The Climate Vs Economics Vectors Don’t Work Out

Bezos has donated massive amounts to fight climate change. Many others too have — all with great intent. So many of us are truly, deeply consumed with the issue, and act in many different ways — both small and big — to try and counter this problem-of-our-times.

The issues around inequality and many others are connected. The ecology, the economy, indigenous freedoms and rights, the richness of our commons are all inextricably linked.

The 2 major opposing ideas and directions are that of scarcity and abundance. The economy today is built around the former, and opposed to the ecology.

Our jobs, our production, consumption, entrepreneurship, success, investment — all of those vectors are in that direction. All more or less opposed as well, and aligned with the destruction of the ecology. Indeed, the markers of success depend on the outcome of that destruction and extraction converted to currency and valuations at an ever more furious pace.

Many of the problems we are starting to see and experience are rooted in the destruction of the ecology. Our existence itself is threatened by this.

Our efforts to negate this happen at a tiny scale, while our work, business/economic efforts continue to further that destruction at a scale that is orders of magnitude larger. Each of us, in small everyday ways, lends more weight to the destructive and extractive vectors, and some of us then try doing something in the opposite direction to a much, much smaller extent.

Irrespective of all our little efforts and hopes and inventions, this math can never work, and the gulf will continue to widen rapidly. It can only get worse.

For things to truly deeply change, the work, our jobs, economic value and our valuation of things and effort has to align to the vectors that point left. Unless each thing we do is not only less destructive, but regenerative, we’re only making it worse even if doing it slower. It’s why even the best intent around sustainability isn’t enough today.

We have to rewire how we live and work on this planet. We have to rewire how we assign the value of things, and what things we value.

(I should have added $$ to the right side of that picture as well, because we suck at valuing the left side today.)

We will truly be living and working in sync with the planet and may not need philanthropy to try save it — or rather it’s version of it that works for us. We just have to change the direction of those vectors, and add a lot more weight to the ones more or less pointing to the left of that picture.