News: SMR Golden Energy And Resources Says Unit Purchased 6.60 Mln Shares In Capital Of Stanmore..., page-3

From your link: "No fund manager on the planet will want to be caught with a bag of ESG-unfriendly coal stocks in a global slowdown.". [NB. I assume ESG stands for Environmentally Sustainable Growth, not Energy Services Group] I respectfully disagree (I'm disagreeing with Frazis Capital Partners not with you). You see, it depends on the causes of the slowdown. The powers that be have been operating with rose-coloured spectacles when looking at this ESG cr*p, and business-class airline eyeshades when [not] looking at any kind of reality. OK, so what are the causes of the slowdown? The media tell you day after day that the one and only cause of slowdown is the evil Donald Trump's trade war on China. In no way will I argue that it isn't a factor (if you stop someone eating your lunch, that someone's GDP will slow down thus cutting global growth while it still takes you a while to prepare a new lunch for yourself). But other very significant things are going on. Germany (and thus Europe) is slowing, for example. (Aside: What good timing for Brexit). Their slowdown is not caused by The Donald's trade war - if anything that would help Germany who could supply some of the withdrawn lunch.

The German slowdown is caused in large part by the collapse of their insane energy policy, the Energiewende, built on their ideological other version of ESG (Environmentally Sustainable Growth). Germany's massive push into (mainly) wind energy has pushed up their power prices so far that they can no longer compete (they are behind only South Australia and Denmark for high energy power prices - the only two places to have gone further into wind energy than they have). You can verify that power prices really do matter because Bluescope Steel has just announced a big investment in the US to take advantage of lower power prices there. And why do the US have lower power prices? .. easy, they aren't fracking stupid, they're fracking gas.

Now we rant on a lot about how stupid our politicians are, and with good reason, but even politicians can wake up to reality eventually - they have to because if they don't they end up losing votes [the public often "get it" first. As Sir Humphrey said "I am their leader. I must follow them."].

Who amongst us is brainless enough to think that coal will not play a big role in turning around the disastrous power prices? Adani delivered a massive number of votes to ScoMo in the last federal electio - and don't think for a moment that he didn't notice. ScoMo even took a lump of coal into Parliament a while ago. His public rhetoric is pathetic because he's scared that if he upsets the Greens they will make very loud noises that cost him votes, but in private he knows the score. Other western leaders will eventually get there too. For example, I understand that Government minister Andrea Leadsom in the UK is ordering an independent review of the recent horrendously expensive UK grid collapse. The operator put out a whitewashing report of course, but even that showed that the sudden switching off of the Hornsea wind farm (because of high winds!!!) was a factor. Any independent report worth its salt will make it clear that the grid collapse was caused primarily by the UK's equivalent of our RET, which causes energy "inertia" (that's reliable power) to be progressively removed from the grid as wind speeds increase. So the inevitable result is grid collapse if wind speeds increase further to the point that wind farms suddenly switch off.

In summary, the western world has painted itself into a corner, and coal will be needed in large quantities to get them out of it. Frazis Capital Partners may be very smart, but they have got this one wrong (deliberately??? to mislead others?). Coal's time has come round again. Go SMR, and Go Adani!

Apologies for the long comment and for any iPhone typos.