DL Open Thread Wednesday August 23 2023
Veteran art teacher Carolyn McGrath incorporates climate change into her art classes at Hopewell Valley Central High School in Pennington, N.J. by encouraging her students to think of art as a tool.
Evelyn Lansing, a senior at Hopewell Valley Central High School in Pennington, N.J., brushed purple glaze onto her clay tile as the school year came to an end in June.
Lansing and her classmates had spent weeks researching the impacts of human-caused climate change on their communities and their own lives. Their bas-relief tiles and the three-dimensional images sculpted onto them represented something each of them learned.
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Making Climate Destroying Investments Less Attractive to Investors
“The top one percent is responsible for more emissions than the bottom half of the country,” said Jared Starr, a sustainability scientist at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst and the study’s lead author. “For the top households, over 50% of their emissions responsibility is coming from income flowing from their investments,” he told Fortune. “So if we want change, we have to look at this segment.” …
Starr argues that any hope of bringing down carbon emissions requires targeting the ultrawealthy.
“Eventually, we have to stop creating carbon pollution. If we don’t, the planet will be uninhabitable,” he said. “The question is, how do we provide the right incentive for people on corporate boards and the executive C-suite and shareholders to shift their behavior?”
One proposal the study suggests is a tax on investment products directly tied to how polluting they are. For him, that’s a logical outgrowth of the idea of shareholder supremacy—the notion, first popularized by Milton Friedman in the 1970s, “that companies exist to create value for shareholders.”
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Will summer of climate change impact GOP presidential politics for Trump, DeSantis?
Nope.
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Climate Change Litigation: The Montana Precedent
Photo by Michael Bourgault
Climate change litigation is falling into pressing fashion. In Australia, the 2021 case of Sharma, despite eventually failing before three judges in the Federal Court in 2022, suggested that ministers had been put on notice regarding a potential duty of care regarding the consequences of approving fossil fuel projects.
The lower court decision had shaken the fossil fuel industry with its finding in favour of the eight children and their litigation guardian, an octogenarian nun. Justice Bromberg found that considering the potential harm arising from carbon dioxide emissions was a mandatory consideration of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. The Minister for the Environment also had a duty of care given that it was reasonably foreseeable that the Australian children would face a risk of harm in extending the mine project. Furthermore, the Minister had control over that risk, given that she could approve the extension, and that the children were vulnerable to a real risk of harm arising from climatic threats.
“that companies exist to create value for shareholders.”
Corporations exist to shield their owners from personal liability.
That theory of “shareholder primacy” is the worst idea in all of human history. Don’t get me started.
https://delawareliberal.net/?s=primacy
Agreed, so called “Share Holder Value” is yet another accounting game designed to feed the rich, supposedly business schools are moving away from this all for one and all for the top game. Suspect they’ll merely rename it. My other favorite is the obscene “Carried Interest ” game that generates billionaires like there’s no tomorrow, that it is savagely defended by the Republicans comes as no surprise.
https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/crime/2023/08/23/emma-grace-cole-delaware-murder-toddler-killed-kristie-cole-haas-brandon-haas/70640603007/
They let the father out on bail. Sad to say, but that poor girl should have never been born, and had she lived, would likely have become just like them. Both of the parents had a history of addiction and were clearly unfit to have kids. The children should have been fostered by their relatives and both Brandon and kristie sterilized.