Biden admin and Wall Street to create green economy through credit policy

Ignoring the debates, complexity, and uncertainties of current climate science, a Biden Treasury, Fed, and the big guns of US and international finance plan to force a shift to a carbon-free, green economy through credit allocation to companies compliant with the green agenda, denying it to the others.

by Richard Schulman

Joe Biden’s announced appointments so far appear to turn away from the Sanders-Warren progressive wing of the Democratic Party in favor of Clinton-Obama veterans –the appointment of Xavier Becerra as HHS Secretary being an exception. Appearances are deceiving, however. Despite the seeming business-as-usual continuity with Obama policies and personnel, the incoming Biden administration aims to impose a radical green remake of the US economy beyond the Sierra Club’s fondest dreams. It will seek to accomplish this regardless of whether it succeeds in retaking the Senate following the January 5 Georgia runoffs and regardless of the uncertain state of contemporary climate science. This will all be accomplished, without legislation if need be, by a trifecta consisting of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen at Treasury, and the Wall Street financial community.

The credit dictatorship

Walter Russell Mead, writing in the December 8 Wall Street Journal, notes that

[C]onventional regulatory pressure is yesterday’s tactic. It is the financial system that drives the allocation of capital, and the considerable power that governments and central banks have over investment decisions is increasingly seen by environmentalists as the key to driving the massive global transformation they seek to address climate change…. Treasury Secretary-designate Janet Yellen is a longtime climate hawk…. The Fed is also a likely accomplice…. Already the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund seek to drive borrowers toward more ‘climate friendly’ policies.

The Biden administration is also receiving crucial support from big guns in the Wall Street financial community (BlackRock, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and others). They are already threatening or have already begun cutting off non-green private sector companies from credit support. The wealthiest US corporations, especially those with commanding positions in the digital economy (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Netflix, and Microsoft), are also on board and played a notable role in supporting Biden’s candidacy.

Power and pelf

What’s in it for this government-billionaire coalition? For the former — the progressive politicians — unparalleled power over people and policy. For the latter — the billionaires — a means of thwarting the rise of new entrepreneurs and newly industrialized countries that could topple the elites from their present summits of power and wealth. Secondarily, the coalition is happy to pocket risk-free profits from the one, two, many new Solyndras that will be paid for by taxpayers.

There is no scientific or cost-benefit basis for the agenda that the Fed, Treasury, Wall Street, corporate billionaires, UN, and other international elites are promoting. Weather can scarcely be accurately predicted beyond a three-day horizon, and yet the climate catastrophist community wants us to believe that it has the expertise to predict what the climate will be in the years 2030, 2050, or 2100 — whether by projection of current technology (which likely won’t be around in 2050 or 2100) or by implementation of its ultra-expensive no-carbon, no-growth plans?

We’ve seen what the worth of government experts has been during the pandemic. They’ve flip-flopped, contradicted each other, and barked one-size-fits-all commands that did as much harm as good. The media multiplied the harms a many-fold by their own ignorant cheerleading and censorship.

Warmist prediction record makes election pollsters seem geniuses

The climate modelers supporting UN catastrophe scenarios continue to make fools of themselves. Every dire, point-of-no-return prediction by the climate-catastrophe community has been proven wrong. One of the latest casualties is Germany’s Potsdam Climate Institute, which last year “boasted that it had a superior El Niño one-year forecasting model, claiming 80% certainty. Today, a year later, its forecast emerges totally wrong and the prestigious institute is left humiliated,” NoTricksZone reports.

Yes, you heard that right. Potsdam got wrong a one-year forecast of a terrestrial cyclical phenomenon that is one of the best understood by meteorologists. Yet Potsdam and its UN-allied co-thinkers want to tell us what earth’s climate will be like in 2100?

The alarmist climate community wants us to believe its predictions regarding one of the most complex phenomena of nature, the earth’s climate, with dozens of contributory variables, some of the most important of which are extra-terrestrial. Despite the fact that both the separate and interacting effects of these variables are still far from well understood, the experts insist that we set aside our skepticism and accept their confidence in a single monocausal explanatory variable, CO2?

Climate as an n-body problem, new variables

May we suggest that climate modelers first try to devise a general solution to the three-body problem, in which the initial positions and momenta of each of the three participating bodies are well understood? This problem has challenged scientists from Isaac Newton to the present. But if three-body mechanics are challenging, consider climate with its dozens of climate variables, none of whose initial conditions are well defined.

To further complicate matters, new variables and understandings are continually coming into view, with their relative impact yet to be assessed:

• Jupiter’s gravitational coupling with Saturn on a quasi-sixty-year cycle may slingshot meteorites into earth’s atmosphere, producing climate-modifying dust, according to a September paper in Geophysical Research Letters.
• The causes and timing of sunspot cycles, which are an extremely important influence on earth’s climate, are still only imperfectly understood. The November issue of Solar Physics describes some new thoughts on how to better predict sunspot cycle timing.

The ECS crisis

Meanwhile, there is a crisis in the climate modeling community regarding the huge and embarrassing disagreement among members as to the correct equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) value. That number will supposedly characterize how much the planet’s temperature will rise for a given percentage rise in atmospheric CO2.

The ECS disagreement is especially significant because climate catastrophists have assumed, quasi-religiously, that the complexities and uncertainties can be set aside by just focusing on CO2 and temperature data from the past several decades. They ignore or belittle historical evidence that earth has been much warmer and had much more CO2 on occasion than at present — and recovered without problem; that temperature drives CO2 more than the reverse; that water vapor is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2; that its varying presence in the atmosphere is still not well understood; and that the last decade’s temperature uptick was caused by a mid-decade El Niño, not CO2.

But science be damned. The Biden administration and its financial and corporate-sector allies have an agenda they’re determined to pursue. It’s a plan to create a green economy by providing credit only to compliant green companies and credit-starve the non-compliant ones. The plan will either be the administration’s undoing in the next election or, if successful, set the US economy on a downward economic course from which China will emerge as global leader.

12/14/20: Sierra Club spelling corrected.