Why bankers close their ears to the ‘climate nut jobs’ talking about the end of the world
If the future remembers any corporate villain from 2022, it will be Stuart Kirk. The satirically titled head of “responsible investment” at HSBC looks the part: shaven headed, tightly trimmed beard, hard, sharp eyes. Like all the best villains, the banker’s arguments are insidiously appealing. He says out loud what his audience thinks, cutting through polite society’s pious crap to reveal its selfish desires.
“There’s always some nut job telling me about the end of the world,” he told the Financial Times’s Moral Money conference – and I haven’t made that title up either. “Who cares if Miami is six metres underwater in 100 years? Amsterdam has been six metres underwater for ages and that’s a really nice place.”
Notice the neat two-step he performs. On the one hand, only “nut jobs” talk of a catastrophe, even if the ranks of the nutty include the UN and every serious climate scientist. But when the nut jobs turn out to be anything but nuts, Kirk shifts his position and assures you that we will enjoy climate change, as Amsterdammers enjoy their canalside cafes. And if we can’t? We’ll all be dead in a 100 years anyway so who the hell cares.
I welcome Kirk’s rant as he was articulating what most governments must subconsciously think. Not one country has honoured the promises made at last year’s Cop26 summit in Glasgow. Alok Sharma, a cabinet office minister and Cop26 president, tried his best to stir them the other day by talking of “a monstrous act of self-harm” and “chronic danger”. To no avail. Like Covid lockdowns and 2021’s fashions, climate change is yesterday’s news.
Last week, the government launched a quarter-baked housing initiative, which almost certainly won’t happen, and will only force up the exorbitant price of
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