2021 has flown by.
Life moves fast when you're not locked in your home all day like most of us were in 2020. The Futures are down a bit this morning as both AAPL and AMZN disappointed but, on the whole, earnings season has been pretty good and missteps like those (and SBUX missed too) are being blamed on supply-chain or Covid issues that everything thinks are going away. Only 1,381 people died of Covid yesterday and we'll be crossing 750,000 total deaths in the US (46M infected) early next week – something to be thankful for if we are not one of the 45,000 people who will be dead by Thanksgiving from this thing we're not at all worried about anymore.
The NYPD has 10,000 unvaccinated officers (about 1/3) and, in theory, they are supposed to be put on leave without pay as of this morning. What will actually happen is interesting as it's in court at the moment with the union fighting against the mandate. Covid was the leading cause of death for officers in 2020 and is in 2021 as well with 250 NYC policemen dying of the virus – 5 times more than were killed by gunfire yet 10,000 officers will wear a mandatory vest – but refuse to be vaccinated.
This is why Covid is never going away – people, even in NYC, would rather lose their jobs than get a shot. Combine that with enablers like the Police Union, Conservative Judges (lots of those now) and the GOP Death Cult and we're never going to be able to eradicate the disease like we have done with others in the past. Never before in human history have so many humans gone against the survival of the species – other than Global Warming, of course…
Speaking of Global Warming, World Leaders are meeting in Scotland this weekend to do whatever it takes to make it seem like they care without actually doing anything. Last time they had a meeting like this – a little girl yelled at them but nothing changed and she's not been invited back. In any case, what more can be said?
"My message is that we'll be watching you. This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!
"You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!
"For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.
"You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.
"The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5°C, and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.
"Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.
"So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences.
"How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just 'business as usual' and some technical solutions? With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.
That was two years ago, just before Covid hit and we kind of lost the moment when, for a few months, people actually did care about Global Warming. Now, because Global Warming is contributing to the release of new viruses and other plagues and weather disasters – we're too busy to do anything about it – even as the need to act become more and more urgent. The chart on the right goes to 0.6 – we passed 1.0 this year and 1.5 is the breaking point for the environment..
This meeting (and the rest of earnings) is the last big bit of market data we have, other than next week's Non-Farm Payrolls, for the next few weeks so we'll have to think very carefully about our positioning into the end of the year. Christmas and New Year's are Friday/Saturday this year so they won't be interrupting the markets very much so the big wild cards are Biden's spending plans, the G20s climate spending plans (if any), war over Taiwan and how Covid does during flu season, which is just beginning.
Have a great weekend,
– Phil
