text: Can you see the problem? Hmm, well: this past year, total world investments in clean energy were about $1.7t. To spend $62t at 1.6t/y would take 34 years; and anyway only ~$600b of that was renewable power. Of course that £1.7t per year is likely to go up; were you to assume it doubles every year then it would take ~5 years; but that isn't going to happen.
  So this is a familiar problem: yes, we can transition to renewables, but no it won't happen in just a few years, we simply lack the industrial and other capacity to do so. Can I have my John McCarthy badge now?
  Having written that, I can now try skimming the study itself. I see it makes the usual "it generates jobs" error; it tells you that these people are not economists but it also warns you to be cautious, which is nice.
  * Perhaps you'd like to read AH being enthusiastic about the prospects for solar?
  BH is sad that oil & gas companies are giving windfall profits to shareholders instead of re-aligning towards clean energy. But why? What else should they do with their profts, except give them to the people that own the companies, or invest them in their business. Only in some bizarre statist fantasy would they direct them towards whatever BH deems most worthy. And he thinks that governments should aim to starve and bankrupt them a.s.a.p. which is distinctly "nice company you've got there, be a shame is something happened to it" type language. It doesn't occur to him that if people stop buying their products the oil companies would be starved without any need for govt muscle.
  But that's not all, oh no, that is not all: he also objects to giving subsidies and windfall profits to the oil companies. But this too is bollox: he isn't. The subsidies stuff is largely drivel; and no-one is "giving" windfall profits, other than the people buying the product. That people continue to buy the product despite its price increasing demonstrates how much they value it. If govts care to provide an alternative that is better and cheaper then that would be one solution; although just letting the market do it would be better.
  Another amusing point is that when looking at Ag subsidies, they are easily able to see - it's their first point - that Richer countries spend more on agricultural subsidies than poorer countries, even when seen relative to total agricultural production. But when looking at FF direct subsidies, they are unable to say anything about what kind of countries subsidise more. Could that be because when you look, the answer is that its the banana republics, not the West, doing the subsidising? There is a sliver of good news though: Implicit subsidies for fossil fuels... the local impacts of air pollution and global climate change constituting more than 75 percent of the total: so the banana republics are damaging themselves mostly, rather than us. This means that recommendations like Policy makers must fully reflect the health and societal costs of air pollution in the price of fossil fuels are dubious; because most of the damage / implicit subsidy occurs in what you burn and how you burn it, not how much you burn (see e.g. box 2.3). Indeed I'm somewhat dubious that their focus on FF is correct; they need to include "dung".
  Perhaps I should note that I'm all for removing harmful subsidies. But I'm doubtful that a somewhat meally-mouthed report that can't bring itself to be honest about who is doing the subsidising, and which sez stuff like Subsidies are important tools that governments can use, is going to help.
  Incidentally: I don't think they include negative subsidies (e.g. the EU's ETS) in their totals, and probably should.
  * ‘Power and Progress’ Review: Technology and the New Leviathan: Deirdre N. McCloskey on Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson.
  But (via a source I'll get back to in a moment) that at least provides a ref, which is How the oil majors have spent $1Bn since Paris on narrative capture and lobbying on climate by influencemap. Somewhat weirdly, that quotes the five supermajors as spending over $1b in 3 years, or ~300m/y; and refers to a 2022 update which bumps that up to $750m/y. But I doubt there's any real hope for consistency in these numbers. Having now skimmed the report, I don't think they provide enough detail to know if they've done it well or not. I'm doubtful; I think I can leave it at that.
  Back to my source, which is I'm afraid to say Ben Pile, and his topic is The monolith of climate smear-mongering. He too (after a few preliminary flings) takes issue with influencemap's methodology; I leave you to judge his prose. But he then continues on to How big is the green blob, compared to big oil? which might be interesting. If he's done it well. Picking those that have funded influencemap, and then adding their total spend, he comes to 1.275b/y, or in his words In total, InfluenceMap’s funders are making grants of roughly $1.2 billion per year to climate change lobbying. Can we rely on his arithmetic? Given that he is trying to criticise "the other side" for sloppy accounting, we'd hope that he would in return strive for precision.
  He estimates $478m/y for the climateworks foundation, wot I've never heard of. But they have financial information. Which allows us to see their form 990s, year by year. They've had a good 2021: income has more than doubled over 2020, as have grants. But their total expenses for the year is only $180m which is waay smaller than $478m, and not all of that can be lobbying anyway. Number 2 is the IKEA foundation, for which BP claims $334m/y; from their own report I find USD 118.7 million (62%) to climate action (SDG 13). But I think from the context that much of the money is double-counted in the sense that any one grant can count towards a number of different areas. So that's two strikes for BP and I can't be bothered to go to the third.
  My overall conclusion is that no-one is producing any reliable numbers in this area.
  So what is false: the idea that we knew what was going on in 1965, and Evil Oil Companies somehow derailed this. Because that is drivel: by their own timeline, there was more than two decades between their precious report of 1965 and the disinfo. The truth, of course, is that we didn't know what was going on as early as 1965.
  Note that the report-to-the-Prez in 1965 is only truthy, because they fail to note that the bits dealing with CO2 are shuffled off into an appendix; see Retread: Just 90 companies caused two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions?
  * Truth Serum: The Other Ehrlich Bets: Desroches/Geloso/Szurmak's Analysis