Essay by Eric Worrall
“A cancel culture destroys wealth and progress” – Stuart Kirk’s warning to people who want to silence debate about green investments.
“Climate change is not a financial risk” — HSBC’s head of responsible investment Stuart Kirk resigns
By Velvet-Belle Templeman
Jul 8 2022 1:38PMStuart Kirk, global head of responsible investments at HSBC Asset Management has resigned from the bank after an explosive reaction to a recent speech he gave asserting that climate change is not a financial risk.
In a LinkedIn post announcing his resignation, Kirk said that HSBC’s behaviour towards him since the speech has made staying in the role, ironically, “unsustainable”.
…
“Investing is hard. So is saving our planet. Opinions on both differ. But humanity’s best chance of success is open and honest debate. If companies believe in diversity and speaking up, they need to walk the talk. A cancel culture destroys wealth and progress,” he wrote.
“There is no place for virtue signalling in finance. Likewise as a writer, researcher and investor, I know that words or trading shares can only achieve so much. True impact comes from the combination of real-world action and innovative solutions.”
Read more: https://www.itnews.com.au/digitalnation/news/climate-change-is-not-a-financial-risk-hsbcs-head-of-responsible-investment-stuart-kirk-resigns-582404
What message does this resignation under pressure send to investors, about the quality of advice they are likely to receive from their bankers about climate change investments?
Spain proved renewable investments can be very risky indeed, when the Spanish government’s retrospective cancellation of solar tariffs in 2010 bankrupted 10s of thousands people who thought they could rely on the promises of politicians. Britain also slashed solar tariffs in 2011, causing similar pain.
Stuart’s sin was explaining in detail why adaption is a better strategy than mitigation, using the IPCC’s own figures. He also criticised the dubious management of central banking climate risk models:- “Even with a carbon tax, even with growth, they couldn’t make climate risk move the needle, so they had to get their clever little wonks in the back room to put a gigantic interest rate shock in their models to make headlines”.
We may all be about to experience an interest rate shock – but this shock will occur because excessive public borrowing and political attacks on affordable energy have driven up consumer prices and inflation, not because global warming damaged the production of any important commodity.
Now Stuart has “resigned”, and posted a comment on social media about “cancel culture”. Draw your own conclusions.
Don’t expect any further warnings from the banking industry – Stuart’s “resignation” in my opinion sends a strong message that bankers who question the financial fundamentals of green investments get fired, or have to resign.
If you haven’t watched it already, Stuart Kirk’s speech is available here.
Update (EW): Bloke down the pub points out the UK tariff cut in 2011 wasn’t brutally retrospective like Spain’s tariff cut. But I’m guessing some people still got hurt – hard luck if you were already committed to an expensive solar build.
I hope Stuart declared “Constructive Discharge” in the process of “resigning”. Hooray for him standing up to the Green Mob, and hope he lands in an even better position with a financial institution that has the singular goal of “maximizing client wealth” (with a little caution due to dysfunctional economic policy now in effect).
If one is making an investment that will only be reasonable if government policy remains the same, I would suggest that is a high risk investment.
If you have government at your back, you will do better than the rest.
The UK ship is sinking to the tune of 18% of GDP in the Q1 2022. At the same time, green gilt issues are still oversubscribed. This is money guaranteed a return by the money creators all aimed at mal-investment for Net Zero.
The first issue of green gilts back in 2021 were oversubscribed 10-fold.
The USA central bank will soon be issuing green bonds to attract all the woke money. Then the government will do all it can to ensure those mal-investment produce a return at the expense of the entire global economy.
It is all good for Australia. China makes all the stuff that underpins the mal-investment and Australia supplies some of the coal and most of the iron ore and bauxite China needs to convert into the trinkets for the woke westerners.
Tell us where he lands so we can move our investments there.
Re: That UK Government gilt offering..
I’m a million miles from being any expert or having any much knowledge but, £1 Billion over 12 years seems to be pretty well nothing.
e.g. BoJo blew over a trillion on Covid and £200,000 on a new kitchen for his mistress, who will now surely dump him.
(Not very long ago the pair were expecting at least 10 years in power. Well, Princess Nutz certainly was while she used BoJo as an affable cuddly buffoon, putting up a sweet sort of Public Face – a lot like Brandon in fact)
Anyway, do we know what sort of Interest Rate those Green Gilts were promised to yield?
iow: If the UK Gov’mt were promising 10% while the rest of the market was running 5%, it’s perfectly no wonder they were oversubscribed.
Gilts are Gilts after all. Gilt = Golden and absolutely guaranteed by Government. (and normally aimed at Pension Funds as buyers so usually over longer terms than 12 years)
When a highly regarded entity such as UK Gov starts defaulting on Gilts, the less-than-fragrant really has hit the fan.
That’s the league Venezuela, Zimbabwe and now Sri Lanka play in.
Something doesn’t smell right here, methinks there’s a large element of Turd Polishing going on there.
“The human animal cannot lie”, it always gives itself away somehow
My cynicism says he wants recognition for a new project although his statements are right on.
Since the government is so fond of sticking it’s nose into everybody’s business I think it should require every business that has a stockholders meeting to invite Stuart Kirk to speak at those meetings. You know in an effort to celebrate diversity.
Problem is that there are way too few people like Stuart Kirk with the intestinal fortitude to push back against the Green Blob, especially if he/she knows how scientifically faulty the climate scare is.
Until somebody in the White House or at No. 10 in London has the brains and guts to push back, I fear not a lot will change. I still wish Trump had done so when he was in the White House, and still wonder why he didn’t.
He’s wrong. There is a risk caused by clueless politicians, and other virtue signalers sending us down a “clean energy” path that will cripple energy dependent industries.
Anything the government takes a hand in becomes that much more of a financial risk. Similarly, businesses and Banks going sociopolitical is equally much riskier from an investment P.O.V.. Go woke, go broke isn’t a denier’s critical riposte sans evidence.
HSBC had to make him leave because his point of view was a risk to cash flow. The bank isn’t worried about mom and dad investors, they worry about large pots of money like pension funds that are being run by activist management who would dump HSBC if they weren’t singing from the same hymn book.
Isn’t there an obligation to do the best for your shareholders which becomes criminal if you don’t? There must be a way of ‘shorting’ the greenwash against the time when the hoax becomes apparent and/ or unaffordable, You could make a fortune. Fot eg how much of Octopus Energy is government subsidy?
For anyone interested, my own coverage of this subject can be found over at Cliscep:
https://cliscep.com/2022/07/08/another-miracle-just-happened/
This is how 95% of climate scientists agree on the great con that is AGW . Cull the heretics and the narrative will not be challenged .
<i>’Britain also slashed solar tariffs in 2011, causing similar pain.</i>’
Perhaps it should be made clear that the UK did not slash the tariff for existng FIT holders, only for new installations. In fact, for the lucky few who bought systems in the fire sale as installers dumped stock but still got the higher tariff, payback time was slashed.
“A cancel culture destroys wealth and progress”
It certainly destroyed his wealth and progress…
A title for the Wapo: Responsible Banking Head Resigns due to Irresponsible Head Banging Designs..
Speaking truth, when contrary to the narrative, must be punished.
As one who spent a career in the investment field, I cannot stress enough just how critically important a firm’s culture is.
If principals are reluctant to float ideas for fear of back-stabbing or retribution, the firm’s investment performance will eventually suffer.
It is vitally important to establish an atmosphere of openness and a willingness to consider contrarian ideas.
HSBC is obviously a gargantuan organization. A firm that big is bound to be rigidly hierarchical and unwilling to tolerate dissent or departure from the party line. A firm like HSBC is one of the best arguments for indexing (i.e., passive investing) I can think of. They will never beat the indexes. They’re too big and inflexible. It is very likely that HSBC is already a closet indexer.
When Ayn Rand was writing her epic and prophetic allegories of the decay of America as it pushed toward “scientific socialism” where the policies determine the “science” rather than the other way around, she would have cast Stuart Kirk as one of the heroes. HSBC would have been one of the soon-to-fail commercial enterprises.
Nothing new here. They admit to their lies openly. from:
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/another-climate-alarmist-admits-real-motive-behind-warming-scare/
If they were honest, the climate alarmists would admit that they are not working feverishly to hold down global temperatures — they would acknowledge that they are instead consumed with the goal of holding down capitalism and establishing a global welfare state.
Have doubts? Then listen to the words of former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer:
“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,” said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.
So what is the goal of environmental policy?
“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” said Edenhofer.
For those who want to believe that maybe Edenhofer just misspoke and doesn’t really mean that, consider that a little more than five years ago he also said that “the next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.”
Mad as they are, Edenhofer’s comments are nevertheless consistent with other alarmists who have spilled the movement’s dirty secret. Last year, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, made a similar statement.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said in anticipation of last year’s Paris climate summit.
“This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”
The plan is to allow Third World countries to emit as much carbon dioxide as they wish — because, as Edenhofer said, “in order to get rich one has to burn coal, oil or gas” — while at the same time restricting emissions in advanced nations. This will, of course, choke economic growth in developed nations, but they deserve that fate as they “have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community,” he said. The fanaticism runs so deep that one professor has even suggested that we need to plunge ourselves into a depression to fight global warming.
Perhaps Naomi Klein summed up best what the warming the fuss is all about in her book “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.”
“What if global warming isn’t only a crisis?” Klein asks in a preview of a documentary inspired by her book. “What if it’s the best chance we’re ever going to get to build a better world?”
In her mind, the world has to “change, or be changed” because an “economic system” — meaning free-market capitalism — has caused environmental “wreckage.”
This is how the global warming alarmist community thinks. It wants to frighten, intimidate and then assume command. It needs a “crisis” to take advantage of, a hobgoblin to menace the people, so that they will beg for protection from the imaginary threat. The alarmists’ “better world” is one in which they rule a global welfare state. They’ve admitted this themselves.