Corporation aids market-based climate solutions
Once again, Goldman Sachs has proven itself it to be a leader in good corporate citizenship for the 21st century.
Earlier this week, Goldman Sachs Center for Environmental Markets awarded $2.3 million for three research grants, focused on finding market-based solutions to climate change. The Center for Environmental Markets was announced by Goldman Sachs in late 2005 to support examinations of policy options for lawmakers, market opportunities for environmental technologies, and valuation of fragile ecosystems.
The 2007 grants will go to:
Resources for the Future, for support over one year of its Climate and Technology Policy Program, which seeks to advance economically sensible approaches to dealing with climate change.
World Resources Institute, for a two-year project to analyze the viability of the various technology options that could be deployed both in the U.S. and elsewhere to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and diversify the world’s energy sources.
Woods Hole Research Center, for a three-year project to examine how to value forest ecosystems and analyze economic alternatives to cutting valuable rainforests.
Read more about the grants here.
Congratulations to the three winners, and to Goldman Sachs!
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In 2006, it was reported that Goldman Sachs gave $16 billion in bonuses for this holiday — or over 1/2 million dollars per employee.
Many of those bonuses will be performance-based, so some of the company’s execs are likely to get many millions of dollars each.
Given the scale of natural resource depletion and environmental degradation resulting from big business influences worldwide, a couple of million dollars for EARTH PRESERVATION from companies like Goldman Sachs seems like a pittance. Somehow, we need to help businesses more sensibly define the meaning and establish the value of good corporate citizenship.
Thanks,
Steve
If Goldman Sachs donated the money out of genuine beleif in what the beneficiaries are about, it is a good thing. If, however, they are trying to buy off the environmentalists and the scumball politicians using them, they poured good money after bad. They will continue to be bled and then discarded after they are dead. It is about power. Human nature does not change,
I think a good reading assignment wuld be to read “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand. It is an excellent study in the interation between socialism and human nature. Its validity is borne our by the stellar economic performances of the former Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea,... ad nauseum. By the way, check out the economic performances of these workers paradises.
Dear Benjamin Napier,
It has been a long time since the name of Ayn Rand’s ATLAS has been mentioned. In my youth I admit to finding an appeal in her perspective; however, in the course of time I lost appreciation of it. Life has taught me something about why her work is marginal and holds little regard of most people.
As far as the pyramiding billions in wealth held by Goldman Sachs are concerned, the company appears to be a long way from being “bled until dead,” as you put it. On the other hand, it does concern me that companies like Goldman Sachs could end up in real trouble if they continue to ignore this reality: the world economy is a function of the maintenance of adequate natural resources and global ecosystem services provided by the Earth.
Let us imagine for a moment that humankind must manufacture resources as substitutes for depleted natural resources and supply through technology ecosystem services given to us by the Earth….AT NO COST, according to the contrived bookkeeping of economists. If ever expanding big business activities are dissipating natural resources faster than the Earth can restore them for human benefit; if the unbridled production activities driving economic globalization irreversibly degrade the Earth’s ecosphere, then what does common sense tell us to do? To stay the business-as-usual course? To counsel that ever ‘bigger is better’? To continue the unlimited per human consumption of finite resources? To adhere to the adage, “Progress is most important product”?
Perhaps you will help me understand what is happening here and now and how we are to go forward so that a good enough future is assured for our children and coming generations.
Thanks again,
Steve
Steve
Dear Benjamin Napier,
Please correct me if my views here appear faulty to you.
It looks to me as if economic growth leads to the growth of absolute global human population numbers which, in turn, results in increased consumption of resources. These activities appear to occur within an unforeseen, biophysical “positive feedback loop” that unexpectedly causes the dissipation of limited resources as well as the degradation of ecosystem services the Earth provides to humankind for its benefit. Because we have adequate knowledge that the planetary home we inhabit is finite, we can see that the Earth is not some sort of endlessly providing teat at which the human species can eternally suckle. Mountains of scientific evidence also make clear to us that Earth is not the cornucopia that many economists believe it to be.
The current scale and rate of growth of per human consumption in the US alone has passed beyond “conspicuous” consumption and now approaches the obscene. Millions of Americans are morbidly obese. Perhaps many too many of us have taken the adages, “bigger is better” and “too much of a good thing is wondeful,” too far. At the same time, billions of people in many other places in the world are impoverished and hungry, if not starving.
Although the unbridled growth of human population numbers is not yet recognized by humanity as a potentially daunting problem, people worldwide are beginning to notice that Americans represent just under 5% of the global population but consume 33% of Earth’s limited resources.
If undeveloped countries were to follow the US example of ever increasing unrestrained per capita consumption of natural resources, scientific data indicate that before the close of the first half of the 21st century the human population worldwide could be literally “eating itself out of house and home.”
Benjamin Napier, do you think human production, consumption and propagation activities now occurring worldwide are most probably sustainable or unsustainable?
Always, with thanks to Earth & Sky,
Steve