One of the UK’s most valuable listed companies is to sell its shares directly on the rival New York Stock Exchange, in a move described as a “knock back for London”.

While AstraZeneca will maintain its headquarters in the UK and its primary stock listing on the London Stock Exchange, the news can be seen as a move away from London.

“Although there has been no suggestion that AstraZeneca is imminently going to up sticks and move its primary listing from London, there may be some nervousness this morning around the risk that the UK market might lose one of its largest constituents,” said Russ Mould, the investment director of investment platform AJ Bell.

Read more:
AstraZeneca exit is a frightening prospect for the City and the government

The news “does at least hint at the possibility of a more dramatic shift at some point in the future”, Mr Mould said.

There may also be relief that AstraZeneca is not moving from the London Stock Exchange altogether.

“I think there is probably relief that it’s not pursuing a primary listing in New York, but the decision is hardly a ringing endorsement of London,” said Neil Wilson, the UK investor strategist at investment platform Saxo Markets.

“It reflects the fundamental, structural issues in the UK for the largest globally-oriented stocks – the depth and liquidity of its capital markets is falling short of what’s on offer across the pond.”

“It’s also a bit of a knock-back for London”, Mr Wilson said.

Why is this happening?

The Cambridge-based pharmaceutical company said the decision to sell shares directly on the New York Stock Exchange – rather than the previous less straightforward system of using American depository receipts – has been made to allow it “to reach a broader mix of global investors” and “make it even more attractive for all our shareholders”.

“The US has the world’s largest and most liquid public markets by capitalisation, and the largest pool of innovative biopharma companies and investors,” the company said in an announcement to investors.

AstraZeneca’s share price was up 0.7% on the news.

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Rachel Reeves gets her moment in Liverpool, but Sam and Anne explain why the podium at Labour conference might be the second biggest thing of her week.

By Friday, the OBR will have put a number on the size of the black hole – the money she’s got to find to fund U-turns on policies such as winter fuel.

You’re not getting that number from anyone from government in Liverpool though.

Elsewhere, Andy Burnham is still in lots of the conversations – and we hear what members of the cabinet are getting about him in their WhatsApps.

In its mission to destroy American energy independence, the Energy Department has now banned any discussion of any of the technologies that might get America off of foreign oil, or of the problem that those technologies might solve – and all at the behest of the former oil executive who wants to raise your fuel prices in order to steal more of your money for his industry.

To begin this article, here are some facts:

• The global climate is warming, and it is warming due to human activity.
• The human activity that is warming the global climate the most is fossil fuel combustion.
• There are other things warming the global climate as well, including the meat industry (both through methane emissions from livestock and through deforestation of the land to grow them and their feed), construction (cement releases significant CO2, though not as much as the previous influences), and others. But fossil fuels are the primary cause.
• That global temperature rise puts many ecosystems out of balance, with disastrous results for those ecosystems.
• Humans rely on functioning ecosystems for their most basic needs – water, air, food, temperature regulation, and so on.
• As ecosystems are disrupted, this will make humans’ lives harder and worse, and lead to greater conflict.
• The fossil fuel industry spends a lot of money and effort to deny and obfuscate these facts because it knows its products are responsible for climate change.

Now that we all understand some of the basic facts about climate change that no serious person contests, let us continue.

On Friday, a memo was sent out to the Energy Dept.’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, as reported by Politico. Currently, the titular head of the US Energy Department is Chris Wright, a former oil CEO who has repeatedly peddled false statements about climate change in his self-serving attempts to enrich his deadly industry at great cost to the general public.

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The memo was sent to the Department by Rachel Overbey, acting director of external affairs. Rachel describes herself as an “Oil & Gas Industry Leader” and as a “Political Appointee” – which is to say, not a scientist, and rather someone who was installed into their position by the dumbest person on the planet.

The memo censors Department of Energy employees, telling them not to use a number of phrases that are relevant to their position and to solving the greatest challenge that humanity has ever created for itself: climate change.

Among the list of words and phrases that the memo seeks to censor are:

• Climate change
• Green
• Decarbonization
• Emissions
• Energy Transition
• Sustainability/sustainable
• “Clean” or “dirty” energy
• Carbon/CO2 footprint
• Tax breaks/tax credits/subsidies

Not only can the workers and scientists in the Department not use these words when communicating to the public, but they’re not even supposed to use them in internal communications.

Memo timed alongside other moves to harm American energy

The timing of the memo is interesting, given that public comment just ended on a plan from the DoE and EPA to delete climate science with the goal of raising your fuel costs by $.76/gallon to fill the pockets of Wright and his oil buddies. The DoE openly admitted earlier this year, in a report signed off on by Chris Wright, that its plan would increase your fuel costs, although its analysis did not include the increased health costs that would come along with the higher levels of pollution that dirty fossil fuel energy would cause.

It is in keeping with the republican plan to harm US energy security and raise costs for Americans. The party has been actively seeking to reduce American energy independence and raise your costs in several ways over the course of the last year.

In keeping with this effort, the Energy Department bragged about a move to raise your energy costs last Wednesday, by stating that it would seize $13 billion in funds that had been allocated to energy efficiency. Wright claimed that the green energy businesses these funds were intended for were “not a business that’s going places” if they rely on subsidies, despite the fact that his industry, fossil fuels, is subsidized in the amount of around $700 billion per year in the US alone (out of $7 trillion globally).

Wright of course did not do anything to reduce that massive subsidy for oil – instead choosing to continue stealing your money (and harming your health) for the oil elites he’s out to benefit.

Which makes the last word on the above list quite interesting – the fact that the Department of Energy doesn’t want to talk about subsidies is perhaps a recognition from the oil stooge squatting in its head office that he’d rather not talk about the massive amounts of subsidy that his industry gets. He’d rather keep pulling the wool over the eyes of the American public, fleecing all of us for all we have as he continues to make us poorer and sicker.

Instead of aiding energy independence, Wright lies about it

And all of this comes at the expense of American energy independence. As it turns out, the most oil-rich nations who have spent a century or more getting the world addicted to their poison don’t tend to “play nice,” because they know they don’t have to as long as everyone is addicted.

Gulf oil nations have extremely high slave populations and murder journalists with impunity, Russia has waged war with little opposition due to historical European addiction to its methane gas, representatives from the US went to a climate conference to try to bully the world into buying more deadly methane (including the dumbest speech ever by a guy who has been wrong about everything), and somehow everyone seems to have forgotten that weekend where not one, but two seas caught fire.

Meanwhile, high penetration of renewables actually increases energy independence. Not only can you generate electricity with resources that exist in abundance within your borders (whether that be sunlight, wind, hydropower, etc), you can then use that to drive more efficient equipment and make the energy you have go farther to benefit your people – far better than having to sell yourself out to nations that have proven themselves to be bad neighbors.

For example, a gallon of oil with 33.7kWh of energy can move your average car 24 miles down the road. Meanwhile, 33.7kWh can move most EVs over 100 miles down the road – meaning you can take the same amount of energy and do more than 4x as much with it.

That’s a huge boon to a nation’s overall productivity, and one that several nations have noticed and acted on with policy, like Ethiopia and Nepal for example. Another nation that has noticed that is the US, where public opinion is widely on the side of climate action and where a more popular government took big climate action three years ago, which the saboteurs now at the wheel are currently trying to reverse.

By working to reduce funding for energy efficiency, and increasing reliance on foreign oil instead of building a green energy economy, all Wright does is sell the US out to his oil buddies, making us sicker and poorer for the benefit of the elites he serves.

And by going to international climate talks with the kind of idiotic, isolating message that isn’t tricking anyone else on the planet, all he and his ilk do is push the rest of the world into the arms of China, which has declared itself as the global leader in confronting the greatest challenge of our time.

But then, this memo is also an admission by oil clowns like Wright (and Zeldin) that they don’t have information on their side and must resort to Orwellian tactics. If they were actually right, they wouldn’t need to ban discussion of these words, because their ideas would stand on their own. And they wouldn’t need to fabricate reports that are immediately contradicted by the sources they use.

But their ideas don’t stand on anything… other than the literal millions of dead bodies per year caused by fossil fuel pollution. Not the best foundation, so I guess the last resort is just to lie about it.

If you’re actually interested in energy independence unlike Chris Wright, consider home solar. The 30% federal solar tax credit is ending this year, so now’s the time to act. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.

Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here.