FRIDAY WRAP: UAW's strike, Looney resigns, Carrefour's shrinkflation labels, anti-woke = ESG, lithium vs. Native Americans, and a Disney sale prediction

LIVE from your anti-ESG corner vape store, it’s a Business Pants Friday Show here at September 15th Studios, featuring all your favorites: Ari the data queen, Jessie the money whisperer, AnalystHole Matt Moscardi. On today’s weekly wrap up: a Looney exit at BP, Coco’s triumph, a-holes named Bill and Will, and an underground land grab  

Story of the Week (DR):

1. BP CEO Bernard Looney Resigns Over Past Relationships With Colleagues

2. UAW Goes on Strike Against GM, Ford and Stellantis JS MM

1. Walkouts are first to hit all three automakers at same time and affect factories in Missouri, Ohio and Michigan

2. The United Auto Workers union for the first time ever went on strike at all three Detroit car companies, with workers hitting the picket lines shortly after midnight Friday in targeted work stoppages at plants in Michigan, Ohio and Missouri.

3. UAW officials initiated the walkout after failing to clinch new labor deals with General Motors, Ford Motor, and Jeep-maker Stellantis for about 146,000 U.S. factory workers. Bargaining went late into the night, but the two sides remained too far apart to avoid a walkout at the 11:59 p.m. ET deadline.

3. Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz steps down from coffee chain’s board

1. In connection with Mr. Schultz’s resignation, the Company has agreed to amend the Retirement Agreement dated June 1, 2018, by and between the Company and Mr. Schultz to continue to provide Mr. Schultz and his spouse with reasonable security services due to his recent role as our interim chief executive officer and his significant visibility as our founder. The security services will be provided for a period of 10 years and will be evaluated on an annual basis. In recognition of Mr. Schultz’s leadership as the Company’s founder and Chairman Emeritus, the Company will also provide Mr. Schultz with the reimbursement of his monthly healthcare insurance premiums.

2. Schultz said in a statement he looked forward "to supporting this next generation of leaders to steward Starbucks into the future as a customer, supporter and advocate in my role as chairman emeritus."

4. CEOs tell senators: Time to regulate AI

1. Senators left Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's AI Insight Forum in D.C. Wednesday talking about an urgent need to pass legislation governing AI, while CEOs agreed that Washington must play a role.

1. CEOs Rule!

1. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

2. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

3. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna

4. Former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates

5. Tesla CEO Elon Musk

6. Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg

7. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai

8. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman

9. Palantir  CEO Alex Karp

10. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt

2. Stakeholders Rule!

1. Motion Picture Association CEO Charles Rivkin

2. AFL-CIO President Elizabeth Shuler

3. Writers Guild President Meredith Steihm

4. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten

5. Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights CEO Maya Wiley

6. U.C. Berkley - Researcher Deborah Raji, 

7. Unidos CEO Janet Murguía

1. United States's largest Latino nonprofit advocacy organization

8. Center for Humane Technology Co-founder & ED Tristan Harris

1. American technology ethicist

9. Aerospace Industries Association CEO Eric Fanning

10. Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue

1. hub for AI experts and enthusiasts

11. Humane Intelligence CEO Rumman Chowdhury

1. Non-profit provides services and a platform for sourcing structured public opinion to improve product review

12. Anthropic Co-founder Jack Clark

1. AI-driven research company that focuses on increasing the safety of AI systems

2. After the closed-to-the-public meeting, Elon Musk said it was important for tech leaders to "have a referee" in Washington and suggested the meeting "may go down in history as very important to the future of civilization."

3. Schumer is facing criticism about the closed-door nature of the first event and the fact that senators couldn't ask questions directly to the CEOs.

1. "All of the senators are sitting there, and ask no questions, that's what's happening," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told reporters, urging an end to "special treatment" of big tech companies, and "a tech industry bill that addresses that head on."

4. (It took me about 15 minutes to find an exhaustive list of AI Insight Forum attendees and yet, despite recent newsroom layoffs, Gannett hiring Taylor Swift and Beyoncé reporters

Goodliest of the Week (AB):

1. Carrefour puts ‘shrinkflation’ price warnings on food to shame brands JS MM DR

1. The French supermarket chain Carrefour has put labels on its shelves this week warning shoppers of “shrinkflation”, the phenomenon where manufacturers reduce pack sizes rather than increase prices.

2. It has slapped price warnings on products from Lindt chocolates to Lipton iced tea to pressure top consumer goods suppliers Nestlé, PepsiCo and Unilever to tackle the issue in advance of much-anticipated contract talks.

3. Since Monday, Carrefour has been putting stickers on products that have shrunk in size but cost more even after raw materials prices have eased, to rally consumer support as retailers prepare to face the world’s biggest brands in negotiations due to start soon and end by 15 October.

4. Carrefour has marked 26 products in its stores in France with the labels, which say: “This product has seen its volume or weight fall and the effective price from the supplier rise.”

5. For example, Carrefour said a bottle of sugar-free peach-flavoured Lipton iced tea, produced by PepsiCo, shrank to 1.25 litres (0.33 gallon) from 1.5 litres, resulting in a 40% effective increase in the price a litre.

6. “Obviously, the aim in stigmatising these products is to be able to tell manufacturers to rethink their pricing policy,” Stefen Bompais, the director of client communications at Carrefour, said in an interview.

2. Coco Gauff’s U.S. Open Victory Trounced Men’s Final In Viewership—In Rare Win For Women’s Sports

1. The dramatic win by Coco Guaff proved to be a rare ratings breakthrough moment for women’s sports as the Saturday afternoon game crushed the men’s Sunday final in viewership 

2. AND broke the ESPN record for the most-watched women’s Grand Slam final

3. Nearly 3.4 million people watched Gauff become the first American teenager to win the Open in more than two decades (since Serena)

3. It's the beginning of the end for global oil demand, IEA chief says

1. EVIDENCE: Cocaine Is Set to Overtake Oil to Become Colombia’s Main Export

Assholiest of the Week (MM):

1. Bill Baue - THE DEEPLY TRIGGERED SUPER WOKE POLE

1. This is a deeeeeeeeeeep cut, so stay with me

2. Bill was a writer, journalist, blogger, and consultant covering sustainable investing, ESG, stuff like that - he got his Bachelor’s in English, his Masters in English, and his master of letters in English focusing on 20th century lit

3. After a long career writing about sustainability, he becomes one of the founders of the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTI), a non profit that uses scientific carbon measurements to set targets for companies

4. He sits on the Technical Committee of SBTI (despite having no technical knowledge), and ends up leaving SBTI over a number of disputes about their governance and models.  They look like this:

1. SBTI, like credit ratings agencies, takes money from companies and helps them set a target and then validates the target - so there’s an issuer pays conflict of interest.  Again, the exact same one credit ratings have.

2. SBTI also decides to change from one model of carbon to another, and favors selling its own models/brand over anyone else’s - not very science-y, but very economic

3. SBTI refuses to be transparent about how their decisions get made, and they’re supposed to be devoted to the public interest, and therefore transparent.  

5. He takes his arguments public after getting ignored by his own co-founders.  Very public.  Three years of tweetstorms, LinkedIn rants, public challenges, public letters, inquiries, and anything else to make noise about how fraudulent and corrupt SBTI is

6. The Biden administration passes a rule about suppliers and procurement and how they must have carbon reduction targets, and they choose SBTI to administer them

7. Baue loses his mind again since they’re not using the BEST MODEL and they’re still ignoring him and they aren’t doing everything publicly - he claims now they’re a “quasi-regulator” with no checks or balances

8. He gets heard after throwing fits for years!  By… the House Committee on Space, Science and Technology, lead by a conservative Republican Baptist representative!

9. Baue’s public rants in an effort to whistleblow on an org that is arguably the closest and only thing we have to help set carbon targets are now a centerpiece in the anti-woke campaign

1. They claim that SBTI is corrupt based on Baue’s lengthy public rants

2. They then claim that a corrupt organization is taking on foreign company clients and could become an agent of foreign actors

3. They THEN claim those foreign actors are discriminating against oil and gas and are out to kill the US economy and consumers

4. They then conclude that SBTI is a national security threat as it is an agent in a giant conspiracy to stop oil by Russians

10. Baue, seeing how he’s being used, writes an open letter to the House committee saying his problem was not the regulation, just that it didn’t go far enough!  Don’t stop the carbon accounting, just stop them from using the wrong model!  Make them more transparent!  And then rehashes all of his angst.

11. So to sum up - we have a sustainability evangelist who was angry with the direction of a sustainability non-profit and weaponized his anger to accidentally get conservative lawmakers backed by Leonard Leo and the Koch brothers to work to shut down the non-profit

2. Will Hild - THE PROPAGANDA LIBER-IDIOT ANTI-WOKE POL JS DR

1. Funded by Leonard Leo, leads Consumers’ Research, a conservative idiot front group

2. Duke Energy puts ESG over the needs of its customers

3. The utility monopoly has increasingly pledged its commitment to ESG, including environmental extremists’ objective of net-zero electricity generation by 2050 and net-zero methane emissions by 2030. 

1. He’s angry about a target 27 years from now

4.  Lynn J. Good, chairwoman, president, and CEO of Duke Energy, has stated that the company’s entire business strategy is focused on how to achieve carbon reduction.

1. The one and only use of “chairwoman” when it’s meant as a slander?

5. Duke is so maniacally obsessed with net-zero targets that executive pay is tied to ESG goals . Good’s pay jumped to $21.35 million in 2022, almost 30% more than her $16.45 million total for 2021.

1. The proxy, which Hild links to as his “evidence” but apparently doesn’t read, shows that of her $21.35m salary in 2022:

1. Climate goals were tied to short-term incentives, which are 13% of overall compensation ($2.8m)

2. Of the short-term incentives, climate specifically made up 12.5% of goals (350k)

3. POPULIST MATH: 350,000/21,350,000 = 1.6% of overall pay!

4. Meanwhile, Good received 116k - or about half of her “climate pay” - in corporate jet use

6. AND THEN HE GOES BONKERS: 

7. Duke’s ESG fanaticism serves as a distraction from its environmental disasters. 

1. THE E STANDS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ASSHOLE

8. Just last year, it lost a bid to fleece Indiana customers of $212 million to finance a cleanup of coal ash that contaminated local groundwater. 

1. YOU KNOW WHERE I READ ABOUT THAT? AN MSCI ESG REPORT

9. Federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against Duke in 2015 for illegally dumping millions of gallons of toxic coal ash into North Carolina’s Dan River.

1. COAL ASH! THE COAL THEY’RE PHASING OUT SO THEY DON’T HAVE TO DUMP IT IN A RIVER?

10. By aligning executives’ pay scale to ESG targets rather than servicing customers, she has incentivized Duke to spend more money on wasteful projects and simply pass the costs along to customers. 

1. NOTHING IS AS INCENTIVIZING AS 1% OF YOUR PAY

3. Man who is actively destroying civilization warns how something else he’s working on can destroy civilization - THE BILLIONAIRE TECH MESSIAH BUBBLE POL

1. Elon Musk tells senators AI is a double-edged sword that can do good—but also destroy civilization

Exhausting-est of the Week (JS):

1. New Land Grab by Oil Giants Is Deep Underground

1. If the world is to ward off a dangerous increase in temperature by the end of the century, it needs to shut away more than 5B metric tons of carbon dioxide a year by 2050

2. Companies (like Chevron and Occidental) are shelling out big dollars to get rights to subsurface holes where they hope to store carbon dioxide

3. Critics say that carbon sequestration is a Band-Aid measure that lets companies avoid tough steps to decarbonize and even many supporters have said carbon sequestration is too costly to make business sense

4. Fossil-fuel companies have been some of the most active in exploring the technology, partly because injecting carbon into fading oil fields has for decades been an established way to boost production.

5. Now, spurred by huge U.S. subsidies passed last year for capturing and storing carbon dioxide, some of the world’s leading energy companies and a scattering of startups are quietly engaged in a subsurface land grab.

2. Scientists found a massive lithium deposit inside an ancient US volcano that could be a game-changer for American clean energy but spell disaster for Native Americans MM DR

1. Isn’t this literally the story of our country…a chance for a new life but at the expense of THE PEOPLE THAT LITERALLY LIVED HERE AND CARED FOR THE LAND

2. This is maybe the most exhausting headline I’ve ever covered

3. McDermitt Caldera, located along the Nevada-Oregon border, is an extinct volcano that last erupted approximately 16 million years ago and for lithium hunters, it's the biggest gold mine find of the century.

4. McDermitt Caldera could contain over 132 million tons of lithium — enough to meet global demand for decades and the US may no longer have to rely on other countries for lithium

5. There's just one thing: local Indigenous communities say Thacker Pass is sacred land where they harvest traditional medicines, foods, and supplies for sacred ceremonies

6. Lithium extraction methods can lead to water pollution, land degradation, and potential groundwater contamination. And an estimated 79% of lithium reserves in the US are within 35 miles of Native American reservations, according to the MSCI Sustainability Institute.

3. This headline and all the others like it: Frontier Airlines CEO says the pandemic made workers 'lazy' and less productive: 'People are still allowing people to work from home, all this silliness, right?'

1. Of course it’s all men sharing this specific opinion about working from home- because remote work has been increasingly touted as an important opportunity to level the gender playing field

2. Let’s explore this a bit more– many professions today are "greedy," paying disproportionately more for long hours and weekend work. This has a disproportionate impact on women, who often have to choose between advancing their careers and caring for their families. This results in a vicious cycle where women are paid less, receive fewer promotions, and have a harder time balancing work and family.

3. Remote work eliminates the need to be in the office at prescribed times, allowing women to better balance their work and family responsibilities which in turn, can help women advance their careers without sacrificing their family life

4. This is a very narrow-sighted and privileged comment to make and there’s a lot of old, white leaders sharing this view

Who Won the Week?

1. DR: Spanish women’s soccer players as part of Spain’s #MeToo moment

1. Players in Spain’s women’s soccer league have called off a strike that delayed the opening of the season after reaching an agreement with the league over minimum salaries

1. Up to E21k from E16k

2. After three weeks of protests and calls for his resignation, Spain’s soccer chief, Luis Rubiales, has quit

1. Jennifer Hermoso, has filed a criminal complaint of sexual assault against him

3. firing last week of the squad’s coach, Jorge Vilda, whom Mr. Rubiales loyally supported for years despite complaints of controlling behavior. Fifteen star players walked out in protest last year.

4. Beatriz.Álvarez, the president of Liga F, who represents the clubs, said she hoped that Mr. Rubiales’s resignation would herald “a profound internal restructuring,” and “institutional respect and collaboration” that would enable “the advancement and sustainability of women’s football.”

2. AB: 

3. MM: IBM CEO Arvind Krishna - seriously, when was the last time anyone thought IBM was relevant?  Maybe it’s relevant because his board is a who’s who of jerks! 21% influence on the IBM board, 3% on Northrop Grumman board, bats .373, 75% connected board.  

1. Sub winners: Larry and Sergei, who DIDN’T have to go despite owning the company!  Fake public is awesome!

4. JS: All of Courtney’s patients: Patients have better outcomes with female surgeons

Predictions

1. DR: I test positive for covid the day my covid-infected housemember tests negative

2. AB: 

3. MM: Disney, after months of rumors of selling to Apple and Amazon and anyone with a dollar, they decide not to sell an entire channel or business line.  Instead, Iger decides it’s easier to sell just the women, gay, and black characters from their movies to Apple, thus cementing a legacy of “see, we’re not woke!” and cementing Tim Cook as wokefather supreme. 

4. JS: Birkenstock is the next Allbirds (or Doc Martin)- will IPO strong and then the stock will tank 6 months later

1. I can only find one of their directors in our data- Alexandre Arnault, son of LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault

2. Also sits on the board of Carrefour, our jester of the week

3. He’s a mediocre performing nepo baby with a batting average of .368

4. If this is indicative of the others on the board, I don’t have high expectations for their leadership decisions and therefore the strength of the stock price, longterm