You say you can’t support legislation to mandate your huge corporation to reduce their carbon emissions because it will cost you money in the short term? Are you SURE that you would lose money from it? Like, 100% sure?
Because I mean, I’ve heard that some experts think that won’t happen. I know that a lot of economists agree that spending money on things will cost you money, but how do you really know for sure? There is a significant subset of economists who believe that spending money on things doesn’t have any measurable consequences on your corporate environment. It would be a shame to not reduce climate change if it wasn’t actually going to cost you money.
And I have to say, as nice as some of your arguments for why you have to make money sound, the practical truth is that we can’t just up and inconvenience humanity just to conserve the economy. As a conservative Christian, I agree with Richard Land who says that, “human beings come first in God’s created order… And that primacy must be given to human beings and for human betterment.” I could not agree more, Mr. Land. There’s just not enough consensus about economic change to risk losing human life about it.
Call me anthropocentric if you must, but I stand by it. It saddens me more than you realize to think of a noble industry going extinct when there isn’t any viable paradigm left for them to feed on, or to think of cute little jobs being lost (when their delicate economic relationships are upset). But if it is a battle between human life and economic vitality, I just have to put humans first.
And who knows, maybe the prevailing wisdom is wrong and we have no idea how economic change actually works. Maybe it’s a natural phenomenon that’s just sort of there, and our actions have no effect on it. And I know that our economy was much more bull and bear in the past, so why should we really worry about this now?
Volcanoes cause a lot more economic change anyway.
