Party Pooper Thunberg Kills Big Biz Buzz at COP26

Greta Thunberg

Swedish teenage environmental rock star and party-pooper Greta Thunberg has trashed the COP26 climate change conference as failure and a greenwash festival.

"The COP has turned into a PR event, where leaders are giving beautiful speeches and announcing fancy commitments and targets, while behind the curtains governments of the Global North countries are still refuising to take any drastic climate action," said the 18-year-old.

Publicity hound Thunberg ignores achievements such as slashing methane gas emissions and financing deals to help developing countries cut greenhouse gas emissions.

As she spouts, Amy Poehler, Michael Cain, Amy Schumer and Susan Rockefeller want to punish Edelman for representing ExxonMobil and Shell Oil that are among the world’s worst polluters.

The CleanCreatives group that is committed to exposing Edelman’s alleged greenwashing claims it has had several private conversations with the No. 1 firm that have gone nowhere.

It wants Edelman to drop ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel clients.

An Edelman spokesperson said the firm is focused on "helping our clients across all industries advance their own sustainability commitments."

The firm believes “it is important for us to have a seat at the table with our clients and that we have an obligation to do more—not less—work related to climate change,” according to a statement provided to O'Dwyer's.

That's great stuff but how does your firm's boss, ExxonMobil, feel about that?

Uh-oh….. It’s generally not a good sign when the CEO of a publicly traded company says “We are a real company” during a conference.

But that’s what Rick Dauch, CEO of Workhorse Group, maker of electric vans, told investors during his Nov. 9 call when he broke the news that the Cincinnati-based company reported negative revenue of $576,602 during the third quarter.

It’s hard to put a spin on that sad number.

Dauch reported less than zero revenues because Workhorse had to refund customers $1.1M for the recall of Workhorse’s C-1000 commercial vehicles.

Workhorse’s sub-zero revenues even overshadowed the company’s $81.1M net loss in the third quarter, which was a tad better than the $84.1M for the same period last year.

Loss from operations rose from $9.8M to $25.5M, partly due to a shutdown of the assembly line related to the recall.

To be fair to Dauch, he jumped into the Workhorse driver’s seat in July.

Workhorse founder Steve Burns in 2019 agreed to buy a Lordstown, OH, auto plant that was shut down by General Motors.

Then-president Trump hailed the move and Burns left Workhorse to run Lordstown Motors, which has its own financial and operational problems.

Lordstown reports its financials on Nov. 11. There is a connection between the two sorry Ohio vehicle companies. Workhorse reported that "other loss" increased to $77.1M during Q3 compared to zero last year primarily due to the decrease in fair value and the sale of its investment in Lordstown.

Dauch is looking to the future as his company is testing a redesigned C-1000 and expects to unveil a production forecast during Q1 2022.

He is optimistic that Workhorse “will be prepared to deliver the best-in-class vehicles for the commercial electric vehicle market starting in 2023.”

There’s a big difference between being prepared and actually delivering the C-1000 goods.