The Frog in the Pot: the Winning of Big Friends to Scoop  Us out of Climate Peril

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) Winston Churchill once observed that you can rely of the United States to do the right thing, after all the alternatives have been exhausted. We are at this Churchillian moment on climate action, ....

We are currently going through the cycle of denial that solutions are sustainable, affordable, reliable or available.

In short, because the water is not actually boiling, rather it is uncomfortably warm and getting warmer, the frog has not summoned the will to jump out of the pot regardless of the consequences, because we are not sure we are not jumping into the fire below the pot.

The Problem of 70 percent for, 70 percent against

So we go on, 70 percent demanding action on climate change, 70 percent demanding that action on climate change pay for itself.

(P)art of that comes down not to a debate about the consequences of climate change, but who will win and who will lose once climate change comes, not in the court of public opinion, but in the court of dollars.

If the Fortune 500 could make another fortune on climate change mitigation, we’d be mitigating fast — that’s not bitterness or cynicism, it’s just the way things work, and the sooner we stop expecting for the climate change revolution to be accomplished by the singing of Kumbaya and out-with-the-multinationals-the-Peace-Corps-is-here magical thinking, the better off we’ll be. Enriching the guys with their hands on the switch is a sure-fire way to get national action without the national blow-back.

Because the solution for the frog in the pot is not to summon up the means to jump out, it is summoning up the assistance of a nearby person who can simply scoop you out.

Does anyone really care whether Florida Power & Light or ExxonMobil owns the future? The companies care, the shareholders; no one else really. Asking for the solution to climate change be accompanied by a complete reshuffle of the hierarchy of great companies is to ensure that great companies will sit on the sidelines, hoping the problem goes away, investing their billions in business-as-usual instead of taking bold leaps towards the future.

Capital is on the sidelines because it fears a drowning, not a drowning of the many, but of the self, very few have the altruism for self-sacrifice and almost none of the(m) gravitate to Wall Street or Main Street.

So let us not only create technologies, supply-chains and financing structures. Let us make a path for capital to come in off the sidelines and get into the game. READ MORE