Saturday, July 15, 2023

KERRY COMES CLEAN

KERRY COMES CLEAN

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN ENERGY POLICY

It has been obvious for a long time that the real goal of the “green” movement is to put control over our economy in the hands of government. (Of course, it wasn’t immediately obvious that it would be the Red Chinese government.) What stands in the way of the long-rumored but still far-off green transition? The free enterprise system.

John Kerry admitted as much on MSNBC:

On Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Ana Cabrera Reports,” Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry stated that green transition investment has been undercut by the fact that money managers “have a fiduciary responsibility, an obligation to the people they manage it for not to lose the money, but to produce returns on that investment.”

Yes, that is correct. Corporate managements have the same fiduciary duty to their shareholders.

Kerry said that President Joe Biden and King Charles were briefed “on the way trillions of dollars could begin to be deployed into the private sector to accelerate this transition so we are not putting greenhouse gas emissions up into the atmosphere to the detriment of every human being.”

Host Ana Cabrera then asked, “What’s preventing those trillions of dollars from trickling into the solutions right now?”

Kerry responded, “What’s preventing it is, to some degree, fear, uncertainty about the marketplace. People who manage very significant amounts of money have a fiduciary responsibility, an obligation to the people they manage it for not to lose the money, but to produce returns on that investment. Pension funds, many of them, are very careful about those investments in order to make certain they have the money to pay out to the pensioners who work for that money all their lives. So, there are tricky components of making sure that you have taken the risk away from these investments.”

But what’s the problem? If wind and solar energy are so great, why can’t they make money? Kerry attributes the problem to “risk,” but all investments have risk. What he really means is that the numbers don’t work: the cost of “green” energy is exorbitant, and because it is so unproductive, the demand for it is virtually nonexistent, outside of government mandates. So Kerry says we need to “take the risk away” from “green” investments. How might we do that?

“And the discussion with these people who manage huge sums of money was, we want to help, we want to deploy the funding, but you’ve got to help us create the structure for which we can do that.”

In other words, we are happy to invest trillions of dollars, but you have to take the risk out of the deal by guaranteeing our return. That is, of course, what is already happening with investor owned utilities. But as costs continue to skyrocket, more resources are needed to flow into the inexhaustible maw of the “green” boondoggle. Supply and demand won’t do the trick. Consumers won’t support the effort. So the only solution is using taxpayer money to guarantee private sector returns.

Thus the “green” train chugs onward. An utter failure in the marketplace, but still a darling of the political world, where politicians don’t spend their money. They spend yours.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/07/kerry-comes-clean.php

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