| Climate change is real. Markets are not solving for that. (Subsidies and market theory.) Hopefully we can utilize market economics to incentivize sustainable development and head off currently accelerating environmental destruction with costs unrecoverable in a human lifetime. Markets absolutely have not solved for global warming. Take a look around: the arctic is burning; CA is burning; the severity, frequency, and costs of weather disasters are significantly increasing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20925127 It is denial or delusion to claim that markets have solved or will solve for long-term environmental and thus economic sustainability. Some firms - despite the current EPA's denialism, suppression, and appeasements of special interests - have chosen to forego short-term profits in order to achieve (voluntary) Paris Agreement targets. Unfortunately, markets are hardly reinforcing that good decision. Long-term ROI is beyond the attention spans of retail and institutional investors. Unregulated free markets have resulted in smog-filled cities and polluted drinking water in very many economies. Europe has had carbon credits for quite awhile. That's a good first step, but it's clearly not sufficient. There could be yearly tokens for carbon, greenhouse gases, and toxic waste (e.g. the wastewater from washing out coal plants that the current administration has decided to allow to be dumped in our rivers). Speculators and do-gooders could drive up the prices of said tokens. Is the market choosing the most energy-efficient cryptoasset when there's virtually zero switching cost and plenty of substitute assets? No. That market, at least, is choosing the least energy-efficient alternative; and it appears that nothing but a pan-industry "you can only waste renewable energy on that speculative margin" could be expected to result in capital allocation with long-term environmental security as a rational primary objective. |
Firm B: profitable, blue chip, 100% green, files (e.g. GRI) Corporate Sustainability Reports
Which investors are factoring in the most important long-term factors in portfolio development? Markets are not optimizing for sustainability: policy is necessary to counterbalance profit motive.
Are we just using markets wrong?
Nobody likes penalties more than incentives.