Google, meanwhile, seems to game their advertising auctions, effectively creating a nice little monopoly for themselves.
That’s why I said last night both Facebook and Google should be nationalised.
I meant it half-facetiously, but it is certainly time to confront these vampires.
Google owns the exchange, they own the relationships with publishers, they own the biggest supply side broker and the biggest demand side broker, they own the biggest video platform in the world, and they read your emails to target advertising better.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Not sure I understand your argument Robert. Oil and gas companies also have debt on their balance sheet and this debt is becoming harder and harder to obtain. Juniors too find it more difficult to raise equity capital than ever before.
The number of banks that are willing to touch oil and gas is beginning to shrink, it feels a lot like it did with coal about 10 years ago. The tap started to flow less easily and suddenly before you knew it, international coal projects were only being financed by Chinese or Middle Eastern banks. I lost the thread but last I heard the Carmichael coal mine in Oz was being funded by Adani directly, because after years of tarting it around the world, they couldn’t obtain sufficient debt capital for it.
Oil and gas executives are beginning to feel the same thing now, with activist shareholders breathing down their necks. Capital deployment is being far more carefully considered and there is a continual eye by most of the majors on the relative carbon footprint of any new development opportunity. Meanwhile the smart ones are aggressively pivoting to bio (where the margins are astronomical) and green power where there is a clear runway to massive growth.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Not sure I understand your argument Robert. Oil and gas companies also have debt on their balance sheet and this debt is becoming harder and harder to obtain. Juniors too find it more difficult to raise equity capital than ever before.
The number of banks that are willing to touch oil and gas is beginning to shrink, it feels a lot like it did with coal about 10 years ago. The tap started to flow less easily and suddenly before you knew it, international coal projects were only being financed by Chinese or Middle Eastern banks. I lost the thread but last I heard the Carmichael coal mine in Oz was being funded by Adani directly, because after years of tarting it around the world, they could obtain sufficient debt capital for it.
Oil and gas executives are beginning to feel the same thing now, with activist shareholders breathing down their necks. Capital deployment is being far more carefully considered and there is a continual eye by most of the majors on the relative carbon footprint of any new development opportunity. Meanwhile the smart ones are aggressively pivoting to bio (where the margins are astronomical) and green power where there is a clear runway to massive growth.
I own some Shell and some Chevron bonds. I could currently sell them for *more* than the principle and interest I'm due. In other words, they are currently yielding less than zero.
So, I'm not sure your argument holds up well when compared to reality.
Google, meanwhile, seems to game their advertising auctions, effectively creating a nice little monopoly for themselves.
That’s why I said last night both Facebook and Google should be nationalised.
I meant it half-facetiously, but it is certainly time to confront these vampires.
Google owns the exchange, they own the relationships with publishers, they own the biggest supply side broker and the biggest demand side broker, they own the biggest video platform in the world, and they read your emails to target advertising better.
What’s you view on this deal they appear to have done with FB?
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Not sure I understand your argument Robert. Oil and gas companies also have debt on their balance sheet and this debt is becoming harder and harder to obtain. Juniors too find it more difficult to raise equity capital than ever before.
The number of banks that are willing to touch oil and gas is beginning to shrink, it feels a lot like it did with coal about 10 years ago. The tap started to flow less easily and suddenly before you knew it, international coal projects were only being financed by Chinese or Middle Eastern banks. I lost the thread but last I heard the Carmichael coal mine in Oz was being funded by Adani directly, because after years of tarting it around the world, they could obtain sufficient debt capital for it.
Oil and gas executives are beginning to feel the same thing now, with activist shareholders breathing down their necks. Capital deployment is being far more carefully considered and there is a continual eye by most of the majors on the relative carbon footprint of any new development opportunity. Meanwhile the smart ones are aggressively pivoting to bio (where the margins are astronomical) and green power where there is a clear runway to massive growth.
I own some Shell and some Chevron bonds. I could currently sell them for *more* than the principle and interest I'm due. In other words, they are currently yielding less than zero.
So, I'm not sure your argument holds up well when compared to reality.
Owning some bonds does not confer any special inside knowledge of how oil and gas firms are trying to fund their daily operations and I shall leave it at that.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Not sure I understand your argument Robert. Oil and gas companies also have debt on their balance sheet and this debt is becoming harder and harder to obtain. Juniors too find it more difficult to raise equity capital than ever before.
The number of banks that are willing to touch oil and gas is beginning to shrink, it feels a lot like it did with coal about 10 years ago. The tap started to flow less easily and suddenly before you knew it, international coal projects were only being financed by Chinese or Middle Eastern banks. I lost the thread but last I heard the Carmichael coal mine in Oz was being funded by Adani directly, because after years of tarting it around the world, they could obtain sufficient debt capital for it.
Oil and gas executives are beginning to feel the same thing now, with activist shareholders breathing down their necks. Capital deployment is being far more carefully considered and there is a continual eye by most of the majors on the relative carbon footprint of any new development opportunity. Meanwhile the smart ones are aggressively pivoting to bio (where the margins are astronomical) and green power where there is a clear runway to massive growth.
I own some Shell and some Chevron bonds. I could currently sell them for *more* than the principle and interest I'm due. In other words, they are currently yielding less than zero.
So, I'm not sure your argument holds up well when compared to reality.
Owning some bonds does not confer any special inside knowledge of how oil and gas firms are trying to fund their daily operations and I shall leave it at that.
You know Robert used to be one of the largest global investors in the energy sector, right? I think he’s got a pretty good feel for things.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
The day after the budget traditionally belongs to the geeks, who have been up all night crunching all the numbers in the small print that the government would rather most people missed. And what the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the independent economics thinktank, had found wasn’t altogether encouraging for Brand Rishi.
First up, there was no help for the unemployed, and middle-earners would face £3k in tax rises. Then there were rising energy prices, inflation and low growth with which to deal. Spending on education was almost nonexistent. Debt was still vast. Tax at its highest level since 1950s. Brexit more damaging to the economy than Covid.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Not sure I understand your argument Robert. Oil and gas companies also have debt on their balance sheet and this debt is becoming harder and harder to obtain. Juniors too find it more difficult to raise equity capital than ever before.
The number of banks that are willing to touch oil and gas is beginning to shrink, it feels a lot like it did with coal about 10 years ago. The tap started to flow less easily and suddenly before you knew it, international coal projects were only being financed by Chinese or Middle Eastern banks. I lost the thread but last I heard the Carmichael coal mine in Oz was being funded by Adani directly, because after years of tarting it around the world, they could obtain sufficient debt capital for it.
Oil and gas executives are beginning to feel the same thing now, with activist shareholders breathing down their necks. Capital deployment is being far more carefully considered and there is a continual eye by most of the majors on the relative carbon footprint of any new development opportunity. Meanwhile the smart ones are aggressively pivoting to bio (where the margins are astronomical) and green power where there is a clear runway to massive growth.
I own some Shell and some Chevron bonds. I could currently sell them for *more* than the principle and interest I'm due. In other words, they are currently yielding less than zero.
So, I'm not sure your argument holds up well when compared to reality.
Owning some bonds does not confer any special inside knowledge of how oil and gas firms are trying to fund their daily operations and I shall leave it at that.
You know Robert used to be one of the largest global investors in the energy sector, right? I think he’s got a pretty good feel for things.
I did not know that. I don’t doubt he would have had an excellent feel of things but all I can tell you is that the times they are a changing.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Not sure I understand your argument Robert. Oil and gas companies also have debt on their balance sheet and this debt is becoming harder and harder to obtain. Juniors too find it more difficult to raise equity capital than ever before.
The number of banks that are willing to touch oil and gas is beginning to shrink, it feels a lot like it did with coal about 10 years ago. The tap started to flow less easily and suddenly before you knew it, international coal projects were only being financed by Chinese or Middle Eastern banks. I lost the thread but last I heard the Carmichael coal mine in Oz was being funded by Adani directly, because after years of tarting it around the world, they could obtain sufficient debt capital for it.
Oil and gas executives are beginning to feel the same thing now, with activist shareholders breathing down their necks. Capital deployment is being far more carefully considered and there is a continual eye by most of the majors on the relative carbon footprint of any new development opportunity. Meanwhile the smart ones are aggressively pivoting to bio (where the margins are astronomical) and green power where there is a clear runway to massive growth.
I own some Shell and some Chevron bonds. I could currently sell them for *more* than the principle and interest I'm due. In other words, they are currently yielding less than zero.
So, I'm not sure your argument holds up well when compared to reality.
Owning some bonds does not confer any special inside knowledge of how oil and gas firms are trying to fund their daily operations and I shall leave it at that.
OK.
Let me share some inside knowledge: very few (if any) oil and gas companies fund themselves through banks.
Big companies issue bonds. Those bonds are publicly traded. We know what Exxon or Shell or Total or Repsol or BP pays to borrow money, because they issue bonds. Most of them pay less than sovereigns for debt.
Smaller companies tap into funds that specialise in financing oil companies. This is syndicated lending, typically led by specialist firms, where 20 or so different lenders will get together. Here there is some involvement by traditional banks (although mostly the facilities have terms set - i.e. have lead investors - that are funds rather than banks). If traditional banks pull back from this market, it would have an impact. But not a large one. Firstly, Lloyds TSB or even HSBC are bit players in this space. Secondly, the big players are people you've never even heard of. (And other than Sumitomo Mitsui, they're pretty much all in the US. And while they're big firms they're not household names.)
Edit to add: I missed possibly the most important part of the debt funding of oil & gas - reserves based lending. Again, this is an area where - with one notable exception - the big traditional banks just don't play.
Completely agreed with RCS that Twitter is the thing that seems almost exclusively driven to arguments.
Facebook is photos of kids.
I don't use any of them much anymore, got bored of them. If I use Facebook its to share photos and that's about it.
Facebook have plenty of politics groups that are cesspits of people of either extreme shouting at each other and trying to get each other banned.
Twitter has its good points. I like old TV and Film and often engage there with actors from the past.
I have had some nice discussions with a few of them. Robin Askwith, Reece Dinsdale, Judy Jarvis, Sophia Myles, The son of the late TV drama writer Roger Marshall and many more.
For politics it is also awful and anyone who gets into my timeline spouting shite gets blocked immediately.
Your extreme supply-side attitude Robert is sooooo very American and that's not in this case a compliment. We clearly have a very different attitude and approach to company ethics and responsibility.
Let's park our discussion there. Have a good day.
Your argument seems to be that you can use programmatic advertising imorally.
Yes you can.
You can target people who show an interest in white nationalist topics with adverts that say "Muslims for Hillary". Why? Because that's an amazing way of making sure those people vote Trump.
But you know what? You can do exactly the same thing with the phone system, or with mail. And yet somehow USPS and Verizon aren't the bad guys.
Comparing Facebook with the mail system is like comparing a modern car with a stone wheel.
It is also wrong in that neither Verizon nor the USPS can tell you, or even know themselves, who are the people interested in vintage cars or Brexit. Facebook (as @rcs1000 says, and as used by Dominic Cummings and the Conservative Party) does know and does let you send adverts to quite narrow groups, say, Liverpool fans who are lawyers and buy red shoes. If you are a shop selling LFC footwear, that is very useful. That political propagandists can tell these people that Keir Starmer supports Arsenal is more sinister, even if it is true, or Everton, even though it is false, and Starmer will never know what you have said.
Google, meanwhile, seems to game their advertising auctions, effectively creating a nice little monopoly for themselves.
That’s why I said last night both Facebook and Google should be nationalised.
I meant it half-facetiously, but it is certainly time to confront these vampires.
They should be regulated like utilities with a fixed return above cost of capital.
Natural monopolies are challenging for the free market
There is definitely a massive conflict of interest, particularly with Google (and to a lesser extent with Facebook and Apple). It would be like if you could only buy asset management services from Goldman Sachs, and they also owned the stock exchange, and had controlling interests in all the firms listed on it.
Regulation to ensure that firms were only on one side of the table at a time would be a good start.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Not sure I understand your argument Robert. Oil and gas companies also have debt on their balance sheet and this debt is becoming harder and harder to obtain. Juniors too find it more difficult to raise equity capital than ever before.
The number of banks that are willing to touch oil and gas is beginning to shrink, it feels a lot like it did with coal about 10 years ago. The tap started to flow less easily and suddenly before you knew it, international coal projects were only being financed by Chinese or Middle Eastern banks. I lost the thread but last I heard the Carmichael coal mine in Oz was being funded by Adani directly, because after years of tarting it around the world, they could obtain sufficient debt capital for it.
Oil and gas executives are beginning to feel the same thing now, with activist shareholders breathing down their necks. Capital deployment is being far more carefully considered and there is a continual eye by most of the majors on the relative carbon footprint of any new development opportunity. Meanwhile the smart ones are aggressively pivoting to bio (where the margins are astronomical) and green power where there is a clear runway to massive growth.
I own some Shell and some Chevron bonds. I could currently sell them for *more* than the principle and interest I'm due. In other words, they are currently yielding less than zero.
So, I'm not sure your argument holds up well when compared to reality.
Owning some bonds does not confer any special inside knowledge of how oil and gas firms are trying to fund their daily operations and I shall leave it at that.
You know Robert used to be one of the largest global investors in the energy sector, right? I think he’s got a pretty good feel for things.
I did not know that. I don’t doubt he would have had an excellent feel of things but all I can tell you is that the times they are a changing.
There are many sources of funds that are not prey to the whims of ESG or Eco Activists though. I agree the times are a changing but until we transition we still need oil and we still need gas and will do for the foreseeable future irrespective of what young eco activists think.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Not sure I understand your argument Robert. Oil and gas companies also have debt on their balance sheet and this debt is becoming harder and harder to obtain. Juniors too find it more difficult to raise equity capital than ever before.
The number of banks that are willing to touch oil and gas is beginning to shrink, it feels a lot like it did with coal about 10 years ago. The tap started to flow less easily and suddenly before you knew it, international coal projects were only being financed by Chinese or Middle Eastern banks. I lost the thread but last I heard the Carmichael coal mine in Oz was being funded by Adani directly, because after years of tarting it around the world, they could obtain sufficient debt capital for it.
Oil and gas executives are beginning to feel the same thing now, with activist shareholders breathing down their necks. Capital deployment is being far more carefully considered and there is a continual eye by most of the majors on the relative carbon footprint of any new development opportunity. Meanwhile the smart ones are aggressively pivoting to bio (where the margins are astronomical) and green power where there is a clear runway to massive growth.
I own some Shell and some Chevron bonds. I could currently sell them for *more* than the principle and interest I'm due. In other words, they are currently yielding less than zero.
So, I'm not sure your argument holds up well when compared to reality.
Owning some bonds does not confer any special inside knowledge of how oil and gas firms are trying to fund their daily operations and I shall leave it at that.
OK.
Let me share some inside knowledge: very few (if any) oil and gas companies fund themselves through banks.
Big companies issue bonds. Those bonds are publicly traded. We know what Exxon or Shell or Total or Repsol or BP pays to borrow money, because they issue bonds. Most of them pay less than sovereigns for debt.
Smaller companies tap into funds that specialise in financing oil companies. This is syndicated lending, typically led by specialist firms, where 20 or so different lenders will get together. Here there is some involvement by traditional banks (although mostly the facilities have terms set - i.e. have lead investors - that are funds rather than banks). If traditional banks pull back from this market, it would have an impact. But not a large one. Firstly, Lloyds TSB or even HSBC are bit players in this space. Secondly, the big players are people you've never even heard of. (And other than Sumitomo Mitsui, they're pretty much all in the US. And while they're big firms they're not household names.)
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
Your extreme supply-side attitude Robert is sooooo very American and that's not in this case a compliment. We clearly have a very different attitude and approach to company ethics and responsibility.
Let's park our discussion there. Have a good day.
Your argument seems to be that you can use programmatic advertising imorally.
Yes you can.
You can target people who show an interest in white nationalist topics with adverts that say "Muslims for Hillary". Why? Because that's an amazing way of making sure those people vote Trump.
But you know what? You can do exactly the same thing with the phone system, or with mail. And yet somehow USPS and Verizon aren't the bad guys.
Comparing Facebook with the mail system is like comparing a modern car with a stone wheel.
It is also wrong in that neither Verizon nor the USPS can tell you, or even know themselves, who are the people interested in vintage cars or Brexit. Facebook (as @rcs1000 says, and as used by Dominic Cummings and the Conservative Party) does know and does let you send adverts to quite narrow groups, say, Liverpool fans who are lawyers and buy red shoes. If you are a shop selling LFC footwear, that is very useful. That political propagandists can tell these people that Keir Starmer supports Arsenal is more sinister, even if it is true, or Everton, even though it is false, and Starmer will never know what you have said.
Unless things have changed - targeting rapidly becomes a false economy as the tighter the targeting the more expensive the advert and the more risk that you've accidently missed your actual target.
Key example someone I know once did a campaign to hit x particular people and hit 5% of them while consuming a lot of budget (and this is someone who has specialised in social media advertising for 20 odd years)
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Not sure I understand your argument Robert. Oil and gas companies also have debt on their balance sheet and this debt is becoming harder and harder to obtain. Juniors too find it more difficult to raise equity capital than ever before.
The number of banks that are willing to touch oil and gas is beginning to shrink, it feels a lot like it did with coal about 10 years ago. The tap started to flow less easily and suddenly before you knew it, international coal projects were only being financed by Chinese or Middle Eastern banks. I lost the thread but last I heard the Carmichael coal mine in Oz was being funded by Adani directly, because after years of tarting it around the world, they could obtain sufficient debt capital for it.
Oil and gas executives are beginning to feel the same thing now, with activist shareholders breathing down their necks. Capital deployment is being far more carefully considered and there is a continual eye by most of the majors on the relative carbon footprint of any new development opportunity. Meanwhile the smart ones are aggressively pivoting to bio (where the margins are astronomical) and green power where there is a clear runway to massive growth.
I own some Shell and some Chevron bonds. I could currently sell them for *more* than the principle and interest I'm due. In other words, they are currently yielding less than zero.
So, I'm not sure your argument holds up well when compared to reality.
Owning some bonds does not confer any special inside knowledge of how oil and gas firms are trying to fund their daily operations and I shall leave it at that.
OK.
Let me share some inside knowledge: very few (if any) oil and gas companies fund themselves through banks.
Big companies issue bonds. Those bonds are publicly traded. We know what Exxon or Shell or Total or Repsol or BP pays to borrow money, because they issue bonds. Most of them pay less than sovereigns for debt.
Smaller companies tap into funds that specialise in financing oil companies. This is syndicated lending, typically led by specialist firms, where 20 or so different lenders will get together. Here there is some involvement by traditional banks (although mostly the facilities have terms set - i.e. have lead investors - that are funds rather than banks). If traditional banks pull back from this market, it would have an impact. But not a large one. Firstly, Lloyds TSB or even HSBC are bit players in this space. Secondly, the big players are people you've never even heard of. (And other than Sumitomo Mitsui, they're pretty much all in the US. And while they're big firms they're not household names.)
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
Completely agreed with RCS that Twitter is the thing that seems almost exclusively driven to arguments.
Facebook is photos of kids.
I don't use any of them much anymore, got bored of them. If I use Facebook its to share photos and that's about it.
Facebook have plenty of politics groups that are cesspits of people of either extreme shouting at each other and trying to get each other banned.
Twitter has its good points. I like old TV and Film and often engage there with actors from the past.
I have had some nice discussions with a few of them. Robin Askwith, Reece Dinsdale, Judy Jarvis, Sophia Myles, The son of the late TV drama writer Roger Marshall and many more.
For politics it is also awful and anyone who gets into my timeline spouting shite gets blocked immediately.
The biggest problem with Twitter, is that all the political journalists are completely addicted to it. That failure of political journalism amplifies non-stories and trivial nonsense, at the expense of conveying useful information.
The difference between Facebook and Twitter, and why the former is much more evil than the latter, is the paid-for and very highly targeted messaging, and don’t seem to care if Western audiences are being targeted by negative political messaging out of Russia or China.
The big tech companies all have their evil sides, but Facebook is way more evil than any of the others.
Completely agreed with RCS that Twitter is the thing that seems almost exclusively driven to arguments.
Facebook is photos of kids.
I don't use any of them much anymore, got bored of them. If I use Facebook its to share photos and that's about it.
Facebook have plenty of politics groups that are cesspits of people of either extreme shouting at each other and trying to get each other banned.
Twitter has its good points. I like old TV and Film and often engage there with actors from the past.
I have had some nice discussions with a few of them. Robin Askwith, Reece Dinsdale, Judy Jarvis, Sophia Myles, The son of the late TV drama writer Roger Marshall and many more.
For politics it is also awful and anyone who gets into my timeline spouting shite gets blocked immediately.
The biggest problem with Twitter, is that all the political journalists are completely addicted to it. That failure of political journalism amplifies non-stories and trivial nonsense, at the expense of conveying useful information.
The difference between Facebook and Twitter, and why the former is much more evil than the latter, is the paid-for and very highly targeted messaging, and don’t seem to care if Western audiences are being targeted by negative political messaging out of Russia or China.
The big tech companies all have their evil sides, but Facebook is way more evil than any of the others.
A fair few were addicted here, until that tweak in the way vanilla displays them imposed what seems to have been remarkably successful cold turkey
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
That is great for domestic heating and energy and alot of this is being done. I have put 340mm of additional insulation in my loft this summer. Wouldn't have a heat pump. They are crap and my piping and radiators would need replacing but I would have a hydrogen ready boiler.
But oil produces a wide variety of other products including plastics which produce all manner of products.
We still need oil for the time being. We may need it less and less for energy and fuel but we still need it for other products.
Your extreme supply-side attitude Robert is sooooo very American and that's not in this case a compliment. We clearly have a very different attitude and approach to company ethics and responsibility.
Let's park our discussion there. Have a good day.
Your argument seems to be that you can use programmatic advertising imorally.
Yes you can.
You can target people who show an interest in white nationalist topics with adverts that say "Muslims for Hillary". Why? Because that's an amazing way of making sure those people vote Trump.
But you know what? You can do exactly the same thing with the phone system, or with mail. And yet somehow USPS and Verizon aren't the bad guys.
Comparing Facebook with the mail system is like comparing a modern car with a stone wheel.
It is also wrong in that neither Verizon nor the USPS can tell you, or even know themselves, who are the people interested in vintage cars or Brexit. Facebook (as @rcs1000 says, and as used by Dominic Cummings and the Conservative Party) does know and does let you send adverts to quite narrow groups, say, Liverpool fans who are lawyers and buy red shoes. If you are a shop selling LFC footwear, that is very useful. That political propagandists can tell these people that Keir Starmer supports Arsenal is more sinister, even if it is true, or Everton, even though it is false, and Starmer will never know what you have said.
Unless things have changed - targeting rapidly becomes a false economy as the tighter the targeting the more expensive the advert and the more risk that you've accidently missed your actual target.
Key example someone I know once did a campaign to hit x particular people and hit 5% of them while consuming a lot of budget (and this is someone who has specialised in social media advertising for 20 odd years)
Ah but if you are a pressure group trying to win one election or one referendum, it will be won or lost at the margins so 5% might be enough, so it does not matter. Nor if you are a hostile sovereign state whose funds are basically unlimited. Or if you are both. And if you are a shop selling LFC-branded footwear, 5% might still be better and a damn sight cheaper than taking a full-page advert in the Sun (which Liverpool fans tend not to read).
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Not sure I understand your argument Robert. Oil and gas companies also have debt on their balance sheet and this debt is becoming harder and harder to obtain. Juniors too find it more difficult to raise equity capital than ever before.
The number of banks that are willing to touch oil and gas is beginning to shrink, it feels a lot like it did with coal about 10 years ago. The tap started to flow less easily and suddenly before you knew it, international coal projects were only being financed by Chinese or Middle Eastern banks. I lost the thread but last I heard the Carmichael coal mine in Oz was being funded by Adani directly, because after years of tarting it around the world, they could obtain sufficient debt capital for it.
Oil and gas executives are beginning to feel the same thing now, with activist shareholders breathing down their necks. Capital deployment is being far more carefully considered and there is a continual eye by most of the majors on the relative carbon footprint of any new development opportunity. Meanwhile the smart ones are aggressively pivoting to bio (where the margins are astronomical) and green power where there is a clear runway to massive growth.
I own some Shell and some Chevron bonds. I could currently sell them for *more* than the principle and interest I'm due. In other words, they are currently yielding less than zero.
So, I'm not sure your argument holds up well when compared to reality.
Owning some bonds does not confer any special inside knowledge of how oil and gas firms are trying to fund their daily operations and I shall leave it at that.
You know Robert used to be one of the largest global investors in the energy sector, right? I think he’s got a pretty good feel for things.
I did not know that. I don’t doubt he would have had an excellent feel of things but all I can tell you is that the times they are a changing.
There are many sources of funds that are not prey to the whims of ESG or Eco Activists though. I agree the times are a changing but until we transition we still need oil and we still need gas and will do for the foreseeable future irrespective of what young eco activists think.
I hope that you do not mistake me for a young eco activist! I merely report what I see with my own eyes and ears, just as I saw it happen for coal. Consider me the canary.
If the government really wanted to have an outsized impact on climate change for a country with 1% of the global population, there is one thing that might work. It just needs to look at where the UK is globally relevant.
Confer a double corporation tax on any profits derived from lending, investing or trading with hydrocarbon companies. And use the proceeds to remove corporation tax on any profits derived from the same in green energy.
You could hit banks hard from the other side of the equation too and charge additional regulatory capital on any exposures to the hydrocarbon industry. Justifiable on the basis that the last governor spoke often about the potential for a financial crisis caused by stranded assets.
Sure, you’d see some displacement activity to other financing centres. But you’d move the dial far more than subsidising 80,000 heat pumps.
It’s hard to think of a government intervention that more clearly screams “we are not fucking around with this anymore”. And you then use your diplomatic pressures to try and convince the Europeans and others to follow suit.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
Don’t, he/she will complain about bullying by old, white men...
The one Brexit shortage we sadly won’t ever see is of complacent posts from our Mr T.
Although the fuel ‘crisis’ is long in the past, and I’ve not seen any stories or posts about gaps on the shelves, or pigs being culled for a while either.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
Don’t, he/she will complain about bullying by old, white men...
I'm not old and technically I am mixed race, although I consider the label pretty well meaningless in my case.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
That is great for domestic heating and energy and alot of this is being done. I have put 340mm of additional insulation in my loft this summer. Wouldn't have a heat pump. They are crap and my piping and radiators would need replacing but I would have a hydrogen ready boiler.
But oil produces a wide variety of other products including plastics which produce all manner of products.
We still need oil for the time being. We may need it less and less for energy and fuel but we still need it for other products.
I'm not suggesting we don't need oil (or gas). I'm merely suggesting that the way from here to nirvana is to continually improve the alternatives, so that we don't use so much.
I bought the original Tesla Roadster more than a decade ago. Battery powered cars have move on immeasurably since then. Who'd have thought it possible to get a 300 mile range five seater car, with a robust charging infrastructure and fantastic acceleration for little more than $40,000 (£30,000). Now, is this at an everyman price yet? Nope. It's still the preserve of the better heeled. But every year it becomes a bit more affordable and the share of electric vehicles increases.
This is not to say electric vehicles are a panacea. Only that the world progresses in millions of babysteps.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
I think we can now say with some confidence that recorded cases have peaked. So far this is not leading to a reduction in either hospitalisations or deaths but that may take another week. Lord knows what we might talk about then. We seem to have covered local byelections and sex already.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
Don’t, he/she will complain about bullying by old, white men...
I'm not old and technically I am mixed race, although I consider the label pretty well meaningless in my case.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
I think we can now say with some confidence that recorded cases have peaked. So far this is not leading to a reduction in either hospitalisations or deaths but that may take another week. Lord knows what we might talk about then. We seem to have covered local byelections and sex already.
We'll have cricket and steam trains.
This will horribly confuse @Sunil_Prasannan who will have to take time off from his - ahem - personal activities linked to trains to hit the 'off topic button' every time we mention cricket.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
Don’t, he/she will complain about bullying by old, white men...
I'm not old and technically I am mixed race, although I consider the label pretty well meaningless in my case.
I didn’t think welsh counted as mixed race😀
It's the same proportion as IDS but from China not Japan.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Not sure I understand your argument Robert. Oil and gas companies also have debt on their balance sheet and this debt is becoming harder and harder to obtain. Juniors too find it more difficult to raise equity capital than ever before.
The number of banks that are willing to touch oil and gas is beginning to shrink, it feels a lot like it did with coal about 10 years ago. The tap started to flow less easily and suddenly before you knew it, international coal projects were only being financed by Chinese or Middle Eastern banks. I lost the thread but last I heard the Carmichael coal mine in Oz was being funded by Adani directly, because after years of tarting it around the world, they could obtain sufficient debt capital for it.
Oil and gas executives are beginning to feel the same thing now, with activist shareholders breathing down their necks. Capital deployment is being far more carefully considered and there is a continual eye by most of the majors on the relative carbon footprint of any new development opportunity. Meanwhile the smart ones are aggressively pivoting to bio (where the margins are astronomical) and green power where there is a clear runway to massive growth.
I own some Shell and some Chevron bonds. I could currently sell them for *more* than the principle and interest I'm due. In other words, they are currently yielding less than zero.
So, I'm not sure your argument holds up well when compared to reality.
Owning some bonds does not confer any special inside knowledge of how oil and gas firms are trying to fund their daily operations and I shall leave it at that.
You know Robert used to be one of the largest global investors in the energy sector, right? I think he’s got a pretty good feel for things.
I did not know that. I don’t doubt he would have had an excellent feel of things but all I can tell you is that the times they are a changing.
There are many sources of funds that are not prey to the whims of ESG or Eco Activists though. I agree the times are a changing but until we transition we still need oil and we still need gas and will do for the foreseeable future irrespective of what young eco activists think.
I hope that you do not mistake me for a young eco activist! I merely report what I see with my own eyes and ears, just as I saw it happen for coal. Consider me the canary.
If the government really wanted to have an outsized impact on climate change for a country with 1% of the global population, there is one thing that might work. It just needs to look at where the UK is globally relevant.
Confer a double corporation tax on any profits derived from lending, investing or trading with hydrocarbon companies. And use the proceeds to remove corporation tax on any profits derived from the same in green energy.
You could hit banks hard from the other side of the equation too and charge additional regulatory capital on any exposures to the hydrocarbon industry. Justifiable on the basis that the last governor spoke often about the potential for a financial crisis caused by stranded assets.
Sure, you’d see some displacement activity to other financing centres. But you’d move the dial far more than subsidising 80,000 heat pumps.
It’s hard to think of a government intervention that more clearly screams “we are not fucking around with this anymore”. And you then use your diplomatic pressures to try and convince the Europeans and others to follow suit.
You really wouldn't. Financing is far too fungible.
Ultimately, this is about demand and supply of the actual product, not about how it is financed. If you have an oil & gas company, funding is genuinely the least of your problems.
Completely agreed with RCS that Twitter is the thing that seems almost exclusively driven to arguments.
Facebook is photos of kids.
I don't use any of them much anymore, got bored of them. If I use Facebook its to share photos and that's about it.
Facebook have plenty of politics groups that are cesspits of people of either extreme shouting at each other and trying to get each other banned.
Twitter has its good points. I like old TV and Film and often engage there with actors from the past.
I have had some nice discussions with a few of them. Robin Askwith, Reece Dinsdale, Judy Jarvis, Sophia Myles, The son of the late TV drama writer Roger Marshall and many more.
For politics it is also awful and anyone who gets into my timeline spouting shite gets blocked immediately.
Medical twitter can be quite good too, and it is great for breaking news.
Sure it can be toxic at times, but no need to get involved with that stuff.
I don't miss Facebook at all. It was good for organising a reunion, but not much more than that.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
That is great for domestic heating and energy and alot of this is being done. I have put 340mm of additional insulation in my loft this summer. Wouldn't have a heat pump. They are crap and my piping and radiators would need replacing but I would have a hydrogen ready boiler.
But oil produces a wide variety of other products including plastics which produce all manner of products.
We still need oil for the time being. We may need it less and less for energy and fuel but we still need it for other products.
I'm not suggesting we don't need oil (or gas). I'm merely suggesting that the way from here to nirvana is to continually improve the alternatives, so that we don't use so much.
I bought the original Tesla Roadster more than a decade ago. Battery powered cars have move on immeasurably since then. Who'd have thought it possible to get a 300 mile range five seater car, with a robust charging infrastructure and fantastic acceleration for little more than $40,000 (£30,000). Now, is this at an everyman price yet? Nope. It's still the preserve of the better heeled. But every year it becomes a bit more affordable and the share of electric vehicles increases.
This is not to say electric vehicles are a panacea. Only that the world progresses in millions of babysteps.
I completely agree with this but I do still fear that we are walking along the edge of a cliff and that there is a real risk of a step change in planetary conditions whilst we are taking those steps.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
That is great for domestic heating and energy and alot of this is being done. I have put 340mm of additional insulation in my loft this summer. Wouldn't have a heat pump. They are crap and my piping and radiators would need replacing but I would have a hydrogen ready boiler.
But oil produces a wide variety of other products including plastics which produce all manner of products.
We still need oil for the time being. We may need it less and less for energy and fuel but we still need it for other products.
I'm not suggesting we don't need oil (or gas). I'm merely suggesting that the way from here to nirvana is to continually improve the alternatives, so that we don't use so much.
I bought the original Tesla Roadster more than a decade ago. Battery powered cars have move on immeasurably since then. Who'd have thought it possible to get a 300 mile range five seater car, with a robust charging infrastructure and fantastic acceleration for little more than $40,000 (£30,000). Now, is this at an everyman price yet? Nope. It's still the preserve of the better heeled. But every year it becomes a bit more affordable and the share of electric vehicles increases.
This is not to say electric vehicles are a panacea. Only that the world progresses in millions of babysteps.
To be fair, petrol-engined cars are also significantly better than they were a decade ago, in terms of both power and efficiency.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
That is great for domestic heating and energy and alot of this is being done. I have put 340mm of additional insulation in my loft this summer. Wouldn't have a heat pump. They are crap and my piping and radiators would need replacing but I would have a hydrogen ready boiler.
But oil produces a wide variety of other products including plastics which produce all manner of products.
We still need oil for the time being. We may need it less and less for energy and fuel but we still need it for other products.
I'm not suggesting we don't need oil (or gas). I'm merely suggesting that the way from here to nirvana is to continually improve the alternatives, so that we don't use so much.
I bought the original Tesla Roadster more than a decade ago. Battery powered cars have move on immeasurably since then. Who'd have thought it possible to get a 300 mile range five seater car, with a robust charging infrastructure and fantastic acceleration for little more than $40,000 (£30,000). Now, is this at an everyman price yet? Nope. It's still the preserve of the better heeled. But every year it becomes a bit more affordable and the share of electric vehicles increases.
This is not to say electric vehicles are a panacea. Only that the world progresses in millions of babysteps.
To be fair, petrol-engined cars are also significantly better than they were a decade ago, in terms of both power and efficiency.
My new petrol engined Rapid will do around 50 to the gallon on a 1.2 litre engine. My 1.4 litre Fabia from 12 years earlier, 45 if you drove for absolute economy on a favouring gradient.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Not sure I understand your argument Robert. Oil and gas companies also have debt on their balance sheet and this debt is becoming harder and harder to obtain. Juniors too find it more difficult to raise equity capital than ever before.
The number of banks that are willing to touch oil and gas is beginning to shrink, it feels a lot like it did with coal about 10 years ago. The tap started to flow less easily and suddenly before you knew it, international coal projects were only being financed by Chinese or Middle Eastern banks. I lost the thread but last I heard the Carmichael coal mine in Oz was being funded by Adani directly, because after years of tarting it around the world, they could obtain sufficient debt capital for it.
Oil and gas executives are beginning to feel the same thing now, with activist shareholders breathing down their necks. Capital deployment is being far more carefully considered and there is a continual eye by most of the majors on the relative carbon footprint of any new development opportunity. Meanwhile the smart ones are aggressively pivoting to bio (where the margins are astronomical) and green power where there is a clear runway to massive growth.
I own some Shell and some Chevron bonds. I could currently sell them for *more* than the principle and interest I'm due. In other words, they are currently yielding less than zero.
So, I'm not sure your argument holds up well when compared to reality.
Owning some bonds does not confer any special inside knowledge of how oil and gas firms are trying to fund their daily operations and I shall leave it at that.
You know Robert used to be one of the largest global investors in the energy sector, right? I think he’s got a pretty good feel for things.
I did not know that. I don’t doubt he would have had an excellent feel of things but all I can tell you is that the times they are a changing.
There are many sources of funds that are not prey to the whims of ESG or Eco Activists though. I agree the times are a changing but until we transition we still need oil and we still need gas and will do for the foreseeable future irrespective of what young eco activists think.
I hope that you do not mistake me for a young eco activist! I merely report what I see with my own eyes and ears, just as I saw it happen for coal. Consider me the canary.
If the government really wanted to have an outsized impact on climate change for a country with 1% of the global population, there is one thing that might work. It just needs to look at where the UK is globally relevant.
Confer a double corporation tax on any profits derived from lending, investing or trading with hydrocarbon companies. And use the proceeds to remove corporation tax on any profits derived from the same in green energy.
You could hit banks hard from the other side of the equation too and charge additional regulatory capital on any exposures to the hydrocarbon industry. Justifiable on the basis that the last governor spoke often about the potential for a financial crisis caused by stranded assets.
Sure, you’d see some displacement activity to other financing centres. But you’d move the dial far more than subsidising 80,000 heat pumps.
It’s hard to think of a government intervention that more clearly screams “we are not fucking around with this anymore”. And you then use your diplomatic pressures to try and convince the Europeans and others to follow suit.
I didn't mean to imply you were a young eco activist, they just seem to be the ones pressuring divestment from fossil fuel companies.
My concern is, in the rush to bash oil and the oil industry based on the fossil fuel side, it is very often overlooked the diversity and range of non fuel products made from oil and these need solving too.
The one Brexit shortage we sadly won’t ever see is of complacent posts from our Mr T.
Although the fuel ‘crisis’ is long in the past, and I’ve not seen any stories or posts about gaps on the shelves, or pigs being culled for a while either.
Yesterday a friend asked me where I got my German emissions sticker for my car; when he looked at the website I recommended, it seems that since January they can or will no longer mail them to the UK.
Then I went down the picture framers to collect a picture I left with him three weeks back, but his resupply of frames is snarled in some Brexit import problem and he has no idea when they will arrive. He said he is worrying about his usual pre-Christmas boost in orders, for presents, and added that it is only weeks since he recovered from having problems importing glass.
Lots of small businesses are suffering ongoing regular problems because of Brexit. Something tells me that people who run their own small businesses are underrepresented here.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
Do you think there's going to be a big investment in air filtration? If it's as effective as is claimed, and serious money started going into it bringing the price down, would that create a major change in terms of transmission of viral diseases in general?
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
For me, this has been the biggest disappointment with the vaccines. For at least 6 months the expectation was that they would build herd immunity by stopping those vaccinated from being infected or infectious. I am not sure if that early optimism was just ill founded or the delta variant moved the goal posts but it has made the end game of this wretched disease a lot more painful.
My brother is in hospital at the moment and seriously unwell. He is the only patient in his bay of 6 beds and, so far as I could see the other bays were the same. Despite this there has been a Covid outbreak on the ward and visiting has been stopped. There are 2 nurses on in his ward. The rest seem to be allocated to wards dealing with Covid patients. It is just a million miles away from anything like normal.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
That is great for domestic heating and energy and alot of this is being done. I have put 340mm of additional insulation in my loft this summer. Wouldn't have a heat pump. They are crap and my piping and radiators would need replacing but I would have a hydrogen ready boiler.
But oil produces a wide variety of other products including plastics which produce all manner of products.
We still need oil for the time being. We may need it less and less for energy and fuel but we still need it for other products.
I'm not suggesting we don't need oil (or gas). I'm merely suggesting that the way from here to nirvana is to continually improve the alternatives, so that we don't use so much.
I bought the original Tesla Roadster more than a decade ago. Battery powered cars have move on immeasurably since then. Who'd have thought it possible to get a 300 mile range five seater car, with a robust charging infrastructure and fantastic acceleration for little more than $40,000 (£30,000). Now, is this at an everyman price yet? Nope. It's still the preserve of the better heeled. But every year it becomes a bit more affordable and the share of electric vehicles increases.
This is not to say electric vehicles are a panacea. Only that the world progresses in millions of babysteps.
I was not saying we should do nothing until we are ready to switch, far from it, just oil and gas is far more than just fossil fuels and will still be needed going forward.
Politically too it makes sense to remove dependence on our energy needs from oil and gas and where we need to get it from.
Of course we should, as we are, work at developing alternatives to take the place of its products as is happening.
We changed our car recently and looked at an electric VW, second hand, nearly new. £15K which was not a bad price but a little out of our range. Our next one will be electric in a couple of years when we change my wife's car
I worked for a company that had a Leaf as a pool car and we were lucky to get 80 miles on a charge out of it. The range is being solved and the prices are coming down. Start up and initial investment costs being recouped and increasing volumes help that. It is no different to any other new technology. The early adapters pay a premium but by the time it becomes mainstream the price has tumbled.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
Do you think there's going to be a big investment in air filtration? If it's as effective as is claimed, and serious money started going into it bringing the price down, would that create a major change in terms of transmission of viral diseases in general?
I think it could, though windows that open isn't a bad start. Schools, hospitals, night clubs etc would be the places to start.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
For me, this has been the biggest disappointment with the vaccines. For at least 6 months the expectation was that they would build herd immunity by stopping those vaccinated from being infected or infectious. I am not sure if that early optimism was just ill founded or the delta variant moved the goal posts but it has made the end game of this wretched disease a lot more painful.
My brother is in hospital at the moment and seriously unwell. He is the only patient in his bay of 6 beds and, so far as I could see the other bays were the same. Despite this there has been a Covid outbreak on the ward and visiting has been stopped. There are 2 nurses on in his ward. The rest seem to be allocated to wards dealing with Covid patients. It is just a million miles away from anything like normal.
The one Brexit shortage we sadly won’t ever see is of complacent posts from our Mr T.
Although the fuel ‘crisis’ is long in the past, and I’ve not seen any stories or posts about gaps on the shelves, or pigs being culled for a while either.
Yesterday a friend asked me where I got my German emissions sticker for my car; when he looked at the website I recommended, it seems that since January they can or will no longer mail them to the UK.
Then I went down the picture framers to collect a picture I left with him three weeks back, but his resupply of frames is snarled in some Brexit import problem and he has no idea when they will arrive. He said he is worrying about his usual pre-Christmas boost in orders, for presents, and added that it is only weeks since he recovered from having problems importing glass.
Lots of small businesses are suffering ongoing regular problems because of Brexit. Something tells me that people who run their own small businesses are underrepresented here.
My nephew, a plumber, has several contracts which apparently he can't proceed with, for lack of (mainly imported) parts.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
Do you think there's going to be a big investment in air filtration? If it's as effective as is claimed, and serious money started going into it bringing the price down, would that create a major change in terms of transmission of viral diseases in general?
I think it could, though windows that open isn't a bad start. Schools, hospitals, night clubs etc would be the places to start.
London buses have stickers on the windows asking that they be left open. Not always successfully. Tbh, I'd have added to the sticker some indication of why.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
If I am understanding it correctly, that is a one third reduction in onward transmission per case. In a population of millions that massively slows down the spread, it does not seem disappointing to me in the slightest.
Presumably also cases passed on after vaccination have lower viral load? So on average are not equivalent severity to cases passed on without vaccination?
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
Exactly this.
There is nearly never One Big Solution to The Big Problem.
So for carbon dioxide emissions we have *hundreds* of ongoing solutions. Each, by itself, might, at most, be a few percent of the problem. But if *many* of them come through, you get to zero net emissions.
For oil, yes, without petrol, diesel and other fuels, you have plastics. So there are projects on the list for that....
The day after the budget traditionally belongs to the geeks, who have been up all night crunching all the numbers in the small print that the government would rather most people missed. And what the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the independent economics thinktank, had found wasn’t altogether encouraging for Brand Rishi.
First up, there was no help for the unemployed, and middle-earners would face £3k in tax rises. Then there were rising energy prices, inflation and low growth with which to deal. Spending on education was almost nonexistent. Debt was still vast. Tax at its highest level since 1950s. Brexit more damaging to the economy than Covid.
Voters endorse Rishi Sunak plans and back Chancellor's handling of the economy
Boris & Rishi v Starmer & Rachel on managing the economy - 40%/25%
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
For me, this has been the biggest disappointment with the vaccines. For at least 6 months the expectation was that they would build herd immunity by stopping those vaccinated from being infected or infectious. I am not sure if that early optimism was just ill founded or the delta variant moved the goal posts but it has made the end game of this wretched disease a lot more painful.
My brother is in hospital at the moment and seriously unwell. He is the only patient in his bay of 6 beds and, so far as I could see the other bays were the same. Despite this there has been a Covid outbreak on the ward and visiting has been stopped. There are 2 nurses on in his ward. The rest seem to be allocated to wards dealing with Covid patients. It is just a million miles away from anything like normal.
British hospitals are unusual in the developed world in not having single rooms as standard. I am sure this is a major factor in hospital outbreaks, as is the attempt to run at 95%+ occupancy.
We simply don't have the physical infrastructure or personel to prevent hospital acquired infection.
Notable too was the lack of mention in the budget for postgraduate medical and nurse training. It was tractor stats level with no real attempt to create a fit NHS for the ongoing challenges.
The one Brexit shortage we sadly won’t ever see is of complacent posts from our Mr T.
Although the fuel ‘crisis’ is long in the past, and I’ve not seen any stories or posts about gaps on the shelves, or pigs being culled for a while either.
Yesterday a friend asked me where I got my German emissions sticker for my car; when he looked at the website I recommended, it seems that since January they can or will no longer mail them to the UK.
Then I went down the picture framers to collect a picture I left with him three weeks back, but his resupply of frames is snarled in some Brexit import problem and he has no idea when they will arrive. He said he is worrying about his usual pre-Christmas boost in orders, for presents, and added that it is only weeks since he recovered from having problems importing glass.
Lots of small businesses are suffering ongoing regular problems because of Brexit. Something tells me that people who run their own small businesses are underrepresented here.
My nephew, a plumber, has several contracts which apparently he can't proceed with, for lack of (mainly imported) parts.
Brighter morning here.
One of the features of the next decade is going to be a move in production back around the world, reversing the recent trend of concentrating too much production in China and other Asian economies.
China is becoming more politically difficult to deal with as a country, and we have seen clearly the pandemic effect on global supply chains which already had no slack left in them.
How this relocation of manufacturing can happen in conjunction with a promised reduction in domestic carbon emissions, is a more difficult question?
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
For me, this has been the biggest disappointment with the vaccines. For at least 6 months the expectation was that they would build herd immunity by stopping those vaccinated from being infected or infectious. I am not sure if that early optimism was just ill founded or the delta variant moved the goal posts but it has made the end game of this wretched disease a lot more painful.
My brother is in hospital at the moment and seriously unwell. He is the only patient in his bay of 6 beds and, so far as I could see the other bays were the same. Despite this there has been a Covid outbreak on the ward and visiting has been stopped. There are 2 nurses on in his ward. The rest seem to be allocated to wards dealing with Covid patients. It is just a million miles away from anything like normal.
British hospitals are unusual in the developed world in not having single rooms as standard. I am sure this is a major factor in hospital outbreaks, as is the attempt to run at 95%+ occupancy.
We simply don't have the physical infrastructure or personel to prevent hospital acquired infection.
Notable too was the lack of mention in the budget for postgraduate medical and nurse training. It was tractor stats level with no real attempt to create a fit NHS for the ongoing challenges.
Southmead - Bristol's replacement for Frenchay - does have single rooms. Not sure if that's typical of newer hospitals or not.
Edit - on the last point,you could make very much the same comment about the offer to schools. No real effort to relieve the chronic overcrowding and understaffing.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
If I am understanding it correctly, that is a one third reduction in onward transmission per case. In a population of millions that massively slows down the spread, it does not seem disappointing to me in the slightest.
Presumably also cases passed on after vaccination have lower viral load? So on average are not equivalent severity to cases passed on without vaccination?
The study yesterday said that viral load in the peak period of infectivity (the couple of days before symptoms) was the same as unvaxxed, though the duration of infectivity was shorter.
It is not impossible that the reduced number of symptoms in the vaccinated means that they are more likely to be out and about infecting others, rather than in bed with hot broth.
It looks to me like we are not going to see the back of covid for a long time, if at all.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Not sure I understand your argument Robert. Oil and gas companies also have debt on their balance sheet and this debt is becoming harder and harder to obtain. Juniors too find it more difficult to raise equity capital than ever before.
The number of banks that are willing to touch oil and gas is beginning to shrink, it feels a lot like it did with coal about 10 years ago. The tap started to flow less easily and suddenly before you knew it, international coal projects were only being financed by Chinese or Middle Eastern banks. I lost the thread but last I heard the Carmichael coal mine in Oz was being funded by Adani directly, because after years of tarting it around the world, they could obtain sufficient debt capital for it.
Oil and gas executives are beginning to feel the same thing now, with activist shareholders breathing down their necks. Capital deployment is being far more carefully considered and there is a continual eye by most of the majors on the relative carbon footprint of any new development opportunity. Meanwhile the smart ones are aggressively pivoting to bio (where the margins are astronomical) and green power where there is a clear runway to massive growth.
I own some Shell and some Chevron bonds. I could currently sell them for *more* than the principle and interest I'm due. In other words, they are currently yielding less than zero.
So, I'm not sure your argument holds up well when compared to reality.
Owning some bonds does not confer any special inside knowledge of how oil and gas firms are trying to fund their daily operations and I shall leave it at that.
You know Robert used to be one of the largest global investors in the energy sector, right? I think he’s got a pretty good feel for things.
I did not know that. I don’t doubt he would have had an excellent feel of things but all I can tell you is that the times they are a changing.
There are many sources of funds that are not prey to the whims of ESG or Eco Activists though. I agree the times are a changing but until we transition we still need oil and we still need gas and will do for the foreseeable future irrespective of what young eco activists think.
I hope that you do not mistake me for a young eco activist! I merely report what I see with my own eyes and ears, just as I saw it happen for coal. Consider me the canary.
If the government really wanted to have an outsized impact on climate change for a country with 1% of the global population, there is one thing that might work. It just needs to look at where the UK is globally relevant.
Confer a double corporation tax on any profits derived from lending, investing or trading with hydrocarbon companies. And use the proceeds to remove corporation tax on any profits derived from the same in green energy.
You could hit banks hard from the other side of the equation too and charge additional regulatory capital on any exposures to the hydrocarbon industry. Justifiable on the basis that the last governor spoke often about the potential for a financial crisis caused by stranded assets.
Sure, you’d see some displacement activity to other financing centres. But you’d move the dial far more than subsidising 80,000 heat pumps.
It’s hard to think of a government intervention that more clearly screams “we are not fucking around with this anymore”. And you then use your diplomatic pressures to try and convince the Europeans and others to follow suit.
You really wouldn't. Financing is far too fungible.
Ultimately, this is about demand and supply of the actual product, not about how it is financed. If you have an oil & gas company, funding is genuinely the least of your problems.
Not to forget that if somehow globally the supply of financing to oil and gas companies were to dry up overnight then that would actually boost the profits of companies like PutinGas (Gazprom) as well as western, Middle Eastern etc oil and gas majors.
Those companies would have no problems whatsoever self-financing without relying upon financing, even if it temporarily meant cutting dividends but smaller, competitor fracking companies etc might struggle to generate financing more. Shut off the competition and our electricity and gas becomes more expensive, Putin becomes richer, and the environment is no better.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
If I am understanding it correctly, that is a one third reduction in onward transmission per case. In a population of millions that massively slows down the spread, it does not seem disappointing to me in the slightest.
Presumably also cases passed on after vaccination have lower viral load? So on average are not equivalent severity to cases passed on without vaccination?
The study yesterday said that viral load in the peak period of infectivity (the couple of days before symptoms) was the same as unvaxxed, though the duration of infectivity was shorter.
It is not impossible that the reduced number of symptoms in the vaccinated means that they are more likely to be out and about infecting others, rather than in bed with hot broth.
It looks to me like we are not going to see the back of covid for a long time, if at all.
"hot broth" - now you've triggered me, you need to be cancelled etc etc....
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
For me, this has been the biggest disappointment with the vaccines. For at least 6 months the expectation was that they would build herd immunity by stopping those vaccinated from being infected or infectious. I am not sure if that early optimism was just ill founded or the delta variant moved the goal posts but it has made the end game of this wretched disease a lot more painful.
My brother is in hospital at the moment and seriously unwell. He is the only patient in his bay of 6 beds and, so far as I could see the other bays were the same. Despite this there has been a Covid outbreak on the ward and visiting has been stopped. There are 2 nurses on in his ward. The rest seem to be allocated to wards dealing with Covid patients. It is just a million miles away from anything like normal.
British hospitals are unusual in the developed world in not having single rooms as standard. I am sure this is a major factor in hospital outbreaks, as is the attempt to run at 95%+ occupancy.
We simply don't have the physical infrastructure or personel to prevent hospital acquired infection.
Notable too was the lack of mention in the budget for postgraduate medical and nurse training. It was tractor stats level with no real attempt to create a fit NHS for the ongoing challenges.
I would say that we are pouring more and more money into the NHS for less and less return. Much of this is inevitable. You simply cannot create extra capacity in nurses or doctors overnight so more money simply means that the existing assets are worked harder with diminishing returns.
I do not envy Javid his task to be honest. A system which has been stretched to the limits for a very long time is now facing a massive challenge that looks likely to be endemic for many, many years and which has a direct and negative impact on the performance of the current service. Like @rcs1000's babysteps on climate there is no simple or single solution to this. And with hospitals I fear those babysteps are on glass with bare feet.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
Exactly this.
There is nearly never One Big Solution to The Big Problem.
So for carbon dioxide emissions we have *hundreds* of ongoing solutions. Each, by itself, might, at most, be a few percent of the problem. But if *many* of them come through, you get to zero net emissions.
For oil, yes, without petrol, diesel and other fuels, you have plastics. So there are projects on the list for that....
Its a surprisingly common view in the oil industry that oil is so versatile for things like plastics etc that humanity is mad to just be burning it.
Erm yeah. That was the case from day 1. The reason why the largest companies will "just pay more" is that in any supply crisis there are winners and losers. Amazon see this - like Covid - as a massive market opportunity and are investing accordingly.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
For me, this has been the biggest disappointment with the vaccines. For at least 6 months the expectation was that they would build herd immunity by stopping those vaccinated from being infected or infectious. I am not sure if that early optimism was just ill founded or the delta variant moved the goal posts but it has made the end game of this wretched disease a lot more painful.
My brother is in hospital at the moment and seriously unwell. He is the only patient in his bay of 6 beds and, so far as I could see the other bays were the same. Despite this there has been a Covid outbreak on the ward and visiting has been stopped. There are 2 nurses on in his ward. The rest seem to be allocated to wards dealing with Covid patients. It is just a million miles away from anything like normal.
British hospitals are unusual in the developed world in not having single rooms as standard. I am sure this is a major factor in hospital outbreaks, as is the attempt to run at 95%+ occupancy.
We simply don't have the physical infrastructure or personel to prevent hospital acquired infection.
Notable too was the lack of mention in the budget for postgraduate medical and nurse training. It was tractor stats level with no real attempt to create a fit NHS for the ongoing challenges.
I would say that we are pouring more and more money into the NHS for less and less return. Much of this is inevitable. You simply cannot create extra capacity in nurses or doctors overnight so more money simply means that the existing assets are worked harder with diminishing returns.
I do not envy Javid his task to be honest. A system which has been stretched to the limits for a very long time is now facing a massive challenge that looks likely to be endemic for many, many years and which has a direct and negative impact on the performance of the current service. Like @rcs1000's babysteps on climate there is no simple or single solution to this. And with hospitals I fear those babysteps are on glass with bare feet.
For the Health Secretary it must seem to be on glass with bare feet in the glass challenge of the Squid Games.
The one Brexit shortage we sadly won’t ever see is of complacent posts from our Mr T.
Although the fuel ‘crisis’ is long in the past, and I’ve not seen any stories or posts about gaps on the shelves, or pigs being culled for a while either.
Yesterday a friend asked me where I got my German emissions sticker for my car; when he looked at the website I recommended, it seems that since January they can or will no longer mail them to the UK.
Then I went down the picture framers to collect a picture I left with him three weeks back, but his resupply of frames is snarled in some Brexit import problem and he has no idea when they will arrive. He said he is worrying about his usual pre-Christmas boost in orders, for presents, and added that it is only weeks since he recovered from having problems importing glass.
Lots of small businesses are suffering ongoing regular problems because of Brexit. Something tells me that people who run their own small businesses are underrepresented here.
My nephew, a plumber, has several contracts which apparently he can't proceed with, for lack of (mainly imported) parts.
Brighter morning here.
One of the features of the next decade is going to be a move in production back around the world, reversing the recent trend of concentrating too much production in China and other Asian economies.
China is becoming more politically difficult to deal with as a country, and we have seen clearly the pandemic effect on global supply chains which already had no slack left in them.
How this relocation of manufacturing can happen in conjunction with a promised reduction in domestic carbon emissions, is a more difficult question?
Factories, themselves, are often quite low carbon - machines running on electricity. It is the raw inputs, where the problems are.
Erm yeah. That was the case from day 1. The reason why the largest companies will "just pay more" is that in any supply crisis there are winners and losers. Amazon see this - like Covid - as a massive market opportunity and are investing accordingly.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
Which is what I said elsewhere. The "elsewhere" will be the least productive, least efficient, least wanted element. So we can do without it.
Anything that's actually wanted, people will pay for.
That's not a market failure, its the market working efficiently.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
Exactly this.
There is nearly never One Big Solution to The Big Problem.
So for carbon dioxide emissions we have *hundreds* of ongoing solutions. Each, by itself, might, at most, be a few percent of the problem. But if *many* of them come through, you get to zero net emissions.
For oil, yes, without petrol, diesel and other fuels, you have plastics. So there are projects on the list for that....
Its a surprisingly common view in the oil industry that oil is so versatile for things like plastics etc that humanity is mad to just be burning it.
Though we do need to use much less plastic too, it is destroying the planet in a different way.
What really hit me this week was this graphic. I hadn't realised quite how recent our pollution of the world was. 50% of carbon admissions in the last 30 years means that we cannot return to the lifestyles of my youth. It is very sobering.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
For me, this has been the biggest disappointment with the vaccines. For at least 6 months the expectation was that they would build herd immunity by stopping those vaccinated from being infected or infectious. I am not sure if that early optimism was just ill founded or the delta variant moved the goal posts but it has made the end game of this wretched disease a lot more painful.
My brother is in hospital at the moment and seriously unwell. He is the only patient in his bay of 6 beds and, so far as I could see the other bays were the same. Despite this there has been a Covid outbreak on the ward and visiting has been stopped. There are 2 nurses on in his ward. The rest seem to be allocated to wards dealing with Covid patients. It is just a million miles away from anything like normal.
British hospitals are unusual in the developed world in not having single rooms as standard. I am sure this is a major factor in hospital outbreaks, as is the attempt to run at 95%+ occupancy.
We simply don't have the physical infrastructure or personel to prevent hospital acquired infection.
Notable too was the lack of mention in the budget for postgraduate medical and nurse training. It was tractor stats level with no real attempt to create a fit NHS for the ongoing challenges.
I would say that we are pouring more and more money into the NHS for less and less return. Much of this is inevitable. You simply cannot create extra capacity in nurses or doctors overnight so more money simply means that the existing assets are worked harder with diminishing returns.
I do not envy Javid his task to be honest. A system which has been stretched to the limits for a very long time is now facing a massive challenge that looks likely to be endemic for many, many years and which has a direct and negative impact on the performance of the current service. Like @rcs1000's babysteps on climate there is no simple or single solution to this. And with hospitals I fear those babysteps are on glass with bare feet.
For the Health Secretary it must seem to be on glass with bare feet in the glass challenge of the Squid Games.
Erm yeah. That was the case from day 1. The reason why the largest companies will "just pay more" is that in any supply crisis there are winners and losers. Amazon see this - like Covid - as a massive market opportunity and are investing accordingly.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
Which is what I said elsewhere. The "elsewhere" will be the least productive, least efficient, least wanted element. So we can do without it.
Anything that's actually wanted, people will pay for.
That's not a market failure, its the market working efficiently.
The "elsewhere" are places that people shop, services that people use, and their failure creates the shortage you continue to deny.
Nothing in the budget for emergency cash injections to councils already struggling to provide statutory services to fund "just pay more" to ensure bins get emptied and roads get gritted. Apparently we can do without gritting...
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
For me, this has been the biggest disappointment with the vaccines. For at least 6 months the expectation was that they would build herd immunity by stopping those vaccinated from being infected or infectious. I am not sure if that early optimism was just ill founded or the delta variant moved the goal posts but it has made the end game of this wretched disease a lot more painful.
My brother is in hospital at the moment and seriously unwell. He is the only patient in his bay of 6 beds and, so far as I could see the other bays were the same. Despite this there has been a Covid outbreak on the ward and visiting has been stopped. There are 2 nurses on in his ward. The rest seem to be allocated to wards dealing with Covid patients. It is just a million miles away from anything like normal.
British hospitals are unusual in the developed world in not having single rooms as standard. I am sure this is a major factor in hospital outbreaks, as is the attempt to run at 95%+ occupancy.
We simply don't have the physical infrastructure or personel to prevent hospital acquired infection.
Notable too was the lack of mention in the budget for postgraduate medical and nurse training. It was tractor stats level with no real attempt to create a fit NHS for the ongoing challenges.
I would say that we are pouring more and more money into the NHS for less and less return. Much of this is inevitable. You simply cannot create extra capacity in nurses or doctors overnight so more money simply means that the existing assets are worked harder with diminishing returns.
I do not envy Javid his task to be honest. A system which has been stretched to the limits for a very long time is now facing a massive challenge that looks likely to be endemic for many, many years and which has a direct and negative impact on the performance of the current service. Like @rcs1000's babysteps on climate there is no simple or single solution to this. And with hospitals I fear those babysteps are on glass with bare feet.
For the Health Secretary it must seem to be on glass with bare feet in the glass challenge of the Squid Games.
I have not indulged, sorry.
I won't give any spoilers then, but I will give a recommendation. Its one of the best shows ever, worthy of the hype.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Not sure I understand your argument Robert. Oil and gas companies also have debt on their balance sheet and this debt is becoming harder and harder to obtain. Juniors too find it more difficult to raise equity capital than ever before.
The number of banks that are willing to touch oil and gas is beginning to shrink, it feels a lot like it did with coal about 10 years ago. The tap started to flow less easily and suddenly before you knew it, international coal projects were only being financed by Chinese or Middle Eastern banks. I lost the thread but last I heard the Carmichael coal mine in Oz was being funded by Adani directly, because after years of tarting it around the world, they could obtain sufficient debt capital for it.
Oil and gas executives are beginning to feel the same thing now, with activist shareholders breathing down their necks. Capital deployment is being far more carefully considered and there is a continual eye by most of the majors on the relative carbon footprint of any new development opportunity. Meanwhile the smart ones are aggressively pivoting to bio (where the margins are astronomical) and green power where there is a clear runway to massive growth.
I own some Shell and some Chevron bonds. I could currently sell them for *more* than the principle and interest I'm due. In other words, they are currently yielding less than zero.
So, I'm not sure your argument holds up well when compared to reality.
Owning some bonds does not confer any special inside knowledge of how oil and gas firms are trying to fund their daily operations and I shall leave it at that.
You know Robert used to be one of the largest global investors in the energy sector, right? I think he’s got a pretty good feel for things.
I did not know that. I don’t doubt he would have had an excellent feel of things but all I can tell you is that the times they are a changing.
There are many sources of funds that are not prey to the whims of ESG or Eco Activists though. I agree the times are a changing but until we transition we still need oil and we still need gas and will do for the foreseeable future irrespective of what young eco activists think.
I hope that you do not mistake me for a young eco activist! I merely report what I see with my own eyes and ears, just as I saw it happen for coal. Consider me the canary.
If the government really wanted to have an outsized impact on climate change for a country with 1% of the global population, there is one thing that might work. It just needs to look at where the UK is globally relevant.
Confer a double corporation tax on any profits derived from lending, investing or trading with hydrocarbon companies. And use the proceeds to remove corporation tax on any profits derived from the same in green energy.
You could hit banks hard from the other side of the equation too and charge additional regulatory capital on any exposures to the hydrocarbon industry. Justifiable on the basis that the last governor spoke often about the potential for a financial crisis caused by stranded assets.
Sure, you’d see some displacement activity to other financing centres. But you’d move the dial far more than subsidising 80,000 heat pumps.
It’s hard to think of a government intervention that more clearly screams “we are not fucking around with this anymore”. And you then use your diplomatic pressures to try and convince the Europeans and others to follow suit.
You really wouldn't. Financing is far too fungible.
Ultimately, this is about demand and supply of the actual product, not about how it is financed. If you have an oil & gas company, funding is genuinely the least of your problems.
Erm yeah. That was the case from day 1. The reason why the largest companies will "just pay more" is that in any supply crisis there are winners and losers. Amazon see this - like Covid - as a massive market opportunity and are investing accordingly.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
They’re quiet about what they’re actually investing in, but if I were a betting man (!) I’d put money on hundreds of chartered 747 cargo planes to get key shipments of goods to their major markets in time for Christmas.
Anything not already on a boat from China or Taiwan, isn’t going to arrive in time, so if they want to sell stuff this year they need to get it shipped by plane. On the other hand, they will be some awesome bargains in January and February, if a load of goods arrive late.
As for their staff shortages, distribution companies are finally working out that warehouse workers generally hate their jobs, and that the steady stream of Eastern Europeans who could stick it for a year or two has now dried up. Maybe their workers will soon be able to affford to live close to where they work.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
For me, this has been the biggest disappointment with the vaccines. For at least 6 months the expectation was that they would build herd immunity by stopping those vaccinated from being infected or infectious. I am not sure if that early optimism was just ill founded or the delta variant moved the goal posts but it has made the end game of this wretched disease a lot more painful.
My brother is in hospital at the moment and seriously unwell. He is the only patient in his bay of 6 beds and, so far as I could see the other bays were the same. Despite this there has been a Covid outbreak on the ward and visiting has been stopped. There are 2 nurses on in his ward. The rest seem to be allocated to wards dealing with Covid patients. It is just a million miles away from anything like normal.
Best wishes, this is a unique pig of a virus when your immune system can't bash off the initial symptoms. The immune system sort of turns against you, putting pressure on all the main organs. Best of luck to your brother.
That was never the expectation from those in the know on the MRNA vaccines, what they are designed to do is stop vulnerable people from getting to the danger phase I just described. How successful they are doing that is open to debate at present, we will know much more by the end of the winter.
These vaccines were never going to stop catching or transmission of this virus, that so many intelligent people were led to believe this was the case just says everything to me about our politicians and their advisors.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
Exactly this.
There is nearly never One Big Solution to The Big Problem.
So for carbon dioxide emissions we have *hundreds* of ongoing solutions. Each, by itself, might, at most, be a few percent of the problem. But if *many* of them come through, you get to zero net emissions.
For oil, yes, without petrol, diesel and other fuels, you have plastics. So there are projects on the list for that....
Its a surprisingly common view in the oil industry that oil is so versatile for things like plastics etc that humanity is mad to just be burning it.
When I worked at an oil company, the Received wisdom was -
- Petrol, Diesel etc would be replaced with Hydrogen. - Aviation kerosene would be replaced with bio fuel - Plastics would *eventually* made from non-fossil feedstock - We should invest in solar panel production.
There was considerable real investment by the company in most of the above. Ironically, after I left, "new management" cut back a bunch of this. The solar cell investment died vs Chinese competition IIRC.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
Exactly this.
There is nearly never One Big Solution to The Big Problem.
So for carbon dioxide emissions we have *hundreds* of ongoing solutions. Each, by itself, might, at most, be a few percent of the problem. But if *many* of them come through, you get to zero net emissions.
For oil, yes, without petrol, diesel and other fuels, you have plastics. So there are projects on the list for that....
Its a surprisingly common view in the oil industry that oil is so versatile for things like plastics etc that humanity is mad to just be burning it.
Though we do need to use much less plastic too, it is destroying the planet in a different way.
What really hit me this week was this graphic. I hadn't realised quite how recent our pollution of the world was. 50% of carbon admissions in the last 30 years means that we cannot return to the lifestyles of my youth. It is very sobering.
That is an astounding graphic. It really should get more attention. Billions of years of carbon repression by planetary systems reversed in 30. No wonder we are in trouble.
Erm yeah. That was the case from day 1. The reason why the largest companies will "just pay more" is that in any supply crisis there are winners and losers. Amazon see this - like Covid - as a massive market opportunity and are investing accordingly.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
They’re quiet about what they’re actually investing in, but if I were a betting man (!) I’d put money on hundreds of chartered 747 cargo planes to get key shipments of goods to their key markets in time for Christmas.
Anything not already on a boat from China or Taiwan, isn’t going to arrive in time, so if they want to sell stuff this year they need to get it shipped by plane. On the other hand, they will be some awesome bargains in January and February, if a load of goods arrive late.
As for their staff shortages, distribution companies are finally working out that warehouse workers generally hate their jobs, and that the steady stream of Eastern Europeans who could stick it for a year or two has now dried up. Maybe their workers will soon be able to affford to live close to where they work.
"Maybe their workers will soon be able to afford to live close to where they work."
The arrogance villeins don't want to sleep in their cars in the carpark anymore?
Lots of small businesses are suffering ongoing regular problems because of Brexit. Something tells me that people who run their own small businesses are underrepresented here.
Interesting, I expect you are correct that running a small business does not leave ample time for posting interminably on pb.com.
Now, lawyers on the other hand ....
It is certainly noticeable how many of our frequent posters are lawyers.
I have always had a suspicion those lawyer's fees at £300-1000 per hour were overcharges for actual work done on the job
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
Exactly this.
There is nearly never One Big Solution to The Big Problem.
So for carbon dioxide emissions we have *hundreds* of ongoing solutions. Each, by itself, might, at most, be a few percent of the problem. But if *many* of them come through, you get to zero net emissions.
For oil, yes, without petrol, diesel and other fuels, you have plastics. So there are projects on the list for that....
Its a surprisingly common view in the oil industry that oil is so versatile for things like plastics etc that humanity is mad to just be burning it.
Though we do need to use much less plastic too, it is destroying the planet in a different way.
What really hit me this week was this graphic. I hadn't realised quite how recent our pollution of the world was. 50% of carbon admissions in the last 30 years means that we cannot return to the lifestyles of my youth. It is very sobering.
It shouldn't be too surprising, because its not our lifestyles that are causing this to be frank. The UK ceased to be a major polluter many years ago.
While the UK has ceased to use coal pretty much, I do believe China now uses more coal annually than the UK has used cumulatively. Every single year China is using more coal than the country that founded the industrial revolution has ever used, since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Taxing our energy so draconically means we're pushing manufacturing away from the west (where it would primarily use renewables most of the time in the UK) to the welcome embrace of the Chinese coal industry.
A more self-defeating policy it'd be hard to think of.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
For me, this has been the biggest disappointment with the vaccines. For at least 6 months the expectation was that they would build herd immunity by stopping those vaccinated from being infected or infectious. I am not sure if that early optimism was just ill founded or the delta variant moved the goal posts but it has made the end game of this wretched disease a lot more painful.
My brother is in hospital at the moment and seriously unwell. He is the only patient in his bay of 6 beds and, so far as I could see the other bays were the same. Despite this there has been a Covid outbreak on the ward and visiting has been stopped. There are 2 nurses on in his ward. The rest seem to be allocated to wards dealing with Covid patients. It is just a million miles away from anything like normal.
British hospitals are unusual in the developed world in not having single rooms as standard. I am sure this is a major factor in hospital outbreaks, as is the attempt to run at 95%+ occupancy.
We simply don't have the physical infrastructure or personel to prevent hospital acquired infection.
Notable too was the lack of mention in the budget for postgraduate medical and nurse training. It was tractor stats level with no real attempt to create a fit NHS for the ongoing challenges.
I would say that we are pouring more and more money into the NHS for less and less return. Much of this is inevitable. You simply cannot create extra capacity in nurses or doctors overnight so more money simply means that the existing assets are worked harder with diminishing returns.
I do not envy Javid his task to be honest. A system which has been stretched to the limits for a very long time is now facing a massive challenge that looks likely to be endemic for many, many years and which has a direct and negative impact on the performance of the current service. Like @rcs1000's babysteps on climate there is no simple or single solution to this. And with hospitals I fear those babysteps are on glass with bare feet.
From what I have seen / read / been told directly by several GPs the issue is that the extra cash gets swallowed by the Lansley reforms. When you create a vastly costly network of contracts where medical professionals get diverted off to run a business buying health care, your cash goes to managers and lawyers and doesn't get to the front line.
Which is how you end up investing record amounts into an NHS with record waiting lists and failing critical care. Cameron knew it was a bad idea, but somehow managed to let that lunatic Lansley go ahead.
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
Exactly this.
There is nearly never One Big Solution to The Big Problem.
So for carbon dioxide emissions we have *hundreds* of ongoing solutions. Each, by itself, might, at most, be a few percent of the problem. But if *many* of them come through, you get to zero net emissions.
For oil, yes, without petrol, diesel and other fuels, you have plastics. So there are projects on the list for that....
They might get you to net zero power as well. Then it is back to square one. What our leaders should be focusing on is getting the basics right first,. Certainly in this country, clean air and clean water. Both are a long way off where they should be in 2021.
Lots of small businesses are suffering ongoing regular problems because of Brexit. Something tells me that people who run their own small businesses are underrepresented here.
Interesting, I expect you are correct that running a small business does not leave ample time for posting interminably on pb.com.
Now, lawyers on the other hand ....
It is certainly noticeable how many of our frequent posters are lawyers.
I have always had a suspicion those lawyer's fees at £300-1000 per hour were overcharges for actual work done on the job
Dr. Foxy, why aren't single bed rooms standard here?
Why aren't class sizes of 15 standard?
Same reason.
Incidentally what @DavidL says about the NHS could apply to many other parts of the public sector. Education, local government, transport. And when money is spent to correct it a way is usually found to thwart it (Exhibit A - the eastern leg of HS2). The phrase 'false economy' doesn't seem to have crossed the minds of these people.
Erm yeah. That was the case from day 1. The reason why the largest companies will "just pay more" is that in any supply crisis there are winners and losers. Amazon see this - like Covid - as a massive market opportunity and are investing accordingly.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
Which is what I said elsewhere. The "elsewhere" will be the least productive, least efficient, least wanted element. So we can do without it.
Anything that's actually wanted, people will pay for.
That's not a market failure, its the market working efficiently.
But you do not believe in the market. You do not think employers should have the freedom to recruit who they need to fill the vacancies they have.
Not all people want care assistants. But many do. They often have low incomes. What happens to those people when they cannot afford the amounts needed for care?
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Not sure I understand your argument Robert. Oil and gas companies also have debt on their balance sheet and this debt is becoming harder and harder to obtain. Juniors too find it more difficult to raise equity capital than ever before.
The number of banks that are willing to touch oil and gas is beginning to shrink, it feels a lot like it did with coal about 10 years ago. The tap started to flow less easily and suddenly before you knew it, international coal projects were only being financed by Chinese or Middle Eastern banks. I lost the thread but last I heard the Carmichael coal mine in Oz was being funded by Adani directly, because after years of tarting it around the world, they could obtain sufficient debt capital for it.
Oil and gas executives are beginning to feel the same thing now, with activist shareholders breathing down their necks. Capital deployment is being far more carefully considered and there is a continual eye by most of the majors on the relative carbon footprint of any new development opportunity. Meanwhile the smart ones are aggressively pivoting to bio (where the margins are astronomical) and green power where there is a clear runway to massive growth.
I own some Shell and some Chevron bonds. I could currently sell them for *more* than the principle and interest I'm due. In other words, they are currently yielding less than zero.
So, I'm not sure your argument holds up well when compared to reality.
Owning some bonds does not confer any special inside knowledge of how oil and gas firms are trying to fund their daily operations and I shall leave it at that.
You know Robert used to be one of the largest global investors in the energy sector, right? I think he’s got a pretty good feel for things.
I did not know that. I don’t doubt he would have had an excellent feel of things but all I can tell you is that the times they are a changing.
There are many sources of funds that are not prey to the whims of ESG or Eco Activists though. I agree the times are a changing but until we transition we still need oil and we still need gas and will do for the foreseeable future irrespective of what young eco activists think.
I hope that you do not mistake me for a young eco activist! I merely report what I see with my own eyes and ears, just as I saw it happen for coal. Consider me the canary.
If the government really wanted to have an outsized impact on climate change for a country with 1% of the global population, there is one thing that might work. It just needs to look at where the UK is globally relevant.
Confer a double corporation tax on any profits derived from lending, investing or trading with hydrocarbon companies. And use the proceeds to remove corporation tax on any profits derived from the same in green energy.
You could hit banks hard from the other side of the equation too and charge additional regulatory capital on any exposures to the hydrocarbon industry. Justifiable on the basis that the last governor spoke often about the potential for a financial crisis caused by stranded assets.
Sure, you’d see some displacement activity to other financing centres. But you’d move the dial far more than subsidising 80,000 heat pumps.
It’s hard to think of a government intervention that more clearly screams “we are not fucking around with this anymore”. And you then use your diplomatic pressures to try and convince the Europeans and others to follow suit.
You really wouldn't. Financing is far too fungible.
Ultimately, this is about demand and supply of the actual product, not about how it is financed. If you have an oil & gas company, funding is genuinely the least of your problems.
A good chunk of oil and gas banks would just bin that desk rather than go through the hassle of internationally relocating them, especially with the PR involved. Instead they’d get even more competitive with each other in trying to build up their green desks.
So it probably would have an appreciable impact on financing costs in the RBL market. In turn that would impact the ease (and price) with which declining assets can be divested by majors to juniors. In the absence of a globally mandated carbon tax, I can’t think of a more effective way of the Uk government pricing in co2 externalities that would have a global impact, even if it’s not a silver bullet.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
For me, this has been the biggest disappointment with the vaccines. For at least 6 months the expectation was that they would build herd immunity by stopping those vaccinated from being infected or infectious. I am not sure if that early optimism was just ill founded or the delta variant moved the goal posts but it has made the end game of this wretched disease a lot more painful.
My brother is in hospital at the moment and seriously unwell. He is the only patient in his bay of 6 beds and, so far as I could see the other bays were the same. Despite this there has been a Covid outbreak on the ward and visiting has been stopped. There are 2 nurses on in his ward. The rest seem to be allocated to wards dealing with Covid patients. It is just a million miles away from anything like normal.
British hospitals are unusual in the developed world in not having single rooms as standard. I am sure this is a major factor in hospital outbreaks, as is the attempt to run at 95%+ occupancy.
We simply don't have the physical infrastructure or personel to prevent hospital acquired infection.
Notable too was the lack of mention in the budget for postgraduate medical and nurse training. It was tractor stats level with no real attempt to create a fit NHS for the ongoing challenges.
I spent 6 months in Stoke Mandeville, way back in 1979, on a mixed ward, the first 10 weeks or so confined to a bed. Whilst privacy was next to non-existent, the ability to chat freely to other patients, also stuck in bed, was a massive boon.
Not sure how my mental health would have fared isolated in a room tbh.
Lots of small businesses are suffering ongoing regular problems because of Brexit. Something tells me that people who run their own small businesses are underrepresented here.
Interesting, I expect you are correct that running a small business does not leave ample time for posting interminably on pb.com.
Now, lawyers on the other hand ....
It is certainly noticeable how many of our frequent posters are lawyers.
I have always had a suspicion those lawyer's fees at £300-1000 per hour were overcharges for actual work done on the job
A lawyer died of a heart attack at the age of 29. Enraged, he arrived at the Pearly Gates and shouted at St Peter, 'Why did you do that? I was only 29!'
'Really?' replied St Peter, surprised. 'The how did you bill for 114 years' worth of work?'
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
Until we have fully viable, scalable, alternatives to all the products we make from oil that is not going to happen.
This is the "step function fallacy". Nothing is worth doing until we can solve the problem all in one go.
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
Exactly this.
There is nearly never One Big Solution to The Big Problem.
So for carbon dioxide emissions we have *hundreds* of ongoing solutions. Each, by itself, might, at most, be a few percent of the problem. But if *many* of them come through, you get to zero net emissions.
For oil, yes, without petrol, diesel and other fuels, you have plastics. So there are projects on the list for that....
They might get you to net zero power as well. Then it is back to square one. What our leaders should be focusing on is getting the basics right first,. Certainly in this country, clean air and clean water. Both are a long way off where they should be in 2021.
Solutions to generating electricity without emitting carbon exist in vast numbers. As does storage of generated power. And the price on most of them are falling as well.
In many, many categories of pollution apart from CO2, emissions have been falling in the developed world. This has been accomplished by incremental reductions in the maximum allowed rates, for each "generation" of machinery etc. This process has been quietly doing it's thing since the 1950s. This was another thing that Donald Fucking Trump screwed up in the US, by the way.
Incidentally, on the subject of Heathener, where's this lockdown we were guaranteed in October due to vaccines being so much less effective than we had hoped?
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The news on vaccines isn't great in terms of suppression of disease. Yesterday's report that double vaxxed people infect 25% of double vaxxed household contacts and 38% of unvaxxed for example. They do greatly cut serious disease and mortality though.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
For me, this has been the biggest disappointment with the vaccines. For at least 6 months the expectation was that they would build herd immunity by stopping those vaccinated from being infected or infectious. I am not sure if that early optimism was just ill founded or the delta variant moved the goal posts but it has made the end game of this wretched disease a lot more painful.
My brother is in hospital at the moment and seriously unwell. He is the only patient in his bay of 6 beds and, so far as I could see the other bays were the same. Despite this there has been a Covid outbreak on the ward and visiting has been stopped. There are 2 nurses on in his ward. The rest seem to be allocated to wards dealing with Covid patients. It is just a million miles away from anything like normal.
British hospitals are unusual in the developed world in not having single rooms as standard. I am sure this is a major factor in hospital outbreaks, as is the attempt to run at 95%+ occupancy.
We simply don't have the physical infrastructure or personel to prevent hospital acquired infection.
Notable too was the lack of mention in the budget for postgraduate medical and nurse training. It was tractor stats level with no real attempt to create a fit NHS for the ongoing challenges.
Some Trusts perform a lot better than others. Like the sheer scale of the hospital spread of virus last winter this is largely kept from the public. What you get from the NHS is largely a postcode lottery and that is certainly something the government could focus on.
The one Brexit shortage we sadly won’t ever see is of complacent posts from our Mr T.
Although the fuel ‘crisis’ is long in the past, and I’ve not seen any stories or posts about gaps on the shelves, or pigs being culled for a while either.
Yesterday a friend asked me where I got my German emissions sticker for my car; when he looked at the website I recommended, it seems that since January they can or will no longer mail them to the UK.
Then I went down the picture framers to collect a picture I left with him three weeks back, but his resupply of frames is snarled in some Brexit import problem and he has no idea when they will arrive. He said he is worrying about his usual pre-Christmas boost in orders, for presents, and added that it is only weeks since he recovered from having problems importing glass.
Lots of small businesses are suffering ongoing regular problems because of Brexit. Something tells me that people who run their own small businesses are underrepresented here.
My nephew, a plumber, has several contracts which apparently he can't proceed with, for lack of (mainly imported) parts.
Brighter morning here.
One of the features of the next decade is going to be a move in production back around the world, reversing the recent trend of concentrating too much production in China and other Asian economies.
China is becoming more politically difficult to deal with as a country, and we have seen clearly the pandemic effect on global supply chains which already had no slack left in them.
How this relocation of manufacturing can happen in conjunction with a promised reduction in domestic carbon emissions, is a more difficult question?
Factories, themselves, are often quite low carbon - machines running on electricity. It is the raw inputs, where the problems are.
A bigger question, is where is all the electricity going to come from? Didn’t a bunch of factories in the UK get shut down by their electricity suppliers last month, after a few days of still and overcast weather reduced the output from renewables to almost nothing?
Erm yeah. That was the case from day 1. The reason why the largest companies will "just pay more" is that in any supply crisis there are winners and losers. Amazon see this - like Covid - as a massive market opportunity and are investing accordingly.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
Which is what I said elsewhere. The "elsewhere" will be the least productive, least efficient, least wanted element. So we can do without it.
Anything that's actually wanted, people will pay for.
That's not a market failure, its the market working efficiently.
The "elsewhere" are places that people shop, services that people use, and their failure creates the shortage you continue to deny.
Nothing in the budget for emergency cash injections to councils already struggling to provide statutory services to fund "just pay more" to ensure bins get emptied and roads get gritted. Apparently we can do without gritting...
If people are keen to shop there then the company will be able to afford drivers. If not, then we can do without it.
The Councils can prioritise funding drivers and cut something else instead if that's what is required.
Mr. Z, disagree. I'd rather have privacy and quiet.
Happily, I don't get ill very often.
Mr. Cwsc, you need two teachers, though, whereas the number of doctors required would not change.
Also, it's a while ago but some studies I read at university suggested smaller class sizes aren't necessarily much (or any) better. From fuzzy memory, discipline mattered more than class size (and the capacity to throw out the irredeemable).
Hey @rcs1000 Totally OT question since you're here, is fossil fuel divestment doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital or is it just moving bags from woke pension funds to non-woke investors at a tiny discount?
No, it's not doing anything to starve fossil fuel companies of capital.
For a start, the number of ethical funds is tiny relative to the market. Someone selling Shell wouldn't make a big difference to the pool of buyers. And the remainder are very price sensitive, so I simply can't see how it could do anything more than (maybe) move the equilibrium share price by a percent or two.
But perhaps more importantly - the big oil companies aren't in need of capital! Shell pays out more than $15 billion in dividends every year. They aren't turning up asking Mr Market for money, they're handing massive amounts out to shareholders year in and year out. (I remember Simon Henry, the old Shell CFO, saying to me "Shell has been paying its dividends uninterrupted for a lot longer than most countries have been paying their debts."
The starving will have to be on the demand side.
Quite right.
If you want to make Shell less profitable, use less oil.
That will reduce their turnover - I suspect the oil companies will stay profitable for some time yet. They will just cut back on production and exploration of the more expensive sources.
Comments
Who is this maverick betting genius maling all the best calls? Above post was only 3 days ago when Youngkin was @3.2
Natural monopolies are challenging for the free market
The number of banks that are willing to touch oil and gas is beginning to shrink, it feels a lot like it did with coal about 10 years ago. The tap started to flow less easily and suddenly before you knew it, international coal projects were only being financed by Chinese or Middle Eastern banks. I lost the thread but last I heard the Carmichael coal mine in Oz was being funded by Adani directly, because after years of tarting it around the world, they couldn’t obtain sufficient debt capital for it.
Oil and gas executives are beginning to feel the same thing now, with activist shareholders breathing down their necks. Capital deployment is being far more carefully considered and there is a continual eye by most of the majors on the relative carbon footprint of any new development opportunity. Meanwhile the smart ones are aggressively pivoting to bio (where the margins are astronomical) and green power where there is a clear runway to massive growth.
So, I'm not sure your argument holds up well when compared to reality.
First up, there was no help for the unemployed, and middle-earners would face £3k in tax rises. Then there were rising energy prices, inflation and low growth with which to deal. Spending on education was almost nonexistent. Debt was still vast. Tax at its highest level since 1950s. Brexit more damaging to the economy than Covid.
Facebook is photos of kids.
I don't use any of them much anymore, got bored of them. If I use Facebook its to share photos and that's about it.
Let me share some inside knowledge: very few (if any) oil and gas companies fund themselves through banks.
Big companies issue bonds. Those bonds are publicly traded. We know what Exxon or Shell or Total or Repsol or BP pays to borrow money, because they issue bonds. Most of them pay less than sovereigns for debt.
Smaller companies tap into funds that specialise in financing oil companies. This is syndicated lending, typically led by specialist firms, where 20 or so different lenders will get together. Here there is some involvement by traditional banks (although mostly the facilities have terms set - i.e. have lead investors - that are funds rather than banks). If traditional banks pull back from this market, it would have an impact. But not a large one. Firstly, Lloyds TSB or even HSBC are bit players in this space. Secondly, the big players are people you've never even heard of. (And other than Sumitomo Mitsui, they're pretty much all in the US. And while they're big firms they're not household names.)
Edit to add: I missed possibly the most important part of the debt funding of oil & gas - reserves based lending. Again, this is an area where - with one notable exception - the big traditional banks just don't play.
Twitter has its good points. I like old TV and Film and often engage there with actors from the past.
I have had some nice discussions with a few of them. Robin Askwith, Reece Dinsdale, Judy Jarvis, Sophia Myles, The son of the late TV drama writer Roger Marshall and many more.
For politics it is also awful and anyone who gets into my timeline spouting shite gets blocked immediately.
Regulation to ensure that firms were only on one side of the table at a time would be a good start.
Spoiler alert: Just pay more.
Lloyds TSB ceased to exist some years ago.
*Pedant hat OFF*
Here's what you can do: install insulation; when your boiler is up for replacement, get a tankless water heater, choose a heat pump over a/c and heating. There are lots of little things that help at the margin. And lots of little things - over time - turn into big things.
Key example someone I know once did a campaign to hit x particular people and hit 5% of them while consuming a lot of budget (and this is someone who has specialised in social media advertising for 20 odd years)
We've got two days left and the government's not even brought back masks.
The difference between Facebook and Twitter, and why the former is much more evil than the latter, is the paid-for and very highly targeted messaging, and don’t seem to care if Western audiences are being targeted by negative political messaging out of Russia or China.
The big tech companies all have their evil sides, but Facebook is way more evil than any of the others.
But oil produces a wide variety of other products including plastics which produce all manner of products.
We still need oil for the time being. We may need it less and less for energy and fuel but we still need it for other products.
If the government really wanted to have an outsized impact on climate change for a country with 1% of the global population, there is one thing that might work. It just needs to look at where the UK is globally relevant.
Confer a double corporation tax on any profits derived from lending, investing or trading with hydrocarbon companies. And use the proceeds to remove corporation tax on any profits derived from the same in green energy.
You could hit banks hard from the other side of the equation too and charge additional regulatory capital on any exposures to the hydrocarbon industry. Justifiable on the basis that the last governor spoke often about the potential for a financial crisis caused by stranded assets.
Sure, you’d see some displacement activity to other financing centres. But you’d move the dial far more than subsidising 80,000 heat pumps.
It’s hard to think of a government intervention that more clearly screams “we are not fucking around with this anymore”. And you then use your diplomatic pressures to try and convince the Europeans and others to follow suit.
I bought the original Tesla Roadster more than a decade ago. Battery powered cars have move on immeasurably since then. Who'd have thought it possible to get a 300 mile range five seater car, with a robust charging infrastructure and fantastic acceleration for little more than $40,000 (£30,000). Now, is this at an everyman price yet? Nope. It's still the preserve of the better heeled. But every year it becomes a bit more affordable and the share of electric vehicles increases.
This is not to say electric vehicles are a panacea. Only that the world progresses in millions of babysteps.
This will horribly confuse @Sunil_Prasannan who will have to take time off from his - ahem - personal activities linked to trains to hit the 'off topic button' every time we mention cricket.
Ultimately, this is about demand and supply of the actual product, not about how it is financed. If you have an oil & gas company, funding is genuinely the least of your problems.
Sure it can be toxic at times, but no need to get involved with that stuff.
I don't miss Facebook at all. It was good for organising a reunion, but not much more than that.
But if vaccinations prove not to be great, then lockdowns are pointless (though less intrusive mitigations like air filtration less so). Just don't pretend that we can have anything like normal medical services in the foreseeable future.
My concern is, in the rush to bash oil and the oil industry based on the fossil fuel side, it is very often overlooked the diversity and range of non fuel products made from oil and these need solving too.
Then I went down the picture framers to collect a picture I left with him three weeks back, but his resupply of frames is snarled in some Brexit import problem and he has no idea when they will arrive. He said he is worrying about his usual pre-Christmas boost in orders, for presents, and added that it is only weeks since he recovered from having problems importing glass.
Lots of small businesses are suffering ongoing regular problems because of Brexit. Something tells me that people who run their own small businesses are underrepresented here.
My brother is in hospital at the moment and seriously unwell. He is the only patient in his bay of 6 beds and, so far as I could see the other bays were the same. Despite this there has been a Covid outbreak on the ward and visiting has been stopped. There are 2 nurses on in his ward. The rest seem to be allocated to wards dealing with Covid patients. It is just a million miles away from anything like normal.
Politically too it makes sense to remove dependence on our energy needs from oil and gas and where we need to get it from.
Of course we should, as we are, work at developing alternatives to take the place of its products as is happening.
We changed our car recently and looked at an electric VW, second hand, nearly new. £15K which was not a bad price but a little out of our range. Our next one will be electric in a couple of years when we change my wife's car
I worked for a company that had a Leaf as a pool car and we were lucky to get 80 miles on a charge out of it. The range is being solved and the prices are coming down. Start up and initial investment costs being recouped and increasing volumes help that. It is no different to any other new technology. The early adapters pay a premium but by the time it becomes mainstream the price has tumbled.
Brighter morning here.
Presumably also cases passed on after vaccination have lower viral load? So on average are not equivalent severity to cases passed on without vaccination?
There is nearly never One Big Solution to The Big Problem.
So for carbon dioxide emissions we have *hundreds* of ongoing solutions. Each, by itself, might, at most, be a few percent of the problem. But if *many* of them come through, you get to zero net emissions.
For oil, yes, without petrol, diesel and other fuels, you have plastics. So there are projects on the list for that....
Boris & Rishi v Starmer & Rachel on managing the economy - 40%/25%
http://news.sky.com/story/budget-2021-voters-endorse-rishi-sunaks-plans-and-back-chancellors-handling-of-economy-poll-12453567
We simply don't have the physical infrastructure or personel to prevent hospital acquired infection.
Notable too was the lack of mention in the budget for postgraduate medical and nurse training. It was tractor stats level with no real attempt to create a fit NHS for the ongoing challenges.
China is becoming more politically difficult to deal with as a country, and we have seen clearly the pandemic effect on global supply chains which already had no slack left in them.
How this relocation of manufacturing can happen in conjunction with a promised reduction in domestic carbon emissions, is a more difficult question?
Edit - on the last point,you could make very much the same comment about the offer to schools. No real effort to relieve the chronic overcrowding and understaffing.
It is not impossible that the reduced number of symptoms in the vaccinated means that they are more likely to be out and about infecting others, rather than in bed with hot broth.
It looks to me like we are not going to see the back of covid for a long time, if at all.
Those companies would have no problems whatsoever self-financing without relying upon financing, even if it temporarily meant cutting dividends but smaller, competitor fracking companies etc might struggle to generate financing more. Shut off the competition and our electricity and gas becomes more expensive, Putin becomes richer, and the environment is no better.
I do not envy Javid his task to be honest. A system which has been stretched to the limits for a very long time is now facing a massive challenge that looks likely to be endemic for many, many years and which has a direct and negative impact on the performance of the current service. Like @rcs1000's babysteps on climate there is no simple or single solution to this. And with hospitals I fear those babysteps are on glass with bare feet.
What this Amazon "just pay more" doesn't do is remove Christmas shortages. It just shifts the shortages elsewhere. the watchout at the moment is from councils where some are under siege losing bin lorry drivers who in the winter also drive gritters...
Anything that's actually wanted, people will pay for.
That's not a market failure, its the market working efficiently.
What really hit me this week was this graphic. I hadn't realised quite how recent our pollution of the world was. 50% of carbon admissions in the last 30 years means that we cannot return to the lifestyles of my youth. It is very sobering.
Nothing in the budget for emergency cash injections to councils already struggling to provide statutory services to fund "just pay more" to ensure bins get emptied and roads get gritted. Apparently we can do without gritting...
Anything not already on a boat from China or Taiwan, isn’t going to arrive in time, so if they want to sell stuff this year they need to get it shipped by plane. On the other hand, they will be some awesome bargains in January and February, if a load of goods arrive late.
As for their staff shortages, distribution companies are finally working out that warehouse workers generally hate their jobs, and that the steady stream of Eastern Europeans who could stick it for a year or two has now dried up. Maybe their workers will soon be able to affford to live close to where they work.
That was never the expectation from those in the know on the MRNA vaccines, what they are designed to do is stop vulnerable people from getting to the danger phase I just described. How successful they are doing that is open to debate at present, we will know much more by the end of the winter.
These vaccines were never going to stop catching or transmission of this virus, that so many intelligent people were led to believe this was the case just says everything to me about our politicians and their advisors.
- Petrol, Diesel etc would be replaced with Hydrogen.
- Aviation kerosene would be replaced with bio fuel
- Plastics would *eventually* made from non-fossil feedstock
- We should invest in solar panel production.
There was considerable real investment by the company in most of the above. Ironically, after I left, "new management" cut back a bunch of this. The solar cell investment died vs Chinese competition IIRC.
Dr. Foxy, why aren't single bed rooms standard here?
The arrogance villeins don't want to sleep in their cars in the carpark anymore?
Now, lawyers on the other hand ....
It is certainly noticeable how many of our frequent posters are lawyers.
I have always had a suspicion those lawyer's fees at £300-1000 per hour were overcharges for actual work done on the job
While the UK has ceased to use coal pretty much, I do believe China now uses more coal annually than the UK has used cumulatively. Every single year China is using more coal than the country that founded the industrial revolution has ever used, since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Taxing our energy so draconically means we're pushing manufacturing away from the west (where it would primarily use renewables most of the time in the UK) to the welcome embrace of the Chinese coal industry.
A more self-defeating policy it'd be hard to think of.
Which is how you end up investing record amounts into an NHS with record waiting lists and failing critical care. Cameron knew it was a bad idea, but somehow managed to let that lunatic Lansley go ahead.
Same reason.
Incidentally what @DavidL says about the NHS could apply to many other parts of the public sector. Education, local government, transport. And when money is spent to correct it a way is usually found to thwart it (Exhibit A - the eastern leg of HS2). The phrase 'false economy' doesn't seem to have crossed the minds of these people.
Not all people want care assistants. But many do. They often have low incomes. What happens to those people when they cannot afford the amounts needed for care?
So it probably would have an appreciable impact on financing costs in the RBL market. In turn that would impact the ease (and price) with which declining assets can be divested by majors to juniors. In the absence of a globally mandated carbon tax, I can’t think of a more effective way of the Uk government pricing in co2 externalities that would have a global impact, even if it’s not a silver bullet.
I spent 6 months in Stoke Mandeville, way back in 1979, on a mixed ward, the first 10 weeks or so confined to a bed. Whilst privacy was next to non-existent, the ability to chat freely to other patients, also stuck in bed, was a massive boon.
Not sure how my mental health would have fared isolated in a room tbh.
'Really?' replied St Peter, surprised. 'The how did you bill for 114 years' worth of work?'
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/oct/29/astounding-roman-statues-unearthed-at-norman-church-ruins-on-route-of-hs2
Just think what archeologists are going to find when they do the A303 Stonehenge bypass!
In many, many categories of pollution apart from CO2, emissions have been falling in the developed world. This has been accomplished by incremental reductions in the maximum allowed rates, for each "generation" of machinery etc. This process has been quietly doing it's thing since the 1950s. This was another thing that Donald Fucking Trump screwed up in the US, by the way.
The Councils can prioritise funding drivers and cut something else instead if that's what is required.
Happily, I don't get ill very often.
Mr. Cwsc, you need two teachers, though, whereas the number of doctors required would not change.
Also, it's a while ago but some studies I read at university suggested smaller class sizes aren't necessarily much (or any) better. From fuzzy memory, discipline mattered more than class size (and the capacity to throw out the irredeemable).