“It is minutes to midnight, we are told.
Yet it is also business as usual.”
Bad Information, Nicholas Guildhot, Boston Review
https://bostonreview.net/politics/nicolas-guilhot-bad-information?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers&utm_campaign=1e97b2b0bf-MC_Newsletter_8_26_21&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-1e97b2b0bf-41234270&mc_cid=1e97b2b0bf&mc_eid=898ef5cfaa
Business As Usual is fine, we are told. We just have to make a few fundamental system changes. AND we can do that without fundamentally changing the system.
We can get Governments to force it, if enough of us just protest loudly enough. Or maybe Industry will make these changes, voluntarily, if we just make the Markets make enough disclosures. Either way, we don’t have to make any fundamental changes to the system of Governments vs Markets.
What?
Is it really any wonder so many people today seem so willing to believe so many crazy alternatives? They sense the main narrative itself is crazy. So other crazy narratives, by comparison, seem maybe not so crazy.
The Bank of Nature Project of The Cape Cod Center for Sustainability starts from the proposition that Business As Usual is not fine. Climate change is an eviction notice that Nature is delivering to Modern Society. Nature is our home, and we are trashing the place. So, our lease is being terminated. Not in a legal sense. Nature doesn’t abide by human laws. In a physical sense. Temperatures are rising. Habitats are changing. The places where we have lived and flourished for so long are becoming less and less hospitable to human occupation.
Nature will survive. We are not killing the planet. Humanity will, in all likelihood, survive. We are a very adaptable species. But society as we now know it? Not so much. Modern Society is killing itself.
And, like Nero, we fiddle, while Rome burns.
We fiddle with politics.
We fiddle with markets.
We refuse to face the fact that the problem is with Pensions.
“That can’t be.” we say, “Pensions do not matter. Besides, they’re going away.”
Actually, it can be. And it is.
Pensions are institutions that control tens of trillions of dollars of society’s shared savings, globally, that are entrusted to their good judgment for a purpose. That purpose is to deliver income security in retirement to an open class of ever-changing current and future plan participants, forever. That purpose is not going anywhere.
The problem is that we have these institutions investing in market-clearing pricing markets that are created by design for individuals, ruled by the Invisible Hand of self-interested, utility maximizing, rational actors acting rationally to match Supply to Demand through competition on price in markets for maintaining market-clearing prices. Institutions like Pensions and Endowments are not ruled by the Invisible Hand. They are ruled by the very visible laws of fiduciary duty. And the Laws of Large Numbers. And the Mathematics of Probability. And the Science of Statistics.
These giant fiduciary institutions of statistical probabilities are overwhelming, and distorting, the individual markets, giving us:
Corporate Gigantism through Conglomeration
Economic Elitism
Corporate Capture of Public Opinion and Governmental Policy Making
Political Divisiveness and Social Disintegration
Climate Inaction and Environmental Degradation
Business As Usual as the pursuit of Growth through Extraction from Nature that is, in the words of science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, “heedless of the consequences”.
We can choose to change all this. We can choose to move institutional investors, like Pensions, and also Endowments for universities and foundations, out of public markets that are made for individuals and into Bank of Nature, where the money we entrust to their fiduciary ownership for an open class of current and future generations, forever, will be directed through evergreen equity payback investments into enterprises that honor Nature, and Humanity, in how they conduct commerce.
We can stop climate eviction. We can make a new peace with Nature.
We have this choice.
We can continue to choose the unsafe path of Business As Usual, vainly trying to make Government and Industry connect us to climate security, while we float freely in a self-perpetuating state of climate insecurity.
Or,
We can choose the safer alternative path of Bank of Nature that leads us to climate security.
We can remain in an extractive, and self-destructive, relationship with Nature, making less nature as we make our economy grow, or we can evolve towards an interactive, and evergreen relationship with Nature, Making More Nature as we make more surpluses for us to share.
“How can we choose?” you object, “Bank of Nature doesn’t actually exist. It’s just an idea that you are selling.”
True.
So our real choice, right now, is this. We can collaboratively co-create Bank of Nature to give institutions like Pensions and Endowments a more fit for purpose social structure through which to invest society’s shared savings entrusted to their good judgement, building a safer alternative path that will connect us to climate security, and allow society to keep itself ongoing.
That is, without overstating too much, an heroic undertaking.
Or we can stay with Business As Usual.
And fiddle while Rome burns.
Which do you choose?
Will you choose to be a Climate Hero, or a Climate Nero?