Andrew Bolt: Global warming con making green shysters rich

A senior banker who downplayed the risk of climate change to investors has been silenced. So as Labor vows to spend billions on green schemes, who is getting rich on the global warming con?

Stuart Kirk has learned the price of getting between a bank and a bucket of money. He last week called out the great global warming rip-off and has now been suspended.

Kirk happens to know a lot about this scam. He is – or was – the head of “responsible banking” for the HSBC banking giant.

He’s the very senior guy a bank needs to sweet-talk global warming hysterics into handing over their cash for “ethical investments”. Not coal, though – no, no, no. Evil!

But last week Kirk had enough of the global warming scare that’s making green shysters rich, and people like you poorer.

Have you had the same feeling that you’re been played?

Consider: your electricity bill is going up again as we “transition” to green power. Our new Labor government is promising to spend an extra $75bn in eight years on green schemes, subsidies and handouts.

Someone sure is raking in that cash and getting mega-rich on the global warming religion. Ever wondered who, and what, they might say next to scare up even more money?

Well, Kirk has heard it all already, and finally snapped at a conference organised by the London Financial Times, for which he used to work.

“Twenty-five years in the finance industry, there’s always some nutjob telling me about the end of the world,” Kirk said, standing next to a slide saying “Unsubstantiated, shrill, partisan, self-serving, apocalyptic warnings are ALWAYS wrong.”

Stuart Kirk had enough of the global warming scare.

Now, he said, he’d just heard Sharon Stone, chair of Deloitte’s Global Board, tell the conference “we are not going to survive” the climate crisis – yet most listeners hadn’t even bothered to look up from their mobile phones. None there truly believed these scares.

Nor did investors, speaking with their own hard-earned money.

Kirk put up a slide he said he often used “to be annoying”. It showed the more often journalists used the phrase “climate catastrophe”, the higher share prices soared.

It wasn’t just journalists beating up the scare, either. So were senior bankers like Mark Carney, former governor of the central banks of both England and Canada, who Kirk said felt had “to out-hyperbole the next guy” on global warming to get noticed.

Yet investors didn’t really believe any of them.

If investors thought the world was about to end, why bet top dollar that companies on the stock market had a great future?

And Kirk reckons they’re not wrong. Pardon me for repeating an argument I’ve made for decades, but it’s time more people woke up, especially after millions of Australians just went gaga at this election for global warming hysterics demanding we “do something” about global warming, and never mind the cost.

In fact, said Kirk, “climate change is not a financial risk we have to worry about”.

Kirk did not question the alarmist predictions of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (although he should), but said even if you believed its worst scenarios, we would still end the century 1000 per cent richer than today.

So it made much more sense to use all that extra wealth to simply adapt to global warming, instead of obsessing about trying to stop it.

Our new Labor government is promising to spend an extra $75bn in eight years on green schemes, subsidies and handouts. Picture: Getty Images

Let me put this argument in a way that the people of Lismore would understand perfectly.

Question: what’s the most efficient way to stop your city from being flooded yet again? To spend trillions on uselessly trying to stop the rain, or a few million on building proper levees?

Or as Kirk wickedly put it: “Human beings have been fantastic at adapting to change, adapting to climate emergencies, and we will continue to do so.

“Who cares if Miami is six metres under water in 100 years? Amsterdam has been six metres under water for ages, and that’s a really nice place. We will cope with it.”

All true, but – as Kirk said at the start of his speech – it’s “heresy”. It could also cost HSBC big money, now that mega-big investment funds have signed up to a woke “Environmental, Social, and Governance” standard that tells them to steer clear of coal companies and other global warming sinners.

And so Kirk was suspended by his bank, even though it reportedly approved his talking points beforehand.

You see, Kirk was not wrong. He just got in the way of bankers feeding at the golden trough of the global warming shysters.

So now he’s been silenced, because if people like him are allowed to speak, you might finally understand you’re being scammed and turn off their tap.