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warm future illo

Illustration: Viktor Hachmang

Green
Culture & Design

Making the Fed’s Money Printer Go Brrrr for the Planet

Science-fiction visionary Kim Stanley Robinson makes the case for quantitative easing our way out of planetary doom.

Capital has a tendency to get invested at the perceived highest rate of return, and so we have a tendency towards doom.

Getting human civilization into a healthy and sustainable balance with the biosphere is going to be expensive. It will never be the most profitable investment out there, being a matter of mitigations, infrastructure replacements, decarbonization, and the creation of new and cleaner technologies. The market misprices things such that none of these activities will turn the largest short-term profit, so they are insufficiently attractive to private investment, and we are therefore headed for a mass extinction event.