A lot of big polluters are publicly traded companies. Owning shares of US public companies means you can go to shareholder meetings, vote, and other rights.
What do all think of a non profit that runs and is funded with an endowment composed of big polluters like oil companies and using the dividends to fund climate initiatives? In the mean time, using the seat at the table to influence other shareholders to reduce emissions, which is in their long term interest anyways.
If the endowment dries up, mission accomplished. If it grows, more money to act with.
What do all think?
I think the utopian socialists tried this, it’s been pretty well accepted for well over a century by any serious socialist thought that just talking to capitalists to convince them of anticapitalism - and this is what you’re talking about when you’re asking fossil fuel shareholders to act against their profit motive - simply will never work.
They will kill to protect their money. They will not listen to anything but the exercise of power. If you don’t have a controlling interest in a company, you don’t have power and you won’t influence them. If you could get a controlling interest, you’d be coopted into the capitalist machinery long before the point you could change the fossil fuel companies’ course. If by some miracle you could avoid that, I imagine you would be assassinated.
Don’t kid yourself. Shareholder meetings and votes and whatever other structures create the illusion of accountability only go so far as they are useful in maintaining power for those that have it. The second you really threaten their power the fangs will come out. They will not lie down and simply agree to stop being the bourgeoisie. The apparent civility of a shadeholder meeting is a fig leaf on their blood-drenched bodies.
They will kill to protect their money.
Good point. So in order to go the shareholder route, it would require finding them a way to bring in more profits than fossil fuels.
The problem is that they’ve already thought of that, and they diversify their portfolios. You would be just another company vying for their investments.
Whilst you’re working on your alternative, as long as fossil fuels have anything left to offer them, they will keep burning them until there is nothing left. They won’t just throw away their existing investments. Your alternative will not exhaust their money, no matter how good it is. If your alternative did exhaust their ability to invest, they wouldn’t invest. The risk would be too high, and capitalists are extremely risk averse.
The other problem with this is, no matter what solution you come up with, if it’s in the hands of capital then it will be optimised for financial return over everything else. That means everything else is sacrificed as an externality, including the climate. They won’t just give you money and let you sacrifice their profits for the environment, they will demand you make the greediest decisions possible and ignore all other considerations until whatever you’ve developed is as bad for humanity as fossil fuels.
If you won’t do that, they’ll remove you from the equation, probably by just stealing your work and getting someone less scrupulous to do it in your stead. Property means nothing in reality, it is only a convenient fiction that serves the interests of the powerful, and they don’t respect it when it gets in their way.
The reality is that every measure that has been successful in curbing their power has been direct action by organised groups of people. We have things like the weekend, child labour laws, health & safety regulations, and so many more things not because people worked within the system, but because they refused to be governed by it. People went on strike, demonstrated, sabotaged critical infrastructure - like pipelines - and sometimes waged actual wars, just to displace the power of capital & the state.
Any law we have that protects us was given as a concession in response to these actions, and every one of those laws can stop protecting us the moment our rulers decide they don’t need to do it anymore.
However, people are building a better world now, in the shell of the old and dying world, but one of the things you need to do to be part of that is to stop waiting for permission. Capitalists won’t give it to you, because on some deep systemic level they know that that better world has no place for their way of life.
Sure, if enough people do nice capitalism, it will cancel out the bad capitalism (that we have no intention of getting rid of). 🙃
No, it wouldn’t work for a number of reasons, but the main one is that rich and powerful people want to stay rich and powerful, if you get in their way they won’t just sit back and let you do it, they’ll pump money into propaganda, reactionaries think tanks and anything necessary to keep the status quo.
Capitalism itself is the reason we are going through climate change, “perfecting” it more won’t take us out of it. This is the usual moderate response to any kind of issue: they struggle between wanting progress and being afraid of change so they come up with half-assed solutions that don’t rock the boat too much. Negative peace vs positive peace.
the non profit industrial complex serves to launder the reputations of the ownership class without meaningfully addressing oppressive systems or threatening the status quo.
War planes and assault rifles are used by Russians to invade Ukraine. Should Ukrainians not use them to fight back?
Trains transport coal. Should we stop using freight trains?
That is how they are often used, yes. The NPO is a tool. It is used for nefarious things, yes. It doesn’t have to be though.
Do you have an argument about why it is a bad idea other than you don’t like NPOs because bad wealthy people use them for power and reputation management? We need power to make changes to address the climate crisis.
argument through analogy is a logical fallacy, I’m not going to engage that.
you’ve yet to convince me that further entrenching capitalism (which requires scarcity to the extent that it will create it where there need be none, and demands endless quarterly growth within a limited system) is a solution to the environmental destruction to which it contributes.
it seems to me as though you would like to eat your cake and have it too.
private ownership of capital is a race to the bottom, leading inevitably to unsustainable extraction of natural resources. The latter won’t be halted or reversed without abolishing the former.
we need power to be distributed horizontally, not continue to be concentrated in fewer and fewer actors.
argument through analogy is a logical fallacy, I’m not going to engage that.
Your argument is you don’t like the tool. My argument is we shouldn’t not use a tool because bad actors use a tool for bad things. Not using a tool means we don’t benefit from the good things it can be used for. I just gave examples demonstrating it.
you’ve yet to convince me that further entrenching capitalism
Explain how this entrenches capitalism? I see it as working within the environment. Buying anything from a for profit company or working for a for profit company entrenches capitalism. Using a 401k does too. You can vote, run for office, whatever, but in a capitalist economy, you can’t avoid participating in it, i.e. entrenching it.
it seems to me as though you would like to eat your cake and have it too.
I don’t have any love for capitalism. I’m just a person that sees a problem and is doing their best to fix it. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t question my intentions because you don’t like my idea. I’ll give you the same benefit of the doubt. Deal?
your position presupposes that capitalism can serve to improve our collective wellbeing, when it is fundamentally an oppressive heirarchy enforced through violence.
news flash: if you do not own capital, capitalism’s essential function is not to improve your material condition, but that of the capital owning class.
edit: civility
your position presupposes that capitalism can serve to improve our collective wellbeing, when it is fundamentally an oppressive heirarchy enforced through violence.
Ok. So is your proposition that capitalism NEVER serves the collective well being or that it GENERALLY doesn’t. If it is the former, all I have to do is find a single case to prove it false.
Your argument sounded like it was this (correct me if I am wrong):
P: Bad people use NPO as a tool for bad things Q: NPOs are bad
P->Q
I was demonstrating that at best you can put the existential qualifier on that statement and not the universal. All I have to do is find a single good NPO. If you want to argue what it means to be good, have a PhD in philosophy as it has been argued about since Plato wrote Euthyphro. Probably before.
Edit: civility
There are some groups, which buy shares and use courts and shareholder law to influence large companies already. That has usually two versions. One is working on transparency, as in climate change is a risk and shareholders need to know emissions data and so forth to determine potential impacts of new laws. The other one and more powerfull one is to argue that working on specific fossil fuel projects hurts the profit the companies make. German lignite power plant owner and operator RWE had for example a case to slow down the usage of these plants faster, to allow RWE to sell a huge amount of emissions trading certificates bought for cheap to keep these plants running a few years ago, for a massive profit. You can see perfectly capitalist logic, which other large shareholders might agree with.
However the green alternative has to be better from a profit perspective. Moral good does not work. Capitalism just does not work that way. So to influence massive companies that way you need to own them basicly outright or at least a very high number of votes. For that you need billions or better a few trillions to make it work and quite honestly, with that kind of money start a competitor with green technology and drive fossil fuels out of business.
Again some good can be done this way, but it is unfortunatly not a full scale solution.
For that you need billions or better a few trillions to make it work and quite honestly, with that kind of money start a competitor with green technology and drive fossil fuels out of business.
Good point
This actually could work, but would take too long to be as effective as we need it to be now.
But then it also entrenches certain methods that eventually become meaningfully anathema to someone in some way somewhere. And then what? Rinse and repeat in slow motion again?
Sorry Thanos, you can’t use the instigator of man-made climate change to cure it.
It’s not an unforseen blip capitalism accidentally caused. All the commons always suffer under unchecked capitalism. Our US K-12 System was starved to death to cut capitalist taxes, our commons/infrastructure are in ruin because of capitalists straining them for private profit and again to cut their taxes after they used their profit to lobby for it, etc.
So, no, doubling down won’t help.
All approaches should be on the table. I think there actually already is an org that does this. I’ll see if I can find it.
Edit: engine no. 1 is what I was thinking of. They are not a nonprofit as far as I can tell though so take that as you will.
