… but there’s no money to put it out.
That’s about as absurd a statement as any.
One needs water to put out a fire, not money.
Then again, one needs money to pay for the firetrucks to reach the burning building as well as for the salaries of the firemen to fight it.
If there’s no money available to afford the firetrucks or the fire fighters, then the building is a total loss.
This hypothetical scenario highlights humanity’s dysfunctional relationship with money.
We collectively watch as the building burns to the ground because we don’t have the money to afford to save it.
Humanity is doing that with our planet right now.
We are literally watching our world burn — seemingly powerless to stop it — because our nations collectively lack the money to put it out.
“Lack the money” or “lack the will to spend the money”? That’s the real question.
For centuries, the end-goal of our financial system has always been personal enrichment with no thought to the consequences of the means used to achieve that end. Where the financial system has supported technological advances, it has too often done so at the expense of polluting the planet with no thought to future consequences.
Innovations like a new source of energy in the form of crude oil, a new way to package and preserve products for consumption through the use of plastics, a new way to deliver aerosols in cans using pressurized CFCs, etc.; innovations that did not factor in the most important aspects of waste recovery and environmental pollution.
Sadly, in the minds of those who exploited these new inventions, to consider the safe recovery of waste by-products would subtract from their personal enrichment (by cutting into their profit margins), so they gave it no further attention.
Fast forward to the present, we are now reaping the poisonous harvest of those “innovations” that were meant to improve our quality of life. If only those inventors and their investors displayed some innovative thinking by anticipating the long-term consequences of their new technologies instead of leaving future generations to deal with the negative costs.
Unfortunately, this scenario has played out with many innovations that have slowly damaged our planet over multiple decades and have required tremendous investments of cash to undo the damage.
Now, imagine again, a world without money.
If money was not an issue, imagine the future technological advances we could achieve when designing products or inventing processes that had zero impact on the natural environment.
Imagine the vast amount of human creativity that would be unleashed, unfettered by special-interest groups who would want to preserve their hold on polluting technologies.
That is a future we deserve and one where we could also deal with our “burning house” without worrying about where the money would come from.
We would have access to resources to effectively deal with our multiple “fires” and not have to rely on a small group of organizations or individuals who hold the purse strings to disproportionate amounts of cash.
At the moment, the 1% hoarding the world’s wealth are fire accelerants, not decelerants.
“We didn’t start the fire.” Indeed.
