10 Comments

Very provocative, simple and yet exceedingly aspirational. All of these are "good things" in my book. Thanks for posting

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Hi Melissa, thanks for sharing your thoughts! If you care to elaborate...what do you see as the big challenges and/or the aspects that are the easiest to "sell".

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Capitalism is bad mmmkay🤦‍♀️ You cannot fix what isn't broken. Capitalism is a pyramid scheme dreamed up by fascists. Businesses are predatory and exploitative by design. Hierarchies are also bad, mmmmkay🤦‍♀️ Economies are imaginary systems. Entropy will eat all of our imaginary systems alive. Entropy breaks apart solar systems. You think an series of imaginary systems stand a snowball's chance in hell🤣

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The issue is that no one in power will accept these rules and thus the tearing down, anarchy and such is necessary.

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Justin, let's look at this from another angle. What if the most powerful people saw these rules as the only way for them to stay wealthy and avoid becoming poor. Wouldn't that get them to use their clout to drive the necessary changes?

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Thanks for the reply Brad. I have two thoughts. First, of course this would be great and you'd think the powerful would have done this by now. Unfortunately I don't think it works that way. Humans are hardwired to ignore information that doesn't conform with their core beliefs. Right now the core beliefs and moral imperative of business is the maximization of profits. Given enough trauma, we can change our core beliefs. So perhaps there will come a time when it is undeniably so, when the trauma has taken a major toll, and more of the powerful will get on board.

My second thought is that by rule #1, if faithfully followed, would crush most of the industrial model. It's hard to think of most of our industrial processes as not violating that rule. Feel free to put that to the test. #3 is also quite subjective. We have to question how much benefit anything could be that permanently degrades an ecosystem.

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Justin, these are valid points but again let's look at this from the perspective that the moral imperative of business is to maximize of profits.

Right now we're living in a world where profits are being targeted by climate change. Recent research explores some of the most reputable data in terms of the magnitude of "tail risks" and what it will do to our ability to conduct commerce in the coming years.

Many leaders in the insurance, banking, investment and pension sectors are telling us that they are concerned about this reality but they're afraid to openly talk about it for fear of having their personal or professional reputation attacked.

Yes, business cares about next quarter's profits but the people who work in these businesses also care about their own jobs, lifestyles and retirements. They all have an incentive to not trash their futures and that's where the moral imperative of business to sustain itself (and those who rely on it) gets its biggest challenge.

Have a look at this article that we just released, about tail risks, and let me know what you think. There's also a link in the article that takes you to another article titled, Hey, I’ve got something we need to talk about - but I don’t want anyone to hear. I think both of these articles will give you some additional perspective.

If you have any further thoughts please feel free to share them.

https://bradzarnett.substack.com/p/when-it-comes-to-climate-the-tail

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Thanks again. Jem Bendell spent his life working on this project, giving presentations to corporate leaders around the world. You might find his book enlightening. He opens up about the realities we face, including the fact that even if we dramatically changed civilization relatively quickly, we’d still be facing very challenging times with costs and food in the relative near future. An epub version of his book is free.

https://jembendell.com/2023/04/08/breaking-together-a-freedom-loving-response-to-collapse/

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Thanks for the the recommendation! I think the difference between us and Jem (who I think has amazingly fresh views on this subejct) is that we are lazer focused on the insurance and investment industries. We can live without furniture stores but we can't live without insurance, banking, and predicatible returns on investments and pensions. And these are the people who have influence in our society,

This is why Climobilize is targetting "people of influence" in the four pillars of our economic system; Insurance, Banking, Investments and Insurance. We also have an action element to our efforts that will develop policy that will be handed off directly to lobbyists, marketers and politicians. And finally, I think that things have gotten far worse than when Jem began to make this case, which is likely increasing the number of people who see the problem with more alarm.

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I’m a believer in fighting the good fight on all fronts. Thanks for your efforts.

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