Big Banks Are Putting Rain Forests in Peril
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"The world has lost 60 percent of its population of Bornean orangutans since 1950, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. In July, the Bornean orangutan was listed as critically endangered."
"About 15 percent of the world’s historical forest cover remains intact, according to the World Resources Institute. The rest [85%] has been cleared or degraded or is in fragments."
"Climate concerns have been brought into sharp relief by the impending presidency of Donald J. Trump, who has called climate change a hoax. Mr. Trump has said he will pull the United States out of the Paris accord, a commitment by 95 countries to take concrete measures to reduce planet-warming carbon emissions."
>"Daily emissions from Indonesia’s forest fires last year at times exceeded emissions produced by all economic activity in the United States. A recent Harvard and Columbia study estimated that the fires caused at least 100,000 premature deaths across Southeast Asia. The World Bank estimates that the fires cost Indonesia’s economy $16 billion."
Much like technology that can be used for good and bad, I prefer to live in a world where services are available to all without discrimination – knowing that some people will do things I disagree with using those services – than a world where some random person's morals are used to restrict those services to certain groups.
I find it pretty weird to see people gleeful that a far right party cannot get campaign funding, but those same people baulk at any criticism of democracy. The bank probably doesn't care about the party politics, but it does care about it's reputation. Trying to call the banks out for who they lend money to is probably effective but – IMO – chilling.
In the article, the NYT is making an argument to say that this business behavior is morally reprehensible. Not that it should be illegal or not allowed. It's up to the individuals reading the articles to take any action, if they feel it's necessary. For instance, not using that company for their services.
The logical conclusion to this kind of targeting of banks that have a huge number of uncontroversial clients, and a handful of controversial (but legal) clients is that they will start turning away the business to protect their reputation, and someone else will set up a bank that specializes in shady clients, has an obscure and often changing name, anonymous offices, and generally doesn't care about its reputation.
Would that be better? Obviously not, but it's effectively what activists are ask for.
With money comes responsibility. The US should provide a good guiding example.
But ultimately it is the responsibility of governments to control these corporations that'll compete at every level.
Nice it's not practical for everyone to travel to a region to protest environmental degradation that indirectly affects many more people, perhaps you could could turn your abilities to coming up with a more effective scheme of action.
Capitalism allows people to self motivate to get everything done. It does not really need any helping. Human aspirations is enough.
Governments must protect the future resources our planet has. And do so in an even way which makes the playing field fair for companies.
It's an almost impossible task & I can start to understand why we don't detect any intelligent life anywhere in the universe. Life anywhere is probably similar to ours: took millions of years to develop, collected lots of stored energy underground, and all the organisms are naturally competitive making it impossible for modern life on the planet to co-exist.
Slavery was more stable: lasted millenia. We're in turbulent times, particularly since we're probably ending neoliberal capitalism: an unstable form of capitalism whose one advantage is to damage the imagination enough to stop seeing alternatives except a single bad one.
Lenin (for all his faults) said that fascism is capitalism in decay, and far-right governments are gaining power all over the world, so...
And slavery required less violence, per capita, to maintain? I don't think so. Innumerable slave revolts. Wars of conquest to capture slaves. Slave raiding. The daily violence needed to enforce slavery. Sexual violence perpetrated on slaves.
Capitalism is a rock of stability, from a civil society perspective, in contrast. When was the last time a developed capitalist nation had a civil war, or even a major violent revolt?
Reminder: Before those developed capitalist nations became what they are now, they also had their share of civil wars and major violent revolts.
Ask again in a year or two.
Problems arise when negative externalities [1] are not accounted for. Sure, companies (and their banks) can make a fortune by burning rainforests for palm oil, but that leaves the costs (loss of habitat, CO2 release) to be borne by the rest of the world. Ideally, regulation puts those costs back to the companies causing them. If that doesn't happen, I have no problem with exposing and targeting the banks financing them.
Actually the point of the article is that banks lend money to corporations, some of which go and do awful things. Not that they simply lend money to "people".
Much like technology that can be used for good and bad, I prefer to live in a world where services are available to all without discrimination – knowing that some people will do things I disagree with using those services – than a world where some random person's morals are used to restrict those services to certain groups.
Well, that's fine for an ethos when applied to individuals... but its applicability to corporations is an entirely different matter, altogether.
If a corporation is caught doing something that either domestic or international legal structures -- not simply "some person's random morals" -- have determined to cause great harm to humanity (including, just as an example, blatant, open-air gang-rape of natural resources, as appears to be happening in certain parts of Indonesia) -- then no, they aren't entitled to "equal access" to resources and services. They're going to be prohibited from doing those things, using all legal means available -- including, one find day, let us hope, severe restrictions on access to financial resources; and if necessary, criminal prosecution of the corporation's registered officers.
Successfully implemented, the proper term for such measures it not "discrimination". It's called rule of law.
Whether or not legal structures currently exist to prohibit the kind of abuses described in the article is a separate, technical matter. But address your comment directly: the idea that we should not attempt to control (via legislation or moral opprobrium) the lending behavior of banks with regard to corporations because that would be a form of "discrimination", or somehow an infliction of "someone's random morals" on their individual choices -- is fundamentally flawed.
80% of the deforestation in the Amazon has been for cattle and their food[1].
It makes sense, people eat a lot of animals, animals need a lot of food. Blaming banks is an easier group to blame then ourselves and our own choices, though.
[1] http://globalforestatlas.yale.edu/amazon/land-use/cattle-ran...
My suspicion is that many powerful people feel (rightly or wrongly) that the subject of enforcing diet is simply too untenable for them to take up without all hell breaking loose. (What do you mean I can't eat my meat!?) ...And that's not to mention all the "standard issues" clouding their judgment and priorities.
We literally give billions to animal ag industries in subsidies, we could just stop that. Take it a step further and use that money to actually fund alternatives so they're substantially cheaper for the public. The fact that almond/coconut milk is more expensive than cow milk speaks volumes about how the system is set up.
Another step, which the FDA almost did this year, is advise people to eat less animals because it's awful for the environment. In general just making the message more visible would help.
The last one is kind of telling people what to do, but the FDA already does that anyway so it's not too much of a change.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2015/oct/...
However, almonds pale in comparison to cows or other livestock in terms of water usage (esp when used as meat) - while consuming large quantities of almonds may not be sustainable, it's a lot better than eating meat... just may be as water-unsustainable as drinking local milk (if you live in CA).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/28/california-c...
0.36 kg/L almond milk, and 1.67 kg/L cow milk.
(Note: This is somebody's class report, not a peer-reviewed publication.)
There is some uncertainty in these numbers, of course. If you care more about water usage, then 1L of almond milk uses on the order of 1600 gallons of water, compared to under 100 gallons of water per liter of cow milk. Again, there is some uncertainty. And I think CO2-equivalent emissions is far more important.
[1] http://www.environment.ucla.edu/perch/resources/images/cow-v...
I'm in agreeance with your suggestions, but note that Indonesia has large protests over small increases in meat costs. There's a political reality to dramatically raising food prices in a democracy.
Downvoters tell me why you disagree?
That seems like basic physics(?) How could it possibly be below 1 for anything that doesn't photosynthesize?
Around my place, cows are still in the meadows, then for a few winter months they are in the stable but they are fed mostly with grass cut in the same meadows earlier, plus a bit of straw, leftover of other cultures. The pressure on the local environment is basically nil, and it has no effect on remote locations either.
But if you drive just a few dozen miles away, all catering is industrial (even at small scale): cows live their whole life under a shed, over a concrete slab, behind galvanised steel bars, and are fed silage and soja sprayed from a tractor. They do not ever go in the meadows.
It was not like that 25 years ago, it changed quickly. It is unneeded (production was already excessive with the (not so) old way) and it is unsustainable: it costs lots of investments, it costs lots of food buying, it destroys landscapes which are either turned into farm land or abandoned to the forest, this farm land uses more water and pollutes more, the farmer does not any more produce a wide range of crops and animals, it is specialised in a single (or 2 at most) production and has to stick to it and is thus highly sensitive and fragile with respect to market price variations. In fact he's not a farmer any more, he's just a small industrialist, a meat manufacturer. A very small one who doesn't even have any power to control anything. He's perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy and sometimes commits suicide. So really none, nothing, nowhere benefits of this system (except a few go-between that didn't exist before or existed but increased their margins).
If you drive for more than 5 minutes, you will cause a higher climate effect than any diet choice. Eat just the nicest climate friendly food, and drive for more than 5 minutes in one direction and you end up doing more harm than an meat eating cyclist.
Which also mean that working from home would be the biggest cultural change to fix the environment, and much more effective than any cultural change in diet.
Using https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=307&t=11 we get us co2 per gallon, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_automobiles#Fu... gives average miles per gallon, which with units (gnu tool) translated it to about 8.6 miles for 3kg co2. 8.6 miles is, depending on driving speed, a reasonable estimated of 10m driving. So if a person commute time to work is 5m, and 5m back, the co2 should be similar to a person who eat meat-rich diet but who work from home.
I can only speculate, but I suspect there are a few reason how one could interpret data that I have seen elsewhere. One is that while CO2 from cows are higher than from cars, those numbers don't take into consideration that people can choose to stop driving but not stop eating. If you replace cows with vegetarian option, that is still 2.9kg CO2 being released per day per person. A stop to driving is 0kg CO2.
The second aspect is that there is likely more people who don't drive cars than people who don't eat meat. If we are talking about what individual people can do, stop driving is still the best way to reduce ones environmental impact, and I suspect that the average amount of car owners on HN is a bit higher than the global average. Once that box is ticked off, discussion of meat vs non-meat options is a bit more relevant.
Take Sweden. The loss of farming is causing a significant decrease in open fields, endangering several species who need that kind of habitat. Beef produce in Sweden is also about twice as expensive than the cheapest imported beef, so it becomes a price issue. This where certification can do a good job in guiding consumers to choose producers that in a local context has a net positive on the environment.
We have the opportunity for a two-for-one here by replacing more harmful products with plant based alternatives. Things like the impossible burger people already rave about.
It could be more of a marketing challenge, just making faux meats seem sexy and attractive to people. Luckily it's a growing industry so we'll see more investments in them, along with faux meats.
* if you live near a somewhat alternative food store like Whole Foods, Trader Joes, etc. Kind of a big if.
[1] http://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/cutting-red-me...
Banks operate with other peoples money. Many of those people would not be happy to learn that their money was invested in things the banks said they would not support.
Maybe banks could be held liable.
This is not to say that banks are innocent but the article puts a skewed view that is misleading.
In Indonesia forests are being burned to make space for palm oil plantations not cattle ranches. Your comment and propaganda of an alternative agenda is rather off-base I think.