In “collaboration” with credit card processor Visa, the World Economic Forum has issued a paper advocating a 75% reduction in the number of personal cars and trucks worldwide, from today’s 1.45 billion, to just 500,000 by the year 2050. How will that be achieved? Well, there’s a strong hint from the first letter in their acronym, SEAM, which stands for shared, electric, connected, and automated. The fact that a shared, connected, and automated transport system doesn’t allow for much freedom when it comes to choosing routes or scheduling your trips is likely a feature, rather than, ahem, a bug.
Excerpted from “The Urban Mobility Scorecard Tool: Benchmarking the Transition to Sustainable Urban Mobility“:
The benefits of a [shared, electric, connected and automated] SEAM strategy would reach far beyond mitigating climate change. Today, passenger vehicles cause over half of urban air pollution, which led to an estimated 1.8 million excess deaths in 2019 and nearly 2 million cases of asthma in children. Electrifying transport will deliver cleaner, healthier air for city dwellers. Additionally, fewer vehicles will reduce congestion and decrease the need for expensive motorways, parking and maintenance. Estimated cost savings of embracing a SEAM strategy to the world’s economy could total $5 trillion a year by 2050…
The transport sector is responsible for around 60% of global oil demand, so accelerating the transition to electric vehicles (EVs) is an essential priority. Syncing electrification with a transition to shared transport can, however, deliver a reduction in emissions while tackling wider issues such as congestion, safety and inefficient space allocation.
One might think that removing about a billion private vehicles from the road would also eliminate billions and billions of individual credit and debit card transactions paying for new and used cars, parts, service, and fuel, which would translate to a direct hit on Visa’s bottom line. Like most big corporations these days, however Visa has to hew to Blackrock and McKinsey’s standards on ESG, not the notion of shareholder primacy established in Dodge v. Ford. The Dodge brothers, who were suppliers to and stockholders of Ford Motor Company, and other investors sued FoMoCo because Henry Ford was hoarding cash (to build the Rouge complex) and wouldn’t distribute it as dividends to shareholders. Henry claimed he was doing it for the public good, so he could reduce prices and hire more people. Whether Ford really believed that or whether it was just an, ahem, dodge to cover his real intentions, that was his argument in court. The Michigan Supreme Court, however, sided with the Dodges and said that Ford had to run his company for the good of its owners, not society.
Since then, of course, subsequent rulings have watered down the impact of Dodge v Ford, giving corporate managers wide latitude under the “business judgment rule” but there’s a reason why the case is widely taught. From the Michigan Supreme Court rulling:
A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits, or to the non-distribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes...
I’m pretty sure that a hundred years ago, the Michigan Supreme Court would have ruled that ESG is practically the definition of “other purposes.”
Bad news of the worst sort .
-Nate
Why don't these people show us how it's done? They can build their own electrified 15-minute city and move their and eat bugs and share all their shit with each other. Once they prove how much of a paradise it is the rest of us will yearn to live that way. But that's not how it would work, is it? I lived in Japan in the equivalent of a 15-minute city (just outside Tokyo) and I also lived in a more rural locale, and I was far, far happier in the rural area with my own car where I can live by my own schedule and go where I decide to go rather than where and when the trains go. They must think we're rats and can be easily trapped in a maze like that. But I'm not eating bugs and I'm not giving up my car and I'm not moving into a crowded city to share space with deranged lunatics, drug addicts, and frightened peasants.