The capture and monetisation of the commons through Wall Street is too horrible to contemplate. The notion that these essential services could be monetised for the benefit of the few is beyond appalling.

While at first it may seem like a good idea to protect the last of the wild spaces further thinking reveals the idea to be toxic. It is one step from taxing everyone for the oxygen they breathe.

Ecosystem services have always been free. Since, when has humanity paid for terrestrial forests to produce oxygen, pump water into the atmosphere, store carbon, produce plants with medicinal properties, or for insects to pollinate the plants that are our food?

Across the globe indigenous people have lived in harmony in the great wild spaces such as the Amazon and elsewhere for thousands of years. If any group should be rewarded for custodial services, it is them, not BlackRock and their kind.

We have entrusted enlightened governments to recognise the value of wild spaces and protect them in the form of national parks, reserves and natural habitats in perpetuity for the long-term benefit of all people.

The answer lies not in the monetisation and ownership of these processes but in the recognition that they are our inheritance without which mankind is doomed.

We must give recognition to the great biological systems that James Lovelock has described as the pulse of Gaia and which indigenous peoples have recognised since time immemorial as the sustainers of all life.

These essential biological systems are the inheritance of all and must be preserved and nursed back to health to repair the depredations of mankind chasing the mighty dollar over the recent industrialised centuries. A peculiarly male predilection.

You need look no further than the environmental impact of mining, the impact of the release of fossil carbon into the earth's atmosphere and industrial agriculture at the heart of massive land clearing, resulting in the demise of the Amazon, the tropical forests of South-East Asia and the northern hemisphere boreal forest biome for your answer.

The captains of this system have profited from the destruction of nature's gifts and they now propose to take over the last natural resources and wild spaces for our benefit. Really! Pigs might fly.

This latest “fungible idea” from Wall Street to capture the last of the earth’s resources under Natural Asset Companies and place them under the control of the mega wealthy classes is as grotesque, self serving and revolting as it sounds.

Hunziker's article is worth reproducing:
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Wall Street investors have hit the jackpot. Soon they’ll be able to buy, own, and dictate The Commons, public lands, the world of Mother Nature.

In fact, a pilot project is already in the works with ecosystems up for sale as Wall-Streeters anxiously prepare to gobble up the valued benefits of Mother Nature.

According to the NYSE PR Dept. they’ll IPO nature: “To preserve and restore the natural assets that ultimately underpin the ability for there to be life on Earth.” What? Really?

And, according to NYSE COO Michael Blaugrund: “Our hope is that owning a natural asset company is going to be a way that an increasingly broad range of investors have the ability to invest in something that’s intrinsically valuable, but, up to this point, was really excluded from the financial markets.”

Then, does this mean that neoliberal capitalism is becoming nature’s beneficent caretaker so environmentalists can stop wringing their hands about the horrendous loss of wild vertebrate life, down a whopping 68%, and loss of wetlands and loss of huge chunks of rainforests these past few decades, all of which echoes a guttural sound of impending extinction? Answer: Don’t count on it.

For starters, there’s something extraordinarily distasteful and downright disgusting about Wall Street buying control of nature’s resource capabilities. It bespeaks of an upside down world where the ludicrous becomes acceptable, but is it really acceptable? Is it?

The main character in this new scheme to own the world is a new asset class with a very plain name that says it all: Natural Asset Company or NAC.

Yes, if you are a billionaire, get ready to buy up to 30% of the world’s natural resource beneficence to society. It’s going to be offered on the biggest auction block of the world, the New York Stock Exchange under the cover of sustainability of nature and protection of biodiversity, wink, wink!

Of course, this prompts a series of questions, headlined by when does Mother Nature morph into a tollbooth?

In simplest of terms, NACs allow for the formation of specialized corporations the hold the rights to the ecosystem services produced on a given chunk of land.

The services might be sequestration of carbon or clean water or possibly rare Tibetan mountain air or maybe a lake teeming with trout in the wilderness. The possibilities are endless when auctioning off major chunks of an asset as big as the planet.

The NAC will maintain, manage and grow the natural asset that it has commoditized, working towards maximizing the profit potential of the natural asset, although, of course, this is not emphasized in the PR material. Nevertheless, it could lead to near-infinite profits. After all, the living Earth does rejuvenate and replenish and service ecosystems on its own accord, a natural process that goes on forever. Why not own it?

If ever there has been a time for the people of the world to drop whatever they are doing and focus on one issue, now is that time. The Commons is for sale! Think long and hard about that proposition, study it, discuss it, and decide whether to agree that Mother Nature should be monetized.

If not in agreement, then do something, tell everybody, tell anybody who’ll listen, carry poster boards in the street, join a protest march, bang pots and pans, do something to relieve that breakneck pressure building around your temples!

The Intrinsic Exchange Group, in partnership with the NYSE, is currently working with the Costa Rica government on a pilot project of NACs in the country in order to institute its protocol for ownership of forests, lakes, waterfalls, mountains, meadows, caves, wetlands, in essence, all of nature. Costa Rica is the proving grounds for ownership of Mother Nature, whether she likes it or not.

First, NAC identifies a natural asset, like a forest for example, which is quantified using special protocols that have already been developed by various coalitions amongst multinational corporations, which in and of itself is remarkably terrifying.

The NAC decides who has the rights to the natural asset’s productivity and how it is to be managed. It is then monetized via an IPO on the stock exchange. Thus, the NAC becomes “the Issuer” to potential buyers of the natural asset that the NAC represents.

Essentially, NAC is a real estate agent of Mother Nature. The buyers are institutional investors, or the occasional billionaire, that want to own the rights to the benefits of wetlands or rainforests or natural water springs or rarified mountainous air or hot springs or whatever they want to own.

The world is their oyster to buy, own, enjoy, and profit by.

Throughout all human history nature has been The Commons or the cultural and natural resource for all of society inclusive of natural processes like air and water.

But now private investors are deleting The Commons with claims of “conservation and sustainability” of 30% of what’s called “protected areas” of our precious worldwide assets.

According to initial calculations, NACs will unlock $4 quadrillion in assets as a new feeding ground for Wall Street investors to buy the rights to clean water and clean air and trout streams and bass-laden lakes and gorgeous picturesque waterfalls and lagoons, an entire forest, or maybe eventually extend into the oceans. Who knows the range of possibilities once nature is transacted on Wall Street.

Monetizing nature!

What’s next, what’s left?

The Commons is property shared by all, inclusive of natural products like air, water, and a habitable planet, forests, fisheries, groundwater, wetlands, pastures, the atmosphere, the high seas, Antarctica, outer space, caves, all part of ecosystems of the planet.

The sad truth is Mother Nature, Inc. will lead to extinction of The Commons, as an institution, in the biggest heist of all time.

Surely, private ownership of nature is unseemly and certainly begs a much bigger relevant question that goes to the heart of the matter, to wit: Should nature’s ecosystems, which benefit society at large, be monetized for the direct benefit of the few?

Articles from Ralph Nader are regularly published on Counterpunch:

https://www.counterpunch.org/search-results/?cx=000357264939014560440%3Aicshsy4bfu0&ie=UTF-8&q=Nader#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=Nader&gsc.page=1

When I left the South Australian government to freelance as a consultant I had time between jobs so volunteered at the South Australian Museum to help it sort out some of the PNG and Pacific collections.

One day the Curator of Anthropology, Barry Craig, came into the office and announced he had bought a new camera to replace his old Pentax Spotmatic, which he must have had for at least 40 years.

When I checked it out I discovered that his 'new' camera was a second hand Pentax Spotmatic. What he had essentially done was buy a functioning body on which to continue to use the lenses from his old camera.

I did the same thing with my trusty old Nikon a few years later.

Amazingly, you can still buy film for these cameras and get them processed.

In Adelaide, Hutt Street Photos proudly proclaims: "Against all odds film is still alive & well! We sell film, we process film & we will keep doing so for as long as we possibly can."

There's hope for the world yet.

Phil has pointed out the true implications of any serious attempt to get to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. This has been amplified by Paul and Bernard, while Kindin Ongugo has voiced legitimate concerns about how whatever is done may end up further disadvantaging the world's poorest people.

The bottom line in this whole debate is that the world cannot exert effective control over climate change unless and until the neo-liberal economic model, which requires constant growth in the production and consumption of goods and services, can be reined in.

In turn, this requires that the seemingly endless accumulation of debt being used to fund an absurdly wasteful and grossly unfair economic system must also come to an end.

This will necessarily mean that we citizens of the developed world, now recast in the role of consumers and debtors, must give up our obsession with the accumulation of the 'stuff' through which we often seek to give our lives meaning.

By stuff I refer to what Papua Niuginians call 'bilas', which I interpret as meaning superfluous decoration or glittering but otherwise useless objects.

Much like bower birds, many of us are now thoroughly conditioned to want a great deal of stuff that has no practical purpose and little utility value and which will inevitably end up in landfill or littering the streets.

This stuff is simply the ultimate expression of planned obsolescence because it is manufactured solely in the expectation it will be thrown away.

It is possible to live a much simpler life and now is urgently necessary to do so.

I believe that embarking upon a hugely less consumption based life will not only be good for our finances and the environment, but will liberate us from the pervasive influence of the marketing industry that helps under pin neo-liberal capitalism.

More and more people have now realised the basic truth of what I am saying but I fear they are still a quite tiny minority.

Our political class probably know what has to be done but seem quite unwilling to explain this to 'the punters' for fear of suffering electoral damage by doing so.

Not even the so-called Green Party has been explicit about what the achievement of its policy aims will necessarily require.

As I have written before, my expectation is that only a great deal of suffering due to the impact of climate change will finally create the conditions under which the political class will admit the truth. Right now, that moment is still a long way off.

Perhaps the only hope lies, rather perversely, in the collapse of the vast Ponzi Scheme that we call international finance. If the world's gargantuan debt mountain finally implodes, then a crisis will ensue that may provoke the necessary introspection and, eventually, the political resolve to do things differently.

As for the poorest people in the world, I fear that Kindin is entirely correct and they will, as is usually the case, suffer many adverse impacts whatever the so-called developed world does.

In a world where billionaires fire themselves into space in rockets and sail their vastly expensive yachts or fly their corporate jets to Glasgow to discuss climate change, we cannot expect much to change.

The very people who most benefit from the current system seem highly unlikely to dismantle it.

Vance Packard, the US journalist and social critic wrote two fascinating books back in the late 1950s entitled "The Waste Makers" and "The Hidden Persuaders":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vance_Packard

On the flip side. Our guide in Bulgaria reckoned that anyone who owned and was still driving a Russian car after two years was reckoned to be a fully qualified mechanic.