In August,
Breitbart’s Steve Milloy wrote:
I predicted …
that the left wasn’t going to kill off the coal industry so much as it
was going to steal it. That prediction is already becoming true courtesy
of billionaire George Soros.
U.S. Securities and Exchange Act
filings indicate that Soros has purchased an initial 1 million shares of
Peabody Energy and 553,200 shares of Arch Coal, the two largest
publicly traded U.S. coal companies. As pointed out last week, both
companies have been driven perilously close to bankruptcy by the
combination of President Obama’s “war on coal” and inexpensive natural
gas brought on by the hydrofracturing revolution.
…
Less than a year ago the Soros’ Climate Policy
Initiative issued a major report concluding that the world could save
$1.8 trillion over the next two decades by transitioning
away from coal. The report referred to coal reserves as “stranded assets” that were losing value as they were no longer needed.
What a difference a few months makes, especially when those months have seen coal company stocks fall to fire sale prices.
Instead of the ever-popular
“pump and dump” strategy for making money, this is dump and then pump. Make coal look worthless, then buy it up. Then take the stock price up.
The climate change tap dance features all sorts of financial deals,
and as yet the really huge ones are lurking behind the curtain. In the
meantime, we can see a few of the out-front hustles.
There is the case of Tom Steyer, hedge-fund billionaire, as
reported by NewsBusters in July:
Tom
Steyer’s concern for the environment and almost religious devotion to
promoting green energy appear to be targeting another kind of green.
…
Alternative Energy wasn’t always Steyer’s focus. He only began attacking coal power in 2011 …
Meanwhile in Australia, the hedge fund that Steyer
started and ran until at least 2013, Farallon Capital Management, was
busy finalizing a transaction to create what is on track to become one
of Australia’s largest coal mining operations. This deal increased coal
production in Australia by a staggering 70 million tons.
Steyer
divested from Farallon in 2014 after saying that he could not reconcile
it with his current personal beliefs about climate change. Also,
conveniently after he had made a fortune.
Nice work if he could get it, and he could.
Gore’s good fortune
Several years ago, I wrote a piece about Al Gore’s good fortune as a climate-change god.
Here is an excerpt:
In 2001, Al Gore was worth less than $2 million. Now, in 2012, it’s estimated he’s locked up a nice neat $100 million.
How
did he do it? Well, he invested in 14 green companies, who inhaled —
via loans, grants and tax relief — somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.5
billion from the federal government to go greener.
Therefore,
Gore’s investments paid off, because the government was providing
massive cash backup to those companies. It’s nice to have federal
friends in high places.
For example, Gore’s investment firm at one point held 4.2 million shares of an outfit called
Iberdrola Renovables, which was building 20 wind farms across the United States.
Iberdrola
was blessed with $1.5 billion from the federal government for the work
which, by its own admission, saved its corporate financial bacon. Every
little bit helps.
Then there was a company called Johnson
Controls. It makes batteries, including those for electric cars. Gore’s
investment company, Generation Investment Management (GIM) (
Twitter search),
doubled its holdings in Johnson Controls in 2008, when shares cost as
little $9 a share. GIM sold when shares cost $21 to $26 — before the
market for electric-car batteries fell on its head.
For a while,
the going was good. To make it go good, Johnson Controls had been
bolstered by $299 million dropped at its doorstep by the Administration
of President Barack Obama.
On the side, Gore has been giving speeches on the end of
life as we know it on planet Earth, for as much as $175,000 a pop. (It
isn’t really on the side. Gore is constantly on the move from conference
to conference, spewing jet fumes in his wake.) Those lecture fees can
add up.
The save-the-planet cash registers are
ringing. And you can bet that the future configuration of cap and trade,
carbon taxes and “reparations” paid out from developed to undeveloped
countries will funnel endless cash into elite hands, while cutting
energy production for the planet and putting more people into a state of
poverty.
We’re just seeing the tip of the financial iceberg.
Finally,
Princeton physicist William Happer wrote in January:
… the jihad against atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Like
its predecessors, this cause has generated plenty of sanctimonious
slogans: ‘intergenerational justice’, ‘saving the planet’,
‘sustainability’, ‘negligible carbon footprints’. In reality, the cause
has brought ugly, bird-killing windmills, which have replaced the
psalmist’s ‘cattle on a thousand hills’; hapless native peoples have
been expelled from their from ancestral lands, sometimes at gunpoint, so
wealthy corporations and foundations could claim to be saving the
planet, at no small profit to themselves; fraud in the trading of carbon
credits has cheated honest taxpayers. But for this cause, as for most
of its predecessors, the end justifies the means.
Policies to ‘stop climate change’ are based on climate
models that completely failed to predict the lack of warming for the
past two decades. Observational data show clearly that the predictions
of unacceptable warming by more carbon dioxide are wrong. … [P]olicies
designed to save the planet from more carbon dioxide are based on failed
computer models.
Profits for “the right people,” however, aren’t failing.
–Jon Rappoport