Highlighted Article: A Victim of the Climate Wars: A Warning from the U.K.

From: National Review

By: Andrew Stuttaford

Date: December 31, 2021

A Victim of the Climate Wars: A Warning from the U.K.

"Shell’s decision to pull out of the Cambo North Sea oilfield-development project in early December — which could have also provided enough natural gas for 1.5 million homes for a year — may not seem like something that should concern Americans. Check a little more closely, though, and this grim tale begins to look a lot like an example of how our own oil and gas production is going to be — or is already starting to be — constrained, not necessarily by legislation but by a combination of regulatory overreach, activist agitation, and the increasingly malevolent influence of financial institutions. Many of those in the last group on that list are major institutional investors out to advance a socio-political agenda unconnected, whatever they may claim, to the generation of financial return for their clients. This agenda is often sold under the guise of “socially responsible investing” (SRI), and particularly these days, as “ESG,” a peculiarly virulent variant of SRI under which actual or prospective investments are not only assessed for the money they might make but also for how they score against certain environmental, social, and, much more reasonably, governance benchmarks.

In other instances, the pressure will be from banks, unwilling to help fund fossil-fuel projects that may cause them difficulty with activists, ESG-touting institutional investors, and, before too long, regulators, specifically central banks citing “climate risk.” That this risk is illusory doesn’t matter; that the illusion is useful does. It should be stressed that “illusory” refers not to the question of climate change but to the danger it might pose to our lending institutions.

Economist John Cochrane addressed this issue in a recent article for Capital Matters. Here is an extract:" ...

A Victim of the Climate Wars: A Warning from the U.K.