Capitalism is a system used by sunflowers and salamanders. But sunflowers and salamanders are not taking over the world and destroying it.
Over the past few months I have been trying to tap into a river that could save the planet. You can hear about that river in Bank of England CEO Mark Carney’s year-end interview for BBC Today that Greta Thunberg guest-edited. The river is money. And its owners have a problem.
It is the same problem we all have, really. Climate change is changing everything at a pace that is hard to get our heads around. The world has already left the comfortable Holocene epoch when weather was predicable enough that humans could grow multi-year surpluses of corn and grain and quadruple their offspring’s populations in a single lifetime (mine). We have entered the chaotic world of the Anthropocene, where 8 billion two-legged hominids could very soon be back to zero. We can watch, in real time, as extinction smokes its way through innumerable ranks and orders of beings, smoldering and sparking along like a long fuse that terminates at the powder-keg we perch upon. As go the phytoplankton, so too, go we.
Carney and the others in his world know this. Not dummies, these guys. They get it. At the Madrid COP-25 climate conference they held their own summit at a Marriott Hotel. I attended and heard the same message I’ve been hearing for the past…