Sta Hungry Stay Foolish

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

A blog by Leon Oudejans

Decoupling (8): Shell climate verdict

Recently, Royal Dutch a.k.a. Shell Oil was ordered by a Dutch judge to accelerate its climate targets (eg, Axios, FT, WSJ). The judge argued that climate rights are a part of universal human rights. My blog will not discuss those arguments. It is, however, another example of a decoupling (my blogs) between Business (ie, the belief system Money) and Politics (as a belief system).

Both belief systems (ie, Money and Politics) are in the Power domain of the 7 Belief systems. In my view, Politics is (slowly) becoming redundant; see part one and part two of my related blogs. Politics is (slowly) being replaced by a new belief system, being Data-Info. The essence of this belief system is that the truth is irrelevant and is replaced by government (and/or enterprise) mandated data-info (my 2018 blog).

To some extent, I have some sympathy for this verdict. I believe that climate change is the default rather than the exception. The melting of the polar caps is a geological normality but also indicates something else: a transfer from an interglacial period towards a glacial period (my 2018 blog). A new ice age would probably decimate world population.

Climate change has many causes (eg, BGS, my 2017 blog). Most of these are far beyond human control (eg, earth’s orbit, sun). The increase in greenhouse gasses since the 19th century, did already delay the next ice age (eg, NYT-2003, Bloomberg-2016CNN-2016Guardian-2016Independent-2016). It’s possible that we went over-the-top and created another tipping point, being an acceleration from an interglacial to a glacial period.

Perhaps, our human efforts are futile to stop this acceleration. Perhaps not. Hindsight is 20/20 vision. Geological processes usually take hundreds of thousands of years. There are, however, some indications that something is cooking: erratic motion of north magnetic pole and ocean circulation is changing.

Recently, somebody said to me that “politics is entertainment”. Sir Ernest John Pickstone Benn (1875-1954) had a similar view:

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”

The Verdict (1984) by Joe Jackson
artist, lyrics, video, Wiki-1, Wiki-2

Note: all markings (bolditalicunderlining) by LO unless stated otherwise.

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