Bishop Hill David Henderson on Deutsche Bank
Dec 24, 2010 Climate: Surface Climate: WG3 Energy I'd forgotten to post this up a week or so back - David Henderson's article in the Financial Post about Deutsche Bank getting into the political activism game and the questions this should raise for their investors.
For any organization of standing, not least a leading multinational company such as Deutsche Bank, an obvious aspect of responsible conduct is a demonstrated concern for accuracy and the truth. The bank’s management board could now manifest such a concern, first, by commissioning an independent and informed review of this report, and second, by withdrawing and repudiating the report if the review supports McKitrick’s analysis.
There is also Terence Corcoran's take on the same affair.
As Mr. Henderson puts it, the Deutsche report on climate skeptics has been rendered worthless as a guide to the science and for investors. It also betrays a larger issue, which is a corporate role on the part of Deutsche Bank that makes Exxon look like a Boy Scout.
Reader Comments (27)
and still the 'warmists' will cry that unbelievers are all in the pay of big business. Oh the irony.
The sheer amount of money in play is staggering. The sheer amount of green hypocrisy likewise.
Time to close accounts Deutsche Bank.
And lest we forget, the Bish has covered this before:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/11/9/speechless.html
All complete with links to the responses by McKitrick.
It was and is utterly scandalous.
I have long held the opinion that when it comes to climate change, the environmentalists are the puppets and the investment bankers are the puppet masters. I don't know what kind of bets Deutsche Bank has on carbon trading already or if they just want to be on the ground floor of a "trillion dollar" market but I am amazed at how many progressives blindly carry the water for these billionaire bankers.
Kenya to set up carbon credits trading forum
Kenya will set up a climate exchange platform, similar to a commodity exchange, to facilitate trading in carbon credits and open up financing for generation of renewable energy and afforestation.
The platform is being developed by the Ministry of Finance, assisted by carbon trading consulting company Bea International.
The exchange, to be known as Nairobi Climate Exchange, will be the first of its kind on the continent and will facilitate trading in carbon credits for other African countries.
“Kenya is better placed to emerge as a regional carbon emission trading hub,” said Treasury PS Joseph Kinyua. “We have started a process of establishing a carbon emission trading scheme in Nairobi to pioneer the carbon market in Africa.”
The exchange will offer banks an opportunity to finance climate change investment projects, an area they have been avoiding because of lack of understanding and expertise on profiling risks inherent in such projects, according to a survey by the International Finance Corporation (IFC).
Treasury officials said the formation of the exchange was being fast-tracked because of the high number of inquiries the country has received from foreign banks wanting to partner in trading in carbon credits. “We have been flooded with inquiries from financial institutions like HSBC Bank and JPMorgan, but we cannot engage them now until we have set rules and regulations,” said Geoffrey Mwau, the Economic Secretary.
http://tinyurl.com/3ymhvdm
IPCC Official: “Climate Policy Is Redistributing The World’s Wealth”
The new thing about your proposal for a Global Deal is the stress on the importance of development policy for climate policy. Until now, many think of aid when they hear development policies.
That will change immediately if global emission rights are distributed. If this happens, on a per capita basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there. This will have enormous implications for development policy. And it will raise the question if these countries can deal responsibly with so much money at all.
http://tinyurl.com/3645eef
Bank Tax, CO2 Auctions Recommended by Soros
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-05/soros-panel-draft-says-bank-taxes-c02-auctions-can-fund-climate-aid.html
Africa: Up for Grabs
St Malo: Britain and France working together in Africa
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/energyresources/message/125547
European leaders plan Eurozone extension to Africa by 2050
Europe-Africa Summit - The European Commission Monday proposed the creation of
an expanded Eurozone area covering Africa by 2050. European Commission President
Jose Manuel Barroso said Monday the expansion of the Eurozone area into Africa
could help create a beneficial economic zone of 2.5 billion people from 80
countries, all members of the new alliance between Europe and Africa.
'We have come to Tripoli with the fascinating long-term perspective of a
Euro-African economic area in mind, an area which will provide opportunities for
2.5 billion citizens by 2050,' President Barroso said in a speech during the
Monday's session of the EU-Africa Summit.
'The economic and financial crisis is not over yet. But as we work to emerge
from it, new avenues for Africa and Europe to restore and accelerate growth are
opened,' he said.
http://tinyurl.com/2a8wgc3
Paulson takes on China and climate change
Paulson's an environmentalist - he is the former chair of the Nature Conservancy and the reason why Goldman Sachs, under his watch, became the first investment bank to call for federal regulation of greenhouse gases
http://tinyurl.com/5uxumu
Oil companies and banks will profit from UN forest protection scheme
REDD alert for India's forest-dwellers
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/energyresources/message/125428
African Farmers Displaced as Investors Move In
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/world/africa/22mali.html
UGANDA: CARBON TRADING SCHEME BLAMED FOR DISPLACEMENT.
http://tinyurl.com/2wzxyke
Farm Radio Weekly
Uganda: Indigenous people fight for land lost to carbon credit scheme
Ezra Wandeka is Benet, a group of indigenous Ugandans. The Benet people have long called the Mount Elgon region of southeastern Uganda home. But all that changed in 1993. The land where they lived and farmed was designated as a national park, and forest rangers began evicting the Benets. Soon, trees were being planted in the area. In time, the Benets would learn about the financial interests behind their eviction. A Dutch company called the Face Foundation was paying the Ugandan government to plant trees, so they, in turn, could sell carbon credits
http://tinyurl.com/2f9vrr8
TANZANIA expects South Korea to begin farming 15000 hectares of land in the east African country early next year for food production and processing.
http://www.dispatch.co.za/article.aspx?id=448487
Enron and the Politics of Influence
Rent-seeking in Washington is a highly developed art-form and when really humungous amounts of money are involved, it is always the case that a Baptist-bootlegger coalition has been put together to get the necessary legislation through Congress
snip
The Baptists provided the political cover and the bootleggers pocketed the proceeds
http://tinyurl.com/9byffd
Carbon market chaos strikes again
Hopeful souls imagine that they can improve the regulations or auditing, or close the loopholes, but that’s just the problem: In a fake market based on an unmeasurable, unverifiable thing like the motivations of Third World businessmen, the market itself is the loophole. The only way to close the loophole is to close the market.
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/03/carbon-market-chaos-strikes-again/
Wall St. sets the stage for the next Big Heist
As in all schemes brought to life by Government office, the first question that begs to be asked is Qui Bono? When a Carbon Tax or a Carbon Cap and Share program is announced the one thing that can be assumed is that it will be designed to make money for those who usually make the money all along. To believe that Washington or London have developed a more altruistic nature and suddenly want to save the world, is to deny decades of Political and economic history. The road to discovering the real truth behind the plan is to follow the money, the players and the science.
http://tinyurl.com/7qgfww
I am a top foreigner in Papua New Guinea, says carbon kingpin
''None of the carbon traders operating in PNG are able to demonstrate that they have an effective methodology to ensure that landowners give free and informed consent to the complicated legal contracts they are being induced to sign,'' said a spokesman for the Wilderness Society, Tim King.
''I am not aware of a single landowner group that really understands what they are participating in, the restrictions that will be placed over their land, the potential value of their forests or how they will benefit.''
http://tinyurl.com/lnln8r
Lawrence Solomon: The $7-billion carbon scam
Aided by lax rules, the Danish emissions registry became the world’s largest, with 1256 registered permit traders, most of them fake. As one example, a registered trader used a London parking lot as his address. Following the discovery of the scam, some 1100 of these have been de-registered, leaving scant few traders in the Danish market.
The Danish Minister of Climate and Energy who oversaw the illusory growth in the carbon market, Connie Hedegaard, has since been promoted to the post of EU Climate Commissioner. She is now in Cancun, representing the EU’s interests and arguing for steps that the global community needs to take for the carbon industry to regain credibility.
http://tinyurl.com/3x6csk6
For sale: all of our forests. Not some of them, nor most of them – the whole lot
Tories have never been treehuggers, but their plans to sell off all state-owned forests are unwarranted, unwanted and unworkable
http://tinyurl.com/33louf7
EU Sketches Out Energy Strategy Through 2020
Sahara Solar Power to Ease Reliance on Russia, EU Says
Oct. 26 (Bloomberg) -- A plan to build solar-power generators in the Sahara
desert to feed electricity to the European Union may ease the continent’s
reliance on Russia for supplies, EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said.
Africa, Europe in joint energy initiative
Desertec: Electricity from the desert to unite Europe with the Arab world
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eurorealist/message/39047
Günther Oettinger, Energy Commisioner for the EU, sees the expansion of offshore wind parks in the North and solar plants in the South as a pivotal development. This process would encourage a modernization and standardization of the European power grid. He claims that DESERTEC is the most important idea of a partnership between Africa and Europe.
http://www.desertec.org/en/news/
Building a supergrid for Europe
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eurorealist/message/38549
http://www.desertec.org/
European nations agree on offshore North Sea electric grid
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11909048
EU countries launch North Sea electricity grid
http://tinyurl.com/24a4jyf
Sean2829
Oh yes. Just compare the party line about how climate change supposedly drove up food price rises over the last decade with the truth.
It was Goldman (and others) playing the commodities markets.
The towering irony of it - environmental activists vigorously promoting climate change disinformation that allows great big evil banks to starve the poor...
As with the carbon counting that has led to the destruction of UK energy policy, these people - all of them - have a hell of a lot to answer for.
The truth is that they have precious little to be so damnably self-righteous about. As they are about to discover.
brent
Please consider breaking them up a bit. Thread-killers otherwise.
@BBD
I'm not sure what you mean by thread killers, however if most don't want posts like that , I'll certainly stop
cheers
brent
brent
All I mean is that walls of text a) don't tend to get read and b) chop the thread up into the sections in between them.
Not attacking you or the content you post, just suggesting that there is an alternative approach to presenting it that might work better.
@BBD
I should have added that my intent in stringing some links together as above, is to help "connect some dots".. as all the info is interconnected. Breaking up into small pieces makes it more difficult to "discern the interconnections" in my view.
In any event, if others do not want such posts as I said above, I will most certainly stop
cheers
brent
brent
I think the underlying interconnections are fairly obvious, but I take your point ;-)
I guess I am a bit surprised by the surprise many of you have that a bank would actually involve itself in politics, use it to make money, and do so with very questionable ethics.
Where have you been?
It is just the same old, same old. Been going on for years. Just look at what the ECB was been doing and what happened in Ireland, in particular. And then there is the US FED, which you may be surprised to learn is a PRIVATE corporation. But then again so is the Bank of England, Isle of Man, NI, Scotland, as well as the banks of Honk Kong.
If you want to see a classic example of Bank Robbery, look at AIB, BOI and the rest. They ran Ireland into the ground by making loans to their buddies in the construction industry, building 300,000 houses in Ireland that nobody could use, and then having their buddies in the Irish government pay for it all with public money. Now the entire EU is under threat.
And how many bankers are in jail? Not one.
And as for what happened in Wall Street in late 2008, how many bankers are still in their jobs? Most. The only guy in jail is Bernie Madoff, and that is because he confessed openly.
As one of my old Wall Street friends told me, "If you can't be a financial shark, be a remora. That way you can snap up an occasional scrap". These guys are too big to jail. Learn to survive off them because you sure aren't going to beat them.
George Soros -- whom I don't like at all, but I must respect -- once said: "If you want to make money, go find a bubble and ride it up. The trick is knowing when to get off at the top."
Just look at what he did to the Bank of England in 1992.
Don Pablo
You are surprised at a perceived financial naivety that doesn't exist. Hence:
Could be read as a little... unnecessary.
I'm not surprised at all. What I actually said above was:
See - no surprise.
@BBD
I don't think that Don Pablo was pointing the finger at you. It is fair to say that some of the other commentary on the Deutsche report (in particular at CA) has been a little behind the pace on the subject of Deutshe's reputation and of how much can be expected from bank regulators. Speaking of which:
Deutsche is on trial for aggravated fraud in Italy. It also features prominently in derivatives expert Janet Tavakoli's recent US Congressional testimony about the American subprime crisis, entitled 'Repairing the Damage of “Fraud as a Business Model"'.
(Here's a HTML version of Tavakoli's PowerPoint slides.)
anonym
Thank you.
Not for nothing is it known as Scheisse Bank in some circles.
If Tavakoli's pungent but terse slides wet your appetite for more details on the pervasive fraud now endemic in the big US banks, then I recommend William K. Black's recent series of articles at the Huffington Post (several coauthored with L. Randall Wray). Black was a key figure in unravelling the Savings&Loan debacle, so he knows thereof he speaks. And, for a no holds barred, effing and blinding running commentary by a libertarian, see the archives of Karl Denninger's Market Ticker blog.
[Climate trivia footnote: the forum associated with Denninger's blog featured what may well have been the first detailed discussion of the HarryReadMe file by programmers.]
Thank you Anonym
I was reacting to the overall tone of "OHMYGOD!" not BBD in particular.
Brent
Irrespective of how you present it or format it, I for one am very keen indeed that you continue with your invaluable posts. Hugely appreciated. The treasures here have been saved to a Word document so I can find them again more easily. I'm sure that that BBD (who also makes great comments) would be the first to agree that some of these links deserve closer study.
Seasons greetings to you, the Bish, BBD and everyone else on here (apart from the odd, pathetic troll).
As for corporate sponsorship of the alarmist message, anyone watching TV here in the states is regularly bombarded with messages explaining how company X or corporation Y is working hard to reduce carbon emissions. I just use the ads as a reminder not to shop for the products of those companies. Anyone who spends his ad budget affirming the global warming message, explicitly or implicitly, doesn't get my business.
http://www.deutsche-bank.de/en/content/contact_form.htm
Do you all know where your superannuation and other funds are invested and how much is in untested new technolgies such as renewables and alternative energy?
History shows that very few start up companies and projects are successful, even in industries such as autos and TV that eventually became very successful and long lasting.
Most new companies in these fields went broke.
I understand that the pension funds of certain well known media organisations are highly invested into untried new industries.
It's you future at stake.
Do not moan and wail when it's too late.
It's time to take charge of your own long term future.
Now
Find out just how and where your funds are invested and move them if you are not happy or do not completely understand how they intend to make a fortune for YOU.
@ Brent
Martin Brumby ... what he said. Invaluable.
Speaking as one who is entirely capable of assimilating comments of that size: THANK you.
@Martin B
Sorry I messed up some formatting on a couple of the snippets. I'll try to do better
cheers
brent
Walmart and Environmental Defense Fund (Under the covers together)
http://tinyurl.com/2cswh4o
Walmart collaborated with Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to develop this approach that looks at the supply chain on a global scale. Other external advisers include PricewaterhouseCoopers, ClearCarbon Inc., the Carbon Disclosure Project and the Applied Sustainability Center (ASC) at the University of Arkansas. This team will identify projects, quantify reductions, engage suppliers and ensure proper procedures were followed for each GHG reduction claim.
http://www.edf.org/pressrelease.cfm?contentID=10834
Walmart Senior VP Chokes Up Talking Sustainability
Why he teared up as he did isn't immediately clear -- perhaps the prospect of catastrophic climate change is truly upsetting to him. Or perhaps he was struck by the severe cynicality presented by Dr. Sanjayan of the Nature Conservancy, who spoke right before him and lamented that "nobody really cares about their grandchildren", arguing that may be part of the reason why we fail time and again to pass forward-thinking climate policy -- we're too selfish.
Either way, it was a supremely odd moment -- and a striking one, to say the least -- to see one of the most powerful marketing directors in the world (for the world's largest retailer, no less) break down over green issues.
http://tinyurl.com/34y3tzt
Up to 30 Walmart Stores to Receive Thin Film Solar Panels
Today, Walmart, one of EDF’s most prominent corporate partners, announced its plans to add solar generating systems to another 20 to 30 sites in California and Arizona, and the majority of these locations will feature thin film technology. Two different thin film systems will be assessed – cadmium telluride and copper indium gallium selenide, known as CIGS.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eurorealist/message/37590
First Solar: why Sam's daughter-in-law is wealthiest Walton.
http://tinyurl.com/33dw7t6
Personally I don't begrudge at all one of the Walton's making a shrewd investment in First Solar.
However would not be much in favour of subsidizing the likes of a Walmart under a FIT
program. :(
Enron and the Politics of Influence
Rent-seeking in Washington is a highly developed art-form and when really humungous amounts of money are involved, it is always the case that a Baptist-bootlegger coalition has been put together to get the necessary legislation through Congress
snip
The Baptists provided the political cover and the bootleggers pocketed the proceeds
http://tinyurl.com/9byffd
Warmers like EDF are the “Contemporary Baptists”
as Scottie used to say, "You canna break the laws of physics." yes, you can make short-term profits but very soon the market turns against you. Most studies show that financial speculation tends to be a zero-sum game....reversion to the mean...etc. Very few investors out-perform the market over a long period. The faxct that you might name a few proves my point. The rest did not do so well...and they probably held your pension funds.