The weather warms. The flowers bloom. The garden parties begin anew, and nothing is worse than waiting day after agonizing day for invitations that never come. So why not make an early bid for the most prestigious gatherings, by making a gesture simultaneously empty, loud, in tune with right-minded thinking, and utterly hypocritical?
Yes, my friends, the Rockefellers have emerged from winter hibernation, hungry for adulation, anxious to mate with journalists, and lusting after the applause of the politically correct. The Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF) — one of the family charities — “is proud to announce its intent to divest from fossil fuels.” This follows the earlier loud announcement by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) that it is “abandoning fossil fuels.”
Note that this moral preening is not the stance of the entire Rockefeller empire. Far from it: The assets of the RFF are about $107 million. For the RBF, the figure is about $790 million. The Rockefeller Foundation (RF) assets are about $4.2 billion, and that organization seems to be uninterested in the divestment campaign, satisfying itself instead with a fatuous essay simultaneously amusing and deeply disingenuous, the central theme of which is self-applause about “climate resilience.” Messrs. Ashvin Dayal and Saleemul Huq, the RF bureaucrats who wrote this infantile missive, seem not to understand the difference between weather events and climate trends and could not be bothered even to learn the basic facts. And in precisely what ways has the RF “been working towards [a global climate agreement] for nearly two decades,” apart perhaps from writing some checks and jet-setting to various conferences held in luxury resorts all over the globe?
Even bigger is the family investment and wealth management firm: Rockefeller and Company (R&C), with assets of about $9.8 billion. The silence on fossil fuel divestment emanating from that corner of the Rockefeller media operation is deafening, the reason for which is obvious: R&C is not a charity. It has fiduciary responsibilities to investors and clients, and its nonparticipation in the divestment campaign suggests a view among them that fossil fuel assets might represent an important part of a well-structured portfolio.
And why would that be? That too is obvious: Every person on earth demands energy, and fossil fuels overwhelmingly are the most efficient means with which to provide it. That the fossil fuel sector is huge is the result of those realities. If we think through the attendant implications of the divestment campaign, the supposed “moral obligation” of divestment extends far beyond conventional energy.
All sectors of the global economy — industrial, agricultural, commercial, residential, and transportation — demand energy because ordinary people want the goods and services made available or more affordable by fossil fuels. Precisely why does the moral imperative of divestment not extend to all those sectors, which, after all, are the reason d’être of energy production? Food production. Housing and the associated warming in winter and cooling in summer. Transportation services in all its myriad forms. The delivery of medical care. Manufacturing. Ad infinitum. What accounts for the failure of the Rockefeller deep thinkers to explain why investments in fossil fuels are immoral while investments in the underlying enablers ¬— the entire global economy — are not?
The answer to that question again is obvious: They cannot divest everything. Nor can they divest even a limited subset beyond fossil fuels, because every activity uses conventional energy, and no clear line exists between what is moral and what is not. Even wind and solar power, which would collapse without massive subsidies, require gas- and coal-fired backup power to avoid blackouts.
The Rockefeller decision makers do not understand any of these analytics, do not know how to think them through, and know only the nostrums that they hear constantly among the well-to-do in upper Manhattan. If they did understand the fundamental antihuman core of the divestment argument, they might conclude that investment in government bonds is the only moral course. Except that government too uses vast amounts of energy.
And about that antihuman core of the divestment campaign: More consumption of conventional energy results in reduced poverty, and reduced poverty yields an increase in the consumption of conventional energy. As the world’s elites pursue illusory solutions to a climate problem, the seriousness of which is not supported by the data, they apparently are not all that concerned with the reality that these efforts will impose costs approximating 1 percent of global GDP, or roughly $600 billion to $750 billion per year, to be inflicted disproportionately upon the world’s poor, while yielding virtually no temperature effects at all by the year 2100.
The citizens of the world are attempting to assuage their consciences by supporting an international Green Climate Fund, the ostensible purpose of which is to reduce the exacerbation of global poverty that is the inexorable result of “climate” policies, that is, a sharp increase in the cost of conventional fuels. How to help the world’s poor? Forget free markets; put them on welfare!
Accordingly, the divestment campaign, perhaps realizing it and perhaps not, has slipped into the antihuman trap that is the hidden but essential core of modern environmentalism: Far from being a resource, ordinary people are a scourge on the planet. They prefer cheap energy, strongly, but the moral imperative of divestment is diametrically opposed, and investments in people — education, health, and so forth — make matters worse by increasing human capital and wealth, and thus the demand for energy.
Therefore, not only does the moral imperative of the divestment campaign — its very logic — lead to disinvestment in virtually all economic activities, it does the same for investments in people, in particular in a third world desperate to emerge from grinding poverty. Is it actually possible that the Rockefellers do not understand that expensive energy means more poverty? Or do they not care?
Consider also one central dimension of what it means to be human: the application of intelligence to overcome the obstacles that define life outside the Garden of Eden. From backbreaking toil by hand, to the use of animals and tools, to the evolution of energy from wood to whale oil to coal to oil and gas to nuclear power to new technologies yet to be invented or proven competitive: The history of energy is a fundamental component of mankind’s evolution, reflecting the inventiveness that is uniquely human, a process utterly at odds with the underlying imperatives of the divestment campaign.
Back to the assuagement of conscience, this time by the RFF: Its divestment statement already is the winner of the award for comedy highlight of the spring, with its genuflection to “the global community,” whatever that is, which supposedly is “work[ing] to eliminate the use of fossil fuels.” Well, no, unless “the global community” is defined as the climate industry. And then there is the slap at “the morally reprehensible conduct on the part of ExxonMobil . . . [which] appears [to have] worked since the 1980s to confuse the public about climate change.”
Wow. That the scientific uncertainties on the effects of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations to this day are enormous is acknowledged clearly by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); see this (Table 12.4) as an example. Why is it that the climate models have performed so badly in terms of predicting the actual temperature record? Even something as seemingly straightforward as the “climate sensitivity” of the atmosphere — the amount of warming by 2100 that would be caused by a doubling of GHG concentrations — is a parameter that IPCC has revised downward and that is the subject of much dispute in the peer-reviewed literature. And so Exxon’s uncertainties about this question decades ago somehow are “morally reprehensible”?
Oh, there is more: “Needless to say, the Rockefeller family has had a long and profitable history investing in the oil industry, including ExxonMobil.” So given that sordid past, will the Rockefellers divest themselves of the lavish lifestyles engendered in past Rockefeller generations by the historical growth of the fossil fuel sector? Don’t bet on it.
And at the aforementioned garden parties at which the Rockefellers now have guaranteed themselves thunderous applause, what energy source will be used to prepare the canapés and chill the champagne? The answer: inexpensive natural gas produced in the Marcellus and Utica shale formations in Pennsylvania, made possible with those modern manifestations of evil, hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. Fracking, by the way, has been banned in New York, even as the Rockefellers and all the other state residents benefit from the inexpensive energy that results from it. And so who, in the view of the Rockefellers, is the hypocrite in all this? ExxonMobil!
As the old saying goes, you just can’t make this stuff up. The Rockefellers are pretending to divest from fossil fuels, loudly, while not actually doing so, as part of a gesture that would have no effect on national or global investment in that sector, no effect on future energy paths, and no effect on their vast personal wealth, and that is blatantly obvious in its central goal of keeping them and their minions on the right side of right-minded opinion. When the applause of the politically correct becomes the central objective of individual and organizational striving, we have arrived at the core of moral cowardice.