Ruled by carrots

Remember the cocoa disaster that pushed prices to all-time highs? Well, it appears the same is happening with orange juice — and as you would expect, it is being blamed on climate change, which appears to be the new way of saying “unfavourable weather”.

Disease, it turns out, also had a lot to do with the orange supply squeeze but hey, that must be a consequence of climate change as well because everything is. Convenient is too weak a word to describe the way one phrase has become the go-to explanation for everything bad that is happening anywhere. Ridiculous might be a better one at this point, not that this ridiculousness is discouraging the abusers of “climate change”.

Besides orange juice, climate change is apparently threatening to derail the U.S. economy — and this comes from a regional Federal Reserve Bank, not some think tank. How, you might wonder, would climate change derail the entire U.S. economy? By making weather too hot for construction workers to work.

This would in turn lead to a decline in capital investment in the construction sector somehow, probably because in a climate change-dominated world everything is so tightly connected that a hot week or two can bring down the entire economy of the United States.

It won’t be uncontrolled borrowing, you understand. Not suicidal energy policies. It would be climate change. Which seems about to keep happening because people like SUVs and don’t like wind energy.

“Our findings suggest that, under a scenario with no large scale efforts to reduce carbon emissions, future increases in extreme heat would reduce the capital stock by 5.4% and annual consumption by 1.8%,” economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco said in a new paper. Over what period, you ask? “By the year 2200.”

It appears no longer enough to predict doom, gloom, and extreme heat by 2050. Let’s go farther into the future and try to make it even scarier — somehow. The adorable part is the apparent belief that cutting those evil emissions would absolutely stop hotter days from occurring and everything will be all right because construction workers would continue being able to work outside in the summer.

As we all know, there were no extra-hot days at all before we discovered coal. Summers were all balmy and pleasant and winters were just the right degree of cold. Yes, there are actual people who actually believe this to have been the actual case before the Industrial Age. And these people, I cannot stress this enough, are in positions of decision-making power.

Luckily, no one has yet given direct decision-making power to the IEA but indirectly it continues labouring for the common good. The latest fruit of these labours is the discovery that SUV sales are driving emissions higher, which is of course a very bad thing but we don’t really have a ready solution besides making more electric SUVs, which comes with its own problems because size means greater material requirements and really, why can’t we all just drive e-Up!s?

Sadly, we can’t and we don’t seem to care too much about emissions because despite the massive effort to encourage an “increased public discourse about climate change and the energy transition,” which is my new favourite euphemism for “climate propaganda”, SUV sales last year hit an all-time high of 48% of global car sales, up from 41.4% just three years earlier.

The IEA described this as follows: “If SUVs were a country, they would be the world’s fifth-largest emitter of CO2.” I wish I could say “Americans and their weirdo ways of comparing sizes!” but, alas, the IEA is not American. It must be a communicable disease.

Another symptom of that disease appears to be an acute lack of awareness regarding the fact that actions always, always have consequences and these consequences are not invariably of the desirable sort.

Take sanctions and this fresh Reuters report that says “The growing shadow fleet of tankers transporting sanctioned Iranian, Venezuelan and Russian oil is filling up with the cheapest fuel available, hindering industry efforts to use cleaner fuel to cut shipping emissions, according to shipping data and sources.”

It must be horrible to see all your efforts to clean up maritime transport turn futile because your geopolitical efforts to punish certain countries who see the world differently from you has them and their business partners stop doing business with your business partners.

The frustration at Lloyd’s is palpable in the report. “The dark fleet has gone on steroids. And the deceptive shipping practices that they're engaging in are getting more and more complex and sophisticated,” per one lady from Lloyd’s List Intelligence. Translation: we’re losing business and we don’t like it. All because those at the top forgot that actions have consequences. The size of the business lost? 14.5% of global tankers.

Speaking of business losses, did you hear about Shell and Siemens Gamesa? They’re both laying off wind personnel to cut the abovementioned. Shell is “concentrating on select markets and segments to deliver the most value for our investors and customers,” while Siemens Gamesa is “adapt[ing] to lower business volumes, reduced activity in non-core markets, and a streamlined portfolio."

So many words to say that offshore wind is not making money, which is very unfortunate but there is other business that is making money and, shock of shocks, the companies are focusing on the moneymaking one, climate change be damned.

Even more tragically, some wind companies are being punished for making money — because they’ve been making it the wrong way, namely by inflating the price of the electricity their turbines are producing. “Accidentally” you see. For which the company that got caught, Beatrice Offshore Windfarm Limited, will have to cough up 33 million pounds that will go into a fund to support financially vulnerable electricity consumers. Actions, consequences and all that.

Back to cocoa, for a nice framing of the text, a Unilever-sponsored article that recently appeared in Climate Home News suggests the governments of major cocoa producing countries should tax chemical fertilisers and pesticides to discourage use while encouraging more sustainable cocoa-farming practices. I just revised my cocoa-in-stock target from two to five years.

Fun and totally unrelated fact: Did you know that the Welsh word for carrot is moron?