As I’ve said over and over, and you’ve heard elsewhere, “follow the money”. Following the money reveals what things happen and why. The bottom line is (and yes, pun intended) that when peoples’ incomes and business profits are impacted things change. People and businesses, and governments too, will change when there is opportunity to increase income and profits or when these are threatened.
Today’s featured article describes this reality. As the article below points out (watch the video first) 100 companies are responsible for 70% or the world’s climate destroying emissions. Eliminating the emissions for which these few companies are responsible will go a long way to maintaining a planet that is capable of supporting a civilization to which we’ve all become accustomed.
The thing that will make that happen are profits: the attraction of making more or minimally, maintaining what they have now. Or, the threat of losing their profitability. OR, both.
This is not a new concept. What is new is the rapidly growing realization that the future financial viability of the worlds’ major corporations, along with thousands of other entities and individuals, is in serious and increasingly significant peril.
As this reality becomes obvious the urgency of pivoting to a new carbon free future is growing exponentially and as the article points out, cooperation by government and the private sector can and will significantly speed up the process of change and be a huge benefit for us all.
From Time
Planet Earth’s Future Now Rests in the Hands of Big Business
April 14, 2022
Click on this link for a 3 minute video and the full article:
https://time.com/6166178/earths-future-big-business/?mc_cid=8b0b2997c2&mc_eid=8f4760cc57
The U.S. Department of Energy has partnered with private companies to bolster the clean energy supply chain, expand electric-vehicle charging, and commercialize new green technologies, among a range of other initiatives. In total, the agency is gearing up to spend tens of billions of dollars on public-private partnerships to speed up the energy transition. “I’m here to extend a hand of partnership,” Granholm told the crowd. “We want you to power this country for the next 100 years with zero-carbon technologies.”
Across the Biden Administration, and around the world, government officials have increasingly focused their attention on the private sector—treating companies not just as entities to regulate but also as core partners. We “need to accelerate our transition” off fossil fuels, says Brian Deese, director of President Biden’s National Economic Council. “And that is a process that will only happen if the American private sector, including the incumbent energy producers in the United States, utilities and otherwise, are an inextricable part of that process
For some, the emergence of the private sector as a key collaborator in efforts to tackle climate change is an indication of the power of capitalism to tackle societal challenges; for others it’s a sign of capitalism’s corruption of public institutions. In the three decades since the climate crisis became part of the global agenda, scientists, activists, and politicians have largely assumed that government would need to dictate the terms of the transition. But around the world, legislative attempts to tackle climate change have repeatedly failed. Meanwhile, investors and corporate executives have become more aware of the threat climate change poses to their business and open to working to address its causes. Those developments have laid the foundation for a new approach to climate action: government and nonprofits partnering with the private sector to do more—a new structure that carries both enormous opportunity and enormous risk.
Just 100 global companies were responsible for 71% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions over the past three decades, according to data from CDP, a nonprofit that tracks climate disclosure, and pushing the private sector to step up is already showing dividends. Last fall, more than 1,000 companies collectively worth some $23 trillion set emissions-reduction goals that line up with the Paris Agreement. “We are in the early stages of a sustainability revolution that has the magnitude and scale of the Industrial Revolution,”
How this partnership between government and industry plays out will shape not just the trajectory of emissions over the coming years and decades but also the future of democratic governance and how society will manage the now inevitable social disruption that will result from climate change.
