Hear the bough break

Remember the heroic HSBC executive who two years ago called the climate catastrophists out, saying the apocalyptic scenarios were overblown, that climate change was nowhere near an existential threat, and that humankind has a long history of adapting to a changing environment? Yeah, he got fired for it, just as those of us who applauded his speech at the time expected.

The Stuart Kirk case was a crystal clear example of the same thing that’s happening in academia: if you dare speak against the narrative, you’ll lose your career or never have a chance to get one. As with the other efforts of the climate crusaders, the censorship push has been rash, unthinking, and marked by complete disregard of material realities. It was thus only a matter of time before someone else got fed up and spoke out.

This time, it was a UBS executive who’d had enough and who burst out (per Bloomberg) at a meeting of Fed and ECB officials, banks, and “public officials” to take stock of the progress of the transition.

The reason for what Bloomberg called an outburst: “The world’s biggest banks can’t live up to the green regulatory ideal unless they start dumping huge numbers of clients worldwide at a reckless pace and also roil economies in large swathes of the globe that primarily rely on dirty fuels.”

Okay, so Mr. Judson Berkey may not be of the same calibre as Mr. Kirk, seeing as the latter held zero punches in his attack on the whole narrative, but his speech at that February videoconference is no less significant.

The reason it is no less significant is that this speech is the latest crack in the dam or rather the tree branch where the climate crusade army resides — and which it is burdening with so much regulatory load that the branch is beginning to break. It was bound to be the bankers who’d sound the alarm.