Activist groups are filing climate resolutions across corporate America. Tactically interesting, all six of the largest US investment banks are prominently targeted in a “cut off the money” stratagem.
Wells Fargo & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc had annual meetings this week. The max vote for climate resolutions was 13%.
Even the proxy mafia of Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services recommended clients vote against the resolutions, noting that the companies had already signed onto “strong climate commitments” and the resolutions as structured weren’t in the shareholder’s best interests
“We do not believe that conditioning our financing on a single assumption in a single scenario — which itself contains hundreds of other assumptions — is an effective or practical way to manage our lending practices or to further our net-zero goal,” Wells Fargo wrote in its proxy statement.
Our take is simple. The world is not dying within the next election cycle. Carbon shifts are rational on a 50-year..plus.. plan. A replacement of a carbon-based world requires MULTIPLES of the current investment of what is in carbon assets due to inherent inefficiencies in “alt” energy as well as embarrassingly inadequate analysis of costs and practical deliverability. In other words, replacing X capacity and X dollars of carbon-based energy sources requires 3 to 5 X or more of the same spend per unit of energy delivered. This money comes from somewhere else and needs to be risk and human social cost adjusted.
To credit an unpaid friend at Thunder Energy (https://thundersaidenergy.com/)
Is this socially responsible? Our own perspective, re-iterated ad nauseam over the past 3-years, is that simply underweighting conventional energy, without attracting more capital for new energies (ideally an order-of-magnitude more), is likely to result in energy shortages, inflation, recessio
