Its easy for that to sound like, “we all bear equal blame” which is giving certain entities a big pass.
Humans are animals. We frequently trick ourselves and each other into believing that we are somehow more than that, exempt from the laws of ecology… but if that were somehow true, we would be fretting a whole different set of problems by now.
This notion that the creator of everything gave us the deed of ownership to all of nature, kind of epitomizes the problem right there. And its become just about impossible to tell a son of Adam what he can and cannot do with his property, be it guns or oil wells.
The Reserve Bank has been warned it may have to buy up coal mines and fossil-fuel power stations as part of extraordinary actions to save the economy from climate change-induced financial disaster.
From the story alone (the report isn’t linked, maybe there’s more in the video, which I didn’t watch), it’s not clear whether they’re talking about buying them to preserve them or buying them to shut them down. Either way, shareholders would be taken care of while everyone else pays for it.
I’m sure members of the shareholder class would prefer this to having these businesses outlawed, nationalized by edict, or ruined by plummeting demand.
The article combines three separate reports – from 1) Bank of International Settlements 2) IMF and 3) Deloitte – into a single story.
That’s actually a brilliant solution, if you have to stay within the realm of capitalism. Buying up the offenders means the investors will be willing to step away: there will be a clause about them never getting sued for the damage they’ve caused, which is maddening but unfortunately that’s how it’s going to work. At least it would stop the damage moving forward. No one other than a government agency can make the kind of deal needed to get them to stop.
Requires a political will notably lacking in this day and time. Otherwise, would be one of those “no one is totally happy, but the world is a better place” kind of solutions. Would I love to see the investors held responsible? Sure, until you start to think how many of them are teachers with pension funds invested, or me, with a 401k invested who-knows-where. What a mess.
She needs to go to college so she can be indoctrinated with liberal ideology? (oh wait wrong talking point…*shuffles papers…its because she dumb and you can only listen to smart people, unless they disagree with your bottom line)
Even before we became as aware as some of us now are of climate change, and of the fact that our species has inadvertently caused it, we seemed to be losing our sense of a capital-F Future. Few phrases were as common throughout the 20th century as “the 21st century,” yet how often do we see “the 22nd century”? Effectively, never.
That’s interesting. I think that’s because since at least the 80s, we’ve been imagining pretty bleak futures (with a few exceptions, Star Trek, notably). We’ve spent time looking at what we’ve actually done on this planet, to the planet, the environment, the animals, the trees, the water, and to each other, and we have no idea how to undo all that and move forward productively… Maybe he’s right that people should be writing from the perspective that we can and do get through this and come out the other side (22nd century) in a better position, if only because it will give people hope and a direction to head towards in making better decisions.
