“Even if the world moved straight to net zero over 30 years, only 0.2 C° warming would be prevented by 2050. UK net zero on its own would prevent just 1/500th of a degree, at a cost of £3tn for the energy sector alone. Each £1bn spent on net zero would prevent well below a millionth of a degree. Net zero is as unattainable as it is unaffordable.”
- Letter to The Financial Times from Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, 10th February 2023.
Historians continue to argue about the reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire – a debate that attains added piquancy today given that western civilisation and culture appears to be following Rome over the cliff’s edge. Of the factors often cited for the fall of Rome, some seem to have uncanny echoes here in 2024, including:
- The loss of traditional values and a widespread moral malaise;
- Unchecked invasions by foreign peoples (this time facilitated, rather than resisted, by politicians);
- Widespread corruption and political in-fighting;
- Unsustainable foreign expansion and military over-reach;
- Economic weakness, vast indebtedness and uncontrolled currency inflation.
As professional investors we might be expected to have a particular wariness for these last end-of-cycle characteristics. What would be wholly unique to our modern experience of crisis would be that it was deliberately triggered by the delusional beliefs of a warped doomsday cult – one that believed in anthropogenic climate change, the pursuit of ‘Net Zero’, and an unchallenged commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the expense of any adherence to simple meritocracy.
Get your Free
financial review
Perhaps the defining characteristic of our current crisis is the raft of problems triggered by distant, unaccountable elitism. Catherine Liu (‘The Virtue Hoarders’):
“For as long as most of us can remember, the professional managerial class (PMC) has been fighting a class war, not against capitalists or capitalism, but against the working classes. Members of the PMC have memories of a time when they were more progressive—during the Progressive Era, specifically. They once supported working-class militancy in its epic struggles against robber barons and capitalists like Mrs. Leland Stanford Jr., Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Mellon, but today, they go to Stanford and view private foundations bearing those same names as models of philanthropy and sources of critical funding and recognition.
“They still believe themselves to be the heroes of history, fighting to defend innocent victims against their evil victimizers, but the working class is not a group they find worth saving, because by PMC standards, they do not behave properly: they are either disengaged politically or too angry to be civil. Liberal members of the credentialed classes love to use the word empower when they talk about “people,” but the use of that verb objectifies the recipients of their help while implying that the people have no access to power without them.
“The PMC as a proxy for today’s ruling class is shameless about hoarding all forms of secularized virtue: whenever it addresses a political and economic crisis produced by capitalism itself, the PMC reworks political struggles for policy change and redistribution into individual passion plays, focusing its efforts on individual acts of “giving back” or reified forms of self-transformation. It finds in its particular tastes and cultural proclivities the justification for its unshakable sense of superiority to ordinary working-class people.
“If its politics amount to little more than virtue signaling, it loves nothing more than moral panics to incite its members to ever more pointless forms of pseudo-politics and hypervigilance. The much-maligned Hillary Clinton was honest in her contempt for ordinary people when, in 2016, she dismissed Trump supporters as “deplorables.” Their 2016 defiance of PMC and liberal nostra has only hardened into reactionary antiauthoritarianism, which another reactionary demagogue will seek to exploit.
“PMC virtue hoarding is the insult added to injury when white-collar managers, having downsized their blue-collar workforce, then disparage them for their bad taste in literature, bad diets, unstable families, and deplorable child-rearing habits. When the PMC sympathized with the plight of masses of working people, it also pioneered professional standards of research grounded in professional organizations like the American Medical Association, the Association of University Professors, and all the professional organizations that currently dominate academic life. In organizing professional life, the PMC tried to protect the integrity of specialists and experts against the power of capitalists and the markets…..Those heady days of PMC heroism are long gone. The PMC, with its professional discipline and aura of disinterestedness, did very well for itself during the Depression, during World War II, and in the postwar period with the expansion of universities and the growing complexity of the American and social economic order.
“When the tide turned against American workers, the PMC preferred to fight culture wars against the classes below while currying the favor of capitalists it once despised….The post-1968 PMC elite has become ideologically convinced of its own unassailable position as comprising the most advanced people the earth has ever seen. They have, in fact, made a virtue of their vanguardism. Drawing on the legacy of the counterculture and its commitment to technological and spiritual innovations, PMC elites try to tell the rest of us how to live, and in large part, they have succeeded in destroying and building in its own image the physical and now cybernetic infrastructure of our everyday lives.
“As the fortunes of the PMC elites rose, the class insisted on its ability to do ordinary things in extraordinary, fundamentally superior and more virtuous ways: as a class, it was reading books, raising children, eating food, staying healthy, and having sex as the most culturally and affectively advanced people in human history….
“Although the PMC is profoundly secular in nature, its rhetorical tone is pseudo-religious. While the PMC infuriates conservative Christians with its media monopoly on liberal righteousness, it finds salvation, like most Protestant sects, in material and earthly success. In liberal circles, talking about class or class consciousness before other forms of difference is not just controversial; it is heretical. They call you a “class reductionist” if you argue that race, gender, and class are not interchangeable categories. They pile on with the legalistic and deadly term intersectional to accommodate the materialist critique of their politics.
“The PMC simply does not want its class identity or interests unmasked. Young people wanting to enter what the Ehrenreichs called the “liberal professions” and gain positions in academia and the culture and media industries have had to adapt themselves to the Procrustean bed of PMC-dominated networks of influence.….
“It wants to play the virtuous social hero, but as a class, it is hopelessly reactionary. The interests of the PMC are now tied more than ever to its corporate overlords than to the struggles of the majority of Americans whose suffering is merely background décor for the PMC’s elite volunteerism. Members of the PMC soften the sharpness of their guilt about collective suffering by stroking their credentials and telling themselves that they are better and more qualified to lead and guide than other people. PMC centrism is a powerful ideology. Its priorities in research and innovation have been shaped more and more by corporate interests and the profit motive, while in the humanities and social sciences, scholars are rewarded by private foundations for their general disregard for historical knowledge, not to mention historical materialism.
“The rewards for following ruling-class directives are just too great, but the intellectual and psychic price that has to be paid for compliance should be too high for any member of society. In academia, the American PMC has achieved a great deal in establishing the rigors of peer review consensus and research autonomy, but we can no longer afford to defend its cherished principle of epistemological neutrality as a secret weapon against “extremism.” We live in a political, environmental, and social emergency: class war over distribution of resources is the critical battle of our times.”
Academia has undoubtedly been problematic, but the last four years point an even more damning finger against science and scientism (“an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation”). As the author Ian Hall points out in his jeremiad against climate-change advocates, Unsettled Science, the scientific lobby was largely enabled by President Truman after America’s victory in the Second World War; the winding down of the Manhattan Project that helped develop the atom bomb led to 130,000 scientists being put out of work. And so began the era of government research contracts. This is not to say that all climate scientists are hopelessly conflicted by dint of their addiction to money from the ‘Big State’, only to suggest that, as Ian Hall advises, a philosophy of ‘follow the money’ may well explain some of the professional behaviours and strong feelings linked to the topic of climate change. When you’re paid to follow the party line, you follow the party line. Hall cites President Eisenhower in his parting address of 1961 (the emphasis is ours):
“Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
The danger in hewing to an academic consensus with a strong political agenda can also be seen, for example, in a) how academia almost universally came out in favour of ‘Remain’; and b) how most economists, being in the pay of either investment banks or lobby groups with financial connections to the Big State, remain unreconstructed neo-Keynesians (i.e. they believe in tax-and-spend policies and aggressive money printing). At a MoneyWeek annual investor conference several years ago, for example, we were struck by the consensus among the associated panellists that modern monetary theory (MMT) – essentially, endless money printing and inflation be damned – was alive and well and heading to a central bank near you. There was a helpful letter to the Financial Times from a Mr. George Hatjoullis back in November 2014 that explains some of the dangers of MMT:
“Sir, Adair Turner suggests some version of monetary financing is the only way to break Japan’s deflation and deal with the debt overhang (‘Print money to fund the deficit – that is the fastest way to raise rates’, Comment, November 11). This was precisely how Korekiyo Takahashi, Japanese finance minister from 1931 to 1936, broke the deflation of the 1930s. The policy was discredited because of the hyperinflation that followed.” [Emphasis, again, ours.]
Don’t get us wrong. We are not stating that climate change is not real. We are merely confessing that we don’t know enough about the science to make an informed judgment. But to have a properly informed opinion on climate change requires us all to be experts in astrophysics, astronomy, geology, meteorology, physics, chemistry, ecology, zoology and economics..
We do, however, admit to being climate sceptics. Is our climate changing? Perhaps. Is human activity responsible for that change? We don’t know. If human activity is to blame for climate change, can we reverse that change? We don’t know. What we do know is that the most powerful energy source in our solar system, by some margin, is the sun. Anthropogenic climate change may well be real for all we know, but we are more interested in the effect of cycles in solar activity since – directly or indirectly – that’s where most of the world’s heat, light and energy actually comes from. And trying to prevent the developing world from materially advancing – in part through the use of polluting fossil fuels – seems a particularly imperious way of hoisting the ladder of progress up behind you, once your own country has already attained meaningful commercial wealth.
In the context of the green energy debate, Doomberg has been a consistent voice of sanity. From a recent essay, ‘Mission Impossible’:
“Germany’s swan dive off the energy cliff is a striking example of Mass Dissonance™, a phenomenon under which entire societies believe things provably at odds with physics, truth tellers are ostracized as heretics, and real-world nullification of tightly held dogmas are twisted into proof of the need to double down on the absurdity. It was always impossible for Germany to execute Energiewende without collapsing the standard of living of its citizens, and the moment the latter could no longer be protected from the former, Germany retreated to the coal mines with a swiftness and efficiency on par with the British evacuation from Dunkirk.
“Imagine if Germany had not scrambled to bring their coal plants back online as quickly as they did. Imagine if Thunberg had gotten her way. As we type this piece, more than 40% of Germany’s electricity is being produced by coal. Unplug those coal-fired power plants tomorrow and chaos of historic proportions would quickly follow..
“We surely won’t be alone in noting that Mass Dissonance™ on energy fundamentals is the ultimate expression of affluence and excess. To the vast swathes of humanity struggling at the base of Maslow’s pyramid of needs, the West’s obsession with pretending that impossible goals are achievable while wasting enormous resources in their fruitless pursuit must seem utterly incomprehensible.
“We simply cannot electrify our transportation sector and back up our electricity grid to any meaningful extent using batteries, and therefore we won’t.”
Climate-change advocates seem to us disturbingly millenarian (i.e. they believe in a forthcoming transformation of society). A good example of a similar ‘doomsday cult’ is the Millerites, who followed the teachings of William Miller. We have written of the Millerites before, and doubtless will again, until the threat of similar cultists has abated.
Born in Massachusetts in 1782, William Miller predicted that the world would end in April 1843. Miller had served in the War of 1812 against the British and ultimately became a Baptist preacher. No doubt influenced by his war-time experiences, he became obsessed with death and the afterlife. After the war he devoted 15 years of his life to study of the Bible. During this period, a number of movements sprang up – influenced perhaps by economic crises (such as the recession that followed the Panic of 1837) or the growing social tensions that would in time erupt in the Civil War.
Miller based his analysis on Daniel 8:14, which states that: “Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.”
He then used a contentious “day-year principle,” by which a day in Biblical prophecy became reinterpreted as a calendar year. By this reckoning, and using the starting point as the decree to rebuild Jerusalem by Artaxerxes I of Persia in 457 BC, Miller concluded that the second coming would occur on or around 1843. In a letter to his brother, Miller predicted that Christ would come:
“…in the glory of God, in the clouds of Heaven, with all the saints and angels, change the bodies of all that are alive on Earth that are his, and both the living and the raised saints will be caught up to meet the Lord in the air.”
As for those left behind, the outlook was not quite so benign. Miller forecast that the Earth would be
“…cleansed by fire, the elements will melt with fervent heat, the works of men will be destroyed, the bodies of the wicked will be burned to ashes.”
The wicked – those who rejected the Gospel – would not only die, but their spirits would be banished from the Earth, “shut up in the pit”, and not allowed to return to Earth for a thousand years.
The arrival of an extremely bright comet in 1843 bolstered fears of an impending apocalypse. Although reluctant to identify a specific date for the Day of Judgment, Miller finally settled on April 23, 1843.
April 23, of course, came and went without incident.
Miller concluded that he had erred in using solar years instead of lunar years, and came up with a replacement date for the end of days, namely March 21, 1844. The Millerites, as they were now known, purchased an enormous tent capable of accommodating more than 2,000 people, and were said to have bought “ascension robes” in preparation for their heavenly journey.
When March 21 came and went without incident, the Millerites plumped for October 22, on the basis that it was also the date of Yom Kippur.
When October 22 came and went without incident, Miller and his associate Joshua Himes embraced a new cause, namely to raise money for Millerites who had given up everything including their jobs and possessions to prepare for the end. Thus began a period known as “the Great Disappointment”. A more expansive list of delusional ‘end of days’ predictions is available here.
The British philosopher John Gray a few years ago recorded an audio essay for BBC Radio 4 in which he suggested that “…the belief that an end to history is imminent never really goes away.” Gray compared the antics of the likes of climate-change pressure group Extinction Rebellion to those of previous Armageddonists such as the Millerites. And then, of course, there is the cult of Greta…
We have no problem with healthy debate. We have a big problem, however, with being compelled to act (and invest) in a certain way simply because the chattering classes deem it socially and culturally obligatory to do so. Can paying more tax to politicians really change the weather ? Fund managers are already being urged to draft statements of their ESG (environmental, social and governance) policy commitments. This seems dangerously faddish and subjective to us, perhaps because we are old enough to remember the 1970s, when we were all being warned of an impending new Ice Age.
For as long as it remains legal to do so, we fully intend to take advantage of attractive valuations in the commodity and energy-extraction space – particularly since the activities of people like Greta Thunberg and her related moral panickers have driven the share prices of companies in these sectors, in many cases, to extremely desirable levels. Gold, for example, makes eminent sense as a store of value in economically turbulent and inflationary times. But if we’ve done our homework correctly, sensibly priced precious metals and commodities miners may yet be on the cusp of some truly historic bull trends – which we have every intention of exploiting. Adversity and decline may still yield opportunity.
………….
As you may know, we also manage bespoke investment portfolios for private clients internationally. We would be delighted to help you too. Because of the current heightened market volatility we are offering a completely free financial review, with no strings attached, to see if our value-oriented approach might benefit your portfolio – with no obligation at all:
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Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and author of ‘Investing through the Looking Glass: a rational guide to irrational financial markets’. You can access a full archive of these weekly investment commentaries here. You can listen to our regular ‘State of the Markets’ podcasts, with Paul Rodriguez of ThinkTrading.com, here. Email us: info@pricevaluepartners.com.
Price Value Partners manage investment portfolios for private clients. We also manage the VT Price Value Portfolio, an unconstrained global fund investing in Benjamin Graham-style value stocks.
“Even if the world moved straight to net zero over 30 years, only 0.2 C° warming would be prevented by 2050. UK net zero on its own would prevent just 1/500th of a degree, at a cost of £3tn for the energy sector alone. Each £1bn spent on net zero would prevent well below a millionth of a degree. Net zero is as unattainable as it is unaffordable.”
Historians continue to argue about the reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire – a debate that attains added piquancy today given that western civilisation and culture appears to be following Rome over the cliff’s edge. Of the factors often cited for the fall of Rome, some seem to have uncanny echoes here in 2024, including:
As professional investors we might be expected to have a particular wariness for these last end-of-cycle characteristics. What would be wholly unique to our modern experience of crisis would be that it was deliberately triggered by the delusional beliefs of a warped doomsday cult – one that believed in anthropogenic climate change, the pursuit of ‘Net Zero’, and an unchallenged commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the expense of any adherence to simple meritocracy.
Get your Free
financial review
Perhaps the defining characteristic of our current crisis is the raft of problems triggered by distant, unaccountable elitism. Catherine Liu (‘The Virtue Hoarders’):
“For as long as most of us can remember, the professional managerial class (PMC) has been fighting a class war, not against capitalists or capitalism, but against the working classes. Members of the PMC have memories of a time when they were more progressive—during the Progressive Era, specifically. They once supported working-class militancy in its epic struggles against robber barons and capitalists like Mrs. Leland Stanford Jr., Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Mellon, but today, they go to Stanford and view private foundations bearing those same names as models of philanthropy and sources of critical funding and recognition.
“They still believe themselves to be the heroes of history, fighting to defend innocent victims against their evil victimizers, but the working class is not a group they find worth saving, because by PMC standards, they do not behave properly: they are either disengaged politically or too angry to be civil. Liberal members of the credentialed classes love to use the word empower when they talk about “people,” but the use of that verb objectifies the recipients of their help while implying that the people have no access to power without them.
“The PMC as a proxy for today’s ruling class is shameless about hoarding all forms of secularized virtue: whenever it addresses a political and economic crisis produced by capitalism itself, the PMC reworks political struggles for policy change and redistribution into individual passion plays, focusing its efforts on individual acts of “giving back” or reified forms of self-transformation. It finds in its particular tastes and cultural proclivities the justification for its unshakable sense of superiority to ordinary working-class people.
“If its politics amount to little more than virtue signaling, it loves nothing more than moral panics to incite its members to ever more pointless forms of pseudo-politics and hypervigilance. The much-maligned Hillary Clinton was honest in her contempt for ordinary people when, in 2016, she dismissed Trump supporters as “deplorables.” Their 2016 defiance of PMC and liberal nostra has only hardened into reactionary antiauthoritarianism, which another reactionary demagogue will seek to exploit.
“PMC virtue hoarding is the insult added to injury when white-collar managers, having downsized their blue-collar workforce, then disparage them for their bad taste in literature, bad diets, unstable families, and deplorable child-rearing habits. When the PMC sympathized with the plight of masses of working people, it also pioneered professional standards of research grounded in professional organizations like the American Medical Association, the Association of University Professors, and all the professional organizations that currently dominate academic life. In organizing professional life, the PMC tried to protect the integrity of specialists and experts against the power of capitalists and the markets…..Those heady days of PMC heroism are long gone. The PMC, with its professional discipline and aura of disinterestedness, did very well for itself during the Depression, during World War II, and in the postwar period with the expansion of universities and the growing complexity of the American and social economic order.
“When the tide turned against American workers, the PMC preferred to fight culture wars against the classes below while currying the favor of capitalists it once despised….The post-1968 PMC elite has become ideologically convinced of its own unassailable position as comprising the most advanced people the earth has ever seen. They have, in fact, made a virtue of their vanguardism. Drawing on the legacy of the counterculture and its commitment to technological and spiritual innovations, PMC elites try to tell the rest of us how to live, and in large part, they have succeeded in destroying and building in its own image the physical and now cybernetic infrastructure of our everyday lives.
“As the fortunes of the PMC elites rose, the class insisted on its ability to do ordinary things in extraordinary, fundamentally superior and more virtuous ways: as a class, it was reading books, raising children, eating food, staying healthy, and having sex as the most culturally and affectively advanced people in human history….
“Although the PMC is profoundly secular in nature, its rhetorical tone is pseudo-religious. While the PMC infuriates conservative Christians with its media monopoly on liberal righteousness, it finds salvation, like most Protestant sects, in material and earthly success. In liberal circles, talking about class or class consciousness before other forms of difference is not just controversial; it is heretical. They call you a “class reductionist” if you argue that race, gender, and class are not interchangeable categories. They pile on with the legalistic and deadly term intersectional to accommodate the materialist critique of their politics.
“The PMC simply does not want its class identity or interests unmasked. Young people wanting to enter what the Ehrenreichs called the “liberal professions” and gain positions in academia and the culture and media industries have had to adapt themselves to the Procrustean bed of PMC-dominated networks of influence.….
“It wants to play the virtuous social hero, but as a class, it is hopelessly reactionary. The interests of the PMC are now tied more than ever to its corporate overlords than to the struggles of the majority of Americans whose suffering is merely background décor for the PMC’s elite volunteerism. Members of the PMC soften the sharpness of their guilt about collective suffering by stroking their credentials and telling themselves that they are better and more qualified to lead and guide than other people. PMC centrism is a powerful ideology. Its priorities in research and innovation have been shaped more and more by corporate interests and the profit motive, while in the humanities and social sciences, scholars are rewarded by private foundations for their general disregard for historical knowledge, not to mention historical materialism.
“The rewards for following ruling-class directives are just too great, but the intellectual and psychic price that has to be paid for compliance should be too high for any member of society. In academia, the American PMC has achieved a great deal in establishing the rigors of peer review consensus and research autonomy, but we can no longer afford to defend its cherished principle of epistemological neutrality as a secret weapon against “extremism.” We live in a political, environmental, and social emergency: class war over distribution of resources is the critical battle of our times.”
Academia has undoubtedly been problematic, but the last four years point an even more damning finger against science and scientism (“an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation”). As the author Ian Hall points out in his jeremiad against climate-change advocates, Unsettled Science, the scientific lobby was largely enabled by President Truman after America’s victory in the Second World War; the winding down of the Manhattan Project that helped develop the atom bomb led to 130,000 scientists being put out of work. And so began the era of government research contracts. This is not to say that all climate scientists are hopelessly conflicted by dint of their addiction to money from the ‘Big State’, only to suggest that, as Ian Hall advises, a philosophy of ‘follow the money’ may well explain some of the professional behaviours and strong feelings linked to the topic of climate change. When you’re paid to follow the party line, you follow the party line. Hall cites President Eisenhower in his parting address of 1961 (the emphasis is ours):
“Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
The danger in hewing to an academic consensus with a strong political agenda can also be seen, for example, in a) how academia almost universally came out in favour of ‘Remain’; and b) how most economists, being in the pay of either investment banks or lobby groups with financial connections to the Big State, remain unreconstructed neo-Keynesians (i.e. they believe in tax-and-spend policies and aggressive money printing). At a MoneyWeek annual investor conference several years ago, for example, we were struck by the consensus among the associated panellists that modern monetary theory (MMT) – essentially, endless money printing and inflation be damned – was alive and well and heading to a central bank near you. There was a helpful letter to the Financial Times from a Mr. George Hatjoullis back in November 2014 that explains some of the dangers of MMT:
“Sir, Adair Turner suggests some version of monetary financing is the only way to break Japan’s deflation and deal with the debt overhang (‘Print money to fund the deficit – that is the fastest way to raise rates’, Comment, November 11). This was precisely how Korekiyo Takahashi, Japanese finance minister from 1931 to 1936, broke the deflation of the 1930s. The policy was discredited because of the hyperinflation that followed.” [Emphasis, again, ours.]
Don’t get us wrong. We are not stating that climate change is not real. We are merely confessing that we don’t know enough about the science to make an informed judgment. But to have a properly informed opinion on climate change requires us all to be experts in astrophysics, astronomy, geology, meteorology, physics, chemistry, ecology, zoology and economics..
We do, however, admit to being climate sceptics. Is our climate changing? Perhaps. Is human activity responsible for that change? We don’t know. If human activity is to blame for climate change, can we reverse that change? We don’t know. What we do know is that the most powerful energy source in our solar system, by some margin, is the sun. Anthropogenic climate change may well be real for all we know, but we are more interested in the effect of cycles in solar activity since – directly or indirectly – that’s where most of the world’s heat, light and energy actually comes from. And trying to prevent the developing world from materially advancing – in part through the use of polluting fossil fuels – seems a particularly imperious way of hoisting the ladder of progress up behind you, once your own country has already attained meaningful commercial wealth.
In the context of the green energy debate, Doomberg has been a consistent voice of sanity. From a recent essay, ‘Mission Impossible’:
“Germany’s swan dive off the energy cliff is a striking example of Mass Dissonance™, a phenomenon under which entire societies believe things provably at odds with physics, truth tellers are ostracized as heretics, and real-world nullification of tightly held dogmas are twisted into proof of the need to double down on the absurdity. It was always impossible for Germany to execute Energiewende without collapsing the standard of living of its citizens, and the moment the latter could no longer be protected from the former, Germany retreated to the coal mines with a swiftness and efficiency on par with the British evacuation from Dunkirk.
“Imagine if Germany had not scrambled to bring their coal plants back online as quickly as they did. Imagine if Thunberg had gotten her way. As we type this piece, more than 40% of Germany’s electricity is being produced by coal. Unplug those coal-fired power plants tomorrow and chaos of historic proportions would quickly follow..
“We surely won’t be alone in noting that Mass Dissonance™ on energy fundamentals is the ultimate expression of affluence and excess. To the vast swathes of humanity struggling at the base of Maslow’s pyramid of needs, the West’s obsession with pretending that impossible goals are achievable while wasting enormous resources in their fruitless pursuit must seem utterly incomprehensible.
“We simply cannot electrify our transportation sector and back up our electricity grid to any meaningful extent using batteries, and therefore we won’t.”
Climate-change advocates seem to us disturbingly millenarian (i.e. they believe in a forthcoming transformation of society). A good example of a similar ‘doomsday cult’ is the Millerites, who followed the teachings of William Miller. We have written of the Millerites before, and doubtless will again, until the threat of similar cultists has abated.
Born in Massachusetts in 1782, William Miller predicted that the world would end in April 1843. Miller had served in the War of 1812 against the British and ultimately became a Baptist preacher. No doubt influenced by his war-time experiences, he became obsessed with death and the afterlife. After the war he devoted 15 years of his life to study of the Bible. During this period, a number of movements sprang up – influenced perhaps by economic crises (such as the recession that followed the Panic of 1837) or the growing social tensions that would in time erupt in the Civil War.
Miller based his analysis on Daniel 8:14, which states that: “Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.”
He then used a contentious “day-year principle,” by which a day in Biblical prophecy became reinterpreted as a calendar year. By this reckoning, and using the starting point as the decree to rebuild Jerusalem by Artaxerxes I of Persia in 457 BC, Miller concluded that the second coming would occur on or around 1843. In a letter to his brother, Miller predicted that Christ would come:
“…in the glory of God, in the clouds of Heaven, with all the saints and angels, change the bodies of all that are alive on Earth that are his, and both the living and the raised saints will be caught up to meet the Lord in the air.”
As for those left behind, the outlook was not quite so benign. Miller forecast that the Earth would be
“…cleansed by fire, the elements will melt with fervent heat, the works of men will be destroyed, the bodies of the wicked will be burned to ashes.”
The wicked – those who rejected the Gospel – would not only die, but their spirits would be banished from the Earth, “shut up in the pit”, and not allowed to return to Earth for a thousand years.
The arrival of an extremely bright comet in 1843 bolstered fears of an impending apocalypse. Although reluctant to identify a specific date for the Day of Judgment, Miller finally settled on April 23, 1843.
April 23, of course, came and went without incident.
Miller concluded that he had erred in using solar years instead of lunar years, and came up with a replacement date for the end of days, namely March 21, 1844. The Millerites, as they were now known, purchased an enormous tent capable of accommodating more than 2,000 people, and were said to have bought “ascension robes” in preparation for their heavenly journey.
When March 21 came and went without incident, the Millerites plumped for October 22, on the basis that it was also the date of Yom Kippur.
When October 22 came and went without incident, Miller and his associate Joshua Himes embraced a new cause, namely to raise money for Millerites who had given up everything including their jobs and possessions to prepare for the end. Thus began a period known as “the Great Disappointment”. A more expansive list of delusional ‘end of days’ predictions is available here.
The British philosopher John Gray a few years ago recorded an audio essay for BBC Radio 4 in which he suggested that “…the belief that an end to history is imminent never really goes away.” Gray compared the antics of the likes of climate-change pressure group Extinction Rebellion to those of previous Armageddonists such as the Millerites. And then, of course, there is the cult of Greta…
We have no problem with healthy debate. We have a big problem, however, with being compelled to act (and invest) in a certain way simply because the chattering classes deem it socially and culturally obligatory to do so. Can paying more tax to politicians really change the weather ? Fund managers are already being urged to draft statements of their ESG (environmental, social and governance) policy commitments. This seems dangerously faddish and subjective to us, perhaps because we are old enough to remember the 1970s, when we were all being warned of an impending new Ice Age.
For as long as it remains legal to do so, we fully intend to take advantage of attractive valuations in the commodity and energy-extraction space – particularly since the activities of people like Greta Thunberg and her related moral panickers have driven the share prices of companies in these sectors, in many cases, to extremely desirable levels. Gold, for example, makes eminent sense as a store of value in economically turbulent and inflationary times. But if we’ve done our homework correctly, sensibly priced precious metals and commodities miners may yet be on the cusp of some truly historic bull trends – which we have every intention of exploiting. Adversity and decline may still yield opportunity.
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As you may know, we also manage bespoke investment portfolios for private clients internationally. We would be delighted to help you too. Because of the current heightened market volatility we are offering a completely free financial review, with no strings attached, to see if our value-oriented approach might benefit your portfolio – with no obligation at all:
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Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and author of ‘Investing through the Looking Glass: a rational guide to irrational financial markets’. You can access a full archive of these weekly investment commentaries here. You can listen to our regular ‘State of the Markets’ podcasts, with Paul Rodriguez of ThinkTrading.com, here. Email us: info@pricevaluepartners.com.
Price Value Partners manage investment portfolios for private clients. We also manage the VT Price Value Portfolio, an unconstrained global fund investing in Benjamin Graham-style value stocks.
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