Amazon, the insanity of markets and a single new year’s resolution can all be brought together for the good of humanity. Let me explain.
Amazon is now, without question, the most valuable company on earth. The Amazon rainforest, like its Central African counterpart, is essential to life yet has no market value until its trees are chopped up into wood and sold, and its land exploited by farmers to grow soybeans for pigs and cows in the northern hemisphere. How can it be that these forests, which must be the most valuable thing to our planet, have no value to humanity? It is this madness of markets that governments can and must fix now.
Governments have never been good at fixing problems themselves but rather find ways to allow markets to resolve challenges for us. I could not imagine anything worse, or more inefficient, than government departments trying to develop a vaccine for Covid-19 in any timescale that would have been of any significance. Instead, the government approach of facilitating private companies to do what they do best has delivered a solution that few of us would have envisaged in early 2020.
The wider world population has had a chance to stop and think about our environment during lockdown – there has never been a better time to gain global consensus around managing climate change. With the new Biden government in the United States now confirmed, I can only hope that the world will come together and create a much-needed pricing mechanism for the lungs of our earth – our rainforests. COP 26 offers a monumental opportunity to begin to facilitate a global carbon emissions taxation framework and develop a means to valuing carbon sequestration through our rainforests.
The world works best when we do what we’re good at – governments should set frameworks and businesses should deliver within those. We need to swiftly move away from governments ordering doors for stables from which the horse has already bolted, and start managing our future. This is a great opportunity for us all to kick start 2021 and coalesce behind a positive outcome at the end of what was in many ways, a terrible 2020.
And with that I propose a single new year’s resolution: a coordinated and concerted environmental and business push towards overcoming the failures of our previous 25 COP meetings and make the 26th a real and outcomes driven event.
Let’s get busy repairing the future.
Recent Comments