Post-industrial and neo-technological societies have rigorously separated the stories of cultural values and those of the earth’s nature and climate. Human civilizations have been fully dependent on the wilderness of nature and the particularities of climate for their survival and success for millennia. It is understandable that this decoupling in the 20’th century was inevitably perceived as a desirable outcome. For some years now these two stories are coming together once again meshed by the increased unpredictability and volatility of extreme climate events and their recorded and proven impacts on society at large. They are coming together at a time of repeated signs of perceived and real social and economic fragility, which if not absorbed and equitably remediated may trigger systemic changes. Many complex constructs are used to define systemic change. Among them are some traditional ones of economic shock and of increased volatilities in financial markets. More tangible and physical constructs appeal to unique economic issue such as of the widening gap in insurance coverage. Most recently some modern constructs of climate inequality bring together the stories of nature and social issues on the same conceptual and policy plane. All of these constructs and stories contain an element of social fragility. These formalized concepts are part of a language, which is built to abstract from reality and to adapt to academic, scientific and policy research and its consecutive conversations. Yet, these are not only theoretical constructs, but also tangible stories describing social catastrophes already experienced in recent historical realities. The misfortunes of climate change, pandemic and armed conflict emphasize the fragility of our modern society. These experiences of stress, destruction and loss have vividly erased the distinction between the economic and political impact of natural, health and man-made catastrophes and the sheer human disaster and suffering. They have also raised the need for an immediate examination of the sustainability and legitimacy of many current cultural norms. This process of examination is intended to lead to a proposition that for a cultural norm to be legitimate it must be found socially sustainable and socially resilient. The resilience of a social system becomes a requirement for its own legitimacy. It is well understood and accepted that a social order must protect the life, property and essential liberties of the people who belong to it to be found legitimate. The cultural definition of social resilience and sustainability may vary to some degree across geographical regions and political systems but there is some broad consensus. There is even less divergence in understanding that social resilience in itself becomes the indispensable foundation for systemic legitimacy.
Social resilience for the purpose of this analysis is defined as the ability of a society to adapt and absorb large shocks and externalities caused by excess climate volatility and unpredictability. In general resilience is achieved through preparation for extreme, highly unfavorable, and catastrophic outcomes oftentimes cascading through all nodes of the systemic structure. Systemic architects build tiers of reserves and pockets of conserved energy, which are designed to absorb catastrophic shocks. Still systemic reserves and endurance are an exhaustible resource. Once such resources are depleted, catastrophic shocks through a process of network contagion may have deep cascading effects into social and economic layers, previously considered riskless. Such impacts may lead to systemic collapse and full or partial reorganization of many systemic nodes and layers. The processes of collapse and reorganization may be gradual and of evolutionary nature, but it may also be of a sudden and catastrophic nature. In both cases social resilience towards environmental and climate shocks and catastrophes can never be infinite. Remediating the impacts of climate and natural disasters in an equitable manner becomes a common measure of societal endurance. The various degrees of this systemic ability to provide equitable remediation and then recovery from a catastrophic shock have become a comparative metric of systemic resilience. Systemic stability thus becomes a measure of the veracity of social and political systems. Once systemic and social resilience is brought into macro-economic and macro-financial policy discussions, there grows a need for providing a transition and mapping in definitions and measures. This is not a transition and remapping of exclusively and purely technical definitions. This transition is also about a redefinition of a cultural measure – being a measure of value, which must be associated with the legitimacy of current economic and political enterprises. Furthermore, this transition must be about providing information and a degree of evaluation of the durability and longevity of its underlining social establishment. A cultural measure thus must contain valued societal information. This transition is also required to both stimulate and defend the need for a revision of cultural values in such manner that they unquestionably enhance systemic legitimacy. This new dominion of cultural values must contribute to systemic sustainability and thus must have systemic resilience at its core to be legitimate.
The process of economic globalization at a time of lower climate predictability, at a time of growing volatility in extreme natural catastrophes provides this very ground necessary to intertwine the stories of nature and social values. These premises allow an examination of a twofold need for both redefinition of values and for reclaimed systemic legitimacy. The foundations of the current version of the global economy can be traced back to about forty years. The first phase of globalization is about economic growth and accumulation of wealth. It is about the advancement of technological knowledge and building of interconnectivity among regional and national financial, trade and economic systems. These were years of continuous economic growth. They fostered the progress of the established model and the acceptance of its very outcomes. The economic statistics of the period were convincingly reinforcing the intellectual and technical analysis. Absolute and per capita gross domestic product metrics were rapidly raising. The proverbial tide was lifting all boats – big and small. GDP growth as a measure of the economic effectiveness of the system assumed unlimited and boundaryless resources. This economic success blunted our intuition accumulated from historical experience and our historical cognition gained from studying natural sciences and mathematics. These exact sciences have always maintained that every physical system and every physical process have boundary conditions and limitations. Once these boundary conditions are breached, otherwise and previously stable systems and processes collapse or may perform in chaotic and shockingly unrecognizable manner. From first principles of system’s theory, it is established that breaking through one boundary condition may be sufficient to shock a system and throw it into a state of chaos or collapse. In the last two decades we have broken through three such boundaries of stability – these of efficient markets, of the resilience of global health, and of the predictability of the earth’s climate as a vital natural resource. The breach and exhaustion of these limits reveals previously hidden costs of our economic model at a time of disruption and instability. At present there is no recognizable political system, which can survive, let alone succeed without economic growth being its primary objective. Furthermore, for three centuries, since the onset of the industrial revolutions, the expansion and intensity of our drive towards growth and wealth rendered to second order the values of environmental protection and maintaining the stability and predictability of the earth’s climate.
In this inevitable entanglement of risk factors, cultural values and measures of systemic legitimacy, there is a critical component, which is rarely discussed. This is the impact of moral hazard. The scenario of its emergence has been experienced previously in other settings and can be foreseen with certainty. The measurements of disaster and shock in health and economic systems and their contagion effects upon social fragility have been observed and presented to the public discourse. Counter measures of remediation are also defined and refined. Both types of measures are examined and validated by technical and political authorities and thus may become reflected in established policy. During this process there is an element of moral hazard of such policy innovation being implemented only in physical, statistical, economic and health metrics but not yet becoming deeply embedded in cultural values, that are well accepted in society. It is still by no means necessary that this process of exploration, investigation, and policy definition in itself will lead to a transition in cultural values. There is no mandatory social provision or entity that requires this transition to take place or makes it inevitable. Such a transition to a new set of cultural values cannot be mandated. It cannot be enforced. If moral hazard is allowed to become the preponderant ethical concern in the process of value transition, itself accelerated by rapid systemic change, then systemic legitimacy will be endangered. Thus, the only mechanism which remains to facilitate a transition to a new set of moral values is a widely accepted necessity at all societal levels to ensure the survival of systemic legitimacy.
The development of the global economic system is one process where an emerging transition and mapping of new cultural values may express itself for observation. A transition and remapping of value must then overwhelm all other considerations to become embedded in the values representing the second phase of globalization. The only intellectual force which is capable of accomplishing this drive is the search for systemic survival and legitimacy. By this logic the second phase of globalization should establish itself to be about managing common and existential threats from natural catastrophes and extreme climate events as much as it would be about economic growth and wealth accumulation. A new global economic system is thus deemed timely for design. This one must balance twin objectives – growth and wealth creation on one side with sustainability and preservation of natural, human and climate resources on the other. The importance of balance among these two objectives is undisputable. However, the instruments of balance are far from being yet available. The current economic model is fully and well equipped with all the instruments and techniques of causing a profound disbalance. To pursue the objective of economic growth and accumulation of wealth tools and frameworks refined over hundreds and in many cases over thousands of years are well established. These are goods, commodities and financial markets with their domestic and international trade agreements and their investment and growth policies. The mastery of economic growth presents a danger of allowing self-deception to grow in society of its mastery over nature. The lessons learned every day from climate science reveal elemental forces that can bring about a redefinition of the path of civilization. These same earth and physical sciences show society with every newly compiled scientific report that the story of growing climate unpredictability and its adverse outcome of extreme catastrophic events is also a human story. Balance rather than mastery should be the only sustainable and legitimate principle in the further development and unfolding of this story. To pursue a balance with a new set of values, which center on preserving natural and climate resources, at present society is inadequately, and better still, quite ill equipped for the task. We are unequally equipped to pursue balance and hence the most likely outcome is disbalance and inequality of outcomes. The hard task has become not whether and when but how to find with urgency a new set of moral values which will underwrite this story of balance and stability.
Our current civilization and its economic model have honed and perfected instruments and processes for economic growth for many years. This drive to succeed economically to accumulate wealth has become genetically engrained in many who subscribe to the values of contemporary civilization. It has become a part of the human story. So far this has been a tremendously positive story of our civilization. Now a time has come, where a natural resource upon which this drive depends so thoroughly and unequivocally, namely the predictability of earth’s climate, has run short of its previously unquestioned stability. There are no social preparations for this turn of things. A comparison is highly illustrative between the enormous accumulation of tools, treaties, international and state structures on trade, development, and investment to what we have to manage and balance a newly defined instability. The modern pace of knowledge creation and technological development allows states, societies in general, to quickly build a comparable machinery of institutions, treaties, and processes for managing this risk, and to ensure sustainability and predictability of this natural resource of earth’s climate. This can be done in a relatively short period of time.
The essence of these two human activities – the pursuit of economic growth and the preservation of a fundamental natural resource, defined as the stability and predictability of climate can no longer be mutually exclusive. Societies have trained themselves to succeed in the former for many generations and yet they are only in the first generation to face the need to be equally effective in the latter. The time of a single generation must be sufficient to raise a civilization to the magnitude of this task. This amounts to a shift in cultural values. The definition of economic success must and will continue to encompass growth and wealth accumulation. An updated and modern definition must balance these with environmental sustainability, personal and public health, and general well-being. Market and economic stability and success are no longer sufficient to define systemic success. This transition of values must hold true at the level of the corporation, the public sector, an administrative region and even the sovereign state and the international institution. The interconnections between the lack of climate predictability, excess climate volatility and the emergence of new frameworks of values in economic and political activity are not straightforward and linear. Herein the technical definition and social perceptions of the concept of systemic stability are changing. The new and emerging technical definition implies moral sentiment. Work aimed at accomplishing the definition of systemic success is a work to gain ownership of the present and the future. The criteria of systemic stability now become a set of shared values and shared technical definitions. While technical definitions are much easier to change values alter through a much slower process of evolution, transition, and remapping. Organizations, regions, states which can provide this desired stability will be defined and accepted as successful both in economic and social terms. The alternative will be considered systemic failures. If an institution cannot be the source of its own stability and sustainability, then it is by all laws of nature and economics a failed entity.
The mechanics of markets, trade, and investment work without the intervention of a hegemon. Nonetheless they tend to have self-correction and recovery memories and capabilities and thus provide their own state of stability. However, at present, both cultural traditions and market frameworks are missing a moral sentiment needed for fostering sustainability and recovery of a natural resource as vital as climate stability and predictability. Only until recently, this resource was deemed to be boundless. The transition and remapping of values will require that now this resource is seen as a basic tenet of the legitimacy of social cultures. In a broader perspective it is evident that climate issues are local, institutional, and individual and they impact communities and organizations differently. Thus, for a transition to a new set of cultural values to take place the work and preparations needs to take priority. The lack of a globally accepted framework and a hegemonic plan of action with an existing philosophical current deeply vested in resolving these challenges emphasizes the need for collaboration. Resolving and managing a global crisis of an essential natural resource without core and periphery, without clearly defined geographical and social hierarchies is a collaborative effort of the largest possible scale. A framework of collaboration will withstand the pressures of chaotic action born from the lack of rigid contractual frameworks. This collaboration is vitally needed at all systemic levels – the state and region, the corporation, university, and the non-governmental, civic, and military institutions.
In a new regime of torrential change in a global system lacking a pronounced hegemon, agreement is unsurprisingly hard on who should bear the cost of action. In such a circumstance there simply cannot be an authoritative prescription of who should define the mitigation of risk and its consequences. On the level of cultural and social values there cannot be an authority which demands the right and the obligation to change a person’s or a social group’s way of life. Hence it is essential to treat global climate risk as a unifying concept of common human heritage. The concept must be allowed to evolve into an item of collaboration and to allow various degrees of its adoption. Out of this collaborative effort climate and health stability fostering services would be generated and simultaneously would become sources of newly created economic and social wealth. This new kind of wealth creation is driven by both the self-interest of all actors, and by the process of collaboration and collective understanding of the vital challenges at hand. Systemic stability, which includes climate and health factors relies for its success and endurance on this accumulation of self-interest and collective interest. At the human level this is an opportunity to connect the story of society and its desire for growth and its hidden pitfalls with the story of the tremendous power of the earth’s nature and its climate. Particularly in the advanced post-industrial and neo-technological societies these stories have been kept far apart for far too long. The excess volatility of climate, the accumulation of knowledge on the impacts of climate’s unpredictability are creating a societal opportunity to rethink these two stories. We must weave them together again, as our ancestors have always done this in the past.
Ivelin Zvezdov is a financial and insurance economist by training. He has masters' degrees from the Universities of St. Andrews and Oxford. He works on natural and man-made catastrophe modeling and product development for the (re)insurance industry. His research interests include climate change and environmental risk, contagion and propagation of systemic risk, sustainable and ecosystems approaches to managing natural resources. Mr. Zvezdov has published research papers on financial and insurance quantitative methods for risk management, and on environmental and biodiversity risk estimation.
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The ubiquitous plastic water bottle, crystal clear and shiny, can find its way into lakes, rivers and the oceans, carelessly discarded by cruise ships so notorious for the occasional dumping of garbage into the seas on long cruises; that bottle or parts of it can end up inside marine animals.
If plastic waste gets lodged in their stomachs, the poor creatures have a mistaken feeling of fullness and become nutritionally deprived causing an early death. Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) is the plastic used to make the bottles. It is light in weight, clear, has high strength and stiffness and high chemical resistance i.e. barrier properties — being also cheap makes it a desirable choice. But it takes centuries to degrade. Polycarbonates are used for the harder plastics like baby bottles and refillable ones, also for dinnerware, eyeglass lenses, even compact discs. And they form the protective lining for beverage and food cans. But research on a chemical, bisphenol A (BPA), used in its manufacture is a cause for concern: it disturbs the hormone estrogen, possibly increasing cancer risk. If BPA is no longer being used in baby bottles and sip cups, it still lines steel cans. The Food and Drug Administration maintains the amounts leaching into the contents do not pose a risk to human health. More than 380 million tonnes of plastic are produced annually worldwide. The figure represents what is around to pollute our environment if not disposed of safely. In the U.S., a total of 35.7 million tons of plastics were disposed of in municipal solid waste (MSW) in 2018, according to the American Chemistry Council. Landfills received 27 million tons. Another 5.6 million was combusted together with other MSW recovering energy for heating and power generation. Only 31 million tons were recycled representing less than 9 percent. For PET bottles the number is higher, closer to 29 percent. Aside from fossil fuels, big oil also produces lentil-sized plastic pellets called nurdles from petroleum. These are bought by manufacturers in large plastic sacks and fed into injection molding machines to make the everyday plastic items we see around us. As can be expected, the nurdles can be spilled — as an example, a container ship carrying them foundered a few years ago spreading them in the sea around the southeastern United States.
Trillions of nurdles are produced each year and sent to factories all over the globe. They are then melted and formed into various products – anything from plastic bottles to electronics to car parts. Unfortunately, not all nurdles are melted into products. Unregulated, 200,000 metric tonnes of nurdles, 10 trillion by number, end up in the oceans annually. Looking remarkably like fish eggs, these can even be swallowed by small fish, filling stomachs and causing starvation. Plastic bottles have been found inside marine mammals’ stomachs. And smaller pieces can find their way into the stomachs of littler creatures — fish, birds, oysters, to name a few.
Beached whales are often discovered to contain plastics in their stomach, sometimes in quantities large enough to have compromised feeding and digestion. One found in Scotland two years ago had ingested a horrendous 220 pounds of plastic.
Changing consuming habits can help. Plastic straws will take a couple of centuries or more to degrade. Why not straight from the glass or use a paper one. Regular coffee drinkers collecting their morning brew can bring their own favorite mug or an insulated container.
There is one piece of good news: a team of University of Texas scientists have developed a protein enzyme (FAST-PETase) which breaks down PET making it easier for natural decomposition.
In the end, as with most things, it’s up to us …
Northern India and Pakistan are experiencing an unusual heat wave. It is unusual for two reasons. First, because it has happened early in the summer, and second, because the last one occurred in 2015 only seven years ago, and such an extreme weather event is less frequent. Experts now say climate change will lead to longer heat waves and more often, affecting close to a billion people across the two countries.
The cities of Jacobabad and Sibi in Pakistan reached highs of 47C (116.6 F.) on Friday April 29, a record for any Pakistani city for this date. Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s Minister for Climate Change has called this a “spring-less year” as Pakistan has transitioned abruptly from the Winter season to Summer.
She also warned of Global Lake Outburst Floods (GLOF). Such lakes form because of snow melt on glaciers in the northern mountain ranges. A heat wave can cause snow to melt fast, turning the lakes into sources of raging, catastrophic torrents that rip out everything in their paths.
Minister Rehman reminded her audience that Pakistan has 3044 such lakes now, posing serious risks for the downstream population. If all that is not enough, the dry heat she noted also causes the mountains to be vulnerable “to forest fires and sudden combustion events, which we struggle to cope with.”
In India, the average maximum temperatures for April in the Northwest and Central regions, of 96.6 F and 100 F respectively, have been the highest ever recorded in 122 years of record keeping as reported by the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD). India is also listed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as among countries worst impacted by climate change.
Agriculture is also harmed as heat stress for millions of agricultural workers reduces their efficiency — they are forced to take breaks to cool down. It clearly affects other outdoor workers as well, as for example in construction.
Moreover, heat stress impacts wheat yields. In The Punjab, known as India’s bread basket, the average yield loss has been 5 quintal or 500 kilograms per hectare. In Pakistan too, sizzling temperatures and drying water reservoirs are expected to reduce crop yields.
Higher temperatures, as might be expected, also increase power demand, sometimes resulting in power cuts that make it even more difficult to cope with the heat. In some places, intermittent power cuts of up to 9 hours a day have forced school closures. West Bengal’s Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, being questioned by reporters on school closures, warned that severe heat is causing some children to suffer nosebleeds.
The other serious danger is heat stroke, a condition where the body can no longer cope with the heat. It can lead to unconsciousness and a very dangerous rise in body temperature that can be fatal in the worst cases.
The Indian subcontinent has a difficult summer ahead, and the stark reality is that those at the bottom of the economic ladder suffer the most. The impoverished living in the open in India’s cities sometimes pay the highest price. The current heat wave has caused 25 deaths in the Indian state of Maharashtra alone, reports the Times of India.
Life has never been easy for the very poor … in India or anywhere else but such is our world.
There is only one way that might work — all others (as will be documented here) can’t even possibly work:
Outlaw the purchasing of any stock or bond — any investment securities — in fossil-fuel extraction companies, such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal: any such company at all.
For an example of what that would do, consider the opening of the article “Wall Street Is Quietly Trading For The Return Of Russia”, at the investment-news site Zero Hedge, on March 5th:
For holders of Russian equities, the past week has been nothing short of a surreal, modern-day version of Dante’s 10th circle of hell, where in the span of just a few days virtually all Russian stocks have seen their value wiped out as a result of a barrage of western sanctions that have disconnected Russian equities from global capital markets and money flows, nowhere more visibly than in the stock of Russian Novatek PJSC, Russia’s second-largest natural gas producer and the world’s seventh-largest publicly traded company by natural gas production volume, which collapsed from $215 on Feb 16, to 65 cents a few days later.
This is what happens when a new law (in that particular case, new economic sanctions against Russia) is instituted making impossible for investors in a particular company to legally sell their stocks and bonds in that company: the investment immediately plunges nearly to zero in market-value. The legal markets are the only markets for stocks and bonds. No ‘black market’ exists for any stock or bond, because 100% of the value of any stock or bond depends upon an investor’s ability to sell it to another investor: there exists no “use”-value for that “piece of paper,” other than the ability of other people to buy it from you. It’s not like buying-and-selling an outlawed narcotic, or a stolen artwork — things that DO have ACTUAL uses other than for them to become resold to another buyer. Investment securities have NO OTHER VALUE than their RESALE-value.
Fossile-fuels companies and the global warming that they’ve produced have been extremely profitable for billionaires, even though many of those people mouth and endorse policies (but only — as will be documented here — failed and failing ones) against global warming.
On March 22nd, OilPrice-dot-com bannered “Big Oil Is No Longer ‘Unbankable’”, and reported that because of the soaring prices for fossil-fuels that are resulting from Russia’s being threatened with sanctions which would punish companies that purchase those fossil-fuels, fossil-fuel-investments are soaring — as a result of the consequently plunging fossil-fuel supplies: “It’s an open secret within energy circles that the eventual death of oil and thermal coal won’t come from environmentalists or even directly from renewable energy, but rather when big banks decide to stop financing it, rendering it ‘unbankable’. And the U.S. oil and gas sector came dangerously close to meeting that fate after Wall Street banks started disavowing oil and gas lending at the height of the ESG (environmental, social, and governance) craze. … But the lure of those juicy oil and gas dollars amid an energy boom has been proving hard for Wall Street banks to resist, leading to many throwing their ESG pledges out of the window.” In other words: Investors are investing upon the basis of profit-expectations; that’s the way an investment-market works. The ONLY way to stop this train will be to place an impassable barrier into its immediate path. That’s precisely what outlawing purchases of stocks and bonds in fossil-fuel extractors would do. So: everybody already knows that this would do what NO currently proposed proposal by (the pretended) ‘environmentalists’ would do: crash the stock-and-bond markets of fossil-fuel extractors. Unfortunately, the ‘environmentalists’ are just another front (the liberal front) of the fossil-fuel extractors — doing their (owners’) business of deceiving liberal voters. (Their conservative front is groups which deny that global warming is happening, or that humans are causing it.)
The public, themselves, are actually strongly opposed to global warming, but they are very confused about the matter, largely because the policies that are advocated (by billionaire-fronts) and that have been tried against global warming, don’t work. Billionaires (and their many employees and other agents) hide from the public the only policy that actually would work. (That, too, will be documented here.) The root-source of global warming is the billionaires who profit from it — NOT actually the public who buy those products.
Indeed, the public’s opposition to global warming is clearly shown in an 8 February 2022 poll published by Politico, headlined “Poll: Citizens globally blast politicians’ lack of action to combat climate change”. It reports that globally, fewer than 20% answer No (including both straight-out “No” and “No, probably not”) to “Should fossil fuel companies be held responsible for the impacts their products have on the environment?” Depending on the individual country, from 61% to 90% answer Yes (including both “Yes definitely” and “Yes probably”) to that question — they strongly do want corporations to be held accountable for their impacts on the environment. (The lowest “Yes” are in both Japan and Germany 65%, and in U.S. 68%; the highest “Yes” is in Russia 90%.)
Though they do strongly want “accountability,” they (as will be documented here) don’t know how it can be imposed in a way that will actually have any realistic possibility of reducing the problem. Furthermore, the controlling owners of the fossil-fuel corporations and governments actually don’t want the public to know what would be successful policies on this matter — the answer to that problem is actually hidden from the public.
This combination, of ignorance by the public, and the ongoing profitability (to investors) of global warming, explains the failure, thus far, against global warming. It’s a failure that’s due both to billionaires and to their governments (the governments that they control). This is the reason why publics everywhere are disappointed at where the world is — and has been — headed on the global-warming issue. ONLY ineffectual policies against global warming are being put forward by their leaders.
Of course, the world’s approximately 3,000 billionaires control fossil fuel companies (or at least the largest ones). It’s reasonable to assume that virtually all of the top 100 fossil-fuel extraction companies are controlled either directly or indirectly by billionaires. These governments do their bidding — the bidding of the people who finance the careers of the successful politicians.
On 15 February 2022, CNBC headlined “Banks haven’t quit coal. Study says commercial lenders have channeled $1.5 trillion to the industry since 2019”. This is true though coal has been and still is the main driver of climate-change. That new investment in coal wouldn’t have happened if the buyers of those stocks and bonds had thought that they’d be unable to sell them in the future at even higher prices. (Especially if they couldn’t sell them at ANY price.)
Global warming has been, and is, enormously profitable to the very richest people. The value of those investments must now turn to zero, and only such a law as is being described here can do that. On 22 February 2022, Reuters bannered “Up in flames: Gas flaring soars in Mexico, derailing its climate change pledges as it seeks to boost oil output”. That’s driven really by the billionaires, who control not only the corporations but their own governments, which ‘regulate’ those corporations.
In other words: the world’s few super-rich have profited enormously from the build-up, in the atmosphere, of the global-warming gases that have caused what might now be a runaway global warming. Though global warming is perhaps the biggest threat to the world’s future (maybe even more so than a WW III), it has immensely helped the super-rich become super-rich, and to grow their wealth while the rest of the global population have (in many countries) experienced only the downside of their degraded and increasingly rapidly heating environment.
Those fossil-fuels have thus been an immense engine of global wealth-inequality. Though the super-rich have experienced soaring wealth from their use, the general population has experienced spreading exploitation and misery, from it. If the end-result of this will be the end of our planet’s biosphere (as many scientists predict), then human civilization itself will have perpetrated this most massive of all crimes against not only its own future members (everyone’s children, grandchildren, etc.) but all animals. The stakes here could be that high — a curse upon all future generations.
Because of the poll that Politico published on February 8th, we now know that especially in Russia, but even in U.S. Japan, Germany, and the 9 other surveyed countries (South Africa, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia, China, India, France, and UK), at least two-thirds of the public want fossil fuels companies to be held responsible for the impacts their products have on the environment. They want the owners of those companies to be punished for the world’s biggest-ever crime, of planetcide.
However — for the reasons that will be stated below — there is actually only a single way in which this can be done effectively; i.e., so as to actually stop global warming (if that is still even possible to do): This one way is for the government to outlaw purchases of investments (stocks and bonds) in fossil-fuel extraction companies, as will now be described (and the rest of the present article will be a discrediting of all of the existing proposals — the proposals that the billionaires’ front-organizations have been endorsing — to deal with the global-warming problem: proofs will now be provided that all of them are fakes):
These companies (fossil-fuel extractors) exist in order to discover, extract, refine, and market, fossil fuels, in order for these fuels to be burned — but those activities are killing this planet. There is a way to stop this destruction of the planet from happening, but it is not being applied, and no country is currently even considering it. This way will be explained here. Some background is, however, necessary, in order to understand it:
Buying stock in, and lending money to, these firms doesn’t purchase their products, but it does incentivize all phases of these firms’ operations, including the discovery of yet more fields of oil, gas, and coal, to add yet more to their existing fossil-fuel reserves. Unless these companies’ stock-values are driven down to near zero and no investor will be lending to them, all such operations will continue, and the Earth will therefore surely die from the resulting over-accumulation of global-warming gases.
To purchase stock in a fossil-fuel extractor, such as ExxonMobil or BP, or to buy their bonds or otherwise lend to them, is to invest in or fund that corporation’s employment of fossil-fuel explorers to discover new sources of oil, gas, or coal, to drill. Those discoveries of new reserves are what drive up the market-value of those firms. However, such newly discovered reserves are excess inventories that must never be burnt if this planet is to avoid becoming uninhabitable. But these firms nonetheless continue to employ people to find additional new places to drill, above and beyond the ones that they already own — which existing inventories are already so enormous as to vastly exceed what can be burnt without destroying the Earth many times over. To buy the stock in such corporations (or else lend to them) is consequently to fund the killing of our planet. It’s to fund an enormous crime, and should be treated as such. The only possible solution to the global-warming problem — if it still can be solved — is to drive down the market-value of those firms. Outlawing new investments in those firms will do this and will simultaneously make impossible the continued employment by them of these explorers for new and unburnable reserves.
The only people who will suffer from outlawing the purchase of stock in, and lending to, fossil-fuel extractors, are individuals who are already invested in those corporations. Since we’ve already got vastly excessive known reserves of fossil fuels, discovering yet more such reserves is nothing else than the biggest imaginable crime against all future-existing people, who can’t defend themselves against these activities. Only our government, today, can possibly protect them, and it will be to blame if it fails to do so. The single most effective way it can do that is to criminalize the purchase of stock in fossil-fuels extractors, and to bar loans to them. Here’s why:
The IMF says that “To limit the increase in global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius — the more conservative of the goals agreed to by governments at the 2015 climate change talks in Paris — more than two-thirds of current known reserves, let alone those yet to be discovered (see Table 1), must remain in the ground (IEA 2012).” Obviously, then, what the oil and gas and coal companies are doing by continuing exploration is utterly idiotic from an economic standpoint — it’s adding yet more to what already are called “unburnable reserves.” Thus, waiting yet longer for a technological breakthrough, such as fossil-fuels corporations have always promised will happen but nobody has ever actually delivered (and such as is exemplified here), is doomed, because if and when such a real breakthrough would occur, we’d already be too late and the uncontrollably spiraling and accelerating mutual feedback-loops would already have made the challenge vastly more difficult to overcome than it is today. We’d simply be racing, then, to catch up with — and to get ahead of — an even faster rise in global temperatures than now exists. Consequently, something sudden, sharp, and decisive, is needed immediately, and it can happen only by a fundamental change becoming instituted in our laws, not in our technology. The solution, if it comes, will come from government, and not even possibly come from industry. For governments to wait, and to hope for a “technological breakthrough,” is simply for our planet to die. It’s to doom this planet. It’s to abandon the government’s obligation to the future.
On 13 November 2019, the International Energy Agency reported that “the momentum behind clean energy is insufficient to offset the effects of an expanding global economy and growing population,” and “The world urgently needs to put a laser-like focus on bringing down global emissions. This calls for a grand coalition encompassing governments, investors, companies and everyone else who is committed to tackling climate change.” Obviously, we are all heading the world straight to catastrophe. Drastic action is needed, and it must happen now — not in some indefinite future.
In 2020, I reached out to Carbon Tracker, the organization that encourages investors to disinvest from fossil fuels. Their leader, Mark Campanale, declined my request for them to endorse my proposal. He endorsed instead “a new fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty supported by movements calling to leave fossil fuels in the ground.” When I responded that it’s vastly more difficult, for states (individual governments) to mutually pass, into their respective nation’s laws, a treaty amongst themselves (since it requires unanimity amongst all of them instituting into each one of their legal systems exactly that same law), than it is for any state ON ITS OWN to institute a law (such as I propose), he still wasn’t interested. I asked him why he wasn’t. He said “I’ve chosen a different strategy for my organization.” I answered: “All that I am seeking from you is an ENDORSEMENT. I am not asking you to change your ‘strategy’ (even if you really ought to ADD this new strategy to your existing one).” He replied simply by terminating communication with me and saying, without explanation, “We don’t always agree.”
Here was that “treaty supported by movements calling to leave fossil fuels in the ground”. As you can see there, it was posted in 2012, and as of 8 years later when I checked, it had been signed by 8 individuals, no nations (and not even by any organizations). Mark Campanale wasn’t among these 8, and subsequently no signers have been indicated.
However, in 2020, the very same year when Campanale said this, an organization was formed, “The Fossil-Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative” — and his Carbon Tracker organization did, indeed, become one of its founding signers, along with 350.org and many other innocuous virtue-signaling (otherwise called “liberal” — as opposed to “conservative” or outright evil or overtly pro-fossile-fuels) ‘non-profits’, these liberal ‘non-profits’ being themselves funded by the likes of the Charles Schwab Foundation, David Rockefeller Fund, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Family Fund, and other virtue-signaling fossil-fuels billionaires and their families — anything in order to postpone for as long as possible any meaningful ACTION being taken against the billionaires who have been actually profiting from global warming. For example: neither the 2012 “People’s Sustainability Treaty On Transitioning to a Zero Fossil Fuels World” nor the 2020 “Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty” has any actual TREATY in it. Both are fakes, just like the Paris Climate Agreement is no treaty, and is instead pure fakery. On 21 September 2021, the Guardian headlined “Governments falling woefully short of Paris climate pledges, study finds”. (That failure had been engineered into the treaty; it was intended, a feature of it, not a bug in it.) This can go on forever, because publics everywhere are easy to fool.
Some environmental organizations recommend instead improving labelling laws and informing consumers on how they can cut their energy-usages (such as here), but even if that works, such changes, in consumers’ behaviors, are no more effective against climate-change than would be their using buckets to lower the ocean-level in order to prevent it from overflowing and flooding the land. What’s actually needed is a huge jolt to the system itself, immediately. Only systemic thinking can solve such a problem. Consumers don’t cause the problem; investors and their governments do.
Making such a change — outlawing the purchase of stock in, and prohibiting loans to, fossil-fuel extractors — would impact enormously the stock-prices of all fossil fuels corporations throughout the world, even if it’s done only in this country. It would quickly force all of the fossil-fuel extractors to eliminate their exploration teams and to increase their dividend payouts, just in order to be able to be “the last man standing” when they do all go out of business — which then would occur fairly soon. Also: it would cause non-fossil-energy stock-prices to soar, and this influx of cash into renewable-energy investing would cause their R&D also to soar, which would reduce costs of the energy that clean-energy firms supply. It would transform the world, fairly quickly, and very systematically. And all of this would happen without taxpayers needing to pay tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars, or for governments to sign onto any new treaties. And if additional nations copy that first one, then the crash in market-values of all fossil-fuels corporations will be even faster, and even steeper.
As regards existing bonds and other debt-obligations from fossil-fuels extractors, each such corporation would need to establish its own policies regarding whether or not, and if so then how, to honor those obligations, since there would no longer be a market for them. Ending the market would not be equivalent to ending the obligations. The law would nullify the obligations, but the corporation’s opting to fulfill those obligations wouldn’t be illegal — it would merely be optional. Perhaps most of the firms would opt to place all investors onto a dividends-only system, which would continue until the firm ends or is otherwise no longer producing or marketing fossil fuels.
This would be a taking from individuals who have been investing in what the overwhelming majority of experts on global warming say are investments in a massive crime against future generations. We are now in an emergency situation, which is more than merely a national emergency, a global one, so that such governmental action would be not merely advisable but urgently necessary and 100% in accord with the public welfare, and also in accord with improving distributive justice.
The only way possible in order to avoid getting into the uncontrollable feedback-cycles (feedback-loops) that might set this planet racing toward becoming another Mars is to quickly bring a virtual end to the burning of fossil fuels. That can happen only if fossil fuels become uneconomic. But common methods proposed for doing that, such as by imposing carbon taxes, would hit consumers directly (by adding a tax to what they buy), and thereby turn them into advocates for the fossil-fuel industries (advocates on the fossil-fuels-companies’ side, favoring elimination of that tax upon their products). In this key respect, such proposals are counterproductive, because they dis-incentivize the public to support opposition to fossil-fuel extraction. Such proposals are politically unacceptable, especially in a democracy, where consumers have powerful political voice at the ballot-box. Any carbon tax would also anger the consuming public against environmentalists. Turning consumers into friends of the fossil-fuels extractors would be bad. What I am proposing is not like that, at all. Investors are a much smaller number of voters than are consumers. Everyone is a consumer, but only a relatively tiny number of people are specifically fossil-fuel investors. To terminate the freedom those investors have to sell their stock, by making it illegal for anyone to buy that stock, is the most practicable way to prevent global burnout (if it still can be prevented). This needs to be done right now.
How was slavery ended in the United States? It became illegal for anyone to own slaves — and the way that this was done is that it became illegal for anyone to buy a slave. It made slaves unsellable — worthless to own.
Once it is done, those firms will go out of business. (First, these firms will increase their dividend-payouts to their stockholders while they lay off their explorers, but then they’ll cut their other costs, and then they’ll fold. But the objective isn’t that; it is to make their products uneconomic to produce, market, and sell; and this will do that, even before all of those firms have become eliminated.) All of today’s existing economies-of-scale in the fossil-fuels-producing-and-marketing industries will then be gone, and will become replaced by new economies-of-scale that will rise sharply in non-carbon energy, as R&D there will be soaring, while the fossil-fuels producers fade out.
If it becomes illegal to purchase those investments, then the market-value of them will depend ONLY upon the company’s future dividends. The higher those would be, the sooner the company will end. Unlike with black-market goods such as illegal narcotics, all investment-markets need to be legal in order for a company to be able to attract new investors. Those companies will be doomed and quickly die-off — or else STOP exploring for yet-more fossil fuels, and would go entirely into non-fossil-fuels endeavors. All fossil-fuels exploration will end. All fossil-fuels-promotion will end.
This is the only realistically possible way to avoid a possible global burnout. (Current scientific analyses of the vaporization of all of this planet’s water have been predicated solely upon an increase in solar intensity, but heat-trapping gases could enormously expedite the process, and humans would never get to experience an oceanless Earth, because agriculture would become impossible well before all water is gasified.)
Shell CEO Says Governments, Not Firms, Are Failing on Climate Change
On 14 October 2019, Reuters headlined “Exclusive: No choice but to invest in oil, Shell CEO says” and reported:
Ben van Beurden expressed concern that some investors could ditch Shell, acknowledging that shares in the company were trading at a discount partly due to “societal risk”.
“I am afraid of that, to be honest,” he said.
“But I don’t think they will flee for the justified concern of stranded assets … (It is) the continued pressure on our sector, in some cases to the point of demonisation, that scares asset managers.”
“It is not at a scale that the alarm bells are ringing, but it is an unhealthy trend.”
Van Beurden put the onus for achieving a transformation to low-carbon economies on governments.
He didn’t suggest any specific policies which governments should take, but he did say “that not enough progress had been made to reach the Paris climate goal of limiting global warming to ‘well below’ 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.” Furthermore:
Delaying implementation of the right climate policies could result in “knee-jerk” political responses that might be very disruptive to society, he said. “Let the air out of the balloon as soon as you can before the balloon actually bursts,” van Beurden said.
He is, in a sense, trapped, as the head of one of the world’s largest fossil-fuel extractors. He doesn’t want to be “demonised,” but he is professionally answering to — and obligated to serve — investors who are still profiting from destroying the world. Though he acknowledges that consumers cannot initiate the necessary policy-change, and that investors aren’t yet; and though he doesn’t want government to do anything which “might be very disruptive to society,” he does want governments to “Let the air out of the balloon as soon as you can before the balloon actually bursts,” and he’s therefore contemplating — and is even advising — that governments must do the job now, and not wait around any longer to take the necessary decisive action.
Here’s what that type of governmental action would be (and unlike the Paris Climate Agreement, it doesn’t require an international consensus — which doesn’t actually exist among the nations). (That international agreement is likewise just a fake.)
The “Bridge Fuels” Concept Is a Deceit
The concept of “bridge fuels,” such as methane as being a substitute for petroleum, is a propaganda device by the fossil-fuels industry and its agents, in order to slow the decline of those industries. For example, on 16 November 2019, Oil Price Dot Com headlined “Why Banning Fossil Fuel Investment Is A Huge Mistake”, and Cyril Widdershoven, a long-time writer for and consultant to fossil-fuel corporations, argued against an effort by the European Investment Bank to “put more pressure on all parties to phase out gas, oil and coal projects.” Widdershoven’s argument is that “experts seem to agree that the best way to target lower CO2 emissions in the EU is to substitute oil and coal power generation in Eastern Europe with natural gas.” He says, “Even in the most optimistic projections, renewable energy options, such as wind or solar, are not going to be able to counter the need for power generation capacity. If the EIB blocks a soft energy transition via natural gas, the Paris Agreement will almost certainly fail.”
The unstated “experts” that Widdershoven cited are, like himself, hirees of the fossil-fuels industries. Furthermore, this go-slow approach is already recognized by the IMF and IEA to be doomed to fail at avoiding global burnout.
Furthermore — and this is perhaps the most important fact of all — government-support has largely been responsible for the success of fossil-fuel corporations (especially now for natural gas), and, if fully replaced by government-support going instead to non-fossil-fuel corporations, there will be a skyrocketing increase in R&D in those non-fossil-fuel technologies, which skyrocketing R&D, there, is desperately needed, if any realistic hope is to exist, at all, of avoiding global burn-out.
Moreover, billionaires have also hijacked the environmental movement and made suckers of its believers. For example, Elon Musk has become a centi-billionaire by peddling the idea of switching from fossil fuels to electricity. But the popular concept of ‘switching from fossil fuels to electricity’ as a supposed ‘energy source’ is fake because electricity isn’t an energy-source but only a way of delivering energy that is produced elsewhere, by fossil fuels, nuclear, or others. It’s a fraud, as a ‘solution’.
So, to each reader of this, I ask: If this is not what you propose, then what do you propose? People need to start talking about this — but NOT with the same underlying false assumptions that the billionaires have been promulgating.
P.S.: In January 2021, I had sent this to, and never received any answer from any of the:
He [Timmermans] said right wing countries like Canada, the USA and Brazil were preventing the EU from reiterating the Paris Agreement requirements in the COP conclusions.
“What is needed is a method which (unlike international agreement on carbon-trading credits) won’t require agreement among nations, which are too corrupt to take the necessary collective action to avert catastrophe. Here’s the solution which could be implemented by, say, the EU, or even just Germany, or just India, or just China, alone, if not by any of the far-right countries (such as U.S. and Brazil), which action, taken by any one of them, would create the necessary cascading-effect that could transform the world and perhaps save the future (and please do follow closely the argument here, and click onto any link where you might have any questions, because this is a truly new idea, and every part of it is fully documented here):” and then came a presentation much like what you have just read above. None of them responded.
So: if the public, in any country, have any ability to produce progress on this matter, then the only way it will be able to happen is by replacing leaders such as now exist, and installing instead leaders who will do the right thing, for the future of the biosphere on this planet. None of the current leaders is. Tragically, that is the current fact.
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