By: Cameron MacKenzie
I got into an argument the other night about climate change. I was out with my wife and some of our friends and, for reasons I find difficult to explain, when I get a tall PBR and a shot of Evan Williams in front of me, I feel free to say whatever comes to my mind. This really isn’t a mature way to behave, but a PBR isn’t a mature thing to drink, at least not after the Willamette pinots that came with our dinner and so anyway, I said some dumb stuff.
The simple problem was Greta Thunberg. Greta, for those who don’t know, is a Swedish teenager and fierce advocate for international action to combat climate change. On the night in question, Thunberg had challenged Boris Johnson and Narendra Modi and a host of other world leaders by calling their pledges to cut CO2 emissions as nothing more than "blah blah blah." Two years before, Thunberg delivered speeches in Davos to wide acclaim in which she insisted that, regardless of all the attention climate change has received over the last several years, “our house is still on fire." In the time since, she had evidently seen nothing to change her mind. This girl has the passion of a militant. She’s a darling of the left and a demon of the right. Further, as a kid, she is beyond reproach, even as she is criticized by the right for being beyond reproach. It’s a fascinating thing to watch, something not so different from the situation with Emma Gonzalez and the Parkland student activists. It’s bracing to see young women charged with righteous indignation at the way the world has been conducting itself until their recent arrival.
But what is all this outrage getting us? Now don’t get me wrong (I say, sipping my whiskey), the outrage is real, and (I don’t admit this yet) completely justified. But the portrayal of that outrage, the enactment of it on CNN and MSNBC and in New Yorker profiles and Facebook memes is enough to make us think that something is really afoot; that change is gonna come and that long awaited hard rain is really gonna fall. What's actually happening (I say as I tip back the tall boy), is the outrage enacted by Thunberg lets us all rage along with her until our emotion is cathartically exorcised and then, we’re free to go run errands in an SUV we're never really going to trade in for a Tesla. And don't get me started on Tesla.
At this point my wife’s eyes are widening in horror and our friends’ eyes are narrowing in suspicion. And so I tried to explain that while we're all captivated by the escapades of a Swedish teenager, Australia is, from time to time, swathed in fires that create their own weather systems, the Colorado River is drying up, it’s 70 degrees in Antarctica, and the Northwest Passage is open for cruise ships. That they let Thunberg speak at Davos says more about what Davos is than it does about anyone’s real interest in combating climate change.
But neither my friends nor my wife knows what Davos is so by this point I’d lost the room, so to speak, and my wife is glancing at my drinks (plural), trying to figure out how much is left in that PBR and how much more of me she can take. Ditto for our “friends.” In other words, my big turn, my what we really need to do bit, was too quickly quashed.
But the fun part of having a blog like this is that I get to finish what I was trying to say. I’ve currently got a jasmine citrus tea beside me, so I can clear up any confusion.
Since COP26 recently showed us that the major nations can't even agree whether they should "phase out" or "phase down" fossil fuels, the hopes of government intervention are, at the moment, quite dim, and the weak attempts in the media to celebrate whatever was achieved in Glasgow do little more than prove the truth of Thunberg's blah blah blah. The market, as usual, is running far ahead of elected representatives' ability to regulate it. In that case, climate change is a market problem that should have a market solution.
As an investor, we could put our money in socially responsible investing instruments (SRIs), and while these things were laughing stocks twenty years ago, they are attracting big inflows now. They are, however, still small potatoes compared to the behemoths that are causing the problems Greta’s upset about, the problems that are really causing an impact.
The truth feels very dystopian to me, but I think if we look at Jeff Bezos’s $10 billion dollar contribution from a year ago, $2 billion of which he recently earmarked for restoring natural habitats, we see a model of an actual way forward: private money from concerned parties to counter the private money from corporate interests. I’ve got lots of problems with relying on Bezos or Buffet or Gates to save us, but organized governments have proven to be remarkably ineffective when there’s a profit incentive involved.
But how do we convince someone in the .0001 percent to become a virtuous actor for the good of the planet? What moves them? What changes their mind, gets under their skin, speaks to their soul? Maybe it takes somebody beyond reproach, someone militantly committed, someone with the guts to stand in front of the biggest money the world has ever seen, assembled deep in the mountains of Switzerland, and tell them all to their faces that they’re fiddling while the world burns. It might take someone just like Greta Thunberg. I just hope the right people are listening.
Opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of SagePoint Financial, Inc.