From Forbes (!) - Silicon Valley & More Broadly, Capitalism Are Not Going To Solve Climate Breakdown

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People around the world – even those in the US – appreciate the seriousness of climate change and are willing to expend their human and monetary capital to find a solution to it. Silicon Valley should be all-hands-on-deck working to solve the problem and firms like Andreesen Horowitz should be sifting through thousands of climate change-related start-ups in a year. Instead, the Valley is all-hands-on-deck coding up new mobile apps, designing algorithms to better track and profile American consumers (to more efficiently pick their pockets), automating society’s way into an even more extreme labor crisis (shout out to Andrew Yang!), and evading responsibility for its role in the breakdown of civil discourse.

Yes, there is a lot of money flowing to solar arrays and wind farms. Yes, people are working hard on battery technology. But if you look at the enormous reductions of greenhouse gases necessary to prevent even moderately terrible climate scenarios, it’s clear relying only on these improvements will offer us too little and the effects will kick in too late.

Capitalism’s present failure to respond to a foreseeable crisis relates to structural biases related to the economic incentives offered to agents representing current incumbents. In the words of Warren Buffett’s investing partner, Charlie Munger, “Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.”

All employees of a modern multi-national corporation are incentivized to do one thing and one thing only – figure out how to meet the quarterly and annual financial goals on which the careers and fortunes of their C-level managers are dependent. No matter how important individuals working at a large company might believe climate change to be, swimming against the stream sets them up for exposure to career risk that might cause them and their families and significant financial hardship.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkobayashisolomon/2020/05/28/capitalism-is-failing-us-just-when-we-need-it-most/#8419779a81ea