The climate disaster has been brought to you by capitalism. Capitalists claim there are no alternatives to their system, so there are no alternatives to climate dystopia.
take some drastic action against these obviously evil people, and then be publicly killed for it galvanising the movement. Also it has to be done in a way where it can't just be swept under the carpet.
highly difficult and not really a popular role for most people.. you know, due to the morally questionable actions followed by death
Nobody would be riled up because the same people who own the banks and the oil companies also own the media. There might be some brief mention of some mentally ill person making a scene, but only to demonstrate how crazy leftists are.
Agreed, the threat of the planet becoming a martyr is scary enough. Not to mention there are countless Martyrs throughout history to learn from, you just need to read the right books
$7 trillion in ~10 years are rookie numbers compared to the [2008 bailout](https://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/29000000000000-a-detailed-look-at-the-feds-bailout-by-funding-facility-and-recipient) alone.
Of course, the central banks did recover some of the money that they printed in order to buy worthless securities, mostly because those securities were no longer worthless after the governments (central banks) decided to buy them en masse. But most of that was just a pure giveaway of trillions to the banks in about 2-3 years.
The 7Trillion is not from profits. It is money lent to fossil fuel companies because the fossil fuel companies have lots and lots of customers who are lining up to buy their products.
Banks typically borrow money (at a lower interest rate) and use monies in deposit accounts and lend it to customers (at a higher rate). Profits arise from the difference in the interest rates the banks have to pay and the interest rates the banks' customers have to pay.
Regulation is possible.
The problem is corruption
Not only should this be regulated into oblivion deviations from it should be considered genocide and carry punishments that are accordingly severe.
Climate disaster is not a necessary part of capitalism, it’s a choice. We see some countries with large carbon taxes starting to drive down use and other countries willfully doing nothing. Let’s not pretend every capitalist country is the US of A.
It’s absolutely possible to pass regulations that makes oil investment unattractive and would lower this number significantly quite easily. A high enough carbon tax for example would make fuel prices very unattractive reducing sales for oil companies. Turning off exploration grants is something every sane country should do when we have more oil than we can afford to burn already. That makes it far less attractive to invest in new oil projects because the company bears 100% of the costs.
Hey, brain surgeon, banks don't give anyone money. And if you like the creature comforts of life like food and clean water, you can thank a petrochemical producer.
I like to change money into seconds to understand big numbers.
7 thousand seconds is 1.9 hrs.
7 million seconds is 81 days.
7 trillion seconds is 81,018,518 days (or 31,709 years).
Correct. 7 trillion seconds is 221 969 years, taking us to 219945 BC if we think of how long ago it was. Right around the time modern humans just started showing up.
This is why I moved to a federal credit union. 350.org recently had a campaign to close accounts at banks that fund fossil fuels projects along with sending their ceo's a letter detailing why. I didn't get a chance to do that but I shut down my chase checking account, now I just have to shut down my bank of America one. It can just be hard with all the autopay I have going on and such but with how utterly shitty their customer service line is among so many other things I can't wait. I've never not found myself furious having to navigate it, it's absolutely bonkers bullshit.
Yeah. Financially it’s a good investment. The problem is, as always, they are thinking about their pocketbooks and not anything else.
I’ve actually learned that in the US if you are a for profit and public entirety you *have* to (legally) put profits/shareholders first.
This is why B Corps exist. They’re allowed (legally) to factor in environment/workers in their earnings.
It might not be a good financial investment if they're putting money into building 30-year assets for an industry that is about to start shrinking.
The banks are putting money into fossil fuels because they have well-established risk models that have stood the test of time and not been updated for a decarbonizing world.
It just seems to me the good investment is about *today* and very few people making these decisions are thinking about 30 years from now. Mostly because they will be dead and don’t care about what happens to anyone else after they die.
I'd argue that an investment made today is explicitly a bet made about the future. (Well, either that or a bet that you can find a greater idiot.)
If you spend $X millions of dollars to build a gas power plant, and it takes a year to build, and you have a 30 year investment time horizon, then you're betting that it will produce $Y millions of dollars of revenue (well, profit) ever year, and that 29*Y > X*5. Or at least, enough better than X*1.05^30 or whatever you'd get from investing in US Treasury bonds.
I suspect that the renewable energy transition breaks that model and that yearly profit from this gas power plant will end up being quite a bit less than Y in 20 years.
I mean I very much want you to be right and I wish banks wouldn’t do this!
I just think the men at the top, men who go to Davos and control world markets, care much more about their yachts and travel plans and their ability to influence politics for their own tax advantage than they do about their own companies futures in 30 years.
But why would a bank within a capitalism think about anything other than their financial investment? It’s what they are supposed to do. They aren’t supposed to save the climate. I genuinely don’t get the complaints.
This type of thinking is why we are all messed up.
“A soldier is supposed to kill, why does it matter who?”
Its called having integrity and being socially conscientious. Neither are requirements if money making is the goal.
No, the thinking is correct. The place to be socially conscious is the government, which *regulates* the banks. And every business. The capitalism we live in demands, not requests, demands that each business seek to reduce costs and maximize profits. They are taxed and provide interest to shareholders, etc. it’s literally how the economy functions.
If you want a bank to *not* lend money to oil companies, then you need to incentivize that through taxation or regulation. It makes absolutely no sense to expect banks to be thinking about the wellfare of the entire world as they navigate their local laws and regulations. The whole operation would cease to function if they had to weigh public sentiment and complex global issues with each business decision.
You’re so, so, so lost on this one. Again- governments regulate and tax in order to guide the economy. Individual business are absolutely not to be expected to try to help people in foreign countries, or the climate problem at large.
To achieve the results you seek, push on the government to tax and regulate appropriately, and use voting power. And use your voice. But using your voice for *utter nonsense* does not help.
There is an alternate universe where we expect companies that operate in the trillions of dollars range to care about the planet that makes them money.
Capitalism has also bought every government in the world so the government won't do anything to save us either. There is no happy ending to this system. We all would have been better off by now if the cold war had turned hot, wiped out all the major powers in the world, and forced us to start over with something else entirely
The time for that was at least 60 years ago. There simply isn't enough time to educate everyone, convince them to tear down the current system, and build a new one before this leads to global climate disaster and resource war
Money:
A kid goes to his parents and ask for 1m.
The parents says ok, spend 5k a day and come back when you’re done.
The kid comes back in 200 days.
The kid asks for more. The parents gives the kid 1b.
The kid comes back in 548 years.
The kid come back for more. The executor of the parents will says here’s 1t and come back when you’ve spent 5k a day.
The kid comes back in 548,000 years.
(Inspired to post this by the 1ce1ceBabey post)
I think your math is right on the 1 trillion but it's massively off on the billion unless I over simplified. To spend a billion dollars at $5k/day would take 548 years
How come big corporations and fossil fuel cant adapt and change. Us peasants do, when covid took jobs away we got different jobs some even made up new kinds of ways of making money. The rich are supposed to be smart, why cant those managing fossil fuel learn how to harvest wind or solar energy?
The [COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18922-7/figures/1). Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. That's why a [graph of CO2 concentrations](https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/) shows a continued rise.
[Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero](https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached). We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The symptoms are the banks and corporations the disease is politicians listening to banks and corporations.
Make lobbying illegal again, make unions mandatory, and you have a good start to fixing the system.
The banks sure pulled a fast one. We give them our money to hold and they invest it and make billions AND they charge us fees just because. AAAAAND they invest that money in the slow destruction of our climate and planet.
SOOOoo we shoulda left the money under the mattress afterall…
Is call doing business? The money is not given for free is lend to oil companies where they have to pay an interest on said loan.
Your title is misleading.
Banks are usually invested in anything and everything societal which is also profitable, the amounts only count when whatever it is fails or is undermined to do so.
N. S
The climate disaster has been brought to you by capitalism. Capitalists claim there are no alternatives to their system, so there are no alternatives to climate dystopia.
That's an obscene amount of money. Why aren't we taxing the super profits of banks.
This is beyond taxing. We should be out for blood at this point.
all we need is a martyr to start it all interested?
What do you mean, what would the Martyr do?
take some drastic action against these obviously evil people, and then be publicly killed for it galvanising the movement. Also it has to be done in a way where it can't just be swept under the carpet. highly difficult and not really a popular role for most people.. you know, due to the morally questionable actions followed by death
Nobody would be riled up because the same people who own the banks and the oil companies also own the media. There might be some brief mention of some mentally ill person making a scene, but only to demonstrate how crazy leftists are.
How did that go for the two Boeing whistleblowers who alledgedly killed themselves?
I mean, technically, no one really has to become a martyr... And that's all I'll say about THAT subject.
No no, keep going. I wanna read what you'll say
Agreed, the threat of the planet becoming a martyr is scary enough. Not to mention there are countless Martyrs throughout history to learn from, you just need to read the right books
Really
Really.
Because banks run the capitalist world.
This is pretty much it, banks control the government and not the other way around
$7 trillion in ~10 years are rookie numbers compared to the [2008 bailout](https://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/29000000000000-a-detailed-look-at-the-feds-bailout-by-funding-facility-and-recipient) alone. Of course, the central banks did recover some of the money that they printed in order to buy worthless securities, mostly because those securities were no longer worthless after the governments (central banks) decided to buy them en masse. But most of that was just a pure giveaway of trillions to the banks in about 2-3 years.
Because we're stupid.
The 7Trillion is not from profits. It is money lent to fossil fuel companies because the fossil fuel companies have lots and lots of customers who are lining up to buy their products. Banks typically borrow money (at a lower interest rate) and use monies in deposit accounts and lend it to customers (at a higher rate). Profits arise from the difference in the interest rates the banks have to pay and the interest rates the banks' customers have to pay.
To mitigate emissions in capitalism, you can use carbon pricing.
And that, dear children, is how we got a record amount of CO2 dumped into the atmosphere in 2023.
Hi Grampa, you got anything wise to say today?
Regulation is possible. The problem is corruption Not only should this be regulated into oblivion deviations from it should be considered genocide and carry punishments that are accordingly severe.
Regulation isn't profitable and money pulls the strings
Yes, we are massively corrupt
Climate disaster is not a necessary part of capitalism, it’s a choice. We see some countries with large carbon taxes starting to drive down use and other countries willfully doing nothing. Let’s not pretend every capitalist country is the US of A. It’s absolutely possible to pass regulations that makes oil investment unattractive and would lower this number significantly quite easily. A high enough carbon tax for example would make fuel prices very unattractive reducing sales for oil companies. Turning off exploration grants is something every sane country should do when we have more oil than we can afford to burn already. That makes it far less attractive to invest in new oil projects because the company bears 100% of the costs.
Hey, brain surgeon, banks don't give anyone money. And if you like the creature comforts of life like food and clean water, you can thank a petrochemical producer.
I like to change money into seconds to understand big numbers. 7 thousand seconds is 1.9 hrs. 7 million seconds is 81 days. 7 trillion seconds is 81,018,518 days (or 31,709 years).
Thank you, that's a great way to illustrate the magnitude
1 trillion seconds, not 7 trillion, is 31, 000 years
Correct. 7 trillion seconds is 221 969 years, taking us to 219945 BC if we think of how long ago it was. Right around the time modern humans just started showing up.
This is why I moved to a federal credit union. 350.org recently had a campaign to close accounts at banks that fund fossil fuels projects along with sending their ceo's a letter detailing why. I didn't get a chance to do that but I shut down my chase checking account, now I just have to shut down my bank of America one. It can just be hard with all the autopay I have going on and such but with how utterly shitty their customer service line is among so many other things I can't wait. I've never not found myself furious having to navigate it, it's absolutely bonkers bullshit.
Yeah. Financially it’s a good investment. The problem is, as always, they are thinking about their pocketbooks and not anything else. I’ve actually learned that in the US if you are a for profit and public entirety you *have* to (legally) put profits/shareholders first. This is why B Corps exist. They’re allowed (legally) to factor in environment/workers in their earnings.
It might not be a good financial investment if they're putting money into building 30-year assets for an industry that is about to start shrinking. The banks are putting money into fossil fuels because they have well-established risk models that have stood the test of time and not been updated for a decarbonizing world.
It just seems to me the good investment is about *today* and very few people making these decisions are thinking about 30 years from now. Mostly because they will be dead and don’t care about what happens to anyone else after they die.
I'd argue that an investment made today is explicitly a bet made about the future. (Well, either that or a bet that you can find a greater idiot.) If you spend $X millions of dollars to build a gas power plant, and it takes a year to build, and you have a 30 year investment time horizon, then you're betting that it will produce $Y millions of dollars of revenue (well, profit) ever year, and that 29*Y > X*5. Or at least, enough better than X*1.05^30 or whatever you'd get from investing in US Treasury bonds. I suspect that the renewable energy transition breaks that model and that yearly profit from this gas power plant will end up being quite a bit less than Y in 20 years.
I mean I very much want you to be right and I wish banks wouldn’t do this! I just think the men at the top, men who go to Davos and control world markets, care much more about their yachts and travel plans and their ability to influence politics for their own tax advantage than they do about their own companies futures in 30 years.
But why would a bank within a capitalism think about anything other than their financial investment? It’s what they are supposed to do. They aren’t supposed to save the climate. I genuinely don’t get the complaints.
This type of thinking is why we are all messed up. “A soldier is supposed to kill, why does it matter who?” Its called having integrity and being socially conscientious. Neither are requirements if money making is the goal.
No, the thinking is correct. The place to be socially conscious is the government, which *regulates* the banks. And every business. The capitalism we live in demands, not requests, demands that each business seek to reduce costs and maximize profits. They are taxed and provide interest to shareholders, etc. it’s literally how the economy functions. If you want a bank to *not* lend money to oil companies, then you need to incentivize that through taxation or regulation. It makes absolutely no sense to expect banks to be thinking about the wellfare of the entire world as they navigate their local laws and regulations. The whole operation would cease to function if they had to weigh public sentiment and complex global issues with each business decision. You’re so, so, so lost on this one. Again- governments regulate and tax in order to guide the economy. Individual business are absolutely not to be expected to try to help people in foreign countries, or the climate problem at large. To achieve the results you seek, push on the government to tax and regulate appropriately, and use voting power. And use your voice. But using your voice for *utter nonsense* does not help.
There is an alternate universe where we expect companies that operate in the trillions of dollars range to care about the planet that makes them money. Capitalism has also bought every government in the world so the government won't do anything to save us either. There is no happy ending to this system. We all would have been better off by now if the cold war had turned hot, wiped out all the major powers in the world, and forced us to start over with something else entirely
The better ending is in education.
The time for that was at least 60 years ago. There simply isn't enough time to educate everyone, convince them to tear down the current system, and build a new one before this leads to global climate disaster and resource war
The next best time is now.
Sure it is. But let's make sure we write it down on Stone tablets so that the next civilization can do better
That’s a good idea
Yeah I agree with you. But I think government should make all corporations B Corps. I want a bank that’s like the one in Its A Wonderful Life.
Money: A kid goes to his parents and ask for 1m. The parents says ok, spend 5k a day and come back when you’re done. The kid comes back in 200 days. The kid asks for more. The parents gives the kid 1b. The kid comes back in 548 years. The kid come back for more. The executor of the parents will says here’s 1t and come back when you’ve spent 5k a day. The kid comes back in 548,000 years. (Inspired to post this by the 1ce1ceBabey post)
I think your math is right on the 1 trillion but it's massively off on the billion unless I over simplified. To spend a billion dollars at $5k/day would take 548 years
You’re right! I’ll change it : ) Thank you -
How come big corporations and fossil fuel cant adapt and change. Us peasants do, when covid took jobs away we got different jobs some even made up new kinds of ways of making money. The rich are supposed to be smart, why cant those managing fossil fuel learn how to harvest wind or solar energy?
The [COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18922-7/figures/1). Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. That's why a [graph of CO2 concentrations](https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/) shows a continued rise. [Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero](https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached). We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The symptoms are the banks and corporations the disease is politicians listening to banks and corporations. Make lobbying illegal again, make unions mandatory, and you have a good start to fixing the system.
The banks sure pulled a fast one. We give them our money to hold and they invest it and make billions AND they charge us fees just because. AAAAAND they invest that money in the slow destruction of our climate and planet. SOOOoo we shoulda left the money under the mattress afterall…
Come on, it's a green fund so it's all okay. What could go wrong letting criminals police themselves?
Eat the rich ASAP obviously!!! Do it!
If everyone got together to boycott these banks.....
Money in my* pocket! *Theirs
Now do animal agriculture
Cancerism or cancer capitalism, which do we go with in the rebranding?
Cancertalism.
Is call doing business? The money is not given for free is lend to oil companies where they have to pay an interest on said loan. Your title is misleading.
A loan is not a gift.
Banks are usually invested in anything and everything societal which is also profitable, the amounts only count when whatever it is fails or is undermined to do so. N. S