;)
The Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has once again been trying to use his position to bully the insurance industry into supporting the green movement. His speech last night at Lloyds of London was fascinating - a blend of pseudoscience, green activism and big state interventionism the likes of which one rarely finds outside DECC and Defra.
As far as I can see, Carney's big idea was that more should be done "to develop consistent, comparable, reliable and clear disclosure around the carbon intensity of different assets".
[A] framework for firms to publish information about their climate change footprint, and how they manage their risks and prepare (or not) for a 2 degree world, could encourage a virtuous circle of analyst demand and greater use by investors in their decision making. It would also improve policymaker understanding of the sources of CO2 and corporate preparedness.
This really comes across as quite otherworldly. As was noted in the FT a few days ago, the stranded assets argument is a myth. Moreover, the insurance industry does not price risk based on what GCMs say the world is going to look like in a hundred years' time. The only interest analysts are going to have in insurers' preparations for the end of this century is surely going to be to demand why they are wasting their time on anything quite so ridiculous.
Insurers might, in passing, wonder why the man charged with overseeing the country's financial stability is so divorced from the real world that he thinks any of this worth a moment's thought, let alone any concrete action. But no doubt they will shrug their shoulders and move on.