Police in riot gear storm a rally on Friday, removing hundreds of protesters by truck. , a Local TV report said, as thousands of people took to the streets of the capital, condemning the island nation’s worst economic crisis in recent memory. (AP Photo / Amitha Thennakoon)
The nation of Sri Lanka has an almost perfect ESG rating of 98.1 on a scale of 100, according to WorldEconomics.com. But the government that had forced the nation to achieve this virtue signal goal in recent years collapsed over the weekend because it led the country into self-declared bankruptcy, making it unable to buy adequate supplies of fuel and feed the population. Thousands of angry Sri Lankans stormed the presidential residence on Saturday, forcing President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to step down and flee the country.
Should current trends in global energy supplies continue, Sri Lanka could end up being just a harbinger of bigger things coming around the rest of the world in the months and years to come. Somewhat ironically, an analysis of the complete ESG rankings linked above shows that many of the nations with the highest scores are developing countries with the highest degree of hunger risk. Haiti, for example, has an ESG score of 99, while the well-fed United States is far down the list with just over 58.
“People Worry Most About the Immediate Crisis”
Frans Timmermans, Vice-President of the European Commission, seems to understand the reality his own continent is facing if it were to run out of sufficient energy supply this coming winter. Last week, Timmerman’s EU and national leaders called for efforts to increase energy supply and fossil fuel supply systems in the short term to try to avert disaster. “If our society goes into very, very strong conflict and strife because there is no energy, we will certainly not reach our [climate] goals,” he said, adding “we must make sure that people are not in the cold of the coming winter. “
Wisely, Timmermans further noted that a failure by European leadership to deal with a looming winter energy crisis could create such a high level of social and economic disruption that it could paralyze the continent’s long-term efforts to achieve its climate goals. “I have been in politics long enough, over 30 years, to understand that people are most concerned about the immediate crisis and not about the long-term crisis. To see also : Where are the 45 years in high-tech?. And if we do not tackle the immediate crisis, we will certainly get lost with the long-term crisis, he said.
It remains an open question whether US President Joe Biden and his advisers also understand the risk to their own political future by rising energy costs and the likelihood of power outages. In an extraordinary pre-trip op / ed published in Sunday’s Washington Post, Biden somehow manages to write about 700 words about his pending trip to Saudi Arabia without including the word “oil”, although no one doubts that one The main motivation behind his trip is to ask Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to produce more crude oil in an attempt to supply a underserved global market.
The president refers to one implicit sentence for Middle Eastern oil, saying “Its energy resources are crucial to curbing the impact on global supplies of Russia’s war in Ukraine.”
That’s right, but let’s be clear on this point: the current largest oil producer on the planet is not Saudi Arabia, but the United States. This has been the case for several years now, but we never hear anyone in this administration make similar statements about how crucial the US industry is for maintaining global oil supplies and the international stability that abundant oil supplies create and maintain.
The level of international stability has begun to crumble in the last year, mainly due to the emergence of a chronically undersupplied international crude oil market. This is partly due to several factors, including the effects of the COVID pandemic, Russia’s war on Ukraine, the declining capacity levels of the OPEC + cartel and the growing energy crisis in Europe that began to germinate last summer. But another important reason why this is happening is due to the fact that, despite its ranking as the # 1 supplier in the world, the US industry is still about 1 million barrels of oil per day below the peaks achieved in 2018 and 2019 This is largely due to the continued efforts of the Biden administration to suppress US domestic industry, and to the efforts of the ESG investor community to deny it access to capital.
“Marching to the Brink of Starvation”
This rising level of instability due to rising fuel shortages, supply chain disruptions and the rapidly escalating prices that inevitably result, is now creating food shortages that have placed hundreds of millions of individuals in developing countries around the world under a very real threat of hunger. The head of the UN food program, David Beasley, admitted this in a report last week.
Beasley said the agency’s new analysis shows that “a record 345 million acutely hungry people are marching to the brink of starvation. See the article : Think Of This Way If You Want To Set Up Your Business With Success.” This represents a 25% increase from 276 million at the beginning of 2022, which was double the 135 million before the COVID pandemic came in early 2020.
“There is a real danger that it will climb even higher in the months ahead,” he said. “Even more worrying is that when this group breaks down, a staggering 50 million people in 45 countries are just one step away from famine.”
It should be noted that some of the food shortages are a result of governments prioritizing achieving climate and ESG goals higher than food production. One reason for the collapse of the Sri Lankan government was its decision to force farmers to switch from chemical fertilizers (which use natural gas as an important raw material) to organic fertilizers in April 2021, a mandate that predictably and dramatically reduced yields. When the Sri Lankan government realized the catastrophe it had created and tried to turn the tide in November 2021, it was too late.
The Dutch government, whose 90.7 ESG ranking ranks it in the lower third of European nations, showed a similar preference for ESG over food production last month when it announced plans for dramatic cuts in nitrogen and ammonia emissions that could force close many farms. operations. The resulting protests have been huge, reminiscent of truck drivers’ protests that took place earlier this year in Canada. They have received massive attention on social and traditional media platforms globally.
“Frustration, Anger, Even Despair”
The Dutch agricultural and horticultural organization’s Wytse Sonnema told Sky News Australia that the proposals have caused a widespread sense of “frustration, anger, even despair” among the country’s farmers. “And imagine if you’re a fifth generation farmer living on your land, earning a living, being part of a community, and you see a map that says there’s basically no future. See the article : Choice of food and home offers Run Derby X. No future for agriculture, but nor any future for the economic, social, cultural fabric of the countryside. “
What it all means is that governments in all parts of the world make choices designed to help meet their often arbitrary climate and ESG goals at the expense of feeding the population and enabling citizens to keep their homes warm in the winter. Oddly enough, many of these political leaders seem genuinely surprised when such decisions and the damage they cause cause social unrest that often results in them being thrown out of office and even, as in Sri Lanka, run out of the country.
If this current dynamic continues, you can expect to soon see government officials interested in remaining in office to begin dropping the maintenance of their national ESG rankings down the list of urgent priorities.
