Tag: corpocracy

I have to admit, I initially assumed that Patreon was unexpectedly handed an advantage on at least one of the outstanding issues by a ruling from the California Supreme Court this week:

California recognizes two different torts involving interference with economic relations – interference with performance of a contract and interference with prospective economic advantage.  Originally California courts treated these two torts as essentially the same, the the only difference being that interference with contractual relations required the existence of a binding contract.  In 1995, however, the Supreme Court held that a plaintiff pursuing a claim for interference with a prospective contractual or economic relationship had to plead that the defendant’s conduct was wrongful.  Della Penna v. Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., Inc., 11 Cal. 4th 376 (1995).

Contracts that are terminable at-will occupy a sort of middle estate between these two torts, leading to the question of whether a plaintiff pursuing a claim for tortious interference with an at-will contract must plead that the interference was independently wrongful.  Yesterday, the California Supreme Court held that tortious interference with an at-will contract does require independent wrongfulness. Ixchel Pharma, LLC v. Biogen, Inc., 2020 Cal. LEXIS 4876.

Although the Court recognized that in an at-will contract the parties have more of an expectation of continuity of the relationship than when no contract exists, it found that there is no legal basis in either case to expect continuity from the perspective of a third-party.  The Court also found that legitimate business competition could be chilled if independent wrongfulness is not required.

As I commented on SocialGalactic, this particular decision by the California Supreme Court looked unfavorable to Big Bear on first glance, as well as almost comically untimely. However, it did at least serve to demonstrate that his case was very far from frivolous, considering that the court appeared to be addressing, for the first time, one of the primary issues at dispute in his arbitration.

Upon the LLOE’s review of the ruling, however, it quickly became apparent that despite its apparent relevance to his case, the Ixchel decision actually has nothing to do with Big Bear’s claim for tortious interference on the part of Patreon. This is for four reasons:

1. As defined by the supreme court, an at-will contract requires mutual bargaining by the parties. The Patreon Terms of Use are a contract of adhesion that prevents bargaining and is unilaterally imposed upon one party by the other, so they are not an at-will contract.
2. An at-will contract is, by definition, terminable at will by either party. The Patreon Terms of Use cannot be terminated by the user. Even if a user deletes his account, he remains bound indefinitely by the terms. So, again, the Patreon Terms of Use are not an at-will contract.
3. Patreon did not terminate its contract with Big Bear or even delete his account. What they did was delete his creator page, deny his access to the platform, and prevent patrons from paying him.
4. The Ixchel decision is not analogous to Patreon’s contract with Big Bear, but with Big Bear’s separate contractual relationships with his patrons.

Their losses are not only accumulating, they are accelerating. Which is more than a little fascinating in light of what I wrote in Corporate Cancer concerning the Devil Mouse.

Debt, diversity, and the Devil Mouse

Investors often say that which cannot continue will not. But as one influential economist who was also a highly successful investor noted, “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” So, we can’t expect to know exactly when a converged company is going to succumb to the corporate cancer that has infested it. There is an awful lot of ruin in companies as big and resource-rich as Apple, Disney, Google, Intel, or Microsoft; a single disaster, or even a single series of disasters is probably not going to be sufficient to do them in.

But if the precise end of a converged company cannot be foreseen, the beginning of the endgame often can be. This is because a corporate failure cascade, or a process in a system of interconnected parts in which the failure of one or more parts triggers the failure of other parts, is often observable by even casual observers.

For example, Disney looks indomitable when seen from a distance. It has a market capitalization of nearly $250 billion and in 2018 reported an annual profit of $12.6 billion on $59.4 billion in revenue. It owns a veritable gold mine of intellectual property, from Mickey Mouse to Star Wars, and is arguably the most formidable entertainment empire in the history of the world to date.

But look a little closer and a less imposing picture begins to take form. In just the last year, Disney’s debt has increased by $38 billion, to a total of $53 billion now owed. And while that figure is considered low by industry standards, it has amassed that gargantuan debt to pay for projects that are already failing at an rate that is extremely uncharacteristic of historical Disney projects.

Consider, too, that Netflix now owes $12.4 billion in debt with $15.8 billion in annual revenue, so despite Disney’s low debt/equity ratio of 0.38, it has a debt/revenue rate of 89.2 percent, which is actually higher than the notoriously unstable Netflix’s 78.4 percent.

Star Wars isn’t the only one of Disney’s once-dominant properties and franchises that are failing. The two Galaxy’s Edge theme parks were failures at launch, attendance is declining at both its flagship parks, and ESPN has been losing two million subscribers a year for the last seven years.

Although it has ridden the Marvel Cinematic Universe—which it did not create—to record-breaking box office heights, its attempt to mine its rich cartoon franchise for live action films has not panned out very well when corrected for inflation—the 1994 Lion King made $178 million more than its 2019 remake—and its attempts to create new franchises that can be similarly exploited have repeatedly failed.

On the other hand, Disney is still generating mammoth profits, its seemingly endless series of remakes are profitable, and the launch of its new Disney+ streaming channel could lead to a whole new period of growth for the entertainment giant. Then again, the decision to retroactively censor old films from Song of the South to Dumbo and The Lady and the Tramp tends to suggest that convergence will cause Disney+ to disappoint too.

In the end, it is probable CEO Bob Iger’s declaration that the corporation’s push for more diversity in its entertainment products will be followed by an increase of diversity in its executive suite before he retires that will prove the most reliable guide for the future of Disney as well as a test of the central thesis of this book.

There are only three possibilities, after all. Either social justice convergence is beneficial for business, it is harmful for business, or it is irrelevant. And at this point, it should be eminently clear that is about as good for the average corporation as cancer.

Are we seeing the beginning of a series of convergence-related failure cascades across corporate America? Disney may prove to be a useful harbinger in this regard.

Remember, that was all written before Corona-chan devastated Disney’s vital parks business. So let’s look at what is happening of late on the Devil Mouse front:

Analyst Rich Greenfield recently looked at Disney and ESPN’s reports and found very troubling numbers for the sport network and its parent company. ESPN’s loss in subscribers is also shocking for its size. The loss of subscribers continues and is down another six percent year-over-year. So far, this year’s subscriber loss has accelerated over past years. The sports network was down 4.5 percent in the first quarter, off 5.5 percent in the second quarter, and down a whopping 6 percent in the third quarter. Indeed, the six percent decline ESPN saw in the third quarter this year is just part of the declines suffered in every quarter at since the third quarter of 2016.

ESPN+ ARPU down 22{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d} year-over-year, as it is basically being given away within the Disney/Hulu/ESPN+ bundle. $4.18 vs. $5.33 last year. How do you make money at $4.18 of $ARPU? 

That 6-percent Q3 decline suggests that ESPN will be down to 78 million subscribers by the end of the year, down from 99 million in 2013. It certainly looks like a corporate failure cascade in progress. And while there is a LOT of ruin in the Devil Mouse, the speed at which its debt is accumulating means that it might not take as long as you would assume for that debt to become unserviceable. I haven’t run the numbers yet, so I don’t know how long it might take to go critical, but the fact that Disney is already running a higher debt/revenue ratio than Netflix is an ominous indicator.

A concerned YouTuber emailed Patreon and was so encouraged by the response that she recorded a video entitled Patreon Is Not Going Away:

We’ve heard there are some concerns about the recent decision in the lawsuit we filed and wanted to clarify some things. First of all, there’s nothing to worry about overall. Litigation is an unfortunate fact of doing business and Patreon deals with a lot of it, the same as any other platform. Specifically in this situation, we filed a lawsuit to bring some frivolous arbitrations into court because these claims should be decided in court under our terms of use. Unfortunately the judge denied our preliminary injunction against those claims preceding in arbitrations so we’ll now deal with these in arbitrations while we proceed with the next stage of the lawsuit. It seems that some of the people who are involved in organizing these arbitrations are reporting that we are going bankrupt as a result of these claims. I can assure you, that this is not true and it appears that they are making those claims to try to keep up morale on their side and convince more people to bring claims against Patreon.
– Patreon PR

Allow me to observe that even the CEO of Patreon knows its business model is not sustainable. Back in January 2019, he observed that they would need to add revenue streams and reduce the percentage of payouts to creators to make it sustainable, but they obviously have not done so.

Far from being frivolous, at least 72 of the arbitrations are now certain winners thanks to Patreon’s inexplicable decision to violate its own Terms of Use and bring the very sort of group action in court that it waived its right to bring. The next stage of the lawsuit is going to be the 72 Bears bringing a demurrer which is very likely to be approved; even if the case is not immediately dismissed with prejudice, Patreon has no chance of winning a lawsuit that it has absolutely no right to have brought in the first place under its own contract.

It’s true that Patreon is very unlikely to go bankrupt right away as a result of the current claims. They received 60 million in investment last July, so even if they have been losing the estimated $1.5 million per month thanks to their expensive offices and 200+ employees since then, it should be sufficient to allow them to limp along for another two years or so. However, that presumes that the investors are going to sit by idly as the executives blow all their investment money on lawyers, arbitration fees, and awards, which strikes me as unlikely. Sooner or later, and the longer this dispute goes on, the sooner it will be, the investors are going to pull the remainder of their money out and put it in gold or the stock market, at which point it’s game over and all the creators move to whatever the next model happens to be.

And finally, what need do we have to keep up morale? Patreon is winless in JAMS administration, 0-for-4 in Owen’s arbitration, 0-for-2 in court, and counting. This statement strikes me as pure projection, especially given that it was made in an attempt to reassure a worried Patreon creator. We have absolutely no need to convince more people to bring claims against Patreon. We haven’t even made an arbitration template available to the hundreds of thousands of potentially interested parties; Patreon very foolishly did that when they included the full text of a demand for arbitration in their lawsuit filings.

(I genuinely could not believe that when I saw it. I’ve seen lawyers do some stupid and crazy things over the years, but that almost certainly takes the cake.)

Anyhow, the most important thing about this statement is the fact that Patreon felt the need to make it in the first place. Also, it’s not meth. Definitely not meth.

The word about Patreon’s legal dilemma is rapidly spreading, as an activist site, Reclaim the Net, has picked up the story about Owen and the Bears fighting back against Big Tech censorship and deplatformings:

Tentative ruling against Patreon could provide a legal workaround for Big Tech censorship. If the final ruling goes against Patreon, it could have to pay millions of dollars in arbitration fees and leave other companies such as PayPal open to a similar fate.

A California Court has issued a tentative ruling against fan-funding platform Patreon and denied its request for an injunction against 72 claimants who are seeking arbitration against the company.

If the final ruling goes against Patreon, which it looks like it might, lawyer, commentator, and producer Mike Cernovich believes that it would serve as “a HUGE workaround for Big Tech censorship” where the former backers of large creators who are banned from Patreon or other similar sites such as payments service PayPal could file similar motions and force these companies to pay huge arbitration fees that could total millions of dollars.

At this point, I see no serious probability that the final ruling will not go against Patreon. And the bizarre behavior of Patreon`s lawyers in response to the recent demands for arbitration by various independent parties has made it very clear that they, at least, recognize the significance of the full text of the tentative ruling, to which most of the public has not yet been made privy.

Not only that, but there is a very good chance that at least some of the arbitrations addressed by the lawsuit will be declared to be in default by the arbitrators before the next court hearing, which would be significant in light of the signaling by the judge about his reluctance to interfere with either the arbitrators or the arbitration process.

This reluctance should not be a surprise to anyone, given the deference that state and federal courts have given to arbitration. For example, here is one precedent from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals which the judge could cite in his final ruling, if he were so inclined. The key words here are “he bargains for the process”. And in the case of Patreon, it not only bargained for the process, but drafted and imposed it.

The parties bargained for arbitration. When one bargains for arbitration, he bargains for the process as well as the results. If Ocean had wanted to have the rigors of a federal court proceeding, it could have had them. Instead, it compelled arbitration and now, dissatisfied with the result, seeks a different outcome.
Kergosien v. Ocean Energy, Inc., 390 F.3d 346 (5th Cir. 2004)

A number of people have noted Ebay`s recent changes to its Terms of Use  and assumed they were made in response to Patreon`s situation. That may or may not be so, but regardless, the tweaks Ebay has applied to its dispute process don`t really address its intrinsic vulnerability to mass consumer action.

CGC-20-584586 (PATREON, INC. VS. PAUL MICHAEL AYURE ET AL)
will be heard at 12:30 PM Eastern and should go a long way towards ending the ongoing dispute between Owen, the 72 Bears, and Patreon.

Discuss amongst yourselves. Make predictions if you like, play armchair lawyer if you wish, and provide a running commentary for those who can’t watch if you’re so inclined, but be polite and respectful to all the parties.

UPDATE: The tentative ruling has been published on the Superior Court site by the judge.

Patreon seeks a preliminary injunction to enjoin defendants “from continuing to pursue improper claims against Patreon in JAMS arbitration,” pending this Court’s consideration and final adjudication of Patreon’s complaint for declaratory judgment. Defendants are individual claimants in 72 pending JAMS arbitration proceedings against Patreon. Patreon claims that those claims are barred by its Terms of Use. Patreon’s request for a preliminary injunction is denied, for several reasons.

And so it is back to arbitration they go, to face the reality of 91 defaulted arbitrations, among others.

UPDATE: The hearing went about as well as it could reasonably go, but the judge is not going to issue a ruling yet because Patreon’s lawyers produced some new arguments based on some new precedents that weren’t in their copious filings. So, the judge graciously allowed them more rope with which to hang themselves, since the reason they produced the new arguments was because their previous arguments had already been rejected. Randazza has ten days to rebut the relevance of the new citations, then the judge will issue his ruling.

This, by the way, is why Randazza was so uncharacteristically unchallenging, even when Patreon was making totally false claims about having provided sufficient notice. He did make one very substantive and well-substantiated point, however, about the date of the applicable terms being from “the date of accrual”, or the date on which notice was given, rather than from the date of the actual filing as Patreon has been arguing. Which, of course, renders Patreon’s entire case a non-starter.

As for what will happen next, there are two important things to note here. First, the emergency injunction was not granted. Second, none of these new issues to be addressed have anything to do with the injunction. So, in addition to the evidence of the reasoning behind the tentative ruling, what we can deduce is that the judge is not merely going to reject the injunction, he is probably going to throw out the case in his ruling.

This complete lack of a response to one of the core elements of the dispute pretty much tells you everything you need to know about how next week’s hearing is likely to go.

• JAMS issued a second letter on March 12, 2020, stating that JAMS would not issue a blanket stay for numerous separate arbitrations.  Specifically, the March 12 JAMS Letter stated: “Patreon’s Terms of Use state that arbitrations ‘may only take place on an individual basis’ and no ‘grouping of parties is allowed.’  (Terms of Use, pages 4 – 5). 
• In fact, this matter is subject to dismissal under even the Purported Amendment.  The dispute resolution clause expressly states that “[n]o class arbitrations or other grouping of parties is allowed.”  Patreon, here, has made a grouping of Defendants.  By its own terms, it is not entitled to file this suit and seek the relief it requests.  Patreon is not entitled to an injunction that covers 72 defendants as a group—just as Patreon chose to deny Defendants the ability to join as a group and engage in collective action, it cannot now be allowed to obtain an injunction in violation of that term.
• – DEFENDANTS’ OPPOSITION TO MOTION FOR ISSUANCE OF PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION

SEARCH “grouping”

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– PLAINTIFF PATREON, INC.’S REPLY IN SUPPORT OF REQUEST FOR PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION [Filed concurrently with Declarations of Colin Sullivan and Tyler M. Layton in Support of Reply]

The irony is that Patreon is now complaining about the way a number of the Bears being sued have put Patreon on notice that they will find themselves facing more arbitrations due to Patreon’s breach of contract involved in bringing the group lawsuit. Their Head of Legal cried about it in their most recent filing with a classic “this just proves” argument that would almost make one mistake him for a bowtie-wearing National Review conservative.

On July 2, 2020, I received emails from 15 Defendants, informing me that unless Patreon withdraws this lawsuit, they intend to commence new arbitrations before JAMS claiming that Patreon’s filing of this lawsuit, to enforce the amended Terms of Use, is a breach of the Terms of Use.  Given that Defendants are already challenging the amended Terms of Use in their already pending arbitrations, this confirms that Defendants’ actual goal is to multiply the number of duplicative proceedings to maximize costs to Patreon, in the hopes they can eventually exceed Patreon’s ability to pay.  That outcome would be an irreparable harm.
– Declaration of Colin Sullivan in Support of Reply

It doesn’t prove anything of the sort. To the contrary, informing Patreon that new arbitrations will be commenced if the breach of contract isn’t cured is exactly what Patreon’s Terms of Use require the Bears to do in light of Patreon’s obvious breach of the contract, as spelled out in the very emails about which he is complaining.

I am sending you this notice pursuant to the procedures stipulated in Patreon’s Terms of Use to inform Pateron, Inc. that the filing of case CGC-20-584586 against myself and 71 other individuals constitutes a blatant breach of its own Terms, which, as you know, clearly prohibit the grouping of parties.

No class arbitrations or other grouping of parties is allowed. By agreeing to these terms you are waiving your right to trial by jury or to participate in a class action or representative proceeding; we are also waiving these rights.

Patreon very clearly waived its rights to participate in the very lawsuit it filed. They not only have no right to an emergency injunction, they have no right to be in that courtroom for those purposes at all. So, they should hardly be surprised when the people they are suing call them out for that.

As I mentioned previously, Patreon has taken the highly unusual tactic of attempting to sue its customers for doing exactly what they are required to do in the terms of use, and in the process, it has publicly admitted to its deceptive practices in the legal filing.

We’re clearly not dealing with the legal equivalent of rocket scientists here.

In brief, Patreon required users to first talk to them, and then go to arbitration if the matter could not be resolved by the discussion.

We encourage you to contact us if you have an issue. If a dispute does arise out of these terms or related to your use of Patreon, and it cannot be resolved after you talk with us, then it must be resolved by arbitration. 

Patreon created the dispute by deplatforming Owen and intentionally interfering in the relationship between him and his supporters. So, Owen and the Bears talked to Patreon about the dispute as required by the terms of use. Their response was to shriek that they were being extorted… in at least one case by someone who had never had any contact with them. Since the issue could not be resolved, Patreon was informed that Owen and the Bears would be going to arbitration. But before the arbitrations were filed, Patreon surreptitiously altered its terms of use to bar one specific thing: one of the issues that it had been informed would be involved in the arbitration claim, namely, its tortious interference in the separate economic contract between Owen and his supporters. On December 19, 2019, Patreon slipped this little change into its terms of use without notifying anyone.

This clause does not limit either party’s ability to file an action in a court with jurisdiction to seek injunctive or other equitable relief for disputes relating to intellectual property, proprietary data or to enforce this dispute resolution clause, including your agreement not to assert claims related to the suspension or termination of another person’s account. In any such action, the court rather than an arbitrator must decide whether such a claim is arbitrable and must decide whether the party is entitled to the requested injunctive or other equitable relief.

Now, this is clearly a Deceptive Practice under 1770, which bars the insertion of an unconscionable clause into a contract. No contract can require your agreement to accept tortious interference or any other violation of your civil rights. That wasn’t the only Deceptive Practice committed in Patreon’s alteration of its terms of use, but that is the only one relevant here, so we won’t go any deeper into that subject for the time being. Furthermore, both the arbitration company and various arbitrators have already, and repeatedly, ruled that the claims are arbitrable.

On January 3rd, the Bears filed for arbitration, separately, as required by the terms of use. So what Patreon is now asserting is that because those users filed demands for arbitration, they did so in violation of the revised terms that were deceptively changed 12 days earlier in direct response to their initial contractually-required notice… even though Patreon didn’t notify them of the change. If that sounds exceptionally stupid to you, that’s because it is. Patreon’s legal situation is actually even more precarious than I’ve described it here, because the whole point of requiring individual arbitrations in the first place is to avoid class-action lawsuits, but Patreon has just filed a lawsuit against a class, both aspects of which are specifically barred by the contract. In other words, in this very lawsuit, Patreon has actually done what they falsely accuse these Bears of having done.

Since a lawsuit is a matter of public record whereas an arbitration is not, the Owen-haters on Reddit have just published all the names of the Bears being sued by Patreon. Needless to say, the Legion is on it and we will be legally retaliating very strongly in order to see that Patreon and their lawyers are severely punished for this despicable and unexpected tactic. But the doxxing has already taken place, so if any of you experiences any blowback from this, please be sure to document everything and let us know right away so that the Legion can include everything in their future filings concerning this element of the matter.

If you’re one of the Bears concerned, please don’t worry about anything. It’s going to be fine. The Legion – and more – are on it, and everyone will have your back, just as you have had Owen’s. This is an absolutely desperate move by Patreon to try to further delay your arbitrations against them because they are losing very badly. And if you’re wondering how this joke of a lawsuit can be a matter of public record when you haven’t even been served, exactly. As you can see here, Patreon’s lawyers are not following any of the rules of either the legal or the arbitration processes, which is one of the reasons they are losing so consistently and comprehensively.

Anyhow, I’ll be doing a Darkstream today and will address questions about the matter from everyone. The key right now is to remain calm, remain together, and have faith that we will be completely victorious in the end. This is not our first rodeo. We will win. And while we didn’t anticipate this level of utter lunacy from Patreon, or their desperate refusal to accept the inevitable, the enemy always gets a vote.

So, it is increasingly looking like there either won’t be a Patreon by the end of the year or Owen and the Bears will own it. It’s rather like finding yourself fighting a duel with someone who genuinely believes his most effective attack is to disembowel himself.

I deleted my Linkedin account today. There were no platform problems or anything, it was merely that I’d seen reporters use it to try to get access to people with whom I’m acquainted, and I recently heard from one member of the Legal Legion that he’d caught a lawyer from one former opponent looking at his page.

So, there was some risk inherent in being on there, however low, and absolutely no reward of any kind except occasionally being able to make contact with old friends and colleagues. That was nice and all, but there are plenty of ways to do that without running the risk of colleagues and associates being targeted by reporters and SJWs; the recent brigading of one Webtoons episode serves as a reminder that there is no target too small for the damaged psyches of our enemies to attack.

I have no interest in the corpocracy.

If, at this point, you’re surprised that Disney is actively pushing occult wickedness on children, you are either more in denial than the grandmother of a kid who insists on calling himself “they” or you have been paying less attention than a sperg at a family gathering with a Nintendo Switch.

A new Disney animated television series released by  Disney Television Animation on Friday has many parents concerned that the House that Mickey Mouse Built has transitioned into giving children a bizarre pro-demon and witchcraft message.

The Owl House, created by  Dana Terrace, is described in the words of Disney: “The series follows self-assured teenage girl Luz, who discovers a portal to another realm where humans are not well-liked, and she must disguise herself in order to fit in at witch school.”

Luz, the main character is a 14-year-old Dominican-American teenager. Her mentor, Eda the Owl Lady, is the most powerful witch on the isles and a wanted criminal for selling magical items to humans. King is a demon warrior and Eda’s roommate

The evil nemesis in the story is a character named Warden Wrath who wears a plague doctor mask. Wrath keeps his enemies in a prison called the Conformatorium for the crime of being different from everyone else. The setting for the demon realm is on the Boiling Isles which is the decaying corpse of a titan.

It is a bit amusing that they’re still pushing that twisted old chestnut of “be different, like everyone else” though.

Who would have expected Michael Moore would take on one of the biggest shibboleths of the Left, the so-called Green movement and its massive globo-corporate charade of “renewable energy”:

Examples include a zoo that claims to power itself on ‘renewable’ elephant dung but only produces enough to heat the elephant house.

They film a supposedly solar-powered music festival that quietly plugs into the grid and a similar arrangement at General Motors’ HQ at the launch of a hybrid, plug-in car, where the electricity grid powering the vehicle is ’95 per cent’ fed by coal.

The film also takes issue with solar panels, highlighting their limited shelf-life and that they are made from non-renewable quartz and coal.

In another sequence, joshua trees are chopped down in California so a huge solar facility can be built.

Moore’s documentary is particularly damning of ‘biomass’, the supposedly-renewable energy created by burning organic matter. The film shows huge piles of trees that have been chopped down to feed a power plant, its chimney belching out smoke that appears far from environmentally sound.

Viewers are told biomass is the biggest single source of renewable energy around the world, and — nonsensically given it is supposed to be about energy conservation — has involved wood chips being shipped to Europe from North America, Brazil and Indonesia.

‘Our anxiety over [global] warming has panicked us into embracing anything green or alternative without actually looking too closely at what is involved,’ the film states. With plans to turn animal fat into biomass fuel, the film asks: ‘Is there anything too terrible to qualify as green energy?’

The film suggests that mega-rich businessmen — including Sir Richard Branson and British timber investor Jeremy Grantham — and banks such as Goldman Sachs — are keen to invest in green energy because they want to make a quick buck rather than because they are worried for the planet. According to Moore, Toyota, Citibank and bulldozer giant Caterpillar becoming sponsors of Earth Day provided final confirmation that Big Business has taken over the green movement.

When they had picked their jaws off the floor, the first response from some of the climate scientists and environmental campaigners who have been enthusiasts for renewable energy delighted their opponents — they wanted to ban it.

The truth is always the most powerful rhetoric.