The question we need to be asking is, Can social activism do the right thing?
Riffing off American filmmaker Adam MnKay, in a recent interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, social activism today “cannot seem to get out of this cultural framework that we’re trapped in, that won’t allow us to take in the enormity of” the changes taking place in our changing times in the 21st Century.
That framework is constraining social activism to seeing only private choice and public protest in Markets and against Government as theories of social change.
Civil Society gets marginalized. Finance gets trivialized.
Bill McKibben tells us “They have money. We have bodies. That’s the fight.”
Here's an Inconvenient Truth for Bill: money buys bodies
So the fight Bill wants us to fight is really : they have money to buy bodies; we don’t.
That’s a fight we cannot win.
What a terrifying place to be, for people who care about climate and habitat and equity and a good future.
There is another way. We can get the money on side. It doesn’t have to be a fight. It can be an evolution.
An evolution that begins with innovation in social activism. The innovation of fiduciary activism.
This is public engagement in conversation within Civil Society, about Money.
Not Capital Markets Money.
Fiduciary Money.
The tens of trillions, collectively, worldwide, in society’s shared savings aggregated into social trusts for the social purposes of socially provisioning the social safety nets of Workplace Pensions and Civil Society Endowments as forever promises of hope for a dignified future quality of life for some, directly, that will also be, of necessity, hope for a dignified future quality of life for us all, consequently.
This is money with the size, the purpose and the time to use the technologies of spreadsheet math, desktop publishing and digital communication to supply money to enterprise for its use, for a purpose, for a time, at.a cost and on terms, through negotiated agreement on equity payback to an actuarial/fiduciary cost of money, plus opportunistic upside, from enterprise cash flows prioritized by contract for suitability, longevity and fairness to a dignified future for all.
Plenary powers of discretionary authority over the deployment of this Fiduciary Money are vested in fiduciaries who are required by law to exercise care (prudence) and be caring (loyalty) in their exercise of that discretion. They are accountable to us, as reasonable people who care enough to acquire knowledge and experience relevant to the choices that can and should be made, for being properly careful (prudent) and caring (loyal).
Fiduciary activism needs to engage in conversation with the fiduciaries who are entrusted by law with plenary powers of discretionary authority over the deployment of this money about which enterprises they can and should be negotiating with, and what terms they can and should be negotiating for.
This can and should include responding to COP28's call for "transitioning away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly. and equitable manner".
Social Activism is not taking up this call from COP28. Probably because Social Activism cannot figure out how private choice and protest politics can be deployed to drive that transition in that manner.
Fiduciary Activism can and should take up that call, by mobilizing, through popular conversation, Fiduciary Money to form consortia to buy hydrocarbon companies out of public markets ownership and place them into prudent stewardship, where they can be directed to become, and supported in being, positive contributor to a new global initiative to rapidly redesign and reconstruct our global energy supply ecosystems - core technologies and supporting infrastructure - to be purpose-built, by design, for energy sufficiency complete with habit longevity and social equity in the 21st Century and beyond....
This rededeign will be an enterprise of integrated, coordinated and synchronized Urban, Rural, Curated and Left-Alone landscape design on a planetary scale, the enormity of which Fiduciary Activism will allow us all to take in.
Does anyone now where I can find the UN report they talk about? that says that mining would increase 60% with decarbonizaton. Or someone knows it's name?
Like most discussions of how to confront warming, the solutions are out of sync with the timeframe to social and ecosystem collapse. Any time someone says "By 2100..." we need to remind them that by then, at this rate, humanity will be in tatters. Delton mentions the long timeframes necessary for industry to develop and bring new products to market, and specifically talks about how CDR (not industrial CCUS which has been shown to be nonfunctional but rather things like direct air capture - DAC - or bioenergy with carbon capture and storage), despite being smaller than a drop in the bucket at this point, is still worth investing in now even if it is being used, like David Keith's Carbon Engineering DAC firm he sold to oil giant Oxy and made himself a millionaire with, to take the carbon and use it for enhanced oil recovery (just to pump out more oil) as Oxy's CEO openly admitted. Delton thinks it is worth accepting the cheaters and the slow progress that is typically part of any new technology, because "some day" that tech will finally be a powerhouse. But again, some day soon, we will run out of time. Far too few working even in climate science are willing to admit that our very long term plans are totally unrealistic given warming's rate, which as James Hansen and team recently pointed out, is speeding up.
So back to the question of Can the market do the right thing? It is not designed to do right things, only profitable things. Freedom, here, has resulted in the Jeff Bezos's and Elon Musk's of the world. With no limitations on the pursuit of private wealth, everyone seems to want a piece of the action and nobody wants to behave. Trying to fix this from inside the Problem is so unlikely. When our scientists are on the inside, no wonder they don't speak out. I don't see much hope outside of a popular revolution. If we all learned how to protest like the French, we might get somewhere.
I think this is an idea worth pursuing. Change the incentive to change the game, but why stop with Carbon? Could this methodology not be used to move the dial on other planetary and social boundaries? As Rachel points out, there would doubtless be those who would attempt to play the system, but whatever social and political methods are suggested will have this problem and require appropriate governance.
I wonder whether changing the incentive at a board and citizen level with something like GCP, would go some way to re-wiring the super organism. A “third-attractor” towards a more regenerative future?
Ah, I like Delton’s practical approach to move things toward decarbonizing (particularly the UN org idea) both technically and politically, but was a bit disappointed that he still believes that rationality is outside of ideology. It’s all ideological folks (meaning our ideas are always based on values and experience), we might as well all admit our biases at the beginning and get that out of the way. =)
Unfortunately this guy doesn't live in the real world. Anyone can come up with a fantasy economic system. This isn't even a tiny bit realistic. The fundamental issue with this scheme is that it is based on a bunch of independent actors trusting the carboncryptocoin printer but our basis for trust is our current financial system. There is no reason for anyone to trust the backing of the coins price, because the backing of it would have to be based on power derived from our current model.
Well, that was a long one :)
Delton's thinking and ideas are interesting and could have merit.
My biggest concern is that the system proposed would rely too heavily on people 'playing nice'.
Oh, and thanks for the link to your Mongabay article!
“Can the market do the right thing?”
Wrong question.
The question we need to be asking is, Can social activism do the right thing?
Riffing off American filmmaker Adam MnKay, in a recent interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, social activism today “cannot seem to get out of this cultural framework that we’re trapped in, that won’t allow us to take in the enormity of” the changes taking place in our changing times in the 21st Century.
That framework is constraining social activism to seeing only private choice and public protest in Markets and against Government as theories of social change.
Civil Society gets marginalized. Finance gets trivialized.
Bill McKibben tells us “They have money. We have bodies. That’s the fight.”
Here's an Inconvenient Truth for Bill: money buys bodies
So the fight Bill wants us to fight is really : they have money to buy bodies; we don’t.
That’s a fight we cannot win.
What a terrifying place to be, for people who care about climate and habitat and equity and a good future.
There is another way. We can get the money on side. It doesn’t have to be a fight. It can be an evolution.
An evolution that begins with innovation in social activism. The innovation of fiduciary activism.
This is public engagement in conversation within Civil Society, about Money.
Not Capital Markets Money.
Fiduciary Money.
The tens of trillions, collectively, worldwide, in society’s shared savings aggregated into social trusts for the social purposes of socially provisioning the social safety nets of Workplace Pensions and Civil Society Endowments as forever promises of hope for a dignified future quality of life for some, directly, that will also be, of necessity, hope for a dignified future quality of life for us all, consequently.
This is money with the size, the purpose and the time to use the technologies of spreadsheet math, desktop publishing and digital communication to supply money to enterprise for its use, for a purpose, for a time, at.a cost and on terms, through negotiated agreement on equity payback to an actuarial/fiduciary cost of money, plus opportunistic upside, from enterprise cash flows prioritized by contract for suitability, longevity and fairness to a dignified future for all.
Plenary powers of discretionary authority over the deployment of this Fiduciary Money are vested in fiduciaries who are required by law to exercise care (prudence) and be caring (loyalty) in their exercise of that discretion. They are accountable to us, as reasonable people who care enough to acquire knowledge and experience relevant to the choices that can and should be made, for being properly careful (prudent) and caring (loyal).
Fiduciary activism needs to engage in conversation with the fiduciaries who are entrusted by law with plenary powers of discretionary authority over the deployment of this money about which enterprises they can and should be negotiating with, and what terms they can and should be negotiating for.
This can and should include responding to COP28's call for "transitioning away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly. and equitable manner".
Social Activism is not taking up this call from COP28. Probably because Social Activism cannot figure out how private choice and protest politics can be deployed to drive that transition in that manner.
Fiduciary Activism can and should take up that call, by mobilizing, through popular conversation, Fiduciary Money to form consortia to buy hydrocarbon companies out of public markets ownership and place them into prudent stewardship, where they can be directed to become, and supported in being, positive contributor to a new global initiative to rapidly redesign and reconstruct our global energy supply ecosystems - core technologies and supporting infrastructure - to be purpose-built, by design, for energy sufficiency complete with habit longevity and social equity in the 21st Century and beyond....
This rededeign will be an enterprise of integrated, coordinated and synchronized Urban, Rural, Curated and Left-Alone landscape design on a planetary scale, the enormity of which Fiduciary Activism will allow us all to take in.
Does anyone now where I can find the UN report they talk about? that says that mining would increase 60% with decarbonizaton. Or someone knows it's name?
Like most discussions of how to confront warming, the solutions are out of sync with the timeframe to social and ecosystem collapse. Any time someone says "By 2100..." we need to remind them that by then, at this rate, humanity will be in tatters. Delton mentions the long timeframes necessary for industry to develop and bring new products to market, and specifically talks about how CDR (not industrial CCUS which has been shown to be nonfunctional but rather things like direct air capture - DAC - or bioenergy with carbon capture and storage), despite being smaller than a drop in the bucket at this point, is still worth investing in now even if it is being used, like David Keith's Carbon Engineering DAC firm he sold to oil giant Oxy and made himself a millionaire with, to take the carbon and use it for enhanced oil recovery (just to pump out more oil) as Oxy's CEO openly admitted. Delton thinks it is worth accepting the cheaters and the slow progress that is typically part of any new technology, because "some day" that tech will finally be a powerhouse. But again, some day soon, we will run out of time. Far too few working even in climate science are willing to admit that our very long term plans are totally unrealistic given warming's rate, which as James Hansen and team recently pointed out, is speeding up.
So back to the question of Can the market do the right thing? It is not designed to do right things, only profitable things. Freedom, here, has resulted in the Jeff Bezos's and Elon Musk's of the world. With no limitations on the pursuit of private wealth, everyone seems to want a piece of the action and nobody wants to behave. Trying to fix this from inside the Problem is so unlikely. When our scientists are on the inside, no wonder they don't speak out. I don't see much hope outside of a popular revolution. If we all learned how to protest like the French, we might get somewhere.
I think this is an idea worth pursuing. Change the incentive to change the game, but why stop with Carbon? Could this methodology not be used to move the dial on other planetary and social boundaries? As Rachel points out, there would doubtless be those who would attempt to play the system, but whatever social and political methods are suggested will have this problem and require appropriate governance.
I wonder whether changing the incentive at a board and citizen level with something like GCP, would go some way to re-wiring the super organism. A “third-attractor” towards a more regenerative future?
Ah, I like Delton’s practical approach to move things toward decarbonizing (particularly the UN org idea) both technically and politically, but was a bit disappointed that he still believes that rationality is outside of ideology. It’s all ideological folks (meaning our ideas are always based on values and experience), we might as well all admit our biases at the beginning and get that out of the way. =)
Unfortunately this guy doesn't live in the real world. Anyone can come up with a fantasy economic system. This isn't even a tiny bit realistic. The fundamental issue with this scheme is that it is based on a bunch of independent actors trusting the carboncryptocoin printer but our basis for trust is our current financial system. There is no reason for anyone to trust the backing of the coins price, because the backing of it would have to be based on power derived from our current model.