Loony thinking once more
This today from the *co-leader of the Green Party:
Kia ora Richard,
This National Government is letting us down. Yesterday they did it again.
Yesterday, they stood up in Parliament and voted down my Fossil Fuels Divestment Bill. They said that they think the smart thing to do with our public funds is to invest it in fossil fuels instead of protecting our climate and our future.
Who are they kidding? They are giving up on the future. We will not, ever, give up.
Have you thought this through, Mr Shaw? If, by some miracle, your policy resulted in major oil producers going entirely broke and out of business, where do you think you would get the petrol to keep your personal car running?
If, by some other miracle, you were in power at the time, would you consider it your proper duty to ensure petrol was generally available so that the majority of your fellow citizens could get the petrol for their personal cars?
Finally, if it turned out in, say, fifty years time, that there was no measurable decrease in the mean global surface temperature, would you let us invest once again in these glorious oil companies?
* Any organisation with more than one leader has no leader but a committee, and is thereby doomed to ineffectiveness.
Views: 37
It was irrelevant legislation anyway. Active fund managers like NZ Super have already been moving away from industries with limited growth prospects. NZ Super have significantly reduced their investment in Z and their biggest return on investment in NZ has come from forestry,
Simon
>”[NZ Super Fund] biggest return on investment in NZ has come from forestry”
Mainly because of their huge investment in forestry – $1 billion+ (4.5% of the fund in 2013). Some forestry was dumped in favour of “more attractive investment opportunities for our purposes elsewhere”:
‘NZ Super Fund sells forest blocks’
JASON KRUPP, Last updated 14:16 24/04/2013
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/8591864/NZ-Super-Fund-sells-forest-blocks
>”NZ Super have already been moving away from industries with limited growth prospects”
>”NZ Super have significantly reduced their investment in Z”
They were a private foundation stakeholder in Z and cashed up publicly via sharemarket listing. In other words, they maximized their investment in Z (i.e. extracted the best value they could). That was smart investing for growth and nothing to do with “limited growth prospects”. The growth for NZ Super had already occurred once sharemarket listing was obtained (i.e. market capitalization) so of course any subsequent growth would be relatively minor from NZ Super’s POV and not worth holding the stock any longer.
This is no different to private company owners cashing up via IPO (and tech IPO’s making billionaires in the US or multimillionaires like Sam Morgan in NZ). From the article above:
If they didn’t sell Z for capital gain they would just be looking at dividends. Obviously the capital gain was better than the dividends over whatever time horizon they chose (i.e. net present value – NPV).
350.org’s fossil fuel “divestment” exposed as pointless political puppetry by National Association of Scholars
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/10/350-orgs-fossil-fuel-divestment-exposed-as-pointless-political-puppetry-by-national-association-of-scholars/
Bill Gates calls fossil fuel divestment a ‘false solution’
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/14/bill-gates-calls-fossil-fuel-divestment-a-false-solution
>”voted down my Fossil Fuels Divestment Bill”
Boo Hoo. In other news:
‘Solid Energy creditors accept sell-off plan’ – Updated at 7:58 am on 19 September 2015
Creditors of Solid Energy have approved a progressive sell-down of the company’s assets over the next two-and-a-half years. After that, Solid Energy will cease to exist, ending 70 years of state-run coal mining in New Zealand. The staged sell off was widely viewed as the best available method of handling an unpayable debt of $400 million.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/284432/solid-energy-creditors-accept-sell-off-plan
# # #
We’re going to see a lot of this world-wide and not just fossil fuel companies. In the US alone:
‘Waiting for Collapse: USA Debt Bombs Bursting’ – by William Edstrom, September 23, 2015
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/23/waiting-for-collapse-usa-debt-bombs-bursting/
>”Fossil Fuels Divestment”
Implies selling “at market” or the offer/bid process. In any case, willing seller meets willing buyer. A divestment for one is an investment for the other.
All that changes is the share registry. The company is unaffected.
Who caught the new Green Party leader on TV 1 this morning (Nov 27th) exhorting New Zealanders to be in the lead against climate change in stead of being the embarrassment we are now! If we do nothing the temperature will surely rise by 4 to 5 degrees C by the end of the century! All the while the TVNZ sports journalist doing the interview sympathetically nods at the right time. Not one challenge to a bunch of unsubstantiated garbage & rhetoric. The Green Party leader had high hopes of something even moderately binding that can be built on coming out of this Paris junket compared to the “disaster” (his words) of Copenhagen in 2009.
Just last night the same channel had an article on how India are rightly telling the rest of the world where to get off on interfering with their programme of expanding the number of coal power stations in order to bring millions of their citizens out of poverty in the same way that the western world did.