The Highwire with Del Bigtree - DIVESTING FROM THE GREEN NEW DEAL

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

Governors are walking away from funding coming from the ‘Green New Deal.’ Closer inspection reveals a bad deal, with no viable alternative energy sources from the current model, exposing a dirty energy paradigm riddled with hypocrisy.#GreenNewDeal #DirtyEnergyBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

John Kerry was just an interview recently. And, you know, we're racing towards the electric vehicles. I believe California said they're by 2030. They want all electric vehicles. This is what John Kerry just said. John Kerry says green energy transition isn't happening fast enough. Everything has to accelerate. He's talking a 20 times faster for electric vehicles.

But as we've talked about, there's a problem here. He said screaming into his cell phone from his own private jet, you know. Yeah, exactly. So there's a problem with that. though because these batteries they require lithium they require coal ball lithium in south america's lithium flats and in the congo with the cobalt mining you have basically slave labor and kids that are working down there doing this and it's it's an environmental disaster and here's you know luckily we have some balance in the reporting here here's one of the headlines here elephant in the room clean energies

need for unsustainable minerals so they're finally realizing people are finally this is like a topic at you know dinner tables now that these minerals are unsustainable and we're rushing this push into this and we don't really have a contingent plan for how we're going to find all these minerals. But also the renewables themselves, they rely on energy storage, not when we're talking about cars, but we're talking about tire grids for cities. And some more conversations are coming out to balance this. And people are saying, look, this isn't really realistic. This is a study just recently, this is the headline here. Lack of energy storage makes renewables only grids a pipe dream. And it says in here, renewables only grids require large amounts of electricity storage to make

them viable however the world currently lacks any power storage technology that is both affordable and scalable as the paper's author francis menten explains the amount of storage required is very large perhaps as much as two months of average demand the cost then becomes absurd you can spend all of your GDP on batteries every year and it's it would still not be enough hydrogen is better he goes on to say but it's astonishingly expensive and it's very insufficient to um yeah insufficient to really power this But so we have this grid, you know, in this, in this perfect world, we have this grid, it's great, even if we did have the minerals for it. And even if we did have this storage technology. But what happens when, you know, people like Switzerland have an energy crisis going into the winter like they're having right now?

So we have Switzerland, which has over half of its energy is hydroelectric. But in the winter months, they have to rely pretty much on imports. And we're going, we're obviously in the winter in Europe there. in a lot of these countries, and they're having energy issues, heating their houses. And so when there's an emergency, this is what Switzerland plans to do. Headlines, Switzerland could ban electric vehicle use during energy crisis. This is a report. And so they're talking about basically banning electric car use for non-essential travel.

So we go back to the same thing, right, during the power, you know, sort of rolling blackouts they're having in California, you know, there was people that are being told don't charge your electric vehicles right now, which is amazing because our, Aren't they in California, they're trying to have like all electric by, you know, what, 10, 15 years from now or something? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So they're saying that's great, we can have that. But if there's any issues with the power grid, electric vehicles are banned. And in this contingency plan in Switzerland, they're talking about only keeping your refrigerator to a certain degree and so on and so forth.

We've heard those headlines before. But that all goes into effect in Switzerland, you know, coming into these winter months if they have problems with imports. and we know there's a lot of problems with imports, as we reported on before as well. And then another angle and kind of a final angle to this I want to put in here is this thing called ESG. This is environmental, social, and governmental investing. And there's an explosion of looking through investments, decisions through this ESG lens. And asset management industry has responded to this by offering sustainable, social, responsible funds for people to invest in. But there's an issue with that as well. This is Harvard business law. And there's a lot of great research going

into this now to uncover an inconvenient truth about ESG investing. And it goes on to study a lot of reports showing where to some of the issues with this. But one of the studies we'll look at here is a title here. It says, do ESG funds make stakeholder friendly investments? It says using a comprehensive study of self-labeled ESG mutual funds as identified by Morningstar in the United States from 2010 to 2018, we find that these funds hold portfolio firms with worse track records for compliance with labor and environmental laws relative to portfolio firms held by non-ESG funds managed by the same financial institutions in the same years. Wow.

It also goes on to say, finally, ESG funds appear to underperform financially relative to other funds with the same asset manager and year. And to charge higher fees. Our findings suggest that socially responsible funds do not appear to follow through on proclamations of concerns for stakeholders. So as you're seeing, it's kind of, it's kind of an issue there. And not only are they now returning the capital, but even for people saying, well, I'll take a little bit of sacrifice on my returns to help the environment. They're not seeming to do that. So what's the answer? We're seeing huge backlash now. And from one of the biggest,

one of the biggest portfolios, Vanguard, this was out of Reuters. This is mainstream headlines. Now, Vanguard quits net zero climate efforts citing need for independence. Vanguard manages about seven trillion dollars in assets. They're one of the top ones next to Black Rock in this and they've exited. They've really, they've really become the biggest ones to do this. So this is a major blow to this ESG investment paradigm or scheme or however you want to look at it. It's all so confusing because we've talked about Vanguard before and BlackRock, these two monolithic companies that essentially own the world between the two of them. And you would imagine they're the ones investing in World Economic Forum and all these things that are pushing these agendas.

And now of a sudden, when they say, no, we don't want to be a part of this, it's not sustainable or financially intelligent, you know, it leaves me just looking forward to next year and all the investigations we need to do to figure out what the heck is going on here. Right. And maybe 2023 is the year of gray area. And, you know, no more polarization. You know, things may not be exactly what they seem, black or white, plus or minus. And so this also goes to states. Now, states are taking a stance on this as well and withdrawing

some of their portfolios. Now, this this really talks about Black Rock and concerns them directly. State Treasury's yank $1 billion from BlackRock due to ESG worries. This is South Carolina, Utah, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri. They are all backing out of this. Now, again, Black Rock holds multi-billion dollar investments. So this is a small drop in the pot, but is a drop nonetheless. And one of the biggest people to pull out recently was, was Florida. Here's the headline here. They're the largest, they're taking out the largest amount. Florida pulls two billion from BlackRock and largest anti-ESG divestment. And we go to their finance manager at Florida. This is his Twitter account. He says, using Florida's cash to fund BlackRock's

social engineering project isn't something we signed up for. It's not, it's got nothing to do with maximizing returns and is the opposite of what an asset manager is paid to do. We are divesting from BlackRock. And so a lot of the headlines that were reporting on this saying, oh, it's just a couple of Republican states, but we have now a Democratic-run state in North Carolina that is making, you know, maybe not such a bold move because they're keeping their assets at the firm, but North Carolina treasurer wants BlackRock's CEO to go. So they're asking the CEO to step down because they're not really treating the funds correctly. So this is Larry Fink. That's the head of CEO. So that's a good move, I guess, on that part for people that are really seeing the balance of

this ESG conversation. Well, and when we say just a couple of Republican states, now maybe one, you know, Democrat state. These couple of states get to sort of stand as a historical reference point as these things move further and further down the road and you start watching what states invested correctly and how their finances are doing, just like I think we're now reflecting on Florida and Rhonda Sanchez's decision to pull out of the COVID lockdowns earlier than almost anyone else being told that he was going to destroy humanity and certainly the humanity inside of Florida. instead he's got skyrocketing numbers and everyone moving there. I think that, you know, slowly but surely one state, five states, 15 states, you know, this is how

change really happens. It starts in this grassroots space and it's where politically, you know, I've said growing up aggressive liberal that, you know, I'm now politically maroon, but one of the tenants I really do and I'm starting to appreciate more and more of is this idea of localized government, you bringing the power of government closer to you, the smaller the government, the more power should have. So give city and county councils more power than the state than state over the federal. Because it's so hard to affect federal government and change there, whereas if it's close to us, we can elect and deelect those that aren't representing us.

And so these states stepping forward and watching them really find that power, I think it's kind of exciting. Absolutely. And in local government, your voice and your needs will be, has a greater percentage of being heard and being valued as well.