Like Prohibition is to Moonshine, Green divestment activists are a boon for coal investors
When wowsers banned alcohol in the US, the price of beer rose sevenfold. Nick Cater points at rising coal share prices and ponders that the Green divestment plan to reduce coal use works just as well as prohibition did. Divestment shrinks capital inflow to coal mines, so there are fewer new mines, and less coal available. But people still want just as much coal as they ever did, so the price of coal goes up instead of down. Good news for coal investors. Too bad about those on the poverty line. Put some more dung in the barbie….. .The Financial Times. (paywalled) Once again Green economics amounts to Wish Fairy Declarations. The first Law of Free Markets is Supply and Demand. The Greens might have changed the “supply” slightly (temporarily, and only in some countries) but demand hasn’t changed, so supply will rebound. To help the poor afford coal the only ethical thing to do is invest in coal mining: Nick Cater, The Australian History is unlikely to be kind to them. Coercive attempts to stop the use of fossil fuels are delivering the same perverse economic consequences as the attempts to close down American […]Rating: 10.0/10 (3 votes cast)
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