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Comment by tgv

15 hours ago

Not true. There are banks and funds that have environmental policies. Where you invest speaks about your character.

As Locke said: "I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts."

What organisations say are their principles and what their actions reveal them to be are often very different.

Even at my own job the CEO claims to be a big environmentalist yet the company is spending huge amounts of money on LLM tokens and the "leadership" team is jetting off around the world for "off-sites" constantly.

Seems to me that the vast majority (I leave off saying "all" simply as I have not surveyed all of them) of these claims are nothing more than greenwashing.

  • Yes, there's a lot of bullshitting. I've recently changed banks, because the old one was just lip service. There are orgs that track how banks perform, at least here.

  • Unless you oppose our economic system in a fundamental way, you always accept that wealthy people get to consume more resources than poor people. That goes for shared resources like "acceptable impact on climate and the natural world" too. As long as they pay for the privilege in a comparable scheme to what they want (carbon taxes, tradable quotas etc.), and aren't some sort of anticapitalists, they aren't hypocrites.

    • > As long as they pay for the privilege in a comparable scheme to what they want (carbon taxes, tradable quotas etc.) ... they aren't hypocrites.

      I don't agree. The hypocrisy is from the intent versus the behavior. eg Whaling on the weekends while heading an anti-whaling charity. You can't stop something you're actively working against at the same time. This has nothing to do with capitalism per se, but the qualities of "our economic system".

      Capitalism is a foundational philosophy to global economics, to be sure. Systems have bounds that are philosophical (legal is included) and practical. That's where the hypocrisy tends to lie.

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