Britain’s bombed out pension scheme for Members of Parliament might have to be bailed out by taxpayers following disastrous speculations in ‘ethical’ green investments. But the MPs have only their virtue-signalling selves to blame. For years they have nodded through statutory Net Zero measures that promote increasingly whacky technologies that nobody would dream of investing in unless huge state subsidies were on offer. The technical term for most green punts is dog shares. If MPs own gold-plated pensions are now at risk, the appropriate response to any request for taxpayer help should be, “Damn your impudence, get lost.”
The Telegraph reports the observation of Reform deputy leader Richard Tice that so-called ethical investments have crashed the pension scheme’s performance. It is noted that the £800 million fund is 25% short of its target for the year to March 2024 with a dangerous 40% used for Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investment. These ESG speculations that appeal to the virtuous could lead to taxpayers propping up the fund with tens of millions of pounds, notes Tice. On GB News, the Reform MP talked about investments in energy renewables and battery storage, all technologies helped on the legislative front by British lawmakers. He suggested that the funds should have been invested in traditional equities that perform in line with the wider market.
Green dog shares litter the financial landscape, and have done so for a number of years. Many of them have a history of under-performing the market for decades. Consider below the long-term performance of the Renewable Energy Industrial Index (RENIXX) which tracks the stock capitalisation of the 30 largest renewable energy industrial companies in the world.
Since the official start date around 2006 there has been zero capital growth. The situation is even worse for those who piled in at the recent height of the short Net Zero mania. As the RENIXX graph below shows, investments have more than halved in less than three years.
Last September, the Daily Sceptic published an article titled ‘If you want an investment portfolio full of dog shares try filling it with renewable and green punts’. We noted the fate of the retail exchange traded iShares Global Clean Energy fund which since its inception in 2008 has more or less halved an initial investment of £10,000. UK investment trust Greencoat Renewables PLC was said to provide “attractive risk adjusted returns with a compelling growth opportunity”. As we noted at the time, it was an imaginative way of explaining a loss in share value of 18.6% over the last five years. Perhaps it doesn’t come as a surprise to discover that both investment opportunities have each lost a further, one might say compelling, 10% of value this year to date.
When we published the article, many green energy stocks were suffering as the era of cheap, low interest money was coming to an end. Of course, the British governing classes were directly responsible for the fleeting boom in these junk stocks since for years they printed money and kept interest rates artificially low, as well as directing vast state subsidies into useless technologies such as wind and solar farms, heat pumps and battery storage. To this day, the MPs are promoting all manner of no expense-spared duds such as explosive hydrogen and potentially dangerous, pointless carbon capture. The further tragedy for Britain is that a split vote on the right allowed a deindustrialising, anti-working class Labour party to gain power last year devoted to the zealous promotion of the Net Zero fantasy. This is occurring in a world now waking up to the futility of taking hydrocarbons out of a modern industrial society solely because sandwich board activists have declared a fake climate crisis.
What brazen cheek it will be if the 200 parliamentary boobies, including the entire Lib Dem faction, who expressed support for the recent private member’s Climate and Nature Bill, ask for a taxpayer top-up to their pensions. This bill, which thankfully failed to make progress, would have brought about mass starvation, widespread disease and fatalities and the almost certain collapse of civil liberties. Within a few years, the bill would have reduced the domestic and imported use of hydrocarbons to just 10% of the current level. On the day of the debate, the height of the virtue on verbal display was twinned with the dismal low understanding of economics and science. Tory old buffer Sir Roger Gale summed up the all-round ignorance and pompous wind baggery by admitting the bill had a few “flaws” but would support it anyway for the sake of his grandchildren.
The few flaws in this bill promoted heavily by the Green Blob-funded Zero Hour would have included barely enough power to run basic services such as hospitals, led to people freezing in their homes, no food in the shops, no generally available medicines, no power to run sewage plants or hydrocarbons-based chemicals to clean the water, not to mention an inevitable breakdown in law and order. And, need it be added, no pensions, gold-plated or otherwise.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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