Oxford University launches programme to scare investors away from major energy companies

Former tory Secretary of State for the Environment John Gummer, now Baron Deben, who is the chairman of the UK Committee on Climate Change, yesterday celebrated a new low for the country's perhaps most famous academic institution, the Oxford University. 

The occasion was the launch of "a new research programme aiming to help investors identify assets that could be left 'stranded' by climate change, declining resources and the emergence of new green technologies."

This is how the Oxford University has chosen to describe the new research programme:

Asset stranding is currently little understood, but the implications are potentially very significant for polluting investments. The programme researchers, based at Oxford's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, aim to find out which assets and sectors are most at risk and evaluate how investors, businesses and policy makers can best respond to the challenges.

To mark the launch, Rt Hon John Gummer, Lord Deben, Chairman of the Committee on Climate Change, will give a lecture at the School, highlighting the need for businesses and policy makers to adapt to the new economic landscape. He said: 'Investors continue to deploy hundreds of billions of pounds into polluting and unsustainable sectors. In many cases these investments will not be worth what investors think.

'Climate change, scarcer resources, and new disruptive technologies will reduce value and strand assets. If investors better understand the risks of investing in these assets they will be attracted to greener alternatives and see them as better business propositions and safer places for their funds. The programme is doing the further research necessary to help underpin this vital transition.' --

The programme is being supported by Aviva Investors, Bunge Ltd, Climate Change Capital Ltd and HSBC Holdings plc, with non-financial partners including the Carbon Tracker Initiative, Trucost and WWF-UK.

The warmist Guardian, of course highly supportive of the new initiative, adds this:

A report published earlier this year by HSBC found current internationally agreed carbon targets could see oil and gas majors, including BP, Shell and Statoil, lose up to 60 per cent of their market value.

Similar studies from the Carbon Tracker group have warned that fossil fuel companies will be unable to burn much of their declared reserves if governments are to meet their stated aim of limiting global average temperature increases to under two degrees Centigrade. 

In reality, the new Oxford University "research programme" is nothing but a partnership with envirofundamentalist WWF to scare investors away from the major energy companies, which produce the fossil energy needed to keep the UK - and global - industry and trade going and make it possible for the society to function. 

Shame on Oxford University for allowing itself be used as a tool for envirofundamentalist propaganda!  

Finally an EU success story: The EU-Style Shoe

The European Commission finally introduces a real success story on its webpage: 

"The EU-Style Shoe"

This is how the well funded EU Dorothy shoe project works: 

The customer, anywhere in the world, steps in a DOROTHY shop and co-designs the EU style shoe, that is manufactured in the multi-site-nation factory, designed thanks to DOROTHY tools.

European Shoe Manufacturing industry faces an intense and growing competitive pressure brought forth by developing countries, which are entering the global market offering low-cost workforce for the production of labor-intensive, low value added products. Moreover these countries are rapidly modernizing their production methods and enhancing their technological capacities (Manufuture, Strategic Research Agenda, p.8, 09/2006). DOROTHY aims at transforming the shoe industry and its related business model for strengthen Europe's ability to compete in terms of high added value for the customer (as cost-based competition is not compatible with the goal of maintaining the Community's social and sustainability standards). This transformation relies, on one hand, on the development of tools for the design of customer driven adding value shoes (service ranging from tailor made shoe to mass produced better fit shoe) and, on the other hand, on the realization of tools for the design, configuration and reconfiguration of flexible multi-site multi-nation production factories, meant to manufacture those customer driven shoes. DOROTHY mission is to "design customer driven shoes everywhere, manufacture them intelligently anywhere" as a crucial challenge for shoe industry to gain competitiveness in the global markets, also through better cooperation (and not only to compete) with low-wage countries.


I would like to by a pair of  "customer driven adding value" EU-Style Shoes - like the ones in the picture - as a Christmas present to my wife. But for some strange reason, I cannot find an EU Dorothy Shoe Shop anywhere. Maybe somebody in the Commission could help me out? 

Or has something gone wrong in the central planning process? 

The slogan of the EU-Style shoe project, "towards sustainable economic development - better cooperate and not only compete", closely builds on the Soviet shoe factory concept, but maybe the EU planners did not quite grasp the entire idea:

In the Soviet Union, however, profit was of no concern to the manager of the state-owned shoe factory. Neither did he worry about selling the shoes. His only concern was to produce what he was told to produce, and if he could do that, both he and the workers of the plant received sizable bonuses.

One explanation for the delay could of course be that Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard is still working on how to minimize the carbon footprint of the EU-Style Shoe. 

Groundbreaking global warming research by a Boston University team

Did human induced global warming slow down  Tom  Longboat,  the winner of the  1907  Boston  Marathon?
(image by wiki)

Here is a hint for the guys choosing next year's Nobel Peace Prize, or alternatively one of the science prizes. A Boston University team has just published some sensational results, based on their groundbreaking new research:

Led by BU biologist Abraham J. Miller-Rushing, the scientists analyzed weather data alongside men's winning times in the Boston Marathon from 1933 to 2004 and women's winning times from 1972 (when women first officially participated) to 2004. They found that a 1.8 degree F (1 degree C) increase in temperature slowed the winning time, on average, by 20 seconds for men and 21 seconds for women. Strong headwinds had a similar effect. But overall, the researchers found that warming trends did not seem to affect the winning times of the marathon between 1933 and 2004, likely because there is still large variation in marathon-day temperature over that period.

"The authors are not saying that a warm temperature on race day on any given year won't affect race performance," said Scott Montain, a physiologist with the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine who was not involved in the study. But the BU data suggests it will take "considerable time" before year-over-year warming will result in predictable and consistent slowing of race times, Montain explained to LiveScience in an email.

The BU researchers said if the race-day temperatures warmed by an average of 0.050 degrees F (0.028 degrees C) per year, they would expect a 64-percent chance that winning times would consistently slow by 2100. But even if Boston saw predictably rising temperatures on the third Monday of every April going forward, marathon runners will likely avoid any long-term climate-caused drag because race organizers have moved up the start time, researchers said. Through 2005, the race kicked off at noon, but since then, it has started in waves beginning at 9:00 a.m.

"By changing starting times for the race to earlier in the day when temperatures are cooler ... race organizers have effectively counteracted any effects that long-term warming would have had on winning times," the authors wrote. "If this change had not been made, we would have expected that warming would likely lead to fewer record-breaking times in the Boston Marathon."

Read the entire article here

It is of course of utmost importance that the distinguished BU research team is awarded extensive new funding for a comprehensive follow up of this exciting new research project.