Tag Archives: markets

Climatistas, Again

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From Watts Up With That we get the latest internal inconsistency of the climate panic-mongers.

Including gas, oil and coal, they [the UN’s IPCC] estimate a total fossil fuel reserve of nine hundred to two thousand gigatonnes of carbon (GtC).  I decided to apply those numbers to both the Bern Model and the simple exponential decay model.

Willis Eschenbach, the author of the linked-to article, asked:

My interest was in finding out what would happen, according to the two CO2 models, if we burned all of the fossil fuels by 2100.

That is, if we completely exhausted all of our coal, oil, and natural gas in an orgy of consumption over the next 85 years, what would we get?

Using the two models cited, the Bern model and the simple single-time-constant exponential model, two of the IPCC’s favorite models, Eschenbach got the answer [emphasis his]:

According to the IPCC, there is not enough fossil fuel carbon (oil, gas, and coal) on the planet to double the atmospheric CO2 concentration from its current value.

Doubling the amount of atmospheric CO2 is one of the big bugaboos of the climatistas, never minding that at 800 parts per million by volume of CO2 in the air (the result of that doubling) is just about the level when life on earth was especially lush during earlier geologic eras.

Hmm….

Another Bill Did Pass

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I wrote earlier about the National Football League’s apparent attempt to extort Georgia into not enacting a bill that didn’t suit the NFL’s pleasure.

North Carolina did enact a bill in the same tenor, and now the National Basketball Association is threatening to pull its next year’s All-Star game from Charlotte in retaliation.

When can we expect the NBA to mandate an inclusive environment to all who attend our games and event[s] and safe spaces of equality and mutual respect in its clubs’ arena rest rooms and to ban Men’s and Women’s rest rooms as unacceptably discriminatory?

Hmm….

Now the Bill Must Pass?

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The Georgia legislature has passed a bill and put it in front of the governor that would

protect pastors from performing same-sex marriages and give “faith-based” organizations permission to deny use of their business for anything they find “objectionable.” Businesses wouldn’t have to hire anyone whose religious beliefs are different from theirs[.]

The NFL doesn’t like that.

“NFL policies emphasize tolerance and inclusiveness, and prohibit discrimination based on age, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, or any other improper standard,” league spokesman Brian McCarthy said. “Whether the laws and regulations of a state and local community are consistent with these policies would be one of many factors NFL owners may use to evaluate potential Super Bowl host sites.”

So, what else does that mean?  Would the NFL then require the Atlanta Falcons to leave Georgia, too?  Sounds like this is a dare that Georgia must accept: the governor must sign the bill.

Central Management

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China is having a harder time managing a property market that is diverging, the country’s housing minister said Tuesday.

“The differences are severe, and it is worsening,” Chen Zhenggao said at a news conference on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress on Tuesday.  “The situation in the first-tier cities and the third- and fourth-tier cities are different, which brings about challenges to our regulatory work, and is a major issue.”

[emphasis added]  And this:

“This is a trade-off,” said Rosealea Yao, an analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics.  “On one hand, you want rural workers to buy homes,” she said.  “But there is a need to prop up housing prices because Chinese people only buy homes when prices are rising.  Inadvertently, this then fuels sharp gains in home prices in first-tier cities.”

There’s a hint there about the utility of managing a large, complex economy from a center that’s far distant from that economy.  Maybe, just maybe, the PRC should lay off from those one-size-fits-all rules.  Or even lay off from regulating so much at all.

Of course, that would mean a lessening of personal power for the men of the PRC government….

Another Reason

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…to reduce investments in the PRC: it’s getting harder to get the money back out, this time from foreign exchange controls designed to be limits on how much money in yuan can be exchanged for other currencies, like the US dollar, the British pound, and the Japanese yen.

China’s foreign-exchange regulator in recent months has deployed a new system to monitor individual purchases of foreign funds and has asked banks to reduce foreign-currency transactions. It has summoned bankers to its offices to give guidance and has grilled them when foreign-exchange activity spikes, according to executives at Chinese and foreign lenders.

Nice little bank you got there….

But it’s more than just threats; the government controls are having material impacts on business’ ability to do straight-up cross border business.

A European chemicals manufacturer recently faced delays in Shanghai in obtaining US dollars, threatening its deadline for an overseas licensing payment. The Bank of Tianjin is having trouble getting funds from mainland investors for a planned Hong Kong public stock offering. A water-treatment company struggled to withdraw $2,000 for an engineer to travel to the US.

And

[Hong Kong law firm Harvey Law Corp Managing Partner—Worldwide, Jean Francois] Harvey said a Chinese client is having problems wiring $15 million to a Hong Kong company that for two years has been helping it buy equipment for a South American factory. “There’s no indication that the money will go through,” he said, “and we heard from our client that it was due to restrictions on money transfer.”

It goes on from there.