Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen participates in global infrastructure and investment forum in New York, Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023. Seth Wenig/AP

Biden teams with corporate Left to raise your energy costs

Washington Examiner September 24, 09:10 AM September 24, 09:11 AM Video Embed

Congress has not voted to force the financial sector to adopt net-zero emissions investing regulations, but thanks to the magic of modern corporatism, that’s what the Treasury Department did this week.

Timed to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly on climate change, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen insisted that the nine “Principles for Net-Zero Financing & Investment” were voluntary.

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“Following the principles is, of course, voluntary, but many of those in this room are taking or have already taken actions consistent with some of the best practices they highlight,” Yellen said. “And for those that haven’t, we think they can be useful in clarifying what to consider.”

Those in the room were all well-heeled members of the global elite, who, after many failures at the ballot box, have turned to corporate power to force their impoverishing net-zero policies on the less wealthy and unenlightened.

Here is how it works. First, compliant management committed to installing net-zero policies worldwide at the largest investment firms: BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. Millions of people trust these institutions to manage their investments.

As part of that trust, corporations are allowed to use voting rights attached to their investors’ investments as they see fit. These firms then use that power to install corporate officers with the same ideological commitment to net zero that they have, and they use that voting power to pass shareholder resolutions, binding corporations to certain policies.

In this case, Yellen knows that many U.S. corporations have been manipulated by investment firms to adopt net-zero emissions policies. Now all the Treasury has to do is release “voluntary” guidelines on how corporations should implement their policies, and voila: by colluding together, the Treasury Department and the corporate elite have created carbon regulations enforceable through shareholder lawsuits that they never could pass through Congress.

The Treasury Department’s “voluntary” net-zero guidelines call on financial institutions to “consider transition finance, managed phaseout, and climate solutions practices when deciding how to realize their” net-zero commitments. What that sentence means is that the Treasury Department wants banks to defund fossil fuel production and invest in politically correct energy sources like wind and solar power instead.

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The amount of fossil fuel energy that “clean” energy would need to replace to get to net zero is more than enough to boggle the mind. The U.S. builds about 3,000 wind turbines a year. To reach net zero by 2050, we’d have to install that number every two days, or a nuclear power plant every day. But there is no mention of nuclear power in the Treasury Department’s net-zero principles. Nuclear power is not global elite-approved.

The only silver lining here is that since these Treasury principles are nominally voluntary, and they didn’t go through the normal regulatory approval process, they will be easy for the next administration to change, assuming that the next administration isn’t also controlled by President Joe Biden.

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