
Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns - dredmorbius
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/money-is-the-oxygen-on-which-the-fire-of-global-warming-burns
======
mindslight
So close... It's the money driving demand for continued overproduction that is
the main problem.

Think about a Lime Scooter in the river. Someone paid for the energy to have
that scooter produced and shipped across the ocean, but yet didn't actually
care enough to keep it from being vandalized. Because the scooter was not
bought by someone investing in a cheaper/quicker way to get around that may
pay off over a year or two, but rather a startup _hoping_ to saturate the
market to eventually control it. Wild preemptive bets look financially
reasonable because there is so much investment capital with nowhere else to
go, as interest rates are being held low to stimulate the economy so that
there are "enough" jobs!

~~~
beamatronic
Lets overproduce some low cost education, and free health care. Let’s
overproduce free lunch for school kids. Let’s overpay public school teachers.

------
dredmorbius
McKibben's essay is an obvious counterpoint to Bill Gates' assertion that
financial divestments are impotent as a greenhouse-gas containment measure.

------
perfunctory
> in the three years since the signing of the Paris climate accord, which was
> designed to help the world shift away from fossil fuels, the banks’ lending
> to the industry has increased every year

------
skybrian
I guess the idea is that if you could somehow get passive investors not to
default to investing in the S&P 500 (or similar) then it could be pretty
powerful?

What are some other indexes that could use more publicity?

------
treggle
Title should be changed to global heating.

------
anm89
This is painfully ignorant. Yeah those companies also rely on gravity for
there day to day operations. So is gravity responsible for global warming?
Should we outlaw both of them?

~~~
dredmorbius
What is more subject to human control, gravity, or access to financial
markets?

~~~
ovi256
We actually don't know if a modern economy can give up on using fossil fuels.
It's a hypothesis we're currently testing and hoping it will hold.

~~~
perfunctory
"We actually don't know if a modern economy can give up on using horses."

\-- Somebody from the beginning of the 20th century.

~~~
whenchamenia
Argubly, there are still economies that rely on horses. Havasupai still gets
all their mail by mule, in the USA. Its a matter of scale. There will always
be use cases for electric, ICE, and even beasts of burden.

