A Saturday Short

The Answer My Friend, Is not Blowing in the Wind

The 1990’s, particularly the latter stages of the decade, saw a tremendous boom in Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). Companies, and specifically software firms were taking advantage of the remarkable advances in the Internet. It was initiated, largely by the IPO of Netscape, which AOL eventually bought out. Netscape was followed into the IPO journey by such software giants as Amazon, Yahoo, and eBay.

Initially, Amazon sold books online. I recall a news-magazine television program which aired not long after that company’s IPO, where it showed founder Jeff Bezos near a small shelving of books, yet personally being worth more than Texaco, Inc. Amazon had publishers send their books to the Amazon buyer, and the books in the warehouse were unwanted returns.

Recently, a Kiplinger article on IPOs states, “Consider if you invested $10,000 in the IPO of Amazon (AMZ) back in 1997. The e-commerce company's per-share offering price was $18. There have been multiple stock splits over the years, so if you held onto your original investment, you would now own 133,200 AMZN shares. What's more, the value of your investment would be roughly $26.6 million. That's more than enough for most folks to retire on”.

Not all companies that had IPOs were start-ups, but most were. With the impending escalation of online stores, the United Parcel Service (UPS) had an IPO in 1998.

When technology or other things advance, there is always someone there to take advantage of it. It is no surprise, thus, that after anthropogenic global warming or climate change went mainstream, many companies started building renewable energy sources, and paramount to them all was that the world’s governments were providing taxpayer incentives.

Further, there was a tremendous growth in environmental advocacy groups. As I write in my article, “The Green of Green”, “While I can no longer find the relevant data, the fastest growing sector for 501c(3) nonprofit organizations, over the last three decades, has been overwhelmingly in the environmental classification. Varying articles claim there are between 15,000 and 26,000 such nonprofit establishments in the United States alone”. While they are considered “non-profit”, I divulge the salaries of a few Chief Executive Officers or Presidents of environmental groups in another article also entitled “The Green of Green”.

Environmental groups, as well as activist groups, also received taxpayer funding through Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). To conceal ideological expenditures, government bureaucrats provide money to NGOs, who then pass it on to the more radical and eventual group.

With government involvement and guarantees, manufacturers of climate change apparatus are convinced of massive short-term profits. These revenues must be made in relative haste because of the unpredictability and volatility of green energy, with experts continuously establishing its imprudence and economic absurdity.

President Obama, at his acceptance speech to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, said, “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” President Obama, under the auspices of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, visited the Solyndra solar panel manufacturing plant in Fremont, California. He was proud to have given them your tax money to the tune of $536 million. Later that year, the company declared bankruptcy, and the taxpayers were out over $500 million. Some green-inspired investors lost a further $700 million pursuant to their venture capital funding. The Tonopah Solar Energy plant in Nevada was another Obama-guaranteed taxpayer loan venture that developed into a loss in excess of $510 million.

The misnamed and falsely intended, “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA)”, which was largely enacted as a climate change bill, also saw a beneficial avenue of funding for green energy manufacturers as well as militant environmental groups. The linked Daily Caller story, “Got To Go’: DOE To Cut Off Billions Of Dollars’ Worth Of Biden-Era Green Energy Projects” tells of the last-minute funding under the act and the billions of taxpayer dollars spent without merit.