One of Norway’s largest companies, Storebrand, has decided to drop Germany’s biggest energy company, RWE, along with nine other companies from its $80 billion pension fund, due to their involvement in the coal industry.
Storebrand is present this week at the ongoing climate conference in Bonn, Germany, and this is their contribution to police the business world on behalf of the climate. Its chief executive, Jan Erik Saugestad, told the press that their decision was meant as a warning to energy companies to “clean up” their energy sources or “lose customers and investors.”
The company also stated that it hoped that Norway’s trillion-dollar oil fund would follow suit and divest from coal companies.
The U.S. Factor
Storebrand’s announcement came while the U.S. arranged an event in Bonn praising the use of coal. Other nations have reacted to America’s attitude with outrage.
Apparently, Western nations and companies are suffering from world savior complex. Even if the worst-case climate doomsday scenarios should turn out to be true, which is increasingly unlikely, there is virtually nothing the West can do about it. Why? Most emissions, population growth, and economic growth are occurring in non-Western countries.
Negligible Difference
Climate scientists Pat Michaels and Paul Knappenberger made a “suicide calculator” in 2013, allowing the reader to calculate the climate effect of all industrialized nations eliminating 100% of their CO2 emissions. You can fiddle with the calculator here.
If all industrialized countries immediately stopped all their carbon emissions, then even in the worst-case scenario with a highly sensitive climate, global warming will only be reduced by 0.352 C or a feeble 0.63 Fahrenheit by 2100. In plain English, that means no discernible effect. Or in even more blunt language: a waste of money and human lives.
Author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels” and president of the Center for Industrial Progress Alex Epstein explains in this PragerU video why coal and fossil fuels, in general, are not only acceptable but the only morally acceptable alternative, if you value human life.
If reducing carbon emissions does not affect climate change, then why insist on doing it? Sadly, it appears to be part of the white guilt industrial complex. For the same reason that Western borders – and only they – need to be open to atone for previous “Western imperialism and colonialism,” so to Western coal plants – and only they – need to shut down to atone for Western economic growth.
All for Nothing
In the end, it does not matter to the virtue signalers that the actions they call for are pointless. At least the Western suicide proves to the rest of the world how morally superior it is by being willing to be replaced by other cultures and economies.
Fortunately, the United States has so far decided to opt out of this madness. If this is the only legacy left by President Donald Trump, it will be a good one.
