of its funds by Republican governors, most notably, $2 billion by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The crux of the issue that Republican lawmakers have with radical ESG funds is that they were trying to impose 'green' initiatives on the corporate level to force change in society, and many of these initiatives would be widely unpopular at the ballot box during elections.
Remember these comments from Fink?
Alyssa Stankiewicz, associate director for sustainability research at Morningstar, told Bloomberg, "We have definitely seen demand drop off in 2022 and 2023."
Also, let's not forget about the 'greenwashing' across ESG industry.
Matt Lawton, T. Rowe Price Group Inc.'s sector portfolio manager in the Fixed Income Division, recently concluded: "It's becoming increasingly difficult to find credible sustainability-linked bonds."
The tide is reversing for Fink: "Backfire: World's Fourth Largest Iron Ore Producer Stops Purchasing Carbon Offsets."
Don't forget this: "McDonald's Scrubs Mentions Of "ESG" From Its Website."
Oops, Mr. Fink.
To be clear, closing funds worth a total of $55 million in the grand scheme of things is penny ante stuff. I would need to know how much $ is in "ESG" to know whether this is a significant trend or not.
And removing "ESG" from a fund's name, or from a company website, doesn't necessarily mean a change in policy. But IMHO, unless you're running carbon credits as a SCAM (i.e. selling carbon credits that simply don't exist), it is unlikely to ever be a money-maker. Removing or reducing CO2 is usually a cost, not a source of revenue.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."
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A previous article on BlackRock and ESG. I've included one important link, but if you want to backtrack to the original sources and also see the chart you'll have to go to ZH.
Quote:
BlackRock CEO Drops "ESG" Term After Blowback
Monday, Jun 26, 2023 - 07:00 PM
On Sunday, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink revealed at the Aspen Ideas Festival that he had abandoned the term "ESG" (environment, social, and governance) because it has been highly politicized and even "weaponized," and he is "ashamed" to be part of the debate, according to Axios.
Fink acknowledged at the event that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' decision to yank $2 billion in assets hurt his firm. Gov. DeSantis pulled state assets managed by the world's largest money manager in late 2022 over "woke" capitalism policies.
Lawmakers from red states have called out BlackRock for its toxic woke capitalism push in corporate America. Besides Florida, states like Louisiana, South Carolina, Utah, Arkansas, West Virginia, Missouri, and Texas have withdrawn funds from the asset manager.
Recall Fink was very nervous earlier this year over the 'demonization' of ESG.
Source: Bloomberg
Last month, seventeen Republican state attorneys filed a motion with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to dispute whether BlackRock could purchase more than $10 million voting stakes in utility companies.
"These elitists are trying to impose restrictions [i.e. decarbonization] on energy companies and utilities that would never win approval at the ballot box.
"Their schemes could raise utility bills for regular Americans, including elderly Hoosiers on fixed incomes, and they could diminish the value of their investment accounts," Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said in a statement last month.
Fink, 70, said he was "ashamed of being part of this conversation," adding:
"When I write these [investment] letters, it was never meant to be a political statement. … They were written to identify longterm issues to our longterm investors."
Of course, that's nonsense. Fink has been at the center of pushing 'climate change' policies and has even said his company would "force behaviors" on corporate America.
And then there's this...
Video: Blackrock CEO Larry Fink: "Markets don't like uncertainty, markets like actually totalitarian governments... the whole dimension is changing with the deomcratization of governments ... "
https://twitter.com/i/status/1673042281652166657
Axios said at the event:
When pressed on the statement later in the conversation, Fink backtracked.
"I never said I was ashamed," he said, incorrectly. "I'm not ashamed. I do believe in conscientious capitalism."
"I'm not going to use the word ESG because it's been misused by the far left and the far right," he added.
Fink isn't ashamed of ESG... He's furious the scheme to ram woke capitalism down corporations through voting proxies has hit a serious snag and generated serious blowback from lawmakers and average Americans.
Here are some of BlackRock's top holdings...
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/blackrock-ceo-drops-esg-term-after-b
lowback
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
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A climate scientist on how to recognize the new climate change denial
Delay, deflect, downplay, and other ways fossil fuel companies block climate action.
What do you call it if it’s not climate denialism anymore? What are we facing now?
So there are other D-words. There’s delay. There’s division. Get climate advocates fighting with each other about, like, whether they’re vegans or not or whether they drive a car or not. Get climate advocates fighting with each other so you divide and conquer the movement. That’s division. Delay: “Oh, look, we can fix the problem with geoengineering, with carbon capture down the road. Trust us, we’ll be able to fix it.” So “let us continue to burn fossil fuels now. We will fix it later.” Delay. And that’s what they want. They want people disengaged on the sidelines rather than on the front lines. We see these tactics literally playing out today.
There’s an article that just recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal detailing how Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil, who had been lauded as the next generation of Exxon leadership — he was not a climate denier. He accepted that climate change is real — there was a real effort by Tillerson and ExxonMobil at that time to present this public face of climate acceptance — because it had already become difficult to deny it was happening. People understood it was happening. It wasn’t credible to deny it. And so it was, “Yes, we accept the science,” but the D-word here is downplaying. And in the article, the Wall Street Journal makes it very clear, based on internal documents that show a different side of ExxonMobil and Rex Tillerson, that they were actively campaigning to downplay the detrimental impacts of the climate crisis while playing up techno fixes like geoengineering. In fact, Rex Tillerson was quoted saying that climate change is an engineering problem.
The idea here is, look, we can continue to extract and burn and sell and burn fossil fuels because we have all these techno fixes, other things that we can do to the climate system: trying to offset the warming by shooting particles into the stratosphere that reflect sunlight or dumping iron into the ocean to fertilize the algae that will take up the carbon dioxide, take it out of the atmosphere. Or massive carbon capture, we’ll just suck the CO2 back out of the atmosphere. That can’t be very hard, right? Well, actually, no. It’s really expensive and really difficult to do. And so [there are] these very elaborate schemes to try to somehow put the genie back in the bottle rather than the obvious solution, which is to keep the genie in the bottle in the first place.
By which you mean what?
Not extracting and burning fossil carbon and putting it into the atmosphere.
Deflection remains one of the key tactics of the fossil fuel industry. And a lot of good people have fallen victim to it. A lot of environmentalists will tell you, yeah, the solution is just us decreasing our carbon footprint. “You need to become a vegan, you can’t have children, you shouldn’t fly.” Ironically, that framing helps the fossil fuel industry even more because it plays to this notion on the right that climate action is about controlling people’s intimate lives (food, children, vacation).
The fossil fuel industry does not want you to switch to a green source of energy instead of burning fossil fuel. The industry wants you only to think of what you will lose if you stop using all forms of energy.
More at https://www.vox.com/climate/23885799/climate-change-denial-fossil-fuel
-companies-exxon-mobil
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:Most people will wait until green energy is cheaper than fossil fuel energy before they will switch. At the same time, the cost of ruining the world will never factor into their calculation of when to switch because they will demand to know just how much the ruining will cost themselves, personally. And they will want that cost to be accurate within $1.00. It is impossible to get such people to think about all the garbage, the hundreds of tons of CO2, they personally put into the atmosphere during their lifetime. They will refuse to pay for removing their hundreds of tons of old garbage. Let some future generation do the work and pay for it. The Signyms of this world are not paying and nobody can convince them to change their minds.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
No, I'm merely pointing out that your fatuous statement about "we must capture carbon dioxide at TEN TIMES THE RATE at which it was emitted" was based entirely on... NOTHING.
*****
"We must capture carbon dioxide at ten times the rate it was emitted in order to
...reach pre-industrial levels of atmospheric CO2 in 30 years???
... avoid exceeding the threshold of increasing average global temperature more than 2degC in 15 years???
... make my investment in carbon capture technology profitable??
*****
I mean, WHAT? Apparently even YOU don't know!
Silly, silly man.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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“OK, did I go to China just to make a video about high-speed rail? Yes,” Barber told his 830,000 followers. “But I’m a firm believer in [the fact that] you shouldn’t say something is good and works until you try it out. And after trying out high-speed rail, this is the greatest way to travel, ever.”
“I want this in Canada,” Barber concluded. “This is the way to go.”
Not only are China’s high-speed trains convenient, comfortable, and incredibly fast, but they are also much healthier for our planet than forcing people to get everywhere by driving cars. (And, of course, infinitely more environmentally friendly than air travel.)
China’s high-speed trains are powered mainly by electricity derived from clean energy sources and can transport large numbers of people at a time.
Barber’s followers were suitably impressed by his journey.
“The fact that Canada and [the] USA don’t have this blows my mind,” one commenter wrote.
“Oil companies lobbying the government probably won’t let that happen,” wrote another.
More at https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/high-speed-rail-china-train/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The Biden Administration’s Next Big Climate Decision
The liquefied-natural-gas buildout — and fossil-fuel exports — challenge progress on global warming.
By Bill McKibben, September 22, 2023
It’s the greatest L.N.G. boom in history, a feat that is all the more remarkable given that U.S. oil-and-gas exports were essentially nil before 2016, when, just days after the Paris climate negotiations ended, congressional Democrats agreed to end the forty-year ban on selling American oil abroad in exchange for extending solar- and wind-energy-industry tax credits in an omnibus spending bill. The first large-scale L.N.G. exports began in 2016; Vladimir Putin provided a rationale for backing increased exports when he launched his attack on Ukraine in 2022 and turned down the gas tap for Europe. The U.S. and others met the challenge, exporting fifty-six billion cubic metres to the European Union last year; the Biden Administration has promised another fifty billion this winter. Projects like C.P.2, though, won’t be done for at least three years, by which time the geopolitical reasoning will presumably have faded, but the infrastructure will linger for decades. The U.S. has now surpassed Russia and Qatar to become the single largest exporter of L.N.G. in the world.
And that’s just the beginning. A new report published last week (I helped present the data at a press conference) showed that more than a third of increases in oil and gas production between now and 2035 is slated to come from the U.S. alone—the authors, who work for the research and advocacy group Oil Change International, based in Washington, D.C., said that this will make the United States the “Planet Wrecker in Chief.” If that sounds odd, given the level of climate action underway since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, in the summer of 2022, you need to consider the artificial distinction that the world draws between domestic and foreign emissions. It’s a kind of math problem, though not a very hard one.
President Biden has said that he will cut U.S. emissions in half from 2005 levels by 2030; the huge investments in electric vehicles, wind turbines, and the like under the I.R.A. should accomplish a significant fraction of that task. But, at the same time, the Administration has overseen the continued ramp-up of fossil-fuel exports. (Venture Global alone is planning to produce a hundred million metric tons of L.N.G. a year.) The emissions from all that gas don’t officially “count” against the U.S.’s total, because it will be burned elsewhere, and under rules set by the United Nations the country of combustion, not production, is on the hook for it. But the atmosphere doesn’t care where fossil fuel is burned; the resulting carbon dioxide mixes quickly into the atmosphere and raises temperatures everywhere. And, if those emissions are added “into our footprint,” the analyst Jeremy Symons told me recently, “our total emissions in 2030 will be roughly the same as in 2005.” The rules constitute, he said, “the greatest shell game in the history of the world. We’re so focused on domestic emissions that we’ve missed entirely what’s going on with exports.”
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20230923121443/https://www.newyorker.com/n
ews/daily-comment/the-biden-administrations-next-big-climate-decision
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
No, I'm merely pointing out that your fatuous statement about "we must capture carbon dioxide at TEN TIMES THE RATE at which it was emitted" was based entirely on... NOTHING.
*****
"We must capture carbon dioxide at ten times the rate it was emitted in order to
...reach pre-industrial levels of atmospheric CO2 in 30 years???
... avoid exceeding the threshold of increasing average global temperature more than 2degC in 15 years???
... make my investment in carbon capture technology profitable??
*****
I mean, WHAT? Apparently even YOU don't know!
Silly, silly man.
SECOND: Most people will wait until green energy is blah blah blah blah
..
What does this have to do with your incredibly stupid statement?
Oh, NOTHING, you say??
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
FUN FACT: Wind Turbine blades are 100% non-recyclable, consisting each of 35 tonnes of plastic and fiberglass which are either thrown into a landfill to be somebody else's problem another day, or are incinerated, which not only is bad news for future CO2 emissions, but as a bonus are going to end up adding to the insane amount of microplastics that you already have coating the inside of your lungs and are already found littering pretty much every cell in your body.
As of 2022, we have a recorded total of 70,800 wind turbines in the US alone, each consisting of 3 blades.
So, not including all of the blades that have already been buried or burned, we have a combined total of 14,868,000,000 lbs of non-recyclable future waste product that's mostly going to end up in your lungs and contribute to global warming once they reach the end of their life cycle.
Oh... and don't forget that every single tonne of glass fibers produced in the first place results in a carbon footprint of approximately 1.7-2.2 tonnes. So, not including the blades we've already buried or burned, the blades on the existing 70,800 wind turbines currently active in America alone required us to put 12,637,800 to 16,354,800 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere before they even made their first rotation.
Clean energy indeed!
Well boys...
Smoke if you got 'em!
Sources:
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/can-wind-turbine
-blades-be-recycled
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-many-turbines-are-contained-us-wind-turb
ine-database
https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyNET.exe/30003WOK.TXT?ZyActionD=ZyDocument&
amp;Client=EPA&Index=1991+Thru+1994&Docs=&Query=&Time=&EndTime=&SearchMethod=1&TocRestrict=n&Toc=&TocEntry=&QField=&QFieldYear=&QFieldMonth=&QFieldDay=&IntQFieldOp=0&ExtQFieldOp=0&XmlQuery=&File=D%3A%5Czyfiles%5CIndex%20Data%5C91thru94%5CTxt%5C00000009%5C30003WOK.txt&User=ANONYMOUS&Password=anonymous&SortMethod=h%7C-&MaximumDocuments=1&FuzzyDegree=0&ImageQuality=r75g8/r75g8/x150y150g16/i425&Display=hpfr&DefSeekPage=x&SearchBack=ZyActionL&Back=ZyActionS&BackDesc=Results%20page&MaximumPages=1&ZyEntry=1&SeekPage=x&ZyPURL
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-sustainable-sustainablemodern-const
ruction-materials-okpara
--------------------------------------------------
How you do anything is how you do everything.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
FUN FACT: Wind Turbine blades are 100% non-recyclable . . .
Quote:It's as if you two are paid to be stupid by the fossil fuel industry. On the other hand, I sell the fuel but I am not responsible for what boneheads like you two do with the fuel. It is your responsibility, one which you obviously refused. You don't clean up your CO2. See this story about how a seller of natural gas convinces buyers to be irresponsible.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
What does this have to do with your incredibly stupid statement?
Oh, NOTHING, you say??
SoCal Gas spent millions on astroturf ops to fight climate rules
It's a breathtaking fraud. SoCal Gas, the largest gas company in America, spent millions secretly paying people to oppose California environmental regulations, then illegally stuck its customers with the bill. Californians were forced to pay to lobby against their own survival.
The criminal scheme is spelled out in eye-watering detail in a superb investigative report by Joe Rubin and Ari Plachta for the Sacramento Bee, which names the law firms and individual lawyers involved in the scam.
Here's the situation: SoCal Gas is California's private, regulated gas monopoly. They are allowed to lobby, but are legally required to charge their lobbying activities to their shareholders, and are prohibited from raising customer rates to pay for lobbying.
The company spent years secretly violating this rule, in the sleaziest way possible: working with corporate cartels like the California Restaurant Association and BizFed, the monopoly paid BigLaw white-shoe firms to procure people who posed as concerned citizens in order to oppose climate regulations that are essential to the state's very survival.
More at https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/19/cooking-the-books-with-gas/#reichma
n-jorgensen
Quote:
At first glance, a September 2019 meeting before the California Public Utilities Commission in Los Angeles looked like democracy in action. Speakers lined up before the state’s powerful utility regulator to debate the merits of natural gas. One by one, climate activists supported powering buildings with zero-emission appliances running on clean electricity. Burning gas in homes and businesses currently emits a quarter of the state’s carbon pollution that is worsening climate change. More than a dozen business owners followed suit, arguing instead for the preservation of gas. Their activism, however, was far from grassroots.
A concealed contract showed that the nation’s largest gas utility had paid a leading Los Angeles business association to recruit speakers against electrification, and drive them to the meeting using ratepayer money. Speaker Sassan Rahimzadeh, owner of a San Diego dry cleaning company, was recruited to attend. He told The Sacramento Bee he was troubled to learn that the arrangement was charged to customers of SoCalGas.
“As a ratepayer,” he said, “that would concern me big time.”
Read more at: https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article2
77266828.html#storylink=cpy
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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SECOND, I was merely pointing out your stupidity ("we must capture carbon dioxide at rate ten times ..blah blah blah") and your attempts to distract away from it by changing the topic. You're STILL trying to distract away from it by name-calling!
Just admit it was a boneheaded statement and move on.
And then we can start discussing your OTHER boneheaded statements!
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME