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The Real Threat to Banks Isn’t From Climate Change. It’s From Bankers.

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Over the last two years, some of the world’s most powerful and influential bankers and investors have argued that climate change poses a grave threat to financial markets and that nations must switch urgently from using fossil fuels to using renewables.

In 2019, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco warned that climate change could cause banks to stop lending, towns to lose tax revenue, and home values to decline. Last year, 36 pension fund managers representing $1 trillion in assets said climate change “poses a systemic threat to financial markets and the real economy.”

And upon taking office, President Joe Biden warned government agencies that climate change disasters threatened retirement funds, home prices, and the very stability of the financial system.

But a major new staff report from the New York Federal Reserve Bank throws cold water on the over-heated rhetoric coming from activist investors, bankers, and politicians. “How Bad Are Weather Disasters for Banks?” asks the title of the report by three economists. “Not very,” they answer in the first sentence of the abstract.

The reason is because “weather disasters over the last quarter century had insignificant or small effects on U.S. banks’ performance.” The study looked at FEMA-level disasters between 1995 and 2018, at county-level property damage estimates, and the impact on banking revenue.

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The New York Fed’s authors only looked at how banks have dealt with disasters in the past, and what they wrote isn’t likely to be the final word on the matter. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and most other scientific bodies predict that many weather events, including hurricanes and floods, which cause the greatest financial damage, are likely to become more extreme in the future, due to climate change.

And in February, The New York Times quoted one of six United States Federal Reserve governors saying, “Financial institutions that do not put in place frameworks to measure, monitor and manage climate-related risks could face outsized losses on climate-sensitive assets caused by environmental shifts.”

But the Fed economists looked separately at the most extreme 10 percent of all disasters and found that banks impacted not only didn’t suffer, “their income increases significantly with exposure,” and that the improved financial performance of banks hit by disasters wasn’t explained by increased federal disaster (FEMA) aid.

In other words, disasters are actually good for banks, since they increase demand for loans. The larger a bank’s exposure to natural disasters, the larger its profits.

Happily, the profits made by banks are trivial compared to rising societal resilience to disasters, which can be seen by the fact that the share of GDP spent on natural disasters has actually declined over the last 30 years.

While scientists expect hurricanes to become five percent more extreme they also expect them to become 25 percent less frequent, and now, new data showglobal carbon emissions actually declined over the last decade, and thus there is no longer any serious risk of a significant rise in global temperatures.

Banking Against Growth

Biden nominee Saule Omarova said she wants to bankrupt energy companies

The real risk to banks and the global economy comes from climate policy, not climate change, particularly efforts to make energy more expensive and less reliable through the greater use of renewables, new taxes, and new regulations.

“For policymakers,” warned the three economists writing for the New York Fed, “our findings suggest that potential transition risks from climate change warrant more attention than physical disaster risks.”

While they may seem like outliers, they are far from alone in expressing their concern. The second half of the quote by the Fed governor about climate change, which was hyped by The New York Times, warned that banks “could face outsized losses” from the “transition to a low-carbon economy.” (My emphasis.)

And, now concern is growing among members of Congress about the dangers of over-relying on weather-dependent energy, with some members citing the New York Fed’s report after The Wall Street Journal editorialized about it last week .

Proof of the threat to the economy from climate policy is the worst global energy crisis in 50 years. Shareholder activists played a significant role in creating it, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg, and The Financial Times, by reducing investment in oil and gas production, and causing nations to over-invest in unreliable solar and wind energies, which has driven up energy prices, and contributed significantly to inflation.

And yet a crucial Biden Administration nominee for bank regulation has openly said she would like to bankrupt firms that produce oil and gas, the two fuels whose scarcity is causing the global energy crisis. Progressive academic, Saule Omarova, nominated by Biden, said recently that “we want [oil and gas firms] to go bankrupt” and that “the way we basically get rid of these carbon financiers is we starve them of their source of capital.

Omarova is not an outlier. The Biden Administration’s Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) is advocating 30 new climate regulations that should be imposed on banking. Many analysts believe the US Securities and Exchange Commission will require new regulations. The goal is to radically alter how America’s banks lend money, the energy sector, and the economy as a whole.

And former Bank of England chief, Mark Carney, co-chair of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, has organized $130 trillion in investment and said recently that his investors should expect to make higher, not lower, returns than the market. How? In the exact same way Omarova predicted: by bankrupting some companies, and financing other ones, through government regulations and subsidies.

Carney created the Glasgow Financial Alliance, or GFANZ, with Michael Bloomberg, and they did so under the official seal of the United Nations. “Carney said the alliance will put global finance on a trajectory that ultimately leaves high-carbon assets facing a much bleaker future,” wrote a reporter with Bloomberg. “He also said investors in such products will see the value of their holdings sink.”

What’s going on, exactly? How is it that some of the world’s most powerful bankers, and the politicians they finance, came to support policies that threaten the stability of electrical grids, energy supplies, and thus the global economy itself?

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The Unseen Order

Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, and George Soros

Three of the largest donors to climate change causes are billionaire financial titans Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, and Tom Steyer, all of whom have significant investments in both renewables and fossil fuels.

Soros is worth $8 billion and recently made large investments in natural gas firms (EQT) and electric vehicles (Fisker), Bloomberg has a net worth of around $70 billion and has large investments in natural gas and renewables, and much of Steyer’s wealth derives from investments in all three main fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas — as well as renewables.

All three men finance climate activists and politicians, including President Biden, who then seek policies — from $500 billion for renewables and electric vehicles over the next decade to federal control over state energy systems to banking regulations to bankrupt oil and gas companies — which would benefit each of them personally.

Bloomberg gave over $100 million to Sierra Club to lobby to shut down coal plants after he had taken a large stake in its replacement, natural gas, and operates one of the largest news media companies in the world, which publishes articles and sends emails nearly every day reporting that climate change threatens the economy, and that solar panels and wind turbines are the only cost-effective solution.

Soros donates heavily to Center for American Progress, whose founder, John Podesta, was chief of staff to Bill Clinton, campaign chairman for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and who currently runs policy at the Biden White House. So too does Steyer, who funds the climate activist organization founded by New Yorker author Bill McKibben, 350.org, which reported revenues of nearly $20 million in 2018.

The most influential environmental organization among Democrats and the Biden Administration is the Natural Resources Defense Council, NRDC, which advocated for federal control of state energy markets, the $500 billion for electric cars and renewables, and international carbon markets that would be controlled by the bankers and financiers who also donate to it.

In the 1990s, NRDC helped energy trading company Enron to distribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to environmental groups. “On environmental stewardship, our experience is that you can trust Enron,” said NRDC’s Ralph Cavanagh in 1997, even though Enron executives at the time were defrauding investors of billions of dollars in an epic criminal conspiracy, which in 2001 bankrupted the company.

From 2009 to 2011, NRDC advocated for and helped write complex cap-and-trade climate legislation that would have created and allowed some of their donors to take advantage of a carbon-trading market worth upwards of $1 trillion.

NRDC created and invested $66 million of its own money in a BlackRock stock fund that invested heavily in natural gas companies, and in 2014 disclosed that it had millions invested in renewable funds.

Former NRDC head, Gina McCarthey, now heads up Biden’s climate policy team, and Biden’s top economic advisor, Brian Deese, last worked at BlackRock, and almost certainly will return at the end of the Biden Administration.

Money buys influence. In 2019, McKibben called Steyer a “climate champ” when Steyer announced he was running for president, adding that Steyer’s “just-released climate policy is damned good!” And in 2020, McKibben wrote an article called, “How Banks Could Bail Us Out of the Climate Crisis,” for The New Yorker, which repeated the claim that extreme weather created by climate change threatens financial interests, and that the way to prevent it is to divert public and private money away from reliable energy sources toward weather-dependent ones.

Forms filed to the Internal Revenue Service by Steyer’s philanthropic organization, the TomKat Charitable Trust, show that it gave McKibben’s climate activist group, 350.org, $250,000 in 2012, 2014, and 2015, and may have given money to 350.org in 2013, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, as well, because 350.org thanked either Steyer’s philanthropy, TomKat Foundation, or his organization, NextGen America, in each of its annual reports since 2013.

At the same time, McKibben’s motivations are plainly spiritual. He claims that various natural disasters are caused by humans, that climate change literally threatens life on Earth, and is thus “greatest challenge humans have ever faced,” a statement so unhinged from reality, considering declining deaths from disasters, declining carbon emissions, and the total absence of any science for such a claim, that it must be considered religious.

McKibben first book about climate change, The End of Nature, explicitly expressed his spiritual views, arguing that, through capitalist industrialization, humankind had lost its connection to nature. “We can no longer imagine that we are part of something larger than ourselves,” he wrote in The End of Nature. “That is what this all boils down to.” Indeed, for William James, the belief in “an unseen order” that we must adjust ourselves to, in order to avoid future punishment, is a defining feature of religion.

Climate change is punishment for our sins against nature — that’s the basic narrative pushed by journalists, climate activists, and their banker sponsors, for 30 years. It has a supernatural element: the belief that natural disasters are getting worse, killing millions, and threatening the economy, when in reality they are getting better, killing fewer, and costing less. And it offers redemption: to avoid punishment we must align our behavior with the unseen order, namely, a new economy controlled by the U.N., bankers, and climate activists. Unfortunately, as is increasingly obvious, the unseen order is parasitical and destructive.

When Nuclear Leads, the Bankers Will Follow

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emanuel Macron, and U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm

The unseen order of bankers, climate activists, and the news media is so powerful that it is difficult to imagine how it could ever be challenged.

The financial might of the climate lobby covers the wealth not only of billionaires Soros, Steyer, and Bloomberg, but also $130 trillion in investment funds, including many of the world’s largest pension funds, such as the one belonging to California public employees. The climate lobby’s political power is equally awesome, covering the entirety of the Democratic Party and a significant portion of the Republican Party, and most center-Left parties in Europe.

And all of that is sustained by cultural power, which has led many elites to view climate change as the world’s number one issue, has convinced half of all humans that climate change will make our species extinct, and has served as the apocalyptic foundation for Woke religion.

But serious cracks in the foundation are growing. The global energy crisis has revealed for many around the world the limits of unreliable renewables, with European governments having to subsidize energy to avoid public backlash, President Biden and other heads of state opening up emergency petroleum reserves, and all nations begging OPEC to produce more energy.

The blackouts and rising unreliability of electricity in California, along with the work of the pro-nuclear movement over the last 6 years, has resulted in a growing number of Democrats supporting nuclear energy. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm last week publicly urged California Governor Gavin Newsom not to close California’s Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, the signature nuclear plant Environmental Progress has been trying to save since 2016. Democratic support in particular for nuclear is growing.

And alternative media including Substack, podcasts, and social media platforms are increasingly providing a counterweight to the mainstream news media, exposing a huge number of issues that the media got wrong in recent years, and amplifying alternative voices.

Nowhere is the change occurring faster than in Europe, where energy shortages are affecting heating, cooking, and electricity supplies in ways that undermine the legitimacy of the banker-led climate efforts. In Britain, private energy companies have gone bankrupt, forcing the government to bail them out. For-profit energy companies, like banks, ultimately depend on taxpayers, who are also voters.

Outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who led her nation’s exit from nuclear energy, acknowledged that Germany had been defeated in its anti-nuclear energy advocacy at the European Union level, and that nuclear would finally be recognized as low-carbon.

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And French president Emanuel Macron, under pressure from the political right as voters look to elections next year, gave a passionate speech in favor of nuclear energy last month, announcing $35 billion for new reactors.

As the world returns to nuclear, policymakers, media elites, and climate advocates will be increasingly confronted with the question of why consumers and taxpayers will benefit from a global carbon trading scheme and more weather-dependent renewables, particularly at a time of declining global emissions from the continuing transition from coal to natural gas, reduced deforestation, and increased reforestation.

Simply building more nuclear power plants means there is no climate change justification for weather-dependent renewables, which actually require greater use of natural gas, in order to deal with the high amount of unreliability.

Nuclear power goes with slow and patient capital. The obvious funders of a nuclear expansion in the West would be the pension funds, which need the secure return on investment that major construction and infrastructure projects provide, and which unreliable renewables, as the energy crisis shows, do not.

And though the news media is currently ignoring the New York Fed’s report, reporters will not be able to continue spreading misinformation about climate change indefinitely. Increasingly, they, and thus policymakers and the public, will be forced to confront facts inconvenient to their narrative, including that humans are adapting remarkably well to climate change, that renewables make energy unreliable and expensive, and that only nuclear can achieve sustainability goals of reduced emissions, material throughput, and land use.

As people ask, “How Bad Are Weather Disasters?”, not just for banks, but for all of us, the answer will increasingly come back, “Not very.”

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Energy

CANADA – U.S TRADE – A Deeper Dive on the Tos and Fros

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From EnergyNow.ca

By William Lacey

The biggest lesson from all this is that Canada must find a way to diversify its trade, especially when it comes to energy. We need to build more pipelines, we need to diversify our customer base

I cannot help myself. At my heart, I am a self professed nerd when it comes to data. With all of the headlines in Canada regarding the potential of 25% tariffs being levied on Canadian exports starting on February 1st, I wanted to understand for myself what the data actually looks like. Note that I only looked at 2023 as the information was readily available, it is reasonably clean (i.e. no significant COVID hangover) and the 2024 data won’t likely be available for a while.

Canada and the United States are significant trade partners. In 2023 Canada exported US$438 billion to the United States while the United States exported US$353 billion to Canada, resulting in Canada having a trade surplus with the United States of US$85 Billion and thus the (uninformed) consternation when it comes to current talk south of the border.

United Nations COMTRADE database

Looking at the top exports from Canada, I drew an arbitrary line at the top 20 exports. This was not to say that businesses that do less than this are any less important, rather I just wanted to make a chart that was actually readable. As one would expect, energy and auto lead the way, accounting for 43% of all of our exports to the United States in 2023.

 

United Nations COMTRADE database

However, as with all countries, we also import a tremendous amount as well. Why? Because in simplified terms it is good to focus on that which you do best, and have in abundance, and leave other aspects to other countries that are good at other things. As such, automotive as well as machinery, nuclear reactors and boilers account for 31% of the trade flow going north into Canada in 2023.

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United Nations COMTRADE database

When dealing with the border, it is important to remember that goods flow both ways, and the curious part as it pertains to oil is that despite Canada being awash in black gold, eastern Canadian refineries cannot access crude from the west, so Canada needs to export it to the US and re-import it to Canada. Weird. If only we had a pipeline that could do this…

I think it is also useful to look at the net balances, by category, to better understand the tos and fros of trade. Similar to previous charts, I made an arbitrary cut off line, this time at net exports exceeding US$1 billion in 2023. No real surprises here as energy dominates the landscape as Canada is a significant producer of oil and gas, and produces far more than it can consume internally and accounts for 76% of Canadian net exports to the United States.

United Nations COMTRADE database

In terms of net imports, the picture is more balanced, with the top two categories being machinery, nuclear, boilers and electrical, electronic equipment accounting for a significant portion of Canadian net imports (37%) from the United States.

United Nations COMTRADE database

Moreover, if you look at the breakdown of many of the components, and yes I am generalizing a bit, you will see that a lot of what we export are raw materials / base inputs, while what we import are value added finished products. As I have said many times, Canada is the proverbial resource bread basket that the rest of the world would crave to call its own.

If you exclude energy (mineral fuels, oils, distillation products) from the above analysis, you actually return to a more balanced trade picture between the two countries, and Canada actually is a small ($15 billion) net importer from the United States. Why do I think that is a fair way to look at things? The United States is a significant consumer of Canadian energy, and heavy oil in particular is something that Canada produces a lot of and is consumed by the complex refineries located in Minnesota, Indiana and in the U.S. Gulf Coast. If you want to learn more about this, I strongly encourage you to follow Rory Johnston as he does some brilliant deep dive analysis on this sort of topic and others.

At the end of the day, if the Trump administration really is about “fairness” in trade, we need calmer minds to prevail on this topic, as the data shows that the trade relationship is fair, and Canada is a valued (and economical) trade partner. I have my own suspicions that this issue extends beyond trade deficits and even beyond the issues he has also cited of illegal immigration and flows of fentanyl, and could even be as simple as “I am doing this, because I can, and I will do whatever I can to benefit my country.” Is this rational and fair? No.

The biggest lesson from all this is that Canada must find a way to diversify its trade, especially when it comes to energy. Canada’s need to build more pipelines, needs to diversify it’s customer base, and needs to start acting like a country that is looking out everyone, not just it’s own self interest.

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Daily Caller

Trump Dresses Down The Davos Globalists

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

Organizers and attendees at this week’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, had to have been shocked at the new tone from the United States after four years of subservient obeisance from Joe Biden and his ineffective emissaries. In a wide-ranging speech via videoconference on Thursday, President Donald Trump essentially blew up the liberal world order consensus as it relates to the climate alarm agenda.

After putting the conference on notice that the United States would again become a sovereign nation with secure borders, Trump then turned to climate and energy policy. “I terminated the ridiculous and incredibly wasteful Green New Deal – I call it the Green New scam,” Trump began, “withdrew from the one-sided Paris climate Accord and ended the insane and costly electric vehicle mandate. We’re going to let people buy the car they want to buy.”

It was an opening salvo that flew directly in the face of remarks made earlier in the week by the likes of European Commission leader Ursula Von Der Leyen, John Kerry, Al Gore, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and many others. But Trump was far from done.

“I declared a national energy emergency to unlock the liquid gold under our feet and pave the way for rapid approvals of new energy infrastructure,” he informed the conference, adding, “The United States has the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth, and we’re going to use it.”

The message was crystal clear: The age of America conforming its energy and climate policies to fit the strictures of the liberal world order as formulated at international climate conferences organized by the WEF and the United Nations is over, at least for the next four years and possibly beyond that. It should be obvious to everyone by now that Trump intends to completely reverse the Biden Green New Deal agenda and implement policies designed to return the U.S. to the position of what he calls “energy dominance” achieved during Trump’s first presidency.

The net-zero fantasy goal has gone completely off the rails over the last two years as both the ESG and DEI philosophies fell into disrepute. The fading of those interrelated leftwing religions led major energy companies and the banking community alike to place heavier focus on mounting and financing major energy projects designed to enhance energy and national security.

Energy reality was already making a comeback before Trump emerged triumphant in the 2024 election. Despite these and other emerging realities, the WEF’s old guard came to Davos armed with the same old rhetoric.

Sec. Gen. Guterres, always eager to engage in laughable hyperbole, labeled the oil industry a “Frankenstein monster sparing nothing and no one” as it sows what he calls “climate chaos.”

Von Der Leyen’s bombast was no less absurd: “Heat waves across Asia. Floods from Brazil to Indonesia, from Africa to Europe, wildfires in Canada, Greece and California, hurricanes in the US and the Caribbean. Climate change is still on top of the global agenda,” she warned, sounding for all the world like Bill Murray and his fellow “Ghostbusters” in the famous “dogs and cats living together – mass hysteria!” scene from the 1984 film.

Kerry was somewhat more muted, likely due to the fact that he no longer holds any official role in representing U.S. interests. Gore essentially mailed it in, delivering virtually the same hyperbole-filled remarks he spewed to the 2024 conference.

But a pair of participants in a panel discussion held Wednesday were much more realistic.

Graham Allison, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, warned his audience not to underestimate the new president. “Trump has done something no person in the world has ever done before,” he said, adding, “A dead man, a dead politician has risen. This is the greatest comeback in political history of a politician.”

Longtime political columnist Walter Russel Mead added, “We need to also factor in not only who’s won, which is Trump, but who’s lost. Which is to say, us.”

He isn’t wrong, and the elitists who make up the liberal world order would do well to pay attention. Whether they like it or not, their world has changed.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

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