A lot of big polluters are publicly traded companies. Owning shares of US public companies means you can go to shareholder meetings, vote, and other rights.
What do all think of a non profit that runs and is funded with an endowment composed of big polluters like oil companies and using the dividends to fund climate initiatives? In the mean time, using the seat at the table to influence other shareholders to reduce emissions, which is in their long term interest anyways.
If the endowment dries up, mission accomplished. If it grows, more money to act with.
What do all think?
I think the utopian socialists tried this, it’s been pretty well accepted for well over a century by any serious socialist thought that just talking to capitalists to convince them of anticapitalism - and this is what you’re talking about when you’re asking fossil fuel shareholders to act against their profit motive - simply will never work.
They will kill to protect their money. They will not listen to anything but the exercise of power. If you don’t have a controlling interest in a company, you don’t have power and you won’t influence them. If you could get a controlling interest, you’d be coopted into the capitalist machinery long before the point you could change the fossil fuel companies’ course. If by some miracle you could avoid that, I imagine you would be assassinated.
Don’t kid yourself. Shareholder meetings and votes and whatever other structures create the illusion of accountability only go so far as they are useful in maintaining power for those that have it. The second you really threaten their power the fangs will come out. They will not lie down and simply agree to stop being the bourgeoisie. The apparent civility of a shadeholder meeting is a fig leaf on their blood-drenched bodies.
Good point. So in order to go the shareholder route, it would require finding them a way to bring in more profits than fossil fuels.
The problem is that they’ve already thought of that, and they diversify their portfolios. You would be just another company vying for their investments.
Whilst you’re working on your alternative, as long as fossil fuels have anything left to offer them, they will keep burning them until there is nothing left. They won’t just throw away their existing investments. Your alternative will not exhaust their money, no matter how good it is. If your alternative did exhaust their ability to invest, they wouldn’t invest. The risk would be too high, and capitalists are extremely risk averse.
The other problem with this is, no matter what solution you come up with, if it’s in the hands of capital then it will be optimised for financial return over everything else. That means everything else is sacrificed as an externality, including the climate. They won’t just give you money and let you sacrifice their profits for the environment, they will demand you make the greediest decisions possible and ignore all other considerations until whatever you’ve developed is as bad for humanity as fossil fuels.
If you won’t do that, they’ll remove you from the equation, probably by just stealing your work and getting someone less scrupulous to do it in your stead. Property means nothing in reality, it is only a convenient fiction that serves the interests of the powerful, and they don’t respect it when it gets in their way.
The reality is that every measure that has been successful in curbing their power has been direct action by organised groups of people. We have things like the weekend, child labour laws, health & safety regulations, and so many more things not because people worked within the system, but because they refused to be governed by it. People went on strike, demonstrated, sabotaged critical infrastructure - like pipelines - and sometimes waged actual wars, just to displace the power of capital & the state.
Any law we have that protects us was given as a concession in response to these actions, and every one of those laws can stop protecting us the moment our rulers decide they don’t need to do it anymore.
However, people are building a better world now, in the shell of the old and dying world, but one of the things you need to do to be part of that is to stop waiting for permission. Capitalists won’t give it to you, because on some deep systemic level they know that that better world has no place for their way of life.