ESG fatigue grows as elected representatives turn a forensic eye on climate change costs
 Imagine the climate scientist's feelings when it was discovered that while achieving one goal he put the major goal of defeating global warming at a further remove.
What happened, but was too often ignored by scientists and bureaucrats who fret about such things, when few others do. And since the election of US President Trump, there has been a growing, and increasingly dominant "ESG fatigue"- a weariness of caring about environment, social and governance issues nearly as much as we are supposed to.
In obedience to such finger wagging, the shipping industry has, like many others, shifted toward more costly alternative fuels to meet the UN's decarbonisation goals, and methanol, hydrogen, ammonia, wind-assisted propulsion systems and other technologies are gaining traction for this reason.
What happened recently when researchers at Cornell University in upstate New York while enjoying success at removing sulphur dioxide from shipping fuel, also managed to increase global warming by 0.08°C.
There was a resulting fuss. "Climate scientists were saying this is essentially impossible, that it's bonkers to see such a jump all at once," said Daniele Visioni, assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences. "People were saying, 'Climate change is suddenly accelerating.' We'd never seen something like this."
"The unprecedented heat became a normal warm year once you accounted for that," Dr Visioni told California's SciTech Daily.
Quantifying how much these polluting aerosols reflect heat back into space to make a noticeable increase in the Earth's temperature is not, Dr Visioni said, a suggestion that these pollution-cutting efforts should be curtailed.
"Air quality improvement is immediate, and everyone is always going to go for that. A lesson here is we make decisions about trade-offs all the time," he said. "We are reducing air pollution more than was predicted 10 years ago, so there needs to be a lot more open discussion. It means the urgency of emission reduction is even greater."
In the face of such disappointments, be they scientific, technological, but increasingly social and political, the alarmist climate change community, which commands the vast bulk of the Deep State bureaucracy and has the legacy media on side, has found their message a harder and harder sell.
Thus, the typical establishment response of people like Dr Visioni is to double down and insist on what's needed is more of the same. And if that doesn't work, much more of the same.
"We need to be more forceful about emissions reductions," he said. "We have to bridge a gap. But we should work to prevent warming of the planet through other means. Cloud brightening, geoengineering climate interventions - these are not things that are going to reduce emissions, but they are things we might need to prevent further warming."
To Trump voters, this is increasingly nonsensical. Global warming is like homelessness, they say. The more money one lavishes upon it, the more one gets.
For the moment, ocean shipping has been able to suffer government gouging through emission taxes, but with mounting impatience largely because of windful profits by dint of the Covid scare, prolonged uncertainty of a narrowly averted US dock strike, and the threat of Trump tariffs.
In the aviation sector the impatience with bureaucratic eco-geekery is more acute. As usual, most approved "sustainable" ways forward, are fraught with risible impossibility - like flying planes fuelled by used cooking oil, of which there is never enough to be found. With vast government green subsidies, Sweden's Heart Aerospace, is developing a 30-seat electric airplane, which many see its greatest success as a subsidy sucker rather than a useful aircraft, given the size and weight of the battery needed to power it, and the limited range and payload make profitability more doubtful.
Talk at this year's Airline Economics conference in Dublin was overshadowed by the scramble facing airlines just to keep their jets flying as they deal with parts and sustainable fuel shortages.
"The general consensus is that the sustainability subject is moving off centre.
There are obviously very short-term issues that are occupying our minds," said one delegate.
Bottlenecks and parts shortages have forced airlines to keep older jets flying for longer, even as targets for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) in the European Union come into force.
Industry leaders say there is less optimism over reaching the industry's over-arching goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Aviation is responsible for 2-3 per cent of carbon emissions.
"The rose-tinted glasses have come off," said Deion McCarthy, an executive at Dubai Aerospace Enterprise.
So what are we all worried about? Global warming, re-labelled "climate change" when Washington or Texas is occasionally plunged into the deep freeze.
From what can be gathered from a quick Google asking for scientific results of unfettered global warming, one gets:
"Human-induced global warming of 1.1 degrees C has spurred changes to the Earth’s climate.
"Climate impacts on people and ecosystems are more widespread and severe than expected.
"Adaptation measures can effectively build resilience, but more finance is needed to scale. Some climate impacts are already so severe they cannot be adapted to, leading to losses."
Not very scarifying, is it? Not to mention bereft of specifics. And has this not been the same old story for the last 40 years?
One thing that is increasingly apparent is the climate catastrophe party is on the backfoot and the world is about to learn whether lavishing less money on the problem will have the reverse effect than spending more money on it has done so far. It seems that more and more people think it is time for a change.
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