A lot of big polluters are publicly traded companies. Owning shares of US public companies means you can go to shareholder meetings, vote, and other rights.
What do all think of a non profit that runs and is funded with an endowment composed of big polluters like oil companies and using the dividends to fund climate initiatives? In the mean time, using the seat at the table to influence other shareholders to reduce emissions, which is in their long term interest anyways.
If the endowment dries up, mission accomplished. If it grows, more money to act with.
What do all think?
I think the utopian socialists tried this, it’s been pretty well accepted for well over a century by any serious socialist thought that just talking to capitalists to convince them of anticapitalism - and this is what you’re talking about when you’re asking fossil fuel shareholders to act against their profit motive - simply will never work.
They will kill to protect their money. They will not listen to anything but the exercise of power. If you don’t have a controlling interest in a company, you don’t have power and you won’t influence them. If you could get a controlling interest, you’d be coopted into the capitalist machinery long before the point you could change the fossil fuel companies’ course. If by some miracle you could avoid that, I imagine you would be assassinated.
Don’t kid yourself. Shareholder meetings and votes and whatever other structures create the illusion of accountability only go so far as they are useful in maintaining power for those that have it. The second you really threaten their power the fangs will come out. They will not lie down and simply agree to stop being the bourgeoisie. The apparent civility of a shadeholder meeting is a fig leaf on their blood-drenched bodies.
Sure, if enough people do nice capitalism, it will cancel out the bad capitalism (that we have no intention of getting rid of). 🙃
No, it wouldn’t work for a number of reasons, but the main one is that rich and powerful people want to stay rich and powerful, if you get in their way they won’t just sit back and let you do it, they’ll pump money into propaganda, reactionaries think tanks and anything necessary to keep the status quo.
Capitalism itself is the reason we are going through climate change, “perfecting” it more won’t take us out of it. This is the usual moderate response to any kind of issue: they struggle between wanting progress and being afraid of change so they come up with half-assed solutions that don’t rock the boat too much. Negative peace vs positive peace.
