And the IEA, for its part, expects China to continue to be the sole meaningful over-achiever. It recently revised upwards by 728 GW its forecast for total global renewables capacity additions in the period 2023–27. China’s share of this upward revision? Almost 90 percent. While China surges ahead, the rest of the world remains stuck.
Are there any examples of large companies, especially stock corporations, that have voluntarily given up short-term profits in favor of long-term calculation or sustainable management? Or examples of cooperation between competitors outside of common (short-term) profit interests? I am only aware of “sustainability campaigns” that have been staged mainly for publicity purposes, which in the vast majority of cases are nothing more than a drop in the ocean.
As far as I know, it has always been necessary to use legal regulations to force the companies to pay even the slightest attention to the common good. One example of this is the ban on CFCs to protect the ozone layer - and that took more than a decade (from 1987 until 1999).
The statement is not that these changes require legislation, though, the claim is that legislation under capitalist (presumably also socialdemocrat?) regimes will not be enough and full centralized control in the vein of China, rather than liberal democracies, is required.
Which is some delusional crap, honestly. There is obviously the capacity to enact regulation in democratic societies, and it’s obviously been put to use for the “common good”. Anarchocapitalists may disagree that it’s useful or positive, but I refuse to give them ownership over representative democracy, or to give totalitarian regimes ownership over all functional regulation.
Plus the data itself is misrepresented, but that’s a different question.
If the company is public, it could be argued that any optimization that isn’t towards short-term profits is harmful to the shareholders and can be used to unseat the relevant executive