Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Institute for Policy Studies, a prominent Washington based think tank, has released a report which claims corporate pay structures which incentivise Chief Executive Officers to maximise shareholder value are accelerating climate change.
According to the report;
MONEY BURN HOW CEO PAY IS ACCELERATING CLIMATE CHANGE
…
Our contemporary executive pay incentives, analysts believe, directly encouraged the reckless behavior of Wall Street executives that led to the 2008 financial crisis. These same misplaced incentives are today encouraging the recklessness of fossil fuel executives — and deepening our global climate crisis.
The world’s largest fossil fuel companies are currently holding vast stocks of carbon reserves. These reserves, if all burned, would emit approximately 2,795 gigatons of carbon dioxide, five times the amount of carbon that researchers tell us would push the globe into catastrophic climate change, everything from extreme flooding and drought to a significant rise in sea level. Yet the fossil fuel industry, fixated on the extreme short term by perverse CEO pay incentives, is now spending over $600 billion a year to locate additional carbon reserves.
Today’s executive pay packages, these pages will show, give the leaders of America’s oil, gas, and coal giants an enormous personal financial incentive to spend billions per year developing new fossil fuel reserves that cannot be exploited without destabilizing the climate. These fossil fuel executives spend billions more on new infrastructure — pipelines, power plants, drilling platforms, and more — that lock us into fossil fuels at a time when our nation should be investing in conservation and renewable energy options.
…
Read more: http://www.ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/EE2015-Money-To-Burn-Upd.pdf
The report quickly moves on to discussing what should be done with all that executive pay. Their top suggestion is to give the money to green groups.
What else could $6 billion pay for?
To put these fossil fuel executive compensation figures in perspective, we can compare them to several urgent climate-related challenges and opportunities at the U.S. and global levels.
Green Climate Fund
At the global level, $6 billion could double the U.S. governments’ $3 billion pledge to the Green Climate Fund, the new institution tasked with helping the world’s most vulnerable countries mitigate and adapt to climate change. …
Of course, it wouldn’t be possible to redistribute the money to green groups, if the money was still being paid to the executives.
Abolish executive performance pay
Michael Dorff of the Southwestern Law School, author of the 2014 book Indispensable and Other Myths: The True Story of CEO Pay, is proposing the abolition of “performance pay.” Others have suggested executives should have to wait to cash in such forms of compensation for at least 10 years, even if they are fired or retire. At best, stock options and other performance-pay incentives have CEOs thinking more about their own personal rewards than long-term enterprise sustainability. At their worst, “pay for performance” deals encourage criminal behavior.

If underpaid executives don’t have any financial incentive to do a good job, there might not be that much excess money to redistribute. But maybe I’m just being pessimistic. Perhaps all those formerly well paid company executives would discover a new source of motivation, while viewing pictures of happy green activists enjoying their new financial windfall.
It’s true there is a problem with the capitalist model right now, but it needs to be fixed, not thrown away.
Businesses are supposed to maximise their profits and maximise their longevity. Some CEO’s are maximising their personal wealth instead, whilst risking the other aims.
It’s easily fixable, and it has b*gger all to do with climate change
“We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrialized civilization to collapse.”
Maurice Strong, U.N. Earth Climate Summit 1992.
It has been a recurring theme, propounded by many, in various forms. Truly, to them, “the science” is merely a means to an end. And the ends, to them, justify the means.
Don’t forget leftys mantra. Achievement must be punished.
As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from AGW springs.
So ….. Big Green is hindering Big Green?
“At the global level, $6 billion could double the U.S. governments’ $3 billion pledge to the Green Climate Fund, the new institution tasked with helping the world’s most vulnerable countries mitigate and adapt to climate change. ”
Or as the man from Potsdam put it…
“But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy…One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy any more.” – Ottmar Edenhofer, Co-chair of IPCC WG III, New American, Nov. 19, 2010
How many times do they need to discredit themselves before the lie completely collapses? Yes climate changes naturally, I don’t buy man made climate change.
“LIBERALS” just hate capitalism and fat cats, they are so jealous, they want to reform the system and force socialism. Environmentalist and Marxists are perfect bedfellows.
Just when you think that you have seen the most insane suggestion ever possible from the Warmist/Greenists, they manage to top it all and come up with something even more insane and ridiculous…..always however to their benefit.
Now, on blame for CO2.
Take the North American continent before the three ships of Columbus.
How many deer, antelope , moose, bison, etal , were out and about, how many wild fires on the plains, how many millions and millions of acres of forest burned in one summer at the time.
So much flatulence, so few facts.
And fair enough.
Some of these blokes are earning nearly as much as Elon Musk (is that really and truly his name? Or is it a stage name?)
[Please, no ‘chemtrails’ on this site. ~mod.]
Just further evidence (like we needed more) that the CAGW Hoax is ultimately about destroying capitalism; not “saving the planet”….
The 2008 Sub-Prime Loan Collapse, was about.. well… sub-prime loans. Leftists thought it would be a brilliant idea to force banks to give poor people with awful credit ratings ARM mortgages with zero down… Leftists also thought it made sense to set interest rates at zero to allow governments to finance the $trillions of national debt they already have, and run up $trillions more.
The Leftists’ zero-interest policies also drive good money out of low-risk investments (savings accounts/CDs) and into high-risk real estate and stock market bubbles…
Leftists learned NOTHING from the 2008 sub-prime loan collapse. Leftists still have zero-interest policies, which is why we have even worse real estate, government bonds and stock market bubbles that have already started to implode in China and will soon collapse around the world.
CAGW, Keynesianism and centrally controlled economies are all hypothese that have failed miserably. Until free-market capitalism, limited governments and free-floating interest rates are adopted, the world will simply move from one financial crisis to another ad infinitum.
Typical watermelon clap-trap.
Do they explain what “accelerating climate change” means? Are major US landfalling hurricane numbers dropping more rapidly? Presumably any change is bad and caused by humans?
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” Voltaire
http://rhymeafterrhyme.net/2015/08/08/the-pseudo-morals-of-a-pseudo-science/
Well, they’re consistent. If they think it’s bad, it’s from global warming—sorry, ‘climate change’.
It’s time for all those who believe in catastrophic climate change that can be stopped by a change in behaviors to lead by example. How about they stop driving, stop flying, stop using any products that require to be mined and transported, and disconnect from the grid? Wouldn’t the world be a better and quieter place?
The economic cycles of boom and bust predate the history of performance pay by centuries and can be tracked back to before the “Tulip Mania.” All the so-called “performance pay” has done is give CEO’s and other executives greater opportunity to pillage and plunder their paymasters, which, of course, because they are such ethical and conscientious individuals they could not possibly do.
(/sarc)
This silly claim about executive compensation is a derivative of the CAGW initiative to force companies to account to their shareholders about their adherence to a “carbon budget”. I truly loved the response that Exxon-Mobil made to demands that it revise its investment planning. You can read it here:http://cdn.exxonmobil.com/~/media/global/files/other/2014/report—energy-and-carbon—managing-the-risks.pdf
“If underpaid executives don’t have any financial incentive to do a good job, there might not be that much excess money to redistribute.”
1. Ban / confiscate all performance-related pay.
2. Watch CEOs et al get massive salary increases unrelated to performance.
3. ???
4. Profi- no wait, never mind.
Do the members of this “think tank” realize that without customers ready to buy the product the
wouldn’t mean anything?
It is not like the evil fossil fuel companies are recovering the fossil fuels and just burning them in open pits. People are buying the fossil fuels to provide them the power they need/want to live their lives. And in general those people will chose the cheapest means to provide that power.
Confiscate pay of capitalists to give to elite insiders? Yes, I think that’s been tried.
Remember “management by objectives” (MBO)? Great idea, but…everyone quickly relearned the old caution to “be careful what you wish for”. If you don’t think out, set and state your objectives very carefully you won’t get what you had in mind, or expected, which also hammered home the “law of unintended consequences”.
People will respond to their incentive sets, but of course we never know, cannot know their entire incentive arrays — their individual, personal, private knowledge, ignorances, things each “knows” which are not so, etc. This is exactly why open, honest markets with discouragement against initiation of force and fraud are so very important.
The watermelons are showing their true nature. There are only two types of greens: 1) those who use climate change as cover to implement their true agenda, and 2) useful idiots