Financial Green

I tend to post alarming happenings here, but this will be different. I have often said that the humankind will turn from destroying this planet to saving it only when enough of them realize there is no other choice. Ecosystems have a certain amount of resiliancy and no more. Beyond a certain point there is no recovery. This beautiful planet's ability to support us is shrinking fast, closing like a knothole that humanity must pass through in order to survive. The only question in all this is, "How small will the organizations of humanity allow that knothole to become before they start trying to turn the economic ships of the world?"

It is a monument to the collective human death wish that our economic systems are set up to profit from the destruction of the very forces that sustain life on Earth.

At what point will this change?

There are hopeful signs in this world and here is a very large one. This is a framework whereby environmental considerations will be included in that most evil of all documents

....The Business Plan.

Here are tenets of the framework:
disclose the greenhouse gas emissions of all its operations;

make $1 billion available for investments in renewable energy;


set up a think tank to identify other lucrative green markets;


work on public policy measures relating to climate change;


conduct more rigorous assessments of its new projects' impacts on the environment and on indigenous people;


refuse to finance extractive projects in World Heritage sites or any projects that violate the environmental laws of the host country.

Sounds pretty strong. The most hopeful thing of all is who this business plan is from:

Goldman Sachs, the world leading investment bank. Noting that two thirds of the world's resources are being depleted unsustainably and calculating that the Earth's ecosystem provides $33,000,000,000,000.00 worth of value each year to human enterprise, Goldman Sachs has taken the stance that money has little value if there is no planet on which to spend it.

That figure was thirty three TRILLION dollars, by the way. That's what Mother Nature means to us. Here's the full report:

Business Plan

Peace,

Steve