Week 44: The Gun Is on the Table

Dear all,

You can see it. Plain sight. Inequality. Explanations — political gibberish from both the right and the left. Books have been written about it. Entire academic fields have developed, and scholars have been awarded for their plight.

Inequality has a particular smell — a musty scent of shadows. Heavy with the weight of dreams deferred. Echoing stories that no one knows. Sharp and acrid. A toxic haze of anger and despair. A façade of wealth, a slippery slope, while the cries of the voiceless are swept aside.

The content of this newsletter would make any politician shit-scared, and most people working in the field of sustainability deeply and seriously worried — because much of what we’ve been discussing for years about how to manage and mitigate climate change is, to a large extent, misplaced. We’ve been looking in the wrong place, tracing emissions instead of money.

This toxic topic is not included — and never has been — in the upcoming COP X in Belém, Brazil, or in any previous COP. Nor is it part of any NDC of any country in the world.

For years, throughout my 30 years of working on this, I have been addressing this treacherous topic in as many ways as I could — in speeches, in the books I’ve published, in opinion pieces, in interviews. Yet somehow, despite the effort, I have failed.

In my latest opinion piece on this very topic, published last week in Sweden’s largest financial daily — Dagens Industri — I tried again. My efforts are nothing compared to the people affected by the lethal use of investments around the world in the name of keeping the equilibrium of fossil dependency permanent.

In this newsletter, you must brace for impact. Numbers tell their own story. And they are, by all means, brutal.