Tag: harvard

Fossil Fuel Martyr: Mrs Tom Steyer Resigns from Harvard (One Day Before Her Six-Year Tenure Ends)

Business advice for the mission-driven entrepreneur. SVN member Kat Taylor, CEO & Co-Founder of One PacificCoast Bank, says "culture matters the most" when starting up a business.
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Kat Taylor—wife of billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer—has resigned from Harvard’s Board of Overseers in protest at the university’s ongoing refusal to divest itself of its fossil fuel investment holdings.
The Daily Caller reports:

Taylor had enough of Harvard University’s fossil fuel investments. She stepped down from her position as a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers on Tuesday. In her resignation letter, Taylor decried the school’s “failure” to “adopt ethical commitments,” according to the Harvard Crimson.

“We should and would be horrified to find out that Harvard investments are actually funding some of the pernicious activities against which our standout academic leadership rails,” her letter stated. “But that is where we still sit, vulnerable to the inevitable association with our investment targets that profiting from them demands.

Harvard has a total endowment of $37.1 billion, with some investments in fossil fuels. The prestigious university has long faced pressure to divest. Over 100 Harvard faculty penned an open letter in 2014 urging University President Drew Faust to do so. In 2015, 20 students stormed a university building and demanded divestment. In March 2017, members of the activist organization Divest Harvard made similar demands while blockading University Hall.

It’s possible, however, that Harvard’s Board of Overseers won’t feel the loss of Ms Taylor too keenly. Her resignation, highly principled and selfless though it surely was, reportedly came just one day before her six-year term was due to expire.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Shock: BBC Still Pumping out Dumb Eco-Propaganda

BBC
There was an extraordinary but oh-so-BBC-ish programme on Radio 4 this morning in which a Harvard philosopher named Michael Sandel tackled one of the great issues of the moment: why still not nearly enough is being done by policymakers to address the pressing threat of the Millennium Bug.
Sometimes known as Y2K, this apparent glitch in our computer systems could cause all manner of upset in the year 2000, we learned. As well as office equipment it might affect traffic circulation systems, refrigeration controls, even vital hospital machinery. “The problem is real”, Sandel explained in a voice of robotic deliberation clearly very used to having students listening unquestioningly to what he has to say. But there are, he conceded, different schools of thought on how the problem should be addressed: one thinks that lots of taxpayers’ money should be thrown at it while the other thinks that lots of money should be thrown at it, only in a different, cleverer way…

Yes, obviously, I’m joking but only slightly.

The actual topic of Sandel’s programme was very nearly as pointless, irrelevant and out of date: climate change.

I’ve just had a glance at the BBC page promoting this programme and it feels like something some starry eyed eco-activist who’d just had a tofu burger with Al Gore dashed off about 20 years ago:

Most climate scientists think the world is getting warmer and that humans are at least in part responsible. Almost every country in the world has pledged to make efforts to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere in order to prevent dangerous “interference with the climate system”. But exactly how to do this raises interesting questions about fairness.

No it doesn’t raise interesting questions about fairness because the premise on which it is based is entirely specious. Every one of the assumptions on which Sandel’s philosophical musings rest is at best heavily contested, at worst disproven.

Stuff like this, for example:

The inhabitants of The Maldives – made up of more than 1,200 islands, most of which are no more than one metre above sea level – are already feeling the effects of climate change. They are victims. But they didn’t cause the problem. Should those countries with historical responsibility for emissions be obliged to compensate The Maldives?

No one who has done even the merest scintilla of a modicum of homework on this subject is remotely worried about the effects of climate change on the Maldives because the Maldives are doing just fine.

Yet rather than row back from its relentless climate change propaganda in the light of evidence, the BBC continues to pretend that it’s a major problem – not just in obvious places like the regular eco-scare newsbulletins of its house green activist Roger Harrabin but even on programmes where it really ought to have no relevance like this episode in its Global Philosopher series.

Sometimes people tell me that for all its faults the BBC is a marvellous institution which we’d miss fearfully if it were ever to leave us.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Exposed: The Green Activists Who Cooked up the RICO Conspiracy against Big Oil

Reuters/Jason Reed
Big Oil is the new Big Tobacco and must be destroyed in the courts on RICO charges. This is the latest big idea in environmental circles – and it didn’t come from nowhere. It was in fact the invention of a tiny group of innocuous-looking green activists at a workshop three years ago in California.

Before I reveal their identities, let me give you some examples of just how successful they have been.

Hillary Clinton has called for an investigation into what Exxon really knew about climate change. (By weird coincidence, this came just after Exxon stopped funding an organization called the Clinton Foundation).

Sheldon Whitehouse and three other Democrat senators have written to Exxon accusing it of supporting “climate denial” and “anti-climate policy advocacy.”

A bunch of climate alarmist scientists have written to President Obama urging him to use RICO legislation against corporations which may “knowingly have deceived the American people about the risks of climate change.” (Though they’ve been a bit less vocal since one of their number got himself embroiled in the “largest science scandal in US history”)

Two separate journalistic investigations have claimed that Exxon’s scientists “knew” about the threat of global warming as early as the late 70s and that the company is guilty of some kind of cover up. Now Scientific American has jumped on the bandwagon too.

It’s all mendacious nonsense, as I explain here. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that unscrupulous lawyers, shyster politicians and green NGOs won’t go ahead and seize this flimsy excuse to intensify their war on capitalism in the guise of concern about the environment. Exxon, for example, may have no case to answer. But that won’t stop its operations, its reputation and its share value being seriously disrupted by a potential lawsuit, however ill-founded and vexatious.

Read the rest at Breitbart.