from HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works to world@lemmy.world on 14 Jan 07:10
https://sh.itjust.works/post/31070359
The number of British pollution hotspots is also on the rise. If emissions remain unrestricted and uncontrolled, the costs of cleanup will reach £9.9bn a year in the UK, according to the findings of a year-long investigation by the Forever Lobbying Project, a cross-border investigation involving 46 journalists and 18 experts across 16 countries.
PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), commonly referred to as “forever chemicals” are a family of more than 10,000 human-made substances. Manufactured by a handful of companies, they are widely used in consumer products and industrial processes.
They can be found in nonstick pans, pizza boxes, cosmetics, waterproof clothing, firefighting foam and pharmaceuticals, among other places. The properties that make them so useful – heatproof, greaseproof and waterproof – also have fateful downsides. Almost indestructible without human intervention and persistent in living organisms, PFAS have been linked to infertility, cancers, immune and hormone disruption, and other illnesses.
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We need to fundamentally revise the shareholder system. All a shareholder can loose is the money he paid on the shares. If a company is causing a billion worth of environmental damage to generate a 100 worth if profit on his 20 share, the shareholder has an incentive to let them do that or even advocate for them to do that.
If large shareholders would be personally liable for all damages the company causes, factored by their ownership, the risks and rewards would be balanced.
You would also need judges to consult with environmental and medical experts to properly assess the damages. The trouble with slow violence is that the true damage is obfuscated
Fuck that. We need to completely remove the liability shield of the LLC and enact a corporate death sentence.
If you don’t do your due diligence and mass produce a dangerous or destructive product, the max penalty should be life in jail and being stripped of all your wealth, for all decision makers.
Ecocide has the potential to destroy the lives of every living organism on earth — up to and including extinction — and otherwise could impact all descendants, for evermore. Humanities rule of law should reflect that fact.
Encouraging corporations to continually make their shareholders richer is part of the issue as well.
Just revising the capitalist system with the idea that “any profit is good profit” rather than “the most profit is what must be achieved and it must always be more profit than last year” would likely vastly improve the lives of millions, if not billions, of people.
What you’re seeing here isn’t a flaw of the shareholder model. It’s a fundamental flaw in the free market. You can’t fix its inability to price in externalities. Instead you have to put the market in its place in order to mitigate them. For example by forcing it to price in externalities, or by taking away externality-generating activities out of the hands of the market and into public hands.
How do you price in externalities if the risk is still limited to the value at which someone bought his shares or the minimum capital of an LLC? While you can put a price tag on known pollutions it is difficult with pollutions of the past that manifest as damage, as well as putting a price tag risks people just doing it anyway if it gives more profit than the price is.
I agree that it is a general market failure, but pricing is only part of it, if the risk of punitive liabilty can be mitigated through a business form.
Right. The LLC makes all of it worse, no question. Also I’m not a huge fan of pricing significant externalities since as you point out, pricing is difficult, prone to error, can be too low, etc. I mean the whole point of an LLC is to offload risk to society in exchange for economic growth, with the idea that it would outweigh the the societal cost. I’m not sure that it does. :D
Is there a point in trying to clean it up when it’s still being used in countless products?