Essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Vuk; “there was always some nut job telling me about the end of the world”, “apocalyptic warnings are ALWAYS wrong”. HSBC’s Stuart Kirk candidly sharing his frustration with economic ignorance of climate alarmists, and the wildly unrealistic assumptions he is being pressured to feed into climate economic models to make them produce interesting results.
HSBC banker draws fire after accusing policymakers of climate change hyperbole
Stuart Kirk also claimed central banks designed climate stress tests to obtain alarming results
Harriet Agnew, Simon Mundy and Stephen Morris in London
The global head of responsible investing at HSBC Asset Management has drawn fire after accusing central bankers and policymakers of overstating the financial risks of climate change in an attempt to “out-hyperbole the next guy”.
Speaking at a Financial Times Moral Money event on Thursday, Stuart Kirk said that throughout his 25-year career in the finance industry “there was always some nut job telling me about the end of the world”, likening the climate crisis to the Y2K bug that predicted a widespread computer glitch at the turn of the millennium.
“Unsubstantiated, shrill, partisan, self-serving, apocalyptic warnings are ALWAYS wrong,” he wrote on a slide accompanying his presentation.
…
Read more: https://www.ft.com/content/1716d9fb-4c8f-4d05-a6b4-bb02a48a73a4
A video of Stuart’s speech;
The video is straight to the point, entertaining, well worth watching. Stuart is fed up with government demanding he waste time examining climate risks he knows are a nonsensical exaggeration, so he doesn’t pull any punches. In this video he shares his frustration.
Stuart’s video also contains a plea for regulators to respond with pragmatism to the current economic crisis, which Stuart emphasises has nothing to do with climate change.
You’ve got my vote Stuart. I hope Stuart keeps his job. His points are well argued, but these days clarity and honesty sometimes gets you into trouble. Stuart is drawing a lot of fire for his candour.
Wow, talk about sticking your neck on the chopping block. Good luck.
Yep, the Church of Climate Catastrophists doesn’t want acolytes that are capable of individual logical thought, they want Yes Men who extol the Greenspeak Virtues and are willing to either self Flagellate or Self Immolate for the cause
He’s a White, “cis” (& presumably “het”) male.
Kiss your career goodbye, my friend.
His comments got word wide publicity, what I and Joe public think is irrelevant, it is what other large investment managers think it’s of supreme importance.
Banking corporations have been pressurised to put large amounts in renewables, but money managers don’t see adequate returns for their clients.
“Here’s what the BBC said couple of months ago:
Banks including HSBC, Barclays and Deutsche Bank are still backing new oil and gas despite being part of a green banking group.
HSBC put an estimated $8.7bn (£6.4bn) into new oil and gas in 2021, while Barclays put in $4.5bn, and Deutsche Bank loaned $5.7bn.
The fossil fuel giants receiving the funding included Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, and Saudi Aramco.
Since joining the Net Zero Banking Alliance last year, 24 big banks have provided $33bn for new oil and gas projects, with more than half of that amount ($19bn) coming from four of the founding members – HSBC, Barclays, BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank.”
Successful investment managers are looking for profits and not listening to the ‘doomsayer nutjobs’
There’s a guy from BlackRock UK (Paul Tolmachev) who keeps writing articles at Mises.org criticising The Great Reset and the other loonies. cf. Ed Dowd formerly of BR…
I think some of these guys have finally had enough and are prepared to stick their necks out.
Hopefully, more brave souls will follow their lead.
Wow someone sane!
Makes me want to move my accounts to HSBC, but the $2 Bn US fine for laundering cartel drug money a few years back deters me….
Good for him. When he is on trial for heresy, I hope the Ministry of Justice is lenient in its sentencing.
There is no justice in “Climate Justice” and I can’t see how they can let him get away with this. I will be surprised if the hammer does not fall on him hard and fast.
I have been casually following environmentalists predictions of imminent doom since the late 1960’s, and they have the same track record as. Milenarian preachers.
Takes a lot of courage to speak out publicly when you work for the wokest bank in the West.
Well, he said something that is going to happen in 20 to 30 years. He doesn’t have the background or time to examine these climate change allegations. That is why more scientists need to stand up and speak out.
True but he does have the background and expertise to identify false and misleading economic claims or the economic incompetence of the climate activists. Everybody who is brave enough to stand up at this point will only encourage others to do the same and this will roll back the Green insanity.
The only thing that I think he got wrong is confusing feet with meters. I may have misheard, however. Great talk.
Maybe you should put /sarc right in your screen name just to make it more obvious. Your impersonation right on the nose.
Exactly right, but all the Climatologists and Meteorologists that I know (and I know many) tell me that their jobs and funding entirely rely on supporting the AGW nonsense. They all know it’s just silly, religious nonsense, but none will speak out for fear of the destruction of their livelihoods.
When our local council added a “green” levy to our annual bill, I made certain to deduct that, and they’re threatening to sue me – I said that I was happy to meet them in Court, where they would have to prove where all the Council Tax actually goes, and that there actually was a “Climate Catastrophe” in progress (as their paperwork claims).
Well he’s brave i must say…
He’s also right.
Good for Stuart for speaking out. The problem of CAGW Misinformation is astoundingly large. I was just watching a special on geothermal energy and additional hot water usage on Iceland, when the commentator declared (…however, there is a problem with geothermal, and that is the generation of a lot of carbon dioxide, the toxic greenhouse gas.” We have a long way to go, but it is a journey that is needed.
Pardon me while I scratch my head and try to make some sense out of that.
it’s easy enough. All the lava coming up the shaft spits out hot water, sulfur, steam-for heat, and a lot of good, old CO2. All the discharges from the well include water, sulfur, steam, and a bunch of other chemicals, some of which are nasty too. So the heat extraction process has to be designed not to leak toxic chemicals.
If they are willing to work out a process for stripping all the noxious stuff and just produce clean, near drinkable, hot water for heating that is rather extravagant.
On the other hand, geothermal generally uses more expensive ways to contain the nasty stuff or simply uses a pipe loop to bring up heated water in a pipe, extract most of the heat(it’s usually boiling hot), and pump it back down.
I think I can explain that one, in green-speak, having been in Iceland a few years ago. We rented a cottage a couple of miles from the country’s largest geothermal plant.
Now, if you’re not properly ordained in the green religion, you wouldn’t recognize this. All the outside world sees is a modern series of buildings in a field, with a long pipe connecting alongside the road all the way to Reykjavik. It’s so unassuming that the power company has spent quite a bit of money installing hiking trails in the area and even scenic viewpoints overlooking the plant.
This is all to convince the unanointed that the plant is serene, poses no threat to the very survival of the earth. You can hike right to the gates of the plant if you like, and never see the dangers.
But they’re there, those harbingers of climageddon. Oh they are. It’s the hikers themselves, shedding CO2 like they discard plastic fast-food containers. It’s the ubiquitous sheep and goats on the countryside, belching out toxins.
And the power… oh the power. People who are secure in their reliable energy might heat their homes. And in Iceland, that’s every single month, January through December. Heated homes emit micro-CO2, which is several times more noxious than ordinary CO2, because it implies that people are actually comfortable inside and free to think about things other than the fight to save our planet.
Make no mistake about it, heretics, geothermal energy is the greatest threat the world has ever seen.
It’s funny because it’s true… that alarmists actually think way or will eventually, that humans and animals are a cancer that must be eradicated to preserve life on Earth 🌍.
“… that other humans…”
Not them, of course. It’s everyone else. Otherwise, they’d have the courage of their convictions and do the right thing, leading by example.
I lived in Iceland and one luxury of the geothermal is they have a lot of heated outdoor swimming pools.
The cows and sheep enjoy the geothermal extraction fields the animals go and stand or lie down near the vents to keep warm. It is said that the early Icelanders often curled up close to small steam vents to keep harm too.
Our communist PM Jacinda announced that she would be shutting down some of our geothermal power stations because they emit to much CO2s here in New Zealand .
We need a lot more people in high places like Stuart to stand up and tell the wokes that they are all getting upset about nothing.
At a gathering yesterday in our small country town I would say that every person there was against our government and their carbon zero stupidity .
Our government are trying to bankrupt our country with their insane policies.
Our biggest problem is that we have MMP and the Green Party with around 15% of the overall vote control our Government as they hold the balance of power .
Well, these days they don’t teach science in TV commentator/presenter schools. The “the toxic greenhouse gas” the commentator speaks of happens to be the same CO2 that professional greenhouse growers pump into their greenhouse buildings to make the plants they sell grow bigger, faster, better.
I’d like to see woke Sharon’s presentation for contrast.
240 pounds for video on demand: https://moralmoneyeurope.live.ft.com/page/2167465/register-for-video-on-demand
This is from last year, but by hook or crook, Deloitte is under the thumb of the U.N. and WEF.
So, who has Stuart Kirk drawn fire from?
The usual unnamed “climate scientists”, or somebody else with an agenda? Trying to read more at the Financial Times website is a waste of time they want money.
This doesn’t really say, they just want him fired.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/may/20/hsbc-banker-discredited-climate-crisis-warnings
The usual greenie demand: sack him!
The hard left are always the most censorious fascists.
Notice in the Guardian article there, they quote most of his bit about “some nutjob“, but they put in an ellipsis for the words they left out. What did they leave out? Here’s the full quote where I’ve boldfaced some of the missing words for emphasis. When he spoke of nutjobs, the evidence he cited was … well, an inconvenient truth.
Term for the Wokey lot is scientific illiterates – go Stuart , go!!!
REAL MONEY (real money = money not fooled by lies about human CO2 emissions) is NOT investing in “renewables” or electric vehicles or like human CO2 scams.
REAL MONEY invests in data-driven markets — IF it has accurate information.
Unfortunately, thanks to crooked politicians and crooked scientists there is a lot of money to be made off the climate hustle.
Thus,
HOORAY for Mr. Kirk, doing his fiduciary duty as the head of responsible investing.
Excerpts from Kirk’s Presentation:
9:11 — Kirk calls “renewables” “good” and points out that a rising demand makes them a potential “Eagle.” This is misleading, for the “demand” is contrived demand (market share by government fiat).
9:40 — Coal is slamming “renewables.” HA! Go, Big Coal (and Big Nuclear and Big O’)
(Suggestion: Edit slide to say “S & P Global
CleanNegative ROI/EROEI Energy Index”)10:04 — Re: “stranded assets” — HA! What exemplifies a stranded asset better than a rusting wind or solar “farm” (or any solar — given its costs of production and, especially, maintenance are not being covered by an honest, fair, free market price) or an electric vehicle needing a new battery that costs 25% of the purchase price of the car? The entire “renewables” (absent rate surcharges/cost-shifting to reliable power and/or taxpayer subsidies) market is a “stranded asset.”
11:14 — Banking (and many other industries) is NOT high growth, thus, what will be happening > 10 years out is “irrelevant” for banking and most industries and > 20 years out is “irrelevant” for nearly all. Yes!
13:00 — Banks are using exaggerated and or unrealistic assumptions in their “climate change stress test” models to contrive a crisis (e.g., they assume negative GDP along with a giant carbon tax).
14:00 — Climate change is NOT a long-run risk. Evidence: economic growth since ~1900 on — growing steadily in spite of The Great Depression, in spite of WWII, in spite of everything.
15:00 — Projecting risk beyond 10 years or so is fatuously futile. If we had used the information available to us in 1930 to project what to do about the 1990’s, we would have been worse-than-uselessly wrong. Malthusianism is always wrong (1800’s: We’re going to run out of food!……… oh. Never mind. —— 1970’s: Uh, oh. We’re running out of copper!……….. oh. Never mind…..).
Thank you for sharing this, Mr. Worrall.
Janice
You have nailed it in the phrase “the climate hustle“!
Thanks, Michael. I must give credit for that phrase to the producers of the 2016 documentary movie: “Climate Hustle.” I never did get to see it (one can buy or rent it). I heard it was pretty good. Here is the trailer:
So, how long before YouTube bans that video?
As of today (May 22, 2022), the video is still on YT. They do, however, have their standard disclaimer about climate change being the result of eeeevil humans burning eeeevil fossil fuels. 🙄 Because the UN says so.
The scientific evidence is compelling that manmade climate change is modest & benign, CO2 emissions are beneficial rather than harmful, and the “social cost of carbon” is negative. The major harms from CO2 emissions are all hypothetical, and mostly implausible. The major benefits are proven, measured, and very large.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOwHT8yS1XI
Learn more here:
https://sealevel.info/learnmore.html?0=greening#benefits
OMG, it’s the worst it’s been since our bench mark started 6 months ago, we’re all going to die!
He must be right over the target then.
So climate change results based on a model that is fed into another economic model. I wouldn’t pay 10 cents for the final results.
Boy is he in trouble now.
Not a popular bunny!
“Who Cares If Miami Is 6 Meters Underwater In 100 Years?’ “
The MSM loved that and for very different reasons so did I
He is correct 5 decades of catastrophizing and never ever correct, not even close.
https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-pocalyptic-predictions/
Well – you know what they say
“If you are drawing fire, you are doing something right….”
Moral money?
Oxymoron.
BIG balls. It’s about time someone stood up to the King without clothes. His ““out-hyperbole the next guy” = virtue signaling. The way he talks about the interest rate fears reminds me of forcings in climate models. He may have set himself up for attacks but I don’t see how anyone can fault his logic without swimming in the fear and loathing pool.
As conditions continue to deteriorate in the US under this insane / dementia administration, and bureaucratic policies continue to fall far to the left of rationality, we’re going to see more and more of the sane side spanking back.
Stuart is the man.
Please come to Australia Stuart. After this weekend’s debacle we need logical top of the town bankers who understand the current physical operating environment.
He got very sparse applause. Even business people are hopelessly deluded.
I was glad to hear him deride models, though. Worship of deus machina seems to be a widespread default.
I also liked his notice of the change that occurs over time. All of climate alarm rests on climate ceteris paribus. The notion is idiotic and it’s mesmerized government functionaries everywhere.
A previous economist from HSBC way back in 2010 said lots of awesome words about how the then Government was behaving with economy.
He was accurate in everything he said.
HSBC economists have great history.
” … frustration with
economicignorance of climate alarmists … ”In this sentence there is a superfluos word.
Great video.
That is one very honest brave man. I can only think he is expecting to retire in the coming year and he is past caring what the woke loons think of someone being given the chance to speak the truth in open forum such as the FT.
The Presenter was Stuart Kirk He has an MA in economics from Cambridge University.
He worked for the Financial Times and was the editor of the FT’s prestigious Lex column for 7 years. He has been head of research at Deutsche Bank and HSBC for about 8 years.
His views should be listened to.
The talk was apparently well received – many people privately admiring him for the courage to speak out and say things that others knew but didn’t have the courage to say. It may well have ended his career because he has ruffled quite a few feathers.
May I suggest that you try and copy and post that talk to as many people as you can, particularly those in various industries or companies where the pressure to conform and make the current ESG and similar statements is high.
Stuart Kirk has pointed at the climate change emperor and shown publicly that the emperor has no clothes.
—-
David Tallboys
Data-driven optimism. Inconceivable to the prophets of doom.
Many will take a knee, beg, good boy… a few will stand their ground for dignity, agency, science, and conscience.
He is saying “let’s be realists and make money”. At the same time he recognizes that while climate itself is not a risk, climate regulation is a potential significant risk. Capitalists always find ways to make money within whatever rules exist. The trillion dollar car company he admiringly refers to is Tesla, which of course exists solely because of climate hysteria and subsidy. The bit he is missing is the potential drastic effect of climate taxation and regulation on the cost and reliability of energy. Some will then prosper at the expense of others, the relative notion of wealth, but almost everyone will be poorer, the absolute notion of wealth.
The world’s central banks have already done a pretty good job of impoverishing the world via money supplies backed by either nothing or debt created from thin air, in large part directly because of regulation.
To let you in on a little secret, CO2 is NOT a greenhouse gas, this is a global scam. They have taxed everything they possibly can, from our labour to the water we drink, and run out of growth taxes, so as a last bastion, let’s tax the air that we breathe!
I’m pretty sure I have never used the phrase ‘ballsy banker’ until now…
Stuart Kirk has been suspended by HSBC following this presentation…..the price you pay for speaking the truth and revealing the emperor has no clothes.
HSBC suspend banker who described climate change warnings as ‘unsubstantiated’ (gbnews.uk)
Hé probably has enough money to be able to tell HSBC to get bent. I hope so at least.