“Climate Policy” Is A Financial Swindle

As Ms. Bartsch was drafting her 2007 report on The Economics of Climate Change (cf. previous item), the “next major shock to the global economy,” was occurring right at her very bank, Morgan Stanley! One big trading desk alone lost $14.5 billion, dwarfing all previous bank losses in history. Hopelessly bankrupt, the investment bank was bailed out – first by a $9 billion “investment” from Mitsubishi UFJ; then by a $20 billion preferred stock “investment” by the U.S. Treasury’s TARP program; followed by the awarding of “commercial bank status” to enable it to borrow from the Federal Reserve’s discount window, etc. Millions were foreclosed and evicted, or lost everything. The biggest trans-Atlantic economies were driven into the “Great Recession” of 2009-10.

Could Ms. Bartsch have missed all this? Was she locked in a room at Morgan Stanley where mortgage-backed securities, credit default swaps, and collateralized loan obligations were never mentioned, so as not to offend her lofty sensibilities? Did she frown on such money-grubbing while pursuing the noble goals of saving the planet? Did she really think it was climate change that was going to do the “creative destruction,” when all around her, “creative” bankers were destroying everything?

No. She was working on a scheme to create a new “green finance” bubble in order to bail out the bank — and the financial system — at the cost of regime-change and superpower wars, deindustrialization and another deep recession, a worldwide food crisis, and Malthusian sacrifices. (Recall, in this context, the comment of the 1991 follow-up to the Club of Rome book, Limits to Growth, published under the title The First Global Revolution: “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill…. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome.”)