Stranded: The False Promise of Electric Cars

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The more the state ‘plans,’” wrote Hayek, “the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.” This may resonate with the driver of an electric vehicle (EV) who has pulled up at a charging station in the middle of nowhere, only to find it broken.

In January last year, Carlos Tavares, the CEO of Stellantis, the world’s fifth-largest carmaker (it was formed by the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot), described electrification as “a technology chosen by politicians” and said it was “imposed” on the auto sector. By contrast, the triumph of the internal-combustion engine (ICE) over a century ago was organic. Human ingenuity and the power of markets led to a product that swept almost everything else off the road. EVs (which first had a moment around 1900) were not banned, and neither was the horse. In due course, ICE horseless carriages for the Astors were followed by the Model T and its kin. The automotive age had truly arrived…

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To Be Anti-ESG Is to Be against Free Market Capitalism? Not So Much.

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With environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing — a profoundly political “discipline” in which actual or prospective portfolio companies are measured against a varying selection of environmental, social and governance metrics — finally coming under the fire that it deserves, its advocates are rushing to its defense, many of them seemingly outraged that a political agenda has attracted the attention of elected politicians who disagree with it…

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Losing the Plot: Finance, Natural Gas, and ESG

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It’s a crowded field, but as an example of the destructive uselessness of ESG (an investment “discipline” based on analyzing how companies measure up against somewhat vague environmental, social, and governance standards), this story from Bloomberg takes some beating.

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The Costs of the Energy ‘Transition’ Won’t Be ‘Transitory’

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The appointment of Christine Lagarde as president of the European Central Bank was never going to bode very well for the way that the ECB is run. Lagarde is a politician, not a banker, and, as to her attitudes to rules, well, many of those who followed the euro zone crisis (a time when Lagarde was France’s finance minister) will remember her comments after those in charge approved the first Greek bailout.

Reuters (December 2010):

“We violated all the rules because we wanted to close ranks and really rescue the euro zone,” Lagarde was quoted as saying.

“The Treaty of Lisbon was very straight-forward. No bailout.”

Oh well.

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Adam (Smith) and EVs: Going in Different Directions

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Central planning is not exactly the best way of organizing an economy (#understatement). That’s true, whether we look at the colossal failures of communism or, for that matter, many less ambitious attempts to manage an economy by decree.

Central planning lite (or relatively lite) has been a feature of the energy “transition” now underway in much of the West for some time. As this transition proceeds, the difficulties flowing from its reliance on aggressive, unrealistic and arrogant directives from above are becoming all too apparent, from the woes associated with wind energy — a technology clearly not ready to fulfill the role assigned to it by the climate technocracy — to growing evidence that forcing people away from conventional autos into electric vehicles is going to lead to immense problems that appear not to have been anticipated. (This may a charitable explanation. Perhaps those in charge were well aware of the problems but were determined to press on regardless. Omelets, eggs, we know that script.)

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A Heretic in the Climate Church

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Scientists have traditionally tended to appreciate the usefulness of disagreement or, where necessary, to take it in stride and move on. (A flat Earth, you say? Oookay.) But in many faiths, dissent is heresy. The offender must be cast out, or worse.

Moral Money is, as its name implies, a particularly sanctimonious corner of the Financial Times. It is focused on the likes of ESG (a variant of “socially responsible” investing that measures actual or potential portfolio companies against environmental, social, and governance standards), “stakeholder capitalism,” and other facets of a kumbaya capitalism superior to the Gekko-hearted incumbent, or so the cleverly marketed corporatist story goes.

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

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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.

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Charles the Climate Prince

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At a time when the monarch, James I, “the wisest fool in Christendom,” believed in the divine right of kings, it was perhaps tactless of the English jurist John Selden (1584–1654) to write:

A king is a thing men have made for their own sakes, for quietness’ sake. Just as in a family one man is appointed to buy the meat . . .

Commentary such as this meant that Selden spent a short time in the Tower of London. Nevertheless, he lived long enough to see James’s son, Charles, being found surplus to requirements.

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Climate, Democracy, and Other People’s Money

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Reconciling the climate warriors’ agenda with either free markets or basic democratic accountability is not — how to put this — straightforward. Those attending the COP-26 conference now under way in Scotland are not trying that hard to conceal this unpleasant reality. Of course, so far as the d-word is concerned, current circumstances mean that such an exercise would be even more difficult than usual. As the Wall Street Journal’s Joseph Sternberg observed…

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Ida’s Reminder That Climate Policy Should Be Built on Resilience, Not Delusion

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I was infinitely more fortunate than many, many people, but my Wednesday evening still did not go entirely as planned. I emerged from a cinema to find a downpour, the subway down, and that cabs were nowhere to be seen. Passing on the chance to join a sodden group sheltering in an ATM zone, I trudged the 25 or so blocks home, thinking about . . . infrastructure.

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