Guest essay by Eric Worrall
G20 Guest Bankers also spoke of the need to “unlock” pension funds, so they can invest ordinary people’s savings into combatting the climate crisis.
G20 ministers endorse carbon pricing to help tackle climate change
ECB president Christine Lagarde calls for mechanism that reflects ‘true cost of carbon’
Leslie Hook in London and Kristen Talman in Venice
G20 finance ministers have collectively endorsed carbon pricing for the first time, describing the once contentious idea as one of “a wide set of tools” to tackle climate change.
The issue of taxing carbon dioxide emissions has long divided G20 members, with the US in particular historically opposed.
“Tackling climate change and biodiversity loss and promoting environmental protection remain urgent priorities,” G20 finance ministers said on Saturday after talks on a global tax deal and other issues in Venice. The solutions could include, “if appropriate, the use of carbon pricing mechanisms and incentives”, the group said, expressing support for a carbon price in a communique for the first time.
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William Nordhaus, an American economist and Nobel laureate, gave the keynote address at the conference, calling for a “climate club” of countries willing to commit to a carbon price.
“A key ingredient in reducing emissions is high carbon prices,” he said, adding that a “climate club” would have to impose a penalty tariff on countries that did not have carbon pricing in place.
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“When it comes to unlocking fiduciary assets, pension fund assets and asset owner capital, we need to rethink the role of these institutions. We need to rethink their model,” Fink said, referring to the World Bank and the IMF.
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Read more: https://www.ft.com/content/9cd74b8f-4d6c-4cf8-a249-87c0acb1a828
The Biden representative US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen reportedly skirted around the issue of a carbon tax, though notably absent was a swift rejection of the idea.
The comment about “unlocking fiduciary assets” like pension investments is particularly disturbing. Usually you unlock something because you want access to the contents.
Back in the 1980s, governments around the world passed laws to encourage private pension savings, but they didn’t practice what they preached. Now the world is full of financially distressed debt ridden governments, greedily eyeing off those huge but currently inaccessible pots of private pension money.
The CCP were the first government to crack – in 2020 the Chinese Communists announced they were taking control of private sector investments. Despite China’s high private savings rate, China has some serious financial problems, like a desperate need to finance reconstruction after their 2020 flood catastrophe. They might have been able to absorb such a loss in normal times, but the flood disaster, coupled with the 2020 Covid shock, and the Chinese governments’ already stretched financial position due to their frantic military buildup, along with their slowly escalating demographic crisis, may be pushing China’s public finances to the brink of collapse. Bond defaults, including defaults on bonds issued by government enterprises, are at a record high.
The new laws to allow the CCP to access private savings could be an attempt to buy some time. My opinion is the Chinese Communists likely plan to use their new powers over how private money is invested, to quietly force private savings banks to commit their cash balances to government approved projects, to use the money they’ve seized from private banks to plug gaping holes in China’s public finances.
Given the Chinese Government so far appears to be getting away with whatever they are doing, how can financially distressed Western governments also join the pillaging, and get their hands on your savings?
The alleged climate crisis is the key to making this happen. We have already seen the attack plan – international banking bodies and governments are increasingly subjecting member banks and pension funds to climate resilience tests. Such climate tests in my opinion will likely be used force private funds to invest in dubious crony capitalist green energy projects, to offset the alleged climate risk of other investments in their portfolios.
My pension fund invests – among other investments – in coal companies that are part of the effort to get reliable power into Africa. Barack Obama, the World Bank, and others who were supposed to do things like this not only didn’t do it, they actively blocked it. Now givernments want to steal our money so that I and others can’t put it into win-win situations like this, and then they want to pour it into bottomless government pits from which it can never re-emerge. This proposed robbing of pension funds is the absolute pits. Literally.
Blocking coal funding in the West drives emerging economies to the CCP belt-and-road usery. “Build golden bridges for your enemy.”
Banking makes money through investing. They have always wanted access to manage (for a percentage) “locked” funds.
The Left have always wanted to get their grubby little mitts on other people’s money, but not of course that of the Super Rich, oh no that would never do!!! It must be those modest sums put by, by those ordinary working man & woman!!!
I recall under the Blair Socialist guvment, during a Labour Party conference, both Blair & Brown (the Chancellor of the Exchequer,) stood on stage & told us all that we weren’t putting enough away for our old age, at the same time instigating a guvment raid on private pensions to fund their social programmes!!! My accountant told me if I wanted to keep pace, I’d have to increase my contributions by at least 10%!!! It’s so easy when it’s other peoples money!!!
The Left and their masters are skilled at avoiding the spotlight that they shine elsewhere. For instance, one might wonder what Richard Branson’s carbon footprint was over the weekend.
Yes, Brown and his sidekick Balls ruined the final salary pension schemes in the UK with their tax on dividend income even though you will also pay income tax on receiving your pension. Even the Local Government pension is now average salary leaving just MPs having a gold-plated pension, strange that.
A public (e.g. democratic/dictatorial) smoothing function, ostensibly with good intentions.
Their win win means funneling a percentage of the money they steal from your pension into their private offshore accounts. A small percentage of your pension plus millions of other people amounts to a large accumulation of funds to divy up. Pols and bureaucrats have created a multitude of channels to siphon their share.
Just another money grab under the guise of global warming/climate change/climate disruption.
Governments are just like junkie-thieves: stealing to feed their habit and they always “need” more!
Americans have Trillions of dollars locked away in favorable tax-treatment 401K’s and IRAs. This has not gone unnoticed by the Democrat-socialists who are hungry for it. Democrats in Congress though know that if they change the IRA and 401K tax laws so that they can come after them, like with predatory cap gains taxes, they’ll be thrown out of office en masse.
So their plan is to inflate the economy and steal those private retirement assets through devaluation of the US Dollar under near hyper inflation by simply cranking up the printing presses.
not sure that that plan would work. If they devaluate the US dollar then they reduce to nothing the value of the assets they are supposedly trying to steal.
Izaak, assets which track inflation, like realestate and gold, are resistant to this kind of devaluation. But a lot of pension funds invest significantly in cash bonds. Investments like bonds and high interest savings accounts are vulnerable to inflation.
The prices of assets that don’t have a an offsetting liability, think physical commodities, your toaster, etc., are sheltered against inflation to some extent. Since the real “purpose” of hyperinflation is to make worthless the un-repayable liabilities of governments and banks, the primary burden of hyperinflation falls upon the asset side of the ledger, which include bond holders and bank depositors.
Inflation devalues money, which makes assets more valuable vis-a-vis money.
Another way they can capture part of these accounts is to means test social security.
They just cannot wait to get their hands on our money.
The fact is that for the accepted average surface temperature of the Earth of 15.5 degrees Celsius, 99.8% of the photons absorbed by atmospheric CO2 will be in the 15 micron band. The warming effect of back-radiation of this is equivalent to the warming one would feel standing out in the ice and snow in Antarctica on the few occasions when the temperature falls to -80 degrees Celsius.
https://www.climateauditor.com
Spoken like a man who has no idea how much it costs to own and operate a private jet.
Is there an accepted average surface temperature? 15.5 sounds about right, but I saw something from NOAA a while back that said 14.9C.
Arrhenius said is was 15C around the beginning of the 20th century.
There is just too much money in Pension funds for politicians to leave alone. It is just sitting there, gradually growing, and Politicians want to spend it on pork barreling or buying votes, or just jetting around the world.
Its a problem with compulsory savings. Just whose money is it, and the answer is, its not yours, it’s there’s.
Theirs. And no, it isn’t.
It’s theirs through the Marxist chain: The money belongs to you, and you belong to the state = the money belongs to the state…
Practically every developed state has ever increasing debts due to the pension funds. The low interest rates means these funds can no longer finance the payments with the revenue from the capital. If the states manage to expropriate the owners, or the owners die early (for example if ADE becomes an issue with the Covid vaccines) then their problem is solved.
Sad to say, they’d rather you die.
The usual suspects are claiming that the demonstrations down in Cuba are due to COVID-19, and have nothing to do with 60 years of communist mismanagement.
Enter stage left – Covid.
Easy: $0 / ton, likely less
Probably beneficial.
I’d have to say without a shadow of a doubt massively beneficial. We should be talking about the “true benefit of carbon,” not the “cost.”
Every idiot trying to put a “cost” on “carbon” should be required to pen a 3,000 word essay about how much “better” things would be if they had to personally hunt for and butcher their own meat and grow their own vegetables and starches (or starve), and wear only the hides of their previously hunted meals. Oh, and said hunting and growing all has to be done with nothing more than rocks and sticks (no metals, that requires fossil fuels, i.e, “carbon”). Oh, and winter survival would be all about migration (ON FOOT) to warmer (i.e., more hospitable) climates in winter, no heated shelters allowed (again, that requires fossil fuels, i.e., “carbon,” or requires denuding of the landscape of all the trees for fuel, and that’s not in keeping with the “green” ideology).
Then let’s see them get anyone to agree with their stupidity.
Everyone should get a 74% discount because CO2 is 27% carbon.
The UK beat the world in raiding the pension funds decades ago
Tony Blairs’ government introduced the £5b raid on pension funds as a one-off tax. Every year we that still a similar raid on pension pots
Tony B.liar. AKA TB.
Of course it’s a “one-off” raid! every year, year on year until you die!!!
1972 – the Oz Labor Government took the pension funds of the armed services into consolidated revenue then screwed us again with a flaky new pension scheme.
Trusts us, we’re from the Government and are here to help you /sarc
Argentina seized private pensions and rolled them all into their social security scheme.
More like “social insecurity.”
This is just one reason why I have my investments privately managed and not in a group fund. I know it’s more risky, but it’s been increasing by 10% pa so far, whereas group fubds are typically around 6%,if that. They are plagued by ‘administration fees’, ie rich fat cats skimming the cream of your hard-earned pension. It’s a massive, government mandated rort. Luckily here in Oz you can manage your own superannuation fund, and even invest offshore.
Lookout! Check if BlackRock have their grubby fingers at the till!
The very largest hedge fund evah, has fooled many who think a Black Rock means coal. Do not be a dummy!
Yes, global cooling, acid rain, the ozone hole, nuclear winter, global warming, climate change, the climate crisis, the existential crisis of our time etc. has always been about money and politics.
Raiding of peoples savings has been on the rise for a while. It’s not only to “fight climate” but to bail-in laws are there when the banks fail.
Take your money out now and buy gold.
In Oz the reserve bank have just reiterated to the banks that they need to be ready for negative interest. It’s coming, and coming soon!
You will own nothing, and be happy.
It’s OK, it’s scientific.
They have BIG plans for your future and it will need plenty of Greening as well as a social fund for all the poor folks they create-
Europe’s climate masterplan aims to slash emissions within a decade (msn.com)
We are living through a wave of mass hysteria, whether its about climate, race or gender. The only thing to do is quietly go about one’s business without drawing attention to oneself. These people are mad. They are mad about climate, but they are also mad about race and mad about gender and unfortunately the same people are usually mad about all three things at once.
The situation is a bit like that in France in the last quarter of the 18th century. The intellectual leadership of a country became possessed by the view that radical and never before tried changes to society and government were necessary and were going to be successful in curing all the evils afflicting it. They had the confidence which only extended education and a total lack of any practical experience can give.
In the 20C we lived through many regimes which came to be dominated by such people. In the end they all resorted to mass murder as an essential component to the delivery of the millenium. Nazi Germany, Bolshevism, Maoism, Pol Pot… They all had more or less insane theories of race, national situation, economics. But it all ended up in the same place, pick a subset of the population and murder them.
All it will take for the West to fall into another orgy of pointless mass murder incited by intellectuals in love with the latest theories is a global economic crash. Its implementation will be justified by reasonable and progressive language, as it always has been. Hope it does not happen, and keep your heads down in the meantime. This is going to get worse, madder and more extreme and more targeted, before it gets better.
And do not think that failure of the predictions or the remedies will make the activists change their minds. On the contrary, failures will only increase their faith and the ferocity of their hunt for saboteurs.
If you don’t challenge them they get more powerful, more difficult to dislodge. It is a risk to challenge evil, but a strategy of hoping tyranny will pass you by is also risky.
Yes, this is a powerful argument. My approach does risk turning oneself into a ‘good German’, that is, someone who quietly goes on with his daily business while those who he doesn’t resist do evil unchallenged.
The question is whether resistance is simply foolhardy exposure of oneself with no prospect of success.
Alone, isolated no, as the British Empire would have it.
With a Four Power agreement, China, Russia, India, and the USA with its original mission, the Empire is history.
Get with it!
You must have been replying to a different comment, perhaps, and pasted it here by accident? Alone and isolated? The British Empire?
There is a real parallel in some cultural respects to France in 1780, or Russia in 1905. Or maybe to Germany in 1925. Read Burke on the Philosophes for one example of the phenonomen as it was visible to an acute analyst even before the execution of the King and Queen, and before the Terror or Napoleon. His account of the domination of the media by the woke could be about current events in the West.
Failing to challenge evil isn’t just risky, it’s guaranteed to fail. Appeasement is not a winning strategy.
Failing to challenge is indeed guaranteed to fail at preventing it. But consider the cases of Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany and Mao’s China. Resistance failed to prevent it also.
Its a very uncomfortable situation and it leads to very uncomfortable thoughts. What I see is madmen in the grip of hysteria. Irrational and enraged, basically talking nonsense and intent on doing nonsensical things.
I think it quite likely, though not certain by any means, that at some point their energy will transfer from advocacy to elimination of those they see as enemies. This has been the usual end point of these movements.
What you do when confronted with such a developing situation must depend on how likely you think it that resistance will be successful. If you think its hopeless, then the only two things to do are keep your head down or emigrate.
I am pessimistic, not so much because the madness is widespread, I think at the moment its restricted to an activist minority. But because of the intensity of commitment of the activists, and their success in converting real owners of power in the US, the UK and to a lesser extent other Western countries.
This last is what is so reminiscent of pre-revolutionary France, or pre-revolutionary Russia.
I am not at all sure its reversible by opposition.
What you have described are the tools of trade of the totalitarians,Marxist or fascist,who seek to weaken the target society by breaking its members into “manufactured” victim and oppressor factions and encouraging ongoing domestic and,preferably,international conflicts.The citizenry learns fear,demoralisation and a hatred for their society.
Only the top elites of a society are useful to totalitarians and share the planning and spoils of a victory.
Your advice that we should hide somewhere will ensure our slavery and servitude.
Yes, I know this is the very uncomfortable consequence of my view of the situation, and I don’t like it either.
So in short they’re raiding our pension funds to bankroll their monstrous green-dystopian Luddite folly.
No, they’re raiding pensions to make themselves even richer than they are.
Or possibly worse…..they might be relatively un-rich government petticrats with addiction to the aphrodisiac of power.
Bankers having access to unlocked pension funds?
You mean giving the foxes the keys to the hen houses?
All present and future pensioners would be sooooo screwed!
Would that not be a big disincentive to save for retirement, or for anything, etc.?
I wonder how much CO2 was emitted, A to Z basis, and how much money Branson of Virgin Airways pissed away flying in low space?
The renegade incongruities are everywhere.
First, eliminate those, then consider other measures, such as very significant world population reduction by means of monetary incentives; make them offers that are too good to pass up.
If they have to “unlock” pension funds so that they can invest in “alternative” energy, then they have just proven that “alternative” energy is not a good investment.
You don’t have to force pension fund managers to invest in a good deal.
Their claim is that investments in “green” energy requires all the capital up front for benefits down the road that are shared with all society; while carbon energy has quick returns for the investors and long term costs for everyone else.
It would be a worthwhile argument if it had any truth to it, and it’s just complex enough for the educated idiots that vote left to be fooled into thinking any opposition comes from simpletons.
Well, there goes the pension funds. Better move what you can into different instruments so you don’t loose everything to the CAGW redistributed wealth transfer.
They are speaking, of course, to shared responsibility alleviating, obfuscating their role in creation of sustainable progressive prices, debts, and distortions that are first-order forcings of recurring catastrophic anthropogenic climate change (e.g. [mass] immigration reform, social [in]justice zones, redistributive/retributive change, “diversity (e.g. racism), inequity, and exclusion”, [mass] abortion fields).
I would suggest (with hope) that this action (if taken) would be where the rubber meets the road and people rebel violently against the Marxist takeover attempts.
We need to rethink the need for the G20.
G20 attempting what would put people in prison, using the protection of foreign governments to cover their attempt to satisfy greed in solving a fake crisis.
It’s a known fact, some people when they have reached their goal in life and have no higher goal to reach begin screwing up. The only problem is by that time their power is great enough to screw over everyone else.
“When it comes to unlocking fiduciary assets, pension fund assets and asset owner capital, we need to rethink the role of these institutions.”
From Investopedia:
“What Is a Fiduciary?A fiduciary is a person or organization that acts on behalf of another person or persons, putting their clients’ interest ahead of their own, with a duty to preserve good faith and trust. Being a fiduciary thus requires being bound both legally and ethically to act in the other’s best interests.”
These bozos are advocating removing the responsibility of fund managers to protect their client’s assets. Nothing short of wholesale raiding of funds owned by ordinary citizens. Same thing the mafia did with union pension funds.
From the article: ““A key ingredient in reducing emissions is high carbon prices,” he said, adding that a “climate club” would have to impose a penalty tariff on countries that did not have carbon pricing in place.”
Any price on carbon dioxide will serously harm economic activity, and a high CO2 price will do even more damge.
Imposing CO2 taxes increases the price of transportation which, in turn, increases the prices of everything else you buy.
Nothing good for ordinary people will come from putting a price on CO2.
It’s not a surprise that billionaires and bureaucrats favor taking money out of the Little Guy’s pocket. Their latest scheme is to tax CO2.
I would say these Elites have a narrow window of opportunity, because Trump or someone like him is going to come to power soon, and they are not going to put up with taxing CO2. This proposal would be DOA if Trump were still in office. It’s still DOA as far as aware conservatives are concerned.
Biden rejected imposing higher gasoline taxes on Americans not long ago, so I’m wondering if he will come out in support of a CO2 tax, since its just a gasoline tax dressed up in new clothes.
Gasoline tax or CO2 tax, either one of them is going to harm the economy and put a huge burden on the poorest people in society who will watch their paychecks shrink in buying power as the prices continue to rise. That situation can’t be good for someone who wants to win over the people.
I’ve been wondering why they switched from saying carbon dioxide to just carbon.
I can think of 3 possibilities:
It’s the 3rd possibility that worries me. Could it be they’re planning to tax anything that contains carbon? That would include pencil lead, diamonds, carbon fiber, many plastics, all organic material, DNA, and our human bodies. That’s a much bigger tax base than just fossil fuels.
While you do a spell checker, thy have their grubby fingers in you wallet. Amazing how they fall for it!
Strange how Mr. Worrall diverts from European decadence, Brexit be-damned!
See :
https://www.eib.org/attachments/thematic/eib_group_climate_bank_roadmap_en.pdf
And do a Houdini contortion to ‘blame China’.
This is getting ticklish – where’s the popcorn.
Poor Houdini!
Thanks for the link. EIB is bad, but not quite as bad IMO as what China did, declaring themselves the masters of all private savings.
I’m critical of the EU as well.
Are you a bot, or just off your meds? None of your comments make any sense.
In China power plants are directly or indirectly (via a chain of ownership) owned by a Chinese state. It means that China is going to pay CO2 allowances/taxes TO ITSELF. This is different from capitalist countries where private owners pay to government. If government owns – it pays to itself.
Thus the effective cost of CO2 for a state with state-owned power plants is going to be more of administrative cost of moving money around from itself to itself via a series of intermediaries. Estimate roughly of just a single-digit percent of a nominal CO2 price to pay for servicing such a weird circulation from itself to itself.
They hide in plain sight their true intention – The New GREE(n)D Deal – a wealth transfer from the many to the few. They have conflated a real issue many of us would/do support which is a reduction in ‘pollution’ and being good custodians of the planet to that of climate alarmism, saving the planet. The 1st what drives people, the 2nd is the fear/control propaganda. By making CO2 a ‘pollutant’ and demonising it, they can then bring in the perfect ‘global’ tax… a weather tax; that wouldn’t work or sell though, so they have to build a narrative that you are helping to ‘save the planet’ which is such sanctimonious crap but hey, that makes people feel good and in turn think, it’s ok to steal your money, tax you out of existence and change the way you live.