Category: Business & Capitalism

Citigroup challenged for stigmatizing coal

The Free Enterprise Action Fund has challenged Citigroup regarding the bank’s support for the so-called “Carbon Principles” — a green-inspired effort to deny financing to the coal industry and electric utilities that burn coal.

The Fund’s challenge is in the form of a shareholder proposal that appears in Citigroup’s 2009 proxy statement and that will be voted on at the bank’s annual shareholder meeting on April 21. The proposal requests that Citigroup,

… describe the environmental impacts of its implementation of the Carbon Principles so that shareholders can determine for themselves whether such impacts are worth the reputational damage being inflicted on the source of 50 percent of the
U.S. electricity supply.

Take action:

1. Shareholders of Citigroup should vote “FOR” Proposal 9.

2. Attend the Citigroup meeting in New York City so that you can personally tell CEO Vikram Pandit that America needs coal-fired electricity not green oppression.

The real lesson from the firing of GM’s CEO

The firing of GM CEO Rick Wagoner by President Obama provides an object lesson for all CEOs: a CEO’s failure to combat green can only lead to disaster.

GM and the other car companies have thrived for the last 30 years, despite heavy union burdens, because of SUV sales — popular and high-margin products.

But SUV sales depended on cheap gas. Did any car CEO do anything to ensure cheap gas, say by promoting increased oil drilling and gasoline refining, and challenging greens that blocked those policies? No.

GM CEO Rick Wagoner didn’t call for more drilling until September 12, 2008 — two months after gasoline prices peaked last summer. By then, of course, it was all over for the SUV and car companies.

Ford CEO Bill Ford and Chrysler CEO Bob Nardelli still haven’t figured out the need for cheap gas.

Greens to Pepsi: Not less plastic, no plastic

The Wall Street Journal reported today that,

PepsiCo Inc. is reducing the amount of plastic it uses to package its bottled water in the U.S., the latest step by a beverage company to portray itself as environmentally conscious as sales of bottled water slip.

What was the response from the greens?

Gigi Kellett, national director of a “Think Outside the Bottle Campaign” for Corporate Accountability International, an organization that urges consumers to drink tap water, said a lighter bottle is welcome. But she said she’s concerned about “putting a green veneer on a plastic bottle.”

“Bottled water is costly for the environment, our pocketbooks and our public water systems,” Ms. Kellett said.

Two points:

  1. Corporate America has yet to learn that it will never make the greens happy. It will never be “green” enough as the greens keep moving the goalposts.
  2. The greens won’t stop with bottled water — they’re coming after other bottled beverages as well. Soft drinks, after all, are just flavored bottled water.

Steve Milloy’s new book Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them spotlights how the greens are using capitalists to destroy capitalism.

Shareholders beat NRG on ‘Carbon Principles’

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has ruled that nuclear power utility NRG Energy must allow shareholders to vote on a proposal to have the company justify its involvement with the so-called “Carbon Principles” –a green initiative to pressure banks not to finance coal-fired power plants.

The Free Enterprise Action Fund submitted the following proposal to NRG Energy on December 1, 2008:

Carbon Principles Report

Resolved: The shareholders request that the Company prepare by October 2009, at reasonable expense and omitting proprietary information, a Carbon Principles Report. The report should describe and discuss how the Company’s involvement with the Carbon Principles has impacted the environment.

Supporting Statement:

Coal is used to provide 50 percent of the U.S. electricity supply. The burning of coal by U.S. electricity utilities is clean and safe for the environment. Air emissions are regulated by states and the federal government. Since burning coal is the least expensive way to produce electricity, consumers and the U.S. economy benefit from comparatively low electricity rates.

The Company is an “industry advisor” to the so-called “Carbon Principles,” a voluntary bank lending policy stigmatizing and discriminating against coal-fired electricity based on the dubious assumption that carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal are causing global warming.

But in May 2008, the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine released a petition signed by more than 31,000 U.S. scientists stating, “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will cause in the future, catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate…”

India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change issued in June 2008 states, “No firm link between the documented [climate] changes described below and warming due to anthropogenic climate change has yet been established.”

Researchers belonging to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported in the science journal Nature (May 1, 2008) that, after adjusting their climate model to reflect actual sea surface temperatures of the last 50 years, “global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade,” since natural climate variation will drive global climate.

Climate scientists reported in the December issue of the International Journal of Climatology, published by the UK’s Royal Meteorological Society, that observed temperature changes measured over the last 30 years don’t match well with temperatures predicted by the mathematical climate models relied on by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

A British judge ruled in October 2007 that Al Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” contained so many factual errors that a disclaimer was required to be shown to students before they viewed the film.

NRG asked the SEC asked for permission to exclude the proposal from its annual proxy statement — and thereby deny shareholders a chance to vote on the proposal — claiming that it had only a limited advisory role in the development of the Carbon Principles.

But the Fund countered that,

[The proposal] requests a report on how NRG’s involvement with the Carbon Principles has impacted the environment. NRG admits it helped draft the Carbon Principles. NRG now apparently wants to get away with claiming that, “All we did was draft the Carbon Principles. But we’re not involved with them.” This is disingenuous. Drafting rules for lenders to comply with renders NRG inseparable from the Carbon Principles’ process.

The SEC decided in favor of the Free Enterprise Action Fund — and the rest of NRG’s shareholders.

The upshot is that NRG shareholders will have the opportunity to vote on the proposal through proxy voting and at the NRG annual meeting.

Stay tuned for developments.

Starbucks CEO: Lobbying against his own earnings

The Wall Street Journal reported today that,

Starbucks Corp. Chief Executive Howard Schultz said the coffee chain would combat the notion that its drinks are expensive, as he outlined plans to weather an economic downturn.

Starbucks starting suffering when gas skyrocketed to a green-induced $4/gallon. The choice for consumers between gasoline and a $4 coffee was pretty easy to make. And where $4 gasoline left off, the global financial crisis picked up.

Starbucks investors might want to ask CEO Howard Schultz why he is lobbying for economy-harming global warming regulation, which could easily bring back $4+ gasoline, higher electricity prices and more — none of which is good for the $4 coffee business.

Take action:

E-mail Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and tell him to wake up and smell the coffee — mindless green will hurt his business.

Steve Milloy’s new book Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them spotlights how corporate CEOs are leading our country to green wreck-and-ruin.

EU energy chiefs: Taxpayer cash is king

Today’s Financial Times features a headline that reads,

Energy chiefs urge action on carbon

And what do you think that action might be? Reducing fossil fuel use? Increased wind power? What?

The FT reported,

The chief executives’ demands include the speedy release of subsidies for carbon capture and storage, incentives to build new grid connections…[Emphasis added]

As always in the case of rent-seekers, cash (from taxpayers) is king.

Wells Fargo: Saving the planet or killing jobs?

Taking advantage of federal securities regulations that permit publicly-owned companies to transmit annual proxy statements to shareholders by e-mail rather than by mail, banking giant Wells Fargo stated in its preliminary 2008 proxy statement that,

Wells Fargo is also committed to promoting a clean environment and working towards a greener future. The SEC rule also allows us to reduce the environmental impact of printing and mailing hard copies of proxy materials to each stockholder. We printed 100,546,728 fewer pages of proxy materials for our 2008 annual meeting than we did for our 2007 annual meeting because we used the SEC’s notice and access rule. As a result, last year we saved the equivalent of at least:

  • 7,500 trees;
  • Greenhouse gas emissions of more than 250 cars driven for one year; and
  • Nearly 40 garbage trucks full of solid waste.

While the e-proxy may save Wells Fargo some money, its exaltation of its e-proxy’s green “benefits” is a bit unthinking, if not shortsighted:

  • Given that discarded proxy statements are only a small part of the waste stream, e-proxies won’t reduce garbage truck traffic or significantly increase landfill capacity. That’s good news for employees of garbage hauling companies and landfill operators./li>
  • Trees are a renewable resource. They are continually planted and harvested to make paper. Wells Fargo may have “saved” 7,500 trees, but how many jobs in the timber/paper industry will that cost? How many of those employees would have opened accounts at Wells Fargo?
  • Wells Fargo says it has saved the planet from the greenhouse gas emissions of 250 cars? Do you know how many cars Americans own? More than 250 million. Even if you buy into CO2 hysteria, trivial doesn’t begin describe the banks “achievement.”
  • And if we start applauding the removal of cars from the road, where will auto workers, gas station attendants, road workers, etc. work? Even Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm is starting to figure this one out.

Wells Fargo is going to need a healthy, growing and jobs-producing economy for the sake of its own prosperity.

People can’t live on green.

Climate dislosure imposed on insurers

The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that,

Insurance companies must start disclosing how climate change is likely to affect their businesses, state insurance regulators decided Tuesday.

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners voted to require insurers to submit annual “climate-risk” reports, an unusually aggressive stance on the environmental issue from industry regulators.

The officials acted after concluding that climate change threatens insurers in two ways. It increases the risk of extreme weather events such as floods and wildfires, which would boost claims. And it is prompting governments to cap industrial carbon emissions that contribute to global warming — a move threatens the profits of companies such as coal-fired utilities in which insurers commonly invest.

But as to climate change boosting claims, a Science and Public Policy Institute report concludes,

Despite the lack of any trends in hurricane landfalls along the U.S. and Florida coasts, or damage to U.S. coastlines when population demographics are taken into account, the impact from a single storm can be enormous. The massive population and infrastructure build-up of the US coastline has vastly raised the potential damage that a storm can inflict. It is stunningly dishonest and irresponsibly dangerous to insinuate, let alone assert, that CO2 mitigation policies could cage the destructiveness of nature, particularly in hurricane-prone Florida.

As to insurance industry investments in the coal industry being threatened by climate regulation, why would the insurance industry want to fan the flames of such financially harmful regulation in the first place by falling for climate alarmism?

Ghost of Caterpillar layoffs to come?

Heavy equipment manufacturer Caterpillar today announced plans to lay off more than 2,400 employees at five plants in Illinois, Indiana and Georgia as the heavy equipment maker continues to cut costs amid the global economic downturn.

Since it’s hardly rocket science that,

Bad economy = Less construction = Bad news for Caterpillar,

inquiring minds want to know why caterpillar is lobbying, via the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, for economy-harming greenhouse gas regulation. Moreover, since such regulation is likely to be anti-coal in nature, why is Caterpillar effectively lobbying against the coal industry, one its biggest customers?

Take action:

Ask Caterpillar Investor Relations why CEO James Owens is lobbying against his own earnings.

AutoNation CEO wants higher gas prices

As related in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled, “Tax My Products, Please,” AutoNation CEO Michael Jackson said at a conference earlier this month that

“We need more expensive gaosline.”

Why would Mr. Jackson adopt such an anti-consumer, anti-car and anti-his-own business attitude? The WSJ reported that,

While last year’s energy spike briefly encouraged small-car sales, Mr. Jackson complained that those sales have plummeted with gas prices. “I have fuel-efficient vehicles parked at my dealerships as far as the eye can see. I can’t give them away.” He figures a tax that guarantees a gas-price floor of $4 a gallon is a “good start.” [Ford CEO Alan Mulally], for his part, talked about how good Ford’s sales of small cars were in Europe, and that “one of the reasons is that gasoline and diesel is somewhere between seven and nine dollars a gallon.”

Jackson won’t suffer if gas prices go up. He made $4.5 million in 2006 and $3.4 million in 2007. While information on his 2008 compensation will be released later this month, it could very well be in the same neighborhood since his base salary is $1.1 million.

Take action:

E-mail AutoNation CEO Michael Jackson and tell him that his problem could be resolved by selling vehicles that Americans want to buy — like SUVs. You may want to mention that higher gas taxes are regressive and will hit those in lower tax brackets much harder than it will multimillionaires like himself.

Shell: CO2 intensity increasing

Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell today offered a dose of reality concerning energy and CO2 in a federal securities filing:

In the future, in order to help meet the world’s energy demand, we expect to produce more hydrocarbons from unconventional sources than currently. The production of hydrocarbons from those sources has an energy intensity that is a number of times higher than that for production from conventional sources. Therefore, in the long term, it is expected that the CO2 intensity of our production will increase.

Unfortunately, the sentence immediately preceding the above quote stated:

Emissions of greenhouse gases and associated climate change are real risks to Shell and society in general.

Would you invest in a company that condemns its own products and then says it plans on selling more of them?

Take action:

E-mail Shell Investor Relations and ask them whether pretending that manmade global warming is real is a good business strategy.

Greens, IBM work to make you thirsty

IBM is addressing water resources as part of its Smarter Planet/Think marketing campaign. In a campaign media release today, IBM VP Sharon Nunes said that,

“Without sufficient insight into near- and long-term factors affecting your water supply and usage — complex issues such as access, quality, cost and re-use — you increasingly run the risk of failure.”

A reasonable sentiment — until you get to the end of the media release which reads:

“Together with IBM, The Nature Conservancy is developing computer tools that will enable companies to gain a better understanding of the environmental and social consequences of their water use. By fostering sustainable water management practices, companies and municipalities will be able to make better decisions to the benefit of both local communities and nature.” — Brian Richterb, Director of The Nature Conservancy’s Global Freshwater Team.

Translation: The greens are looking to IBM technology to help them reduce our access to water.

Steve Milloy’s new book, Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, discusses how the greens are working to make us thirsty.