Green rot

Investments in wind and solar, and hydrogen, and batteries, and EVs are rising. They’re rising fast and that’s a really great thing because the planet’s warming and the only way to stop this warming is by investing even more in wind and solar, and hydrogen, and batteries, and EVs.

That’s the messaging that’s been pouring out of every corporate media outlet, every NGO, and every bank with transition ambitions. The trajectory of those investments was assumed to remain uninterrupted and upward — anything else went against dogma, which is an offence punishable by media death in this day and age. Alas, there is rot in the message, and that rot is fast becoming unmanageable because even corporate media is talking about it increasingly often. I guess the stink became impossible to ignore.

It was Bloomberg of all media that recently reported some truly horrible news. Hedge funds were growing sour on the transition, it said last week. Of 500 funds surveyed, more were betting against transition technology than were betting on it. Also, more funds were betting on oil and gas than were betting against them. Weird, right? Also, absolutely unexpected.

Here’s a quote: “Despite the promises, clean energy and green technology stocks have lagged far behind the broader market. Deep-pocketed institutions are concluding that many climate investments won’t pay off as quickly, or as lucratively, as they’d hoped,” Bloomberg wrote, citing hedge fund executives.

The outlet also cited the chief executive of one Swiss-based hedge fund as saying, adorably, that his team and he “have been looking for an inflection point for years” but “we don’t see the inflection as yet.” Wanted: Inflection point for transition technologies that forego the paws of physics and I am not correcting this typo because it is so fitting.

Rot is setting deeper in the greenhouse of the transition and it is spreading faster. Because not only are hedge funds growing cold towards the inflection-pointless transition exercise, but coal demand of all things horrible is about to keep rising instead of playing along and dying already. Oh, and Big Oil just returned to Libya of all places. Must be masochism. Either that, or the transition is doomed.