Gore, speaking of a sustainable society
04/14/2006
I find this article a very interesting study in contradiction.
The final paragraph goes:
As some have said, “We are operating the Earth like it’s a business in liquidation.” More mechanisms to incorporate environmental and social externalities will be needed to enable capital markets to achieve their intended purpose—to consistently allocate capital to its highest and best use for the good of the people and the planet.
I’m not sure if anyone else sees the contradiction, but I don’t see how capital markets can have an altruistic purpose of achieving the “highest and best use of capital for the good of the people and the planet” when the article states that the purpose of “the business response is about making money for shareholders, not altruism.”
The reason for this contradiction is a failure to understand the nature of the beast. Captialism does not in fact have anything to do with sustainability except as an encroachment upon it. It is like saying that “cancer and health are deeply and increasingly interrelated.” While the relationship between cancer and health is indeed interrelated, the robustness of the cancer leads to a commensurate demise in health, ultimately ending in death. In other words, capital markets are not just for the exchanging of necessary goods. As the article states, “the business response is about making money...” which can and has lead to all kinds of absurdities such as creating artificial scarcity and delusionally manufactured needs in order to at least maintain, if not increase, its market share. And the pursuit of market share leads to its own absurdities including criminality and soul-eating amoralism--think Ebenezer Scrooge.
Another aspect is the issue of “the business response is about making money for shareholders, not altruism.” Making money for shareholders, meaning investors. In other words, institutionalized parasitism.
Shareholders, more often than not, are people not directly invovled in the operation of the enterprise. In other words, shareholders do no labor in the enterprise but they reap the rewards of what labor creates. The story of the little red hen comes to mind where she does all the planting, cultivating, harvesting, grinding, and making the wheat into bread while the others do nothing to help and yet they want to share in that bread once it’s been baked. It took no captital to do this, only labor. The exchanging of labor and goods does not require the use of money. It merely makes the exchange easier. Even Adam Smith acknowledged that money, in and of itself, is worthless. It’s value lies only in what it can purchase. This is where greed enters the picture. And greed is not a virtue in any established moral system.
The way to a sustainable society is to begin thinking steady-state instead of constant growth. Growth at all costs is the way of cancer. Homeostasis is the way of health. This means we must begin thinking differently about our definition of wealth, whether it means the pursuit of money or the accumulation of wisdom especially in the wake of peak oil and the coming power down.
Margie A. Hoyt Watonwan Co. A/C Philosopher (BA) at large
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On 4/13/06, Mark Frederickson < > wrote:
To follow up on my last email about Europe transitioning from income tax to environmental taxes, here’s an excellent article co-written by Al Gore. mf , roch
For people and planet
Al Gore, David Blood
Tuesday, April 4, 2006
CAPITALISM and sustainability are deeply and increasingly interrelated. After all, our economic activity is based on the use of natural and human resources. Not until we more broadly “price in” the external costs of investment decisions across all sectors will we have a sustainable economy and society.
[snip]
In the corporate sector, companies like General Electric are designing products to enable their clients to compete in a carbon-constrained world. Novo Nordisk is taking a holistic view of combating diabetes not only through treatment but also through prevention. And Whole Foods and others are addressing the demand for quality food by sourcing local and organic produce. Importantly, the business response is about making money for shareholders, not altruism.
[snip] As some have said, “We are operating the Earth like it’s a business in liquidation.” More mechanisms to incorporate environmental and social externalities will be needed to enable capital markets to achieve their intended purpose—to consistently allocate capital to its highest and best use for the good of the people and the planet.
Al Gore, a former vice president of the United States, is chairman of Generation Investment Management. David Blood, formerly head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, is managing partner of Generation Investment Management, which he co-founded with Gore.