Experienced wrote: Obscure1 wrote: A 16" pipeline outside of New Orleans leaked 300,000 gallons (about 7,000 barrels) on Dec 27th and the news hit the media yesterday.
Of course CBS news is talking up the ecological disaster as it has been reported that 2,300 fish and
32 birds died. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/diesel-spill-near-new-orleans-kills-2300-fish-32-birds-sickens-alligators/
Just to put things in perspective, lets take a look at how many birds die from windmills in the USA each year. According to:
https://abcbirds.org/blog21/wind-turbine-mortality/
"A
study published in March 2020 found that
dogs located 1.6 and 2.7 times as many small bird fatalities as human monitors did at two wind sites in California. This was true even after attempting to correct for searcher detection error, which is a standard practice for such studies.
The Erickson study reported that 62.5 percent of the birds in their data set were small birds. Taking 62.5 percent of the 681,000 annual mortality estimate calculated above and adjusting this with the 1.6- and 2.7-fold multipliers from the dog search study (and adding the other 37.5 percent of birds back in), this would translate into a total of 936,000 and 1.4 million birds based on the numbers from the two sites. Averaging the two, this would suggest that 1.17 million birds are killed by wind turbines in the United States each year."
So, 32 birds die from a pipeline spill which is getting national news coverage. Meanwhile, the best estimates suggest 3,200 birds die EVERY DAY from wind turbines in the USA.
With self-serving myopic zealots dominating the news, it is not surprising that our society is so messed up.
Yep
Sadly, my friend, you will need to get used to this. Right now, and especially in the US the media are nothing short of political aran of the established parties. The key players are the cable news networks. CNN and MSNBC are essentially political propagnada machines for the Democratic party and Fox plays the same role for the Republic Party. None of this is likely to change in the foreseable future.
The other aspect of this are the social media giants, twitter and facebook to name the main two. The also have a political agenda and essentially delete posts or ban people from their site that have a different political perspective under the guise of banning misinformation which is defined essentially as having an opinion different from them. Their actions inherently and essentially have the result of banning debate in society on important subjects like ESG which IMHO ultimately will result in bad decisions.
Given that most of us can't do anything about that, what are the investment decision takeaways from all this?
Well if you are a short term trader, none of this is of any particular significance.
Conversely if you are a long term investor, these things become important over the long run and could pay off in terms of outsized gains if one is patient enough. If we take your example about the birds. The ESG zealots know full well that windmills kill birds but are ignoring it for now (although there are some defectors already - I saw a TED Talk where one of them had converted to being a nuclear power zealot due to birds being killed by windmills) but the irony is that if they are successful in getting more renewable energy projects like wind going, the bird problem will go up exponentially and become a major public issue forcing decision makers back to traditional carbon based energy such as oil and natural gas until they can figure something else out.
The investment implication is that during the first phase of this there will be two things going on - one - fewer new energy development projects and lower valuations of energy producing companies. The second phase where the bird problem gains public scrutiny and people go back to carbon, those companies still in the business will become enormously valuable.
Frankly, as I have mentioned time again, I am not currently invested in SU although I like the company a lot and have been previously invested in it, I am willing to bide my time in more lucrative opportuities until I see that Phase 2 is approaching (assuming of course at my advanced age that I am still alive...lol)