(Zero Hedge)—At the end of the day, it always winds up reverting to common sense and, in the investing world, alpha.
That’s what has Markus Müller, chief investment officer ESG at Deutsche Bank’s Private Bank, admitting this week that if you want to make money – no matter what you label your fund – you’re likely going to need some exposure to energy and big oil. He also noted the obvious: that big oil companies have, in fact, been making strides to reduce emissions, despite being labeled as serial polluters with ‘more money than God’ by the Biden administration and their cronies.
Reuters dropped a bomb last week when they reported that Müller had stated on Tuesday that sustainability funds should include traditional energy stocks, arguing that not doing so deprives investors of a prime opportunity to invest in the transition to renewable energy.
“When we think about clean energy, these are business models which are quite new and sensitive to interest rates,” he said.
Since the surge in fossil fuel prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, fossil fuel stocks have seen significant growth, resulting in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) funds underperforming in comparison.
Müller emphasized that investors focused on sustainability require more detailed disclosures from companies about their shift to lower-carbon operations and clearer regulations for labeling funds concentrating on the transition.
He said that ESG strategies vary, with many funds currently investing in fossil fuels, but impending stricter regulations may lead to more exclusions. For instance, France plans to prohibit ‘ISR’ labeled funds from investing in new fossil fuel projects from 2025. Currently, about 45% of funds, amounting to 7 billion euros, have traditional energy investments.
Deutsche Bank’s Chief Investment Office ESG survey indicates sustained investor interest in sustainability, with energy transition being the top investment choice, surpassing artificial intelligence. However, confidence in ESG factors for risk management is declining, with only 37% agreeing it’s effective, down from previous years.
The survey, with 1,759 mostly European respondents, revealed that just 15% have a solid understanding of ESG, and a mere 3% consider themselves experts.
It’s not surprising, as we have been calling out ESG as a grift since the virtue signaling “trend” was born from the soil of near-unlimited liquidity during the Covid years. Recall, back in August we noted that companies with good ESG scores polluted just as much as those with low ones.
Scientific Beta, an index provider and consultancy, found this summer that companies rated highly on ESG metrics – and even just the ‘Environmental’ variable alone – often pollute just as much as other companies.
Researchers look at ESG scores from Moody’s, MSCI and Refinitiv when performing the analysis. They found that when the ‘E’ component was singled out, it led to a “substantial deterioration in green performance”.
Felix Goltz, research director at Scientific Beta told the Financial Times back in August: “ESG ratings have little to no relation to carbon intensity, even when considering only the environmental pillar of these ratings. It doesn’t seem that people have actually looked at [the correlations]. They are surprisingly low.”
He added: “The carbon intensity reduction of green [ie low carbon intensity] portfolios can be effectively cancelled out by adding ESG objectives.”
Also, let’s not forget about the ‘greenwashing‘ across the ESG industry.
In September, we noted that ESG fund closures in 2023 had surpassed all of the last three years.
Data from Morningstar showed State Street, Columbia Threadneedle Investments, Janus Henderson Group, and Hartford Funds Management Group have unwound more than two dozen ESG funds this year. The latest unwind comes from BlackRock, who told regulators in September it plans to close two ESG emerging-market bond funds with total assets of $55 million.
So far this year, the number of ESG funds closing is more than the last three years combined. This trend comes as investors pull money out of these funds as the ESG bubble has likely popped.
We asked this question in early summer: Is The ESG Investing Boom Already Over?
In January, BlackRock’s Larry Fink told Bloomberg TV at the World Economic Forum in Davos that ESG investing has been tarnished:
“Let’s be clear, the narrative is ugly, the narrative is creating this huge polarization. “
Fink continued:
“We are trying to address the misconceptions. It’s hard because it’s not business any more, they’re doing it in a personal way. And for the first time in my professional career, attacks are now personal. They’re trying to demonize the issues.”
By June, Fink’s BlackRock dropped the term “ESG” following billions of dollars pulled out of its funds by Republican governors, most notably, $2 billion by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The crux of the issue that Republican lawmakers have with radical ESG funds is that they were trying to impose ‘green’ initiatives on the corporate level to force change in society, and many of these initiatives would be widely unpopular at the ballot box during elections.
Remember these comments from Fink?
Alyssa Stankiewicz, associate director for sustainability research at Morningstar, told Bloomberg, “We have definitely seen demand drop off in 2022 and 2023.”
And hey, don’t say we didn’t warn you; we have been writing about the ESG con for years now…
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
