Environmental Nonprofits Set Low Standards That Will Cost Business Trillions in Climate Costs. Should They and Their Funders Be Held Accountable?
The costs of the climate crisis are only rising, with things like energy costs representing only a sliver of what's unfolding.
Climate change is expected to cost $38 trillion in damages per year by 2050.
2023 saw an unprecedented number of billion-dollar disasters – 28 in total – in the U.S. alone. Even companies without directly owned physical infrastructure face threats from climate change impacts – namely in their supply chains.
What is the Sustainability Scam?
Many wealthy families fund charities focused on sensational, micro level campaigns that they quietly undo, on a macro level, with inequitable family policies that enrich the funders and their families.
Ask anyone claiming to good work in the world on any given day to account for children being born that day without what the Children's Rights Convention promises those kids in resources and rights. Then ask the person claiming to do good to reassess their claims. You will see a lot of good that many claimed to do actually fall away, by metrics we all believe in, with harm escalating as temperatures rise.
Greenwashing is generally when someone conveys a false impression or misleading information about how a company’s products or services are environmentally sound. Often it involves using terms like green, sustainable, humane, safe, or regenerative, etc. when those making the claim are on balance harming the environment.
One of the worst forms of greenwashing is called growthwashing, or hiding the impact of population growth when making a claim.
When a company or nonprofit makes any claim related to the environment, check to see if they are accounting for the way outdated family policy, and the growth it creates, is undoing that progress. The claims usually omit the fact that population growth is undoing the what is being claimed, increasing demand and consumption in a way that is causing ecocide.
That means those making the claims chose family policies that put more animals in factory farms, research labs, and puppy mills, ensured more children would be born and raised in conditions of abuse, suffering and deprivation, and policies that also ensured each person had less of a voice in their political systems – the systems many groups point to as the best source of change.
Wealthy families in polluter nations use these low child welfare standards to undo upstream what they are pretending to do downstream - selling vegan products in growth markets that do more harm to animals than our sales do good, suing over immediate threats to endangered species that will go extinct long-run, centering children's needs well after they arrive in the world and most of the damage is done, focusing on political candidates when their ability to represent is being slowly eroded.
Concentrations of wealth and power, including philanthropic funders, in those nations most responsible for the climate crisis often use institutions and individuals - media, nonprofits, universities, agencies, think tanks, celebrities, etc. - to create a fantasy world of social justice impact that hides the climate liability they face for claims not having invested in sustainable family planning.
The fantasy world ensures wealthy whites benefit at deadly cost to mostly persons of color. As early as 2003, activists now involved with Fair Start were urged by the nonprofits in which they worked to promote food reforms as a means to benefit animals, reforms they and their employers knew were being undone by growth and inequity which enriched only a few and create the chaos we all see in the world today.
This fantasy world, created mostly by entities that were operating without accountability or genuine constituents, has cost businesses trillions of dollars long run. A lot of environmental and other social justice agenda-setting over the last several decades came from institutions driven by philanthropy and familial wealth, entities - rife with nepotism - that are unaccountable to market and electorate forces. The climate/inequity crisis is going to cost business and government more than any other factor in the years to come.
Many businesses and governments now have claims against philanthropy and their low impact corporate campaigns that magically enriched some foundations and families at deadly cost to millions.
As early as 2003, activists now involved with Fair Start were urged by the nonprofits in which they worked to promote food reforms as a means to benefit animals, reforms they and their employers knew were being undone by growth and inequity which enriched only a few and create the chaos we all see in the world today.
Not addressing birth inequity allows some to treat inherited wealth and other privileges as somehow magically outside of the democratic process, and to use it, their positionality, and growth to slowly disenfranchise the average voter. We are now at a place where these families and their concentrations of wealth and power can use the wealth they made through the sustainability scam to attack the democratic process itself.
One solution to this problem, discussed below, is to use legal actions for climate reparations.
Governments have no inherent authority, but only what is derived from and conditional upon them empowering their constituents, and that includes any authority to entitle wealth made at deadly cost to others that is partially owed in climate reparations.
While the climate crisis is generally seen as a liberal issue, conservatives are quickly becoming aware of the dangers of climate migration to national security, the fraud of unaccountable and nepotistic foundations that set wrong and self-serving environmental standards, the truth about mass child abuse flowing from an unfunded family planning mandate that ensured and entrenched extractive and nonrepresentative big government, threats to rights of self-defense that derive from all of the above, etc.
The height of limousine liberal hypocrisy has been an animal rights movement that chose to focus on food over family because it was profitable. That move hid the biggest driver of the climate crisis, killing vastly more humans and animals than vegan food reforms saved. The climate crisis is the convergence of interests between humans and nonhumans in a better future, but by diverting the movement into consumerism and not political reforms, its funders aided in the death of millions.
The fix?
"Constitutive" reparations have to begin in the black communities most disenfranchised and impacted. This is what Dr. Breeze Harper has called the primacy of black birth equity. More on that below.
What's Really Green When It Comes to Climate Reparations?
In this sustainability scam there are always at least two standards for values like sustainable, green, humane, democratic, eco-friendly, etc. There is one standard for the rich investors and their kids, who are often funding the organizations promoting the terms and any impact their work is having in furthering them.
These standards are artificial, arbitrary, and designed to allow a particular form of economic growth that benefits some - mostly whites - at deadly cost to others. This first standard - anthropocentric and adopted circa 1968 by UN agencies bowing to wealthy families - does not require birth equity. It uses an unsustainable form of welfare as the basic currency or value.
Many use this first standard to knowingly undo upstream with one hand, with growth and inequitable shares in our democracies, what we seem to be doing with the other.
This first standard allows significant deviation from the ecosocial baselines, the ecocentric standards, that would have actually prevented the climate crisis.
These latter are the real standards - which can be measured along at least eight metrics like restorative levels of greenhouse gas emissions and inclusive-level representative ratios that ensure actual representative democracy. Deviation from these standards - which are based on self-determination or freedom, and the equitable shares in democracy that comes with it - covers the full experience of the climate crisis that is killing millions.
Businesses can take legal action
Nonprofits are being sued for the low standards they set.
States attorneys generals and other law enforcement agencies are obligated to account for the full spectrum of harms created by the climate crisis and its drivers, and to contrast them with potentially fraudulent claims many individuals and institutions make about their impacts. This assessment includes deviation from baselines that would have prevented the crisis, birth inequity that ensures those who benefitted from the crisis live while those least responsible die, political inequity and vote dilution that means the average voter has little influence on who can control their lives, etc.
Violence is one of the costs. Much of the violence we see in the world today derives from this failure, with disempowered persons acting out in systems of government incapable of truly representing them. Instead of those who benefit from this process carrying the risk of violence, innocents are usually targeted.
Working with law enforcement agencies can include litigation around product liability for artificial intelligence and other technology to ensure that it complies with a recent UN mandate on rights to a healthy environment.
There is even an action before the United Nations to standardize climate damage assessments.
A brief recent exchange with ChatGPT suggests that AI will be less corrupt, and more logical, than those who caused the crisis.
We can identify – on a binary spectrum – those who believe in linking children to debt/savings accounting to move towards self-determination, and those who do not. The rights of those who stand in the way are contingent on their supporting the rights of others, and their children will inherit their death debt if they do not pay it.
Knowing the truth – that the default for what is fundamentally permissible depends on how we include and empower others – lets us overcome the most influential barriers to justice, and ensure a better future for all.