Insurance market Lloyd’s of London (not to be confused with the Lloyds Banking Group) has taken another step away from Net Zero. According to the Financial Times, Lloyd's new boss Patrick Tiernan has said that the owners of the insurance market “will no longer ask insurers to stop providing insurance cover for coal or other planet-warming fossil fuels”.
A number of newspaper reports covering the story put the blame (or credit, if you prefer) at the White House. Lloyd's move came “amid a backlash led by Donald Trump against pro-green financing”, says the Telegraph. The Guardian says: “Donald Trump has been expanding oil, gas and coal production, ordering companies to ‘drill, baby, drill’ while ditching green energy programmes.” And the green-leaning FT, too, uses the slogan to contextualise this nail in the global Net Zero coffin, mentioning that "US President Donald Trump ditched dozens of clean energy programmes in favour of fossil fuels, and urged oil and gas companies to ‘drill, baby, drill’”.
But this emphasis on Trump is false. As explained previously here, Lloyd’s was one of the first to exit the Net Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA) in May 2023 – 18 months before Trump 2.0’s November 2024 victory. Lloyd’s was shortly followed by Axa, Allianz and Munich Re. They may be global, but these are all Europe-based insurance firms, further undermining the notion that the collapse of financial institutions’ Net Zero alliances is driven by American hostility to the green agenda.
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“Net Zero, because it contradicts material reality, is only ultimately capable of breeding deep anger and hostility to institutions that attempt to enforce it”.
Further versions in which “Net Zero” is replaced by transgenderism, mass migration, multiculturalism, credit bubble, QE, ZIRP, covid lockdowns, covid vaccinations, claims of WMD in Iraq, rape gangs, “Russiagate”, “climate crisis”… would roughly describe the history of the past 30 or so years.
Interesting to overlay the share prices of Ørsted and Moderna. Although Moderna’s peak is a couple of months later than Ørsted’s and it has lost ~95% of its peak valuation rather than a mere 90%, they have strikingly similar shapes and are now back to their levels of 6 or 7 years ago.
Correlation of course doesn’t imply causation but can sometime suggest shared underlying causes.
That Green Zealot, Mark Carney, turned the Bank of England into a Green Farce, and is now helping to break up Canada, with Alberta leading the Western provinces. Here’s the latest:
https://youtu.be/A3uRWEofN-g
A logical and very well written article, and so very welcome!
The trouble is that so few of the Green Blob will read it, preferring to keep their heads under the sand.
Even so, and despite their remarkably excessive use of fossil fuels, the likes of Bezos, Gates, et al, will pay little attention.
The rapid failure of that ldiot Carney’s NZIA is a massive coup for democracy.
It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that Trump has saved the financial world, though only narrowly, from the tentacles of the Green monster, headed by the dimwit Democrats and Biden.
For all his many faults, the man will be regarded by history as a hero.
Like set of dominoes Net Zero will fall. It only requires one flick of a finger and the whole phony planet saving scam will collapse.
We won’t know of its extent as the Internet and other forms of communication will be down.
It is not a coincidence that the US , is by far the biggest insurance mkt in the world…..I’d say Lloyds has been very dozy as Trump has been back for over 6 months, so presumably when ever a Fossil fuel type risk was offered, they declined…..until now.
But great to see yet another nail get driven into the Globalist coffin.
Market Forces – gods bless ‘em. If Net Zero and the rest of the save-the-planet caper were economically viable and successful we would have had economies without fossil fuels, and a thriving market in “green” investment giving attractive returns long before now.
Markets are the apocryphal horse which can be led to water but not made to drink.
The puzzle is why executives in banks, investment, businesses, auto-makers thought Neddy would drink and drink. The quality of management leaves much to be desired evidently.
Too many History and PPE graduates.
I’ve read that the secret of generating wealth is to seize the opportunities presented on the way ‘up’ and to seize the other opportunities on the way ‘down’. Every significant change is a twofer.
So the opportunities of ‘going green’ have mostly been realised and fresh opportunities are being sought in ‘going black’. All the blather about climate change and saving the world were mere politics and nothing to do with making money. That’s business.
A very enjoyable article, thank you!
Amazing.
The brains of Britain running our financial institutions have finally woken up to the reality that if we cannot switch the lights on things tend to go tit’s up.
Glory be.
It’s more a lack of those studying STEM subjects, and those few lacking a backbone.
Though, if the numbers are few, their courage might have been in vain, such has been the psychological skills applied to propagate this destructive meme.
I wonder, were there other Insurance Organisations available which didn’t subscribe to the ERG doctrine; and have they prospered as a result?
I wouldn’t underestimate the effect and importance of the Trump administration’s scrapping of the Endangerment Finding which classified CO2 as harmful to the environment.
That principle is the bedrock of all Net Zero policy. We cannot be truly free from Net Zero policy as long countries such as ours continue to insist that any amount of CO2 above what is already in the atmosphere causes an existential threat.
It is a totalitarian principle. There is no room for trade offs, no room for nuance or negotiation when any amount of CO2 is supposedly going to lead to catastrophe and death.
Especially as there has been times in Earths history where there was 10 times as much CO2 with no runaway global warming.
Thank you, Ben, for mentioning the immensely destructive “lockdowns” and “COVID”, but not once using the word “pandemic”. As we know, there was no pandemic.
Scamdemic.
A good explanation of how the world really works, and why we are now all completely screwed. Bye-bye Nut Zero, hello Broken Britain.
Perhaps Old King Coal will make a comeback at last.
Robotics will allow us to dig for coal 24/7, without having to send humans underground all day….and it will be as cheap as chips….
We could find new coal fields to mine, using modern, existing mechanisation.
What held back productivity in the UK, even well before nationalisation, was that the unions refused to accept mechanisation, with a slimmed down workforce to pay for the improvement, and improve productivity. Hence the financial losses.