The Classic Green Non Story – Coal Assets Could Be Halved If…..

Coal assets could be worth less than half of their current market value if the world agrees tougher climate targets according to a report by the bank HSBC

“If is the middle word in life” said Marlon Brando’s character Colonel Kilgore in the movie Apocalypse Now.

Generations of computer programmers know If is a conditional, as in the conditional If, used in many programming languages, only in warming alarmist world are conditionals an absolute, where if and could, are actually synonyms for will.

When you couple this skewing of language with vested interests reporting on vested interests, you end up with the a classic Green non story like “Value of coal assets ‘could be halved’ if world goes low-carbon“.

Conditionals are of course based upon probability, and obviously there is a chance that the entire world could decide to believe the Green meme, leave fossil fuel reserves in the ground and decide to follow a dimly lit future based upon intermittent Green approved energy generation.

The big question, is it likely?

HSBC said that the value of coal assets owned by global mining conglomerates such as BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Anglo American and Glencore Xstrata might be slashed by around $20 billion if governments decide that much of the world’s future coal production should be left in the ground.

The possibility that many mines and power stations that burn the fuel could become “stranded assets” gained much greater traction in the past year, as finance institutions such as the World Bank curbed lending to coal and large investors pulled money from the sector.

The World Bank on its website has a whole page devoted to its links with the UN:

Over the years, the World Bank has collaborated with the United Nations in nearly every region and sector, deepening this engagement since the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the international community.

This strategic relationship liaises through the Bank’s offices in New York and Geneva, in a proactive and forward-looking manner, coordinating positions as necessary with a Bank-wide network of managers and staff engaged in UN matters.

Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian Nazi collaborator, during World War II and since, Quisling has become a term which refers to a collaborator and in its own words the World Bank collaborates with the UN.

The whole world knows the UN meme on Anthropogenic Global Warming promoted by the UNFCCC, which is backed up by the junk science of the UNFCCC scientific body the IPCC. So it obviously makes sense to the UN to back up junk science scare stories with junk finance scare stories.

“The latest climate science has reemphasised that the carbon contained in global fossil fuel reserves is far greater than the available ‘carbon budget’ for the rest of the 21st century. Coal is particularly exposed as it is the most carbon- intensive fuel,” HSBC said in today’s report.

So where does HSBC stand on Man Made Climate Change? An extract from their website:

At HSBC we have created a dedicated climate business team, with relationship managers who are trained in renewable energies and the climate proposition. In this way, we aim to help the growth of industries dedicated to combating climate change and to help finance a low carbon economy.

If you click the link on the HSBC website you get directed to a page named Climate Business and are left wondering if the World Bank and HSBC use the same firm of copyeditors.

The next step in the Green non story is to seek confirmation for the HSBC report from the warming alarmists at the International Energy Agency (IEA):

The International Energy Agency’s annual outlook for coal published in December said the fuel is likely to replace oil as the dominant source of energy by the end of the decade.

“This matters because a coal plant, once built, stays around for decades. This carries grave implications for climate change, for in its current form, coal is simply unsustainable,” the IEA chief Maria van der Hoeven said ahead of a clean energy summit in Abu Dhabi today.

She said that without carbon capture and storage and a meaningful carbon price, runaway climate change will be unavoidable.

The circle is complete, ergo it is time to promote the latest monument to Green folly, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), as if there were not already enough monuments to Green folly in the form of wind and solar farms.

Then comes the admission that no one is likely to take much notice of the HSBC report, The World Bank, The IEA or the UNFCCC:

The main problem for policymakers is that coal-fired power is usually far cheaper than gas, nuclear and renewables, while countries such as China and India have large domestic reserves of the fuel in addition to cheap imports from Indonesia.

In large exporting countries, the coal industry also enjoys strong political support.

The warming alarmist industry has already acknowledged that there will be no binding treaty on emissions or any other part of Agenda 21 at COP21 in 2015.

When set against the backdrop of ever lowering expectations for COP21 and the author of the piece admitting there is no political will in many countries any more to be frightened by CO2 anymore the whole piece could really have been titled “If pigs had wings they might fly“.

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