On April 21st, Matt Levine’s Money Stuff newsletter for Bloomberg talked about SilviaTerra, an exchange which streamlines a process in which companies can buy carbon offsets by paying timberland owners not to cut down trees. Companies, under pressure to get to carbon neutrality, are paying to keep the trees erect.
It’s a little complicated, and the effects aren’t straightforward either. Levine covered this all in the newsletter better than I can, so I won’t regurgitate his work here, but suffice to say, SilviaTerra is not going to stop climate change.
But it might help. And in that way, it’s an example of a simple truth about climate change: In a lot of ways, it all comes back to money.
The incentives to do the things that hasten climate change are economic: At its most benign, people, especially in the developing world, want to eat, and are willing to sacrifice long-term environmental health for short-term survival/poverty reduction. At its least benign, investors want a new yacht! But really. I don’t think it’s too outlandish to say that’s how it works. You have a spectrum of environmentally harmful behavior from the should-be-very-understandable developing-world focus on growing enough that people can eat (which probably actually manifests itself in not caring about the climate until enough people can eat) to the ok-yeah-that’s-bad oil and gas fat cats lobbying certain lawmaker-celebrities into some pretty wild stances.
If it all comes back to money, though, it becomes a little easier to change. All you have to do is spend money. If people care enough, the money will, theoretically, be spent. Directly, by doing things like buying timberland for preservation. Indirectly, by doing things like investing in developing economies to hasten their growth to the point they have the breathing room to worry about longer term challenges.
This is a gross oversimplification. But it’s not as gross as it might sound. Climate change can be stopped. But it might cost a lot of money.
