It’s Not Just Earth-Hating Republicans

Meanwhile, Joseph Sternberg draws attention to some interesting developments on the climate change front in this piece in the Wall Street Journal:

It’s a startlingly broad phenomenon. The Swiss last month rejected a referendum to impose a fuel tax and a tax on airline tickets. The British cabinet, which on Wednesday proposed major new carbon restrictions for transport industries, also is split over previously announced plans to ban gas-fired home heating and require landlords to boost energy efficiency in rental units.

The EU hadn’t even unveiled its marquee new climate package this week before furious lobbying erupted in opposition from almost everyone. French officials sound particularly alert to the danger, and no wonder. President Emmanuel Macron has seen his agenda knocked off course for the better part of three years by grassroots protests against a diesel tax hike that started in 2018.

Meanwhile in Japan, climate-minded shareholders have just wrapped up a disastrous (for them) season of annual shareholder meetings. Resolutions codifying aggressive corporate carbon targets were defeated at all three companies where activists proposed them— Mitsubishi UFJ, Sumitomo and Kansai Electric Power.

This followed the announcement in April that Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund, the world’s largest with around $1.6 trillion under management, is abandoning trendy ESG investing. (It stands for “environmental, social and governance.”) The strategy was a financial loser, and “we can’t sacrifice returns for the sake of buying environmental names or ESG names,” Kenji Shiomura, senior director of the fund’s investment strategy department, said in an interview with Bloomberg. Given Japan’s impending glut of retirees and shortage of workers, Bloomberg’s reporters had to concede that “pensions are a more sensitive subject than climate change.”

Over the period of the last 30 years the strategy for reducing carbon emissions that has been used both in Europe and the U. S. has been to offshore heavy industry to China. That is and has always been a futile approach. The atmosphere doesn’t care whether China emits the carbon or we do.