Mr Cannon-Brookes Appears To Have Endured
Our Tech Billionnaire On Course To Get Our Emissions Down
I’ve been scribbling down thoughts on Mr Cannon-Brookes’ attempted acquisition of AGL and acquiring a considerable share of the company and made no secret of the fact that I’m 110% behind MCB in this.
When you think that at this late stage of the climate change disaster, none of us may be around to see even that day just thirteen years into the future, it becomes all the more urgent to support this and other moves like it.
The even worse thing is that I’m 100% serious about that last statement - we really may not get to 2035 to see the last AGL coal fired power station shut down. Climate change accelerates. Svante Arrhenius first saw the potential for our gas emissions to warm the planet in the late 19th Century but that was dismissed as alarmist.
In the mid to late 20th Century a lot more scientific voices were added to the list of climate change believers. And from the 1970s onwards, global temperatures began a steady climb. Each year, we found something new that had been affected by the rise in emissions, the slight rise in temperatures, the meteoric rise of plastic and other domestic waste, and our general greed to profit off the resources of the planet rather than managing them to benefit everyone equally.
We’ve seen the effects everywhere - permafrost melting and temperatures increasing at the poles, more energy in storm weather resulting in ever more destructive storms and floods, bigger fires and more of them every year, people having to leave their home regions due to rising sea levels, increasing flood or fire activity, and even temperatures close to becoming too hot to support human life in places.
That last link was published over a decade ago, and now the situation in some Middle Eastern countries is that the rich are leaving in summer to go to places farther away from the equator - but their staff and the less fortunate left to face temperatures that are already killing local birds and desert foxes in large numbers.
MCB is acting to stop AGL splitting into two companies. AGL rejected his initial quite generous offer because, as they said, “. . . the board believes AGL Energy shareholders would be forgoing the opportunity to realise potential future value via AGL Energy's proposed demerger . . .” and that means that they believed that the demerger would raise their profits.
Stop and think on that a while. AGL supply energy. That’s their business. AGL management believe that somewhere along the way to splitting into two separate entities and operating as such, there was money to be made. Probably the demerger would involve a lot of people getting bonuses for performance, for rolling over, for holding the hose, and Lord knows what else.
Keep thinking. They’ll still be buying their fuels and spare parts from the same place, they’ll still be using existing power distribution grid infrastructure, and so realistically, the only place they’ll be able to screw any more money out of is . . . Anyone? Got it yet? Hands up if you’re seeing it? The customers.
So the demerger will pay a few executives a fine series of payouts, and then try to recover those, and post continuing extra incomes - from us. Whatever they say publicly, the fine print at the end will always read:
”Of course, supply charges will have to go up to cover this”
but probably in even smaller print than that. This is why I want AGL stopped in their tracks, and their direction changed radically. Not only do they generate almost 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions in Australia, but they’d knowingly put themselves in a position of generating even more. If you’d like them held to account and made to do what we want, support MCB’s mission. Bit by bit, public action and pressure can and will bring these bastards to heel.
Let’s not stop at AGL though. Hold some of that heat up to every power station, every country in the world, that still uses coal, gas, or oil to produce their energy. Put the pitchforks into governments that aren’t outlawing petrol and diesel fuelled vehicles for general use and who aren’t supporting a changeover to electric shared vehicles, that aren’t enforcing the strictest emissions controls on every factory on their land.
The reason the warming is increasing exponentially isn’t so much that the planet’s response is exponential. It’s because corporations (motor vehicle industry, energy industry, transportation industry, and so forth) haven’t slowed down any of their current operations and have actually ADDED CAPACITY and NEW PLANT/PRODUCTION. Their attitude seems to be “well - while there’s still people left alive to buy stuff, we’d better make more, and remember - the person to die with the most money in the bank will be declared the winner!”
Footnote:
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