Why? Are there reasons to believe that the shareholders/board members of these companies would not be negatively affected by climate change? Or are they ignorant?
All those things cost money... More money than they are spending today. Even if they just replaced things as they retired, say a work vehicle -- there is still a non zero cost of owning two different types of vehicle.
> These are already good investments.
All the things you listed would normally be listed as a liability and deprecate fairly fast.
> exchange for buybacks and CEO compensation
This is such a small dent in the entire system that it would not make any difference if they spent all the excess cash on the problem. There was a article once about some big CEO of a airline getting some bonus of 12 million. Everybody was freaking out, and demanded it be given to the workers. I did the math on that one, it would have been about 19 cents a hour more for every worker (who were already making $12 + a hour, a 1.6% pay increase or less in most cases)
I am on your side, but just wanting it to happen and calling those who say the money math don't work as greedy is not going to solve the problem. I think people vastly under estimate how much it cost to run some of these large companies, and how thin the profit margin actually is. Paying even slightly more than your competitor can make our break you.
I hate to be cynical but the ROI of lobbying against climate change is super cheap. How can we switch this equation?
I was visiting Tito's bunker in Bosnia last week, and to think it was ok to build a multi-billion dollar facility to hold only 350 politicians and VIPs in case of global nuclear wipeout seems crazy, but when the need arises, people with power will always try and find a quick way out, often at the expense of others.
Many people don't care about long-term stuff either. Look at how many people have no qualms throwing trash out their car window. Look at how many people have no qualms about taking vacations flying all over the place racking up tons of CO2 personally.
Even YC created http://carbon.ycombinator.com as they acknowledge it's an issue (to some extent anyway) yet they still fly hundreds of people out to the Bay Area for in-person interviews each year to select founders for funding, which could instead be done via video chat and used kilograms of CO2 at worst instead of many tons (on average, a plane produces a little over 53 pounds of CO2 per mile. This can be somewhat higher or lower depending upon the type of aviation fuel).
And then take people that truly realize how much of a problem is like I do.
- I have to go to work, it is not practical for me to walk to work so I have to drive a car to work.
- It is not practical for me to not use electricity, living in an apartment I have to use it to cook, to dry my clothes even if I chose to wash them by hand, to run the air conditioning a good chunk of the year to keep the humidity down to prevent mold, to run the heat in the winter because it gets down to -12F/-24C a few days of the year
- I can't walk around naked and both natural fibers and synthetic fibers rely heavily on oil to manufacture
- I can't go buy food from my neighbor or grow my own in a garden, so my food is trucked across the country or even shipped from halfway around the world
So people like me go "nothing I do on a personal level is going to make a damn bit of difference, why bother" and you sit there watching Netflix knowing that every gigabyte you stream is probably another 100-300 grams of CO2 into the atmosphere.
And you sit there depressed - knowing you are breathing in microplastics, knowing you are eating and drinking microplastics, knowing those microplastics and other air pollutants are likely increasing your risk of cancer considerably, knowing that 30 something cities with populations over 1 million people have run out of clean water (or water entirely) including India's 6th largest city by population, knowing that it's probably unwise to have children because sooner or later in their life the world is going to become a largely shitty and miserable place when food/water wars start, knowing that global insect biomass has considerably reduced in your short 34 years on earth, knowing because you are barely in the lower middle class you're probably going to be one of the ones to starve at some point because you'll lose your job and have a hard time finding another and a crop failure or three will cause food prices to go up 200%, 300%, 1000% or more in your lifetime and you'll get to experience what life is like for people in North Korea when you're eating whatever you can get your hands on.
The shareholders, the C-level employees, don't care because they aren't feeling the impacts already. They have fancy houses, fancy cars, take fancy vacations, they wear nice clothes and have more money than they need. The bulk of them have never filed bankruptcy or worried regularly how they're going to put food on the table, the majority of them have never known real struggle. They aren't concerned about climate change because they think the money will always be flowing in and they'll always have stuff.
Look at the articles over the past few years about the rich buying land in New Zealand like Peter Thiel did.
However, much of that security, it hinges on a delusion that this security will go away if we address climate change, which is of course mostly untrue. If we address this soon, it’s a matter of scaling back on a few luxuries while keeping other luxuries and the basics which keep us healthy and fed.
One example of many, how many suburban homes in the US touch much of their space more than once or twice a year? How many have multiple completely unused heated and air conditioned bedrooms? How much of suburban home’s storage is used by stuff which is bought and never gets touched again?
My house currently, about 2/3rds of the space is rarely touched, the storage in the garage and closets is full (organized, i’m not a hoarder lol) but full of projects and stuff which was bought because it seemed like a fun idea at the store, and all of that space is heated and cooled all year long.
The thought processes which go into the type of “need” for this much wasted space is just a norm readjustment which on a fundamental level mostly won’t impact our daily safety issues and still allow actual important luxuries.
If we wait, well, that’s when difficult decisions will have to be made, many of which will greatly impact fundamental life changes.
This Steven Pinker/Bill Gates cheerleeding nonsense is such a distraction. We need more anger and frustration to be stoked against those in power, not some kind of pacifying bullshit about how amazing all our technological gadgets have made our lives. It won't be worth anything once all the above starts happening. And for some people, this apocalypse has already begun.
Also the Amish and Mennonite communities still heavily rely on mass-produced goods manufactured in the same factories we all get stuff from.
- mass produced pre-packaged foods (they will absolutely buy and consume junk food, I know a former Amish - he literally wrote a book called Growing Up Amish) and we have a ton of them here in Indiana)
- hired cars/mass transportation
- community telephones
- manufactured farm equipment
- refrigeration for dairy operations (they have to by law)
Amish also have
- Alcoholism in their communities, mostly among youth
- A good deal of drug use in their communities, mostly among youth
Orange is the New Black didn't include an Amish girl just for the novelty of it, the included her because it's accurate. I imagine a good deal of this escapism via drugs and alcohol is a direct result of their lifestyle.
And yes, some tribal society in Randomplace also lives largely without modern conveniences but they have the knowledge, they have the experience, in most cases it is all they've never known.
My comment was talking about ME, Ryan Mercer, not Generic Human. I can't go claim a bunch of land and set up my own farm/commune/colony, I do not have the knowledge or manpower, I do not have the resources, it is not practical for me or most of the 'first world'.