Risk of Green Backlash
April 26, 2023
Australia may be in danger of facing a US-style backlash against environmental, social and governance activism, particularly around climate change.
By Glenda Korporaal
Note, ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance.
Australia may be in danger of facing a US-style backlash against environmental, social and governance activism, particularly around climate change, the chief executive of the Responsible Investment Association has warned.
Simon O’Connor said there was increasing politicisation of ESG activism in the US, with President Joe Biden last month forced to use his first ever presidential veto to reject a Republican proposal to prevent pension fund managers basing investment decisions on factors like climate change.
He said Republican politicians were complaining that ESG issues were being used by investors to put pressure on companies to pursue their own political agendas
“We see there is a risk of some contagion or spill-over into this market,” he said in an interview with The Australian.
“Whether intentionally or otherwise, there seems to be an attempt to drive a political or an ideological agenda.”
He said this was increasingly the case with climate change where there were “some examples of polarisation” in Australia around how companies responded to climate change.
He said moves against proxy advisers by the Morrison government and Senate inquiries into whether the financial service sector should be able to exclude fossil fuels in their lending practices were some other examples of this.
He said the performance test for superannuation funds could discourage them from investing in the transition towards green energy.
The chief executive of the Australian Shareholders’ Association, Rachel Waterhouse, said there had been criticism of some activist groups raising issues at annual meetings in Australia.
“We have not yet seen a backlash against ESG issues here yet, but like most areas the investment world often follows US trends,” she said.
“We have been seeing criticism of activist investors, with some arguing that they are not seeking to speak on behalf of retail investors but are distracting investor meetings with their preferred topics.”
Chair of the UN Global Compact Fiona Reynolds, who will speak at the Association’s conference next month, said ESG issues were “now getting caught up in the culture wars in the United States and have been labelled ‘woke capitalism’.”
“The forces are growing,” she said. “President Biden in March this year had to use the first veto of his presidency to reject a Republican bill when the US Senate sought to overturn a US
Department of Labor bill that made it clear that US investors could consider ESG issues when making investment decisions.
“It is also caught up in the big business of lobbying in the United States. This is a very difficult issue for many large fund managers, particularly those who are headquartered in the United States.
“On the one hand fund managers there are being told by their European clients that they will only give mandates to those managers who have an understanding and ability to consider ESG factors in their investment decisions and on the other hand, they have Republican law makers telling them, you can’t manage money for our state or our state pension fund if you do consider ESG issues.”
She said there had been attempts by conservative governments to stop ESG investments in Australia over the past 10 years.
The Professor of Political Science at the University of Melbourne, Timothy Lynch, who will speak at the conference, said resistance to ESG, particularly in the US, was being “driven by conservative concerns that the project is woke, green, virtue signalling etc.”
He said proponents of ESG should not pitch their proposed measures as being about changing the world but about returning profit to shareholders.
“ESG in Australia cannot survive if it does not deliver investor returns – measured in bank balances rather than woke feel-goodism,” he said.
EY’s Oceania Partner, Climate Change and Sustainability Services, Emma Herd, said investors had been “watching events unfolding in the US with concern”.
But she said there was “no desire to import the politicisation of investment mandates into Australia.”
She said ESG was being seen in Australia as a means of managing risk and return, and not seen as pushing political agendas.
“There are really significant trends like decarbonisation and housing affordability which are clearly having a market impact with significant implications for company profitability,” she said.
She said superannuation funds were “hearing from their members that they want more information on where their retirement savings are going and the impact it is having.”
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My observation of WOKE INVESTMENTS in Australia, is already here and extremely active. Andrew “Twiggiest” Forrest is the leader of the pact, with his bloated FMG cash, going all out on Hydrogen, Wind and Solar.
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Greenpeace co-founder, Dr. Patrick Moore, on the multi-billion dollar “climate crisis” fear porn industry:
“The activists, the media, the politicians and the scientists on serial government grants, have huge skin in the game. They’re making their living from this, so they want us to believe their scare stories.”
They used to call it global warming then they changed it to climate change as calling it climate change would give them the ability to blame every single previously normal weather event on it.
Warm? Climate change.
Cold? Climate change
Rain? Climate change
Sunny? Climate change
Drought? Climate change
Flood? Climate change
Heart disease? Climate change
Cancer? Climate change
But what it really should be called is a wealth transfer and a power grab.
The “Climate Crisis” was started by a criminal!
The “Climate Crisis” is the greatest fraud ever perpetuated on the world and Australians.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was started by a criminal yet this is who governments point to for justification of country destroying climate policies.
The question is, are the people who go along with the scam fools, or complicit?
Are the Greens patsies and fools, or are they complicit in fraud? They’re claiming an escalating climate emergency—a climate breakdown. Here we go again, with no data to back it up. We know that the Greens have never provided any empirical scientific evidence or logical scientific points to back up their assertion of an escalating climate emergency.
Senator Roberts challenged Senator Waters to a debate in public in 2010—13 years ago—and she still will not debate the topic of CLIMATE CHANGE.
Did we know that Greta Thunberg, who did not finish high school, was just given earlier this year an honorary doctorate in theology by the University of Helsinki? It’s a religion, this climate stuff, and the great god is the United Nations. Did we elect the United Nations Secretary-General to run our country? No. I didn’t. They’ve never been elected.
Let’s have a look at the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. The first, in 1990, was built on fraud, but even that showed that the medieval warming period was warmer than today’s temperatures. That was quickly whipped out of the United Nations next report, in 1995. The scientists gathered under the UN banner said there was no evidence of warming due to human production of carbon dioxide. Yet Ben Santer, one of the scientists, went in and changed that report and presented it in 1995 based on a fraud.
In 2001, 2007, 2013 and 2020 there were reports by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Let’s look at chapter 12. In each of those reports there was only one sole chapter claiming warming and attributing it to carbon dioxide from human activity. In 2001 it was chapter 12. In 2007 it was chapter 9. In 2013 it was chapter 10. Not one of those reports’ sole chapters claiming warming and attributing it to human carbon dioxide contains any evidence for that claim. It’s the same in 2020.
Let’s have a look at the basis of this United Nations report. Maurice Strong was a crook. He died in 2015 after returning from self-imposed exile in China.
Maurice Strong started the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a political tool to get his way for his objectives globally. Maurice Strong started the Chicago Climate Exchange. He was a director of the Chicago Climate Exchange. He sought to make billions of dollars of profit from the Chicago Climate Exchange. He was then pursued for the oil-for-food scandal in the United Nations—complicit; another scandal in the United Nations. He was also wanted by American law-enforcement agencies for serious crimes in the United States, including one very big crime in western United States. He fled in exile. He’s a crook!
That’s what the Greens are basing their policies on. That’s what the Labor Party is basing its policies on. These policies that are destroying everyday Australians’ lives economically, socially, mentally and morally are based upon a crook, and Labor and Greens have fallen for it. What’s more, you’re now getting the people of Australia to pay for it. That is inhuman, it’s irresponsible and it’s dishonest. Are the Greens guilty of fraud or are they simply patsies and fools?
I note that China produces 4.5 billion tonnes of coal and gets more of our coal, while we’re not allowed to use the 500 million tonnes that we produce in this country. They produce nine times as much and yet they have got no agreement for 2050 net zero.
Reference Senator Malcom Roberts parliamentary speech in March 2023
Climate Change Interview – Goes Wrong
How Indiana Jones made history cool again
Actors Harrison Ford and Shia LaBeouf in scene from 2008 film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Ford and his character have helped make the humanities cool again.
- By Peter Frankopan
- 3:00PM March 31, 2023
Short of being chosen to play in the Ashes, I am not sure there is a better job in the world than being a historian – especially today. It used to be the case that people thought historians spend all their time lurking in dark corners of libraries, blowing dust off books no one has read, perhaps in a language few people can understand, and then writing a book that was so highbrow and learned that few would – or could – read. Then along came Indiana Jones, who helped make history (and archaeology) exciting and thrilling to wide audiences. One or two of my colleagues will complain about how Indiana Jones did not follow best practice when it came to handling cultural artefacts and how he insisted on expropriating objects into Western museum collections – sometimes stacked inside a secret warehouse. But most of us are thankful to Harrison Ford for helping to make our discipline feel like an adventure. Even when confined to those libraries, an adventure is what it is: it is a privilege, of course, to spend one’s time poring over texts and objects of whatever period and trying to come up with new ways to think about those who have gone before us. Yet in today’s world dear Indy would have struggled to contain his excitement at the new frontiers in historical research and the new ways to look into the past. Climate laws must not undo our good relations Many of these avenues have opened thanks to advances in the sciences. Genomic data allows us to understand human migration in past periods of history, producing revolutionary insights that can be accurately measured with hard evidence. For example, haplotypes – sets of genetic variants that can be inherited – reveal linkages between population groups in India, Siberia, Central Europe and Scandinavia. Analysis of the phylogenetic tree of yersinia pestis, the bacterium that carries plague, shows that the disease suddenly diverged into four branches shortly before the outbreak of the Black Death that devastated Europe and the Middle East in the first half of the 14th century – and may in fact have also proved catastrophic in China and West Africa, two regions historians believed had been spared from disaster. Many of these new materials are drawn from the natural world and allow us to reconstruct past climates and show how the environment has changed. Tree ring data allows us to see where, when and by how much rainfall levels changed over time. Bristlecone pines can show significant temperature changes – something that can sometimes be linked to volcanic eruptions that brought about sharp drops in temperature. Fossilised pollen provides clues as to uses and changes in vegetation, which can in turn give insights into human behaviour — or lack of it. Data from ice-cores in Greenland, glaciers and the Antarctic show air bubbles trapped in the past that reveal changes in carbon dioxide levels, not only since the start of the industrial revolution which marked a shift in fossil fuel emissions but also thousands, tens of thousands and even millions of years ago – including many times when the atmospheric conditions would not have allowed our own species to survive, let alone flourish. These new tools are extraordinarily important, though not without problems. For one thing, historians must not only specialise in the humanities but also develop scientific and mathematical skills to understand and evaluate the new sources they are looking at. That means revising the antiquated way we think about education, both at secondary school and university level, where subjects are cleaved into silos, with no obvious link between them. For future historians, working on the past will be about integrating biological and plant sciences as much as it will be about reading dusty old texts.
We are living through a golden age of historical opportunities, writes Peter Frankopan. And the results are thrilling. Looking back 40,000 years, we can measure an episode that is known as the Laschamps Excursion, which saw simultaneous shifts of precipitation and wind patterns in the Pacific and Southern Ocean, a sharp decline in the strength of earth’s magnetic field and a spell of unstable solar activity that included multiple massive flares that also affected global weather patterns. The resulting glacial expansions in the Andes and acidification in Australia were so profound they led to the wholesale extinction of large animals. Or there are the changes to the land mass of what is now Australia at the end of a period called “the Last Glacial Maximum” during which around a quarter of the world’s land area was covered with glaciers, and global sea levels were more than 120m lower than they are today. As conditions warmed, ice melted and ocean levels rose. New research funded by the Australian Research Council using predictive models, satellite imagery, acoustic surveys and topographic and bathymetric LIDAR has revealed multiple human settlements 160km from the current coastline which had to be abandoned as sea levels rose – covering around two million square kilometres of land in the process. Likewise, we can identify major changes to population sizes as well as changes to lifestyles and lifeways by hunter-gatherers across continental Australia around 1000 years ago that correlate with higher levels of water and food availability – both of which offered humans new opportunities to engage with the natural environment and each other. We are living through a golden age of historical opportunities that do not require the survival skills and sheer good luck of Indiana Jones to grasp. New evidence allows us to rethink the American Declaration of Independence that was not just about those living in the US wanting to be involved in the political process but was also linked to a series of terrible hurricane seasons that left Spanish and French colonies in the Caribbean severely weakened – and created once in a lifetime opportunities for wealthy elites in Philadelphia and elsewhere whose hands were tied by London’s rivalries with Spain and France. We can consider fresh ways of understanding the extraordinary rise of a series of empires that blossomed across South and South East Asia in the Middle Ages, a time of benign conditions for trade and food production – conditions which were optimal too for the deliberate and systematic exploration of Polynesia and beyond in exactly the same period. And we can suggest fresh insights for the ways that societies react to climatic stress that can stem from sudden events – such as volcanic eruptions – or from anomalies or unusually strong differences in the El Nino – Southern Oscillation cycle of alternating warm El Nino and cold La Nina events which is the dominant year-to-year climate signal on earth. One good example of this comes at the very end of the 1780s, when climatic context is vital to fully understand everything from the rise of the Zulu kingdom to the causes of the French revolution, from the annexation of Crimea by Catherine the Great of Russia to the socio-economic paralysis of Egypt, from the blossoming of British industry to the European settlement of Australia.
Expansion of farming, and of beef and palm oil in particular, has resulted in tens of millions of hectares of forest being cut down. Climate shifts, however, are only part of the story. So too are the ways in which our species has engaged with the natural world and reshaped it to suit our own needs. In some cases, this was done brutally and with a sense of triumphalism: “Man Must Conquer Nature” was one slogan coined by Mao to drive forward the industrialisation program of China to transform the country from an agrarian economy into an economic powerhouse. Similar epic processes of transformation of the landscape have taken place elsewhere. Expansion of farming, and of beef and palm oil in particular, has resulted in tens of millions of hectares of forest being cut down around the world in recent decades, with South East Asia alone losing three million hectares a year since the start of this century, while forest fires in 2021 resulted in the equivalent of 10 football pitches being lost per minute. The way we have consumed energy through burning fossil fuels has not only affected the atmosphere and accelerated global warming but has profoundly affected air quality – and with it health outcomes. Almost the entire population (99.9 per cent) of South East Asia breathe air that is below the guidelines set as safe by the World Health Organisation, which means that life expectancy is 1½ years lower than it would otherwise be. Or there are the by-products of our consumption patterns, with one study published earlier this month estimating there are 170 trillion plastic particles afloat in the world’s oceans – following other studies in recent years that have shown the presence of microplastics in the placentas of pregnant mothers, in the stools of infant children and in all human blood. And that of course is why perspective is so important: discoveries about the past are thrilling, especially when they come from breakthroughs that are in themselves a set of new superpowers. The flipside is that these tools also serve to sharpen the picture of the world around us – one that is being transformed in front of our eyes. Biodiversity loss is taking place faster than in the five previous mass extinctions that served to make the planet into the place we call our home. That should provide plenty of food for thought, as well as a challenge that might even defeat Indiana Jones. Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University. His new book, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History is published by Bloomsbury. Peter Frankopan will be a guest at Sydney Writers Festival in May