REFER TO GREY: Contemplations by Robert Greigos © 2007-2024

This morning Royal Dutch Shell withdrew from a lobbying organization of 19 other oil producers over the issue of climate change. Royal Dutch Shell supports the Paris Agreement. The others do not. According to Reuters, thoughtful insistent investors in Royal Dutch Shell have succeeded in forcing a change in management policy. Return on investment will now be balanced against costs to the supporting environment, something for which I advocated way back in April 2011 with the post Worn and Tired Interface. Hooray for Royal Dutch Shell. But, has the overall tide really begun to turn?

Last week, NPR’s 1A discussed thinking by the Mega-Rich and current incentives within our world’s economic system. That panel included early Amazon investor and multi-millionaire Nick Hanauer. He introduced a concept I’d never heard before, Neo-Liberalism. Though familiar with the notion “survival of the fittest” as perverted by Ayn Rand and others to justify selfishness within a capitalistic system, I’d never heard the term Neo-Liberalism used to describe that dubious ethic, which Hanauer insists is pervasive amongst today’s crop of one percenters. That situation has to change or we will one day find ourselves back in a Feudal world subject to monied Lords bickering over territory and resources, with the rest of us little more than debris in the road. Income inequalities have seldom been more stark than we see today, and we already have deadlock between the haves and have-nots within the few functioning democracies of the world. What needs to change is the system of accounting by which all would be Lords measure their success. Not only need costs to the supportive environment be taken into account, but costs to the cohesiveness of society in general must be considered.

Enlightened citizens, please step forward, as have investors in Royal Dutch Shell. Otherwise, the inevitable outcome will be more mass migration, more disease, and armed bloody rebellion as we now see cropping up within every single dictatorship on the planet. Multi-National corporations will not escape the chaos, either.

Impasse? Yes, I think the would-be Feudal Lords of the world may now be approaching impasse. Undeniable reality is beginning to coalesce before them as a quietly acting enlightened few are beginning to see results. Perhaps the hollowed out rubble of ill-gotten wealth will soon begin to match the dream robbed rubble left behind within the misguided creed of Neo-Liberalism.