Climate change global warming natural disaster freak weather etc. (3 Viewers)

This is surprising, even investment managers are coming out against capitalism



What do you mean you don't pay for premium FT??

Two of the world’s biggest fund management bosses have called for a rethink of capitalism and its obsession with constant economic growth, in a plaintive appeal for business and governments to deal more decisively with the challenges of climate change.

Anne Richards, chief executive of Fidelity International, said the world must end “our obsession with ever-increasing GDP” and the “primacy of shareholders” to foster the kind of long-term thinking that would help protect the environment.

Andreas Utermann, CEO of Allianz Global Investors, said the world’s growth mania — “nominal GDP growth, supported by population growth, [and profit] growth” — was clearly unsustainable, and suggested that capitalism in its current form is “borrowing from the future while destroying the environment”.

The pleas for reform, delivered as part of an FT City Network debate on whether capitalism could fix climate change, came in response to an address by Gail Bradbrook, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, in which she called for wholesale reform of the current economic system to avert global disaster.

Mr Utermann, who announced this week that he will retire from AllianzGI after a 17-year career with the asset manager, said: “A more holistic approach to ‘growth’ needs to evolve, looking to capture societal and environmental benefits and costs.

“More sophisticated measures than GDP per capita are required to determine whether capitalism is delivering to all stakeholders without borrowing from the future while destroying the environment.” It was “self-evident that this is not sustainable”, he said.

In her critique of the short-termist outlook of shareholders, Ms Richards, who has also worked in senior roles at Aberdeen Asset Management and M&G, called for a “pivot [away] from the Milton Friedman concept of capitalism and the primacy of shareholders, who may have a very short-term involvement with an individual company, towards a wider stakeholder approach”.

The surprisingly outspoken interventions from two of the City’s best known asset managers reflected a wider view among contributors to the FT City Network debate that business and government must urgently improve their response to the growing evidence of environmental catastrophe. “Solving climate change through inclusive capitalism will define our generation,” said Nigel Wilson, chief executive of Legal & General, another big asset manager.

Several participants hailed the role that UK-based climate change activist group Extinction Rebellion has played — alongside the likes of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg and film-maker David Attenborough — to highlight the issue. Recent protests have focused in part on the City of London and the role that banks, asset managers and insurers play in financing and sustaining some of the world’s most environmentally damaging industries, from oil extraction to vehicle manufacture.

Central banks’ mandates allow them to tackle climate change
Several City Network contributors said that, while it was impossible to instantly blacklist climate unfriendly firms, it was vital that companies set tough environmental targets, measure whether they were met and reward managers on their performance, rather than on short-term profit.

“Of course it’s not ‘either profits or sustainability’,” said Robert Swannell, the former financier and Marks and Spencer chairman who now chairs the government’s investment arm UKGI. “But let us ditch the shareholder value maximisation mantra and look for metrics that not only measure financial performance but also measure positive or negative impact on society.”

The shift towards a broader interest in stakeholders was foreshadowed in the US by a summertime announcement from the Business Roundtable, a key US corporate lobby group. It insisted that capitalism was the best way to protect jobs in a sustainable economy with “a healthy environment”, though it made no mention of climate change.

The FT City Network is a panel of more than 50 senior figures from across the City of London. Each month the forum debates a subject of topical interest.
 
I have seen it argued (poorly, but it's interesting) that the great increases in fuel efficiency in recent decades have done more to curb carbon emissions than attempting to go green ever could, it's just there's been a 200 fold or whatever increase in the amount of flights and bitcoin and all that.

Obviously my answer is, why not both.
 
increases in fuel efficiency are attempts to go green.

condescendingwonka.gif
Listen I know.

I was going to say "imagine our iPhones were being charged by a waterwheel and coal/steam engines" but the waterwheel actually sounds kind of utopian in 2019 and there's probably some snakeoil salesman in Silicon Valley selling that to the idiots there, like the raw water stuff.
 
Listen I know.

I was going to say "imagine our iPhones were being charged by a waterwheel and coal/steam engines" but the waterwheel actually sounds kind of utopian in 2019 and there's probably some snakeoil salesman in Silicon Valley selling that to the idiots there, like the raw water stuff.

off into tangentville. AZ here but I've been fascinated by how we've* come to fetishize all the low carbon tech that we had 100 years ago. Carts, horse stuff (ploughs and things), bikes, waterwheels, pedal sewing machines, home butter churns all stuck to the walls of bars or sitting as a feature in a hotel garden.

*not thumped obvs, I mean Ireland at large.

That description of silicon valley bros I heard last year that was along the lines of a bunch of guys sitting around trying to replace their moms with tech is kinda hard to get away from.
 
I agree, but also the high-tech, high-capitalism lifestyle is obviously not good for us or the planet so it's no bad thing, as long as you don't go full Nazi Germany/ Gemtrails/Brexiteer worshipping the past. How many times do we have to learn this before we do something about it?

I learnt recently that Easter Island was effectively a fully functioning human utopia until a bunch of Europeans landed, killed half, enslaved the other half and "increased productivity" on the land to the point where everything fell apart. We then spent 300 odd years telling ourselves that the primitives did it to themselves through foolish beliefs.
 
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And by public they mean not even sharing it on twitter.


I correct myself.

3 environmental public consultations have been rammed into the xmas period including the above.

agriculture / marine / food


coffee cups / plastic bags.

 
I learnt recently that Easter Island was effectively a fully functioning human utopia until a bunch of Europeans landed, killed half, enslaved the other half and "increased productivity" on the land to the point where everything fell apart. We then spent 300 odd years telling ourselves that the primitives did it to themselves through foolish beliefs.
/me raises one eyebrow

Where did you learn this?
 
Just out of curiosity - Like I know a lot of you are parents - Is it even remotely considerable to sit down and write a submission for a public consultation 3 weeks before xmas?

*Kinda think the answer is no - just curious as lord no kids here is thinking about setting aside a day to go at it.
 
Just out of curiosity - Like I know a lot of you are parents - Is it even remotely considerable to sit down and write a submission for a public consultation 3 weeks before xmas?

*Kinda think the answer is no - just curious as lord no kids here is thinking about setting aside a day to go at it.
I don’t have the time to do the stuff in work that is similar, let alone on top of home life. Probably true at any time of year but definitely not at Christmas.
 
AFAICS he's as guilty of fitting the evidence to the story he wants to tell as anyone else is. Lots of adjectives describing Polynesians like "incredible", "astonishing", "ingenious". Also a lot of weasel words - "it's likely that ...", "this must have been ...", "this may have ...", "some have argued".

Goes to great lengths to demonstrate that deforestation was the fault of rats rather than Moai-making. What does it matter? The ecology of the island changed dramatically after human arrival, that's not disputed. According to this Solving the Easter Island population puzzle the island could have supported 17-thousand-odd people rather than the couple of thousand the Dutch described. If there was no collapse, as he asserts, then why were there so few people?

There's no dispute that Europeans fucked the place up from the 1800s on, but come on - are we going to pretend that Europeans are the only humans capable of fucking shit up?
 
AFAICS he's as guilty of fitting the evidence to the story he wants to tell as anyone else is. Lots of adjectives describing Polynesians like "incredible", "astonishing", "ingenious". Also a lot of weasel words - "it's likely that ...", "this must have been ...", "this may have ...", "some have argued".
In fairness to him the only one who has called it a Utopia is me. He's building an argument and he's being cautious and careful, you don't need to insult him calling them weasel words since he never claims to know the exact truth.

Goes to great lengths to demonstrate that deforestation was the fault of rats rather than Moai-making. What does it matter? The ecology of the island changed dramatically after human arrival, that's not disputed. According to this Solving the Easter Island population puzzle the island could have supported 17-thousand-odd people rather than the couple of thousand the Dutch described. If there was no collapse, as he asserts, then why were there so few people?
What do you mean what does it matter? It fundamentally changes everything about the story. I'll read that article now in a few mins.

edit: all it says it that it could have sustained 17,500 people, not that there is any evidence that it did. Maybe you're an expert on all this stuff, I don't pretend to be - an argument is made on a podcast that I find more plausible than the arguments made as late as 2005 that the people were too "inflexible" to deal with a changing climate and died off as a result.

There's no dispute that Europeans fucked the place up from the 1800s on, but come on - are we going to pretend that Europeans are the only humans capable of fucking shit up?
No one said that except you.
 
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