Juggling Dynamite

Climate change has been a political topic for more than 20 years and has only gotten more severe.  A Dutch lawyer realized this meant many executive and legislative branches of government are not up to effecting policy changes needed.  He decided to ask for assistance from the nation’s judicial branch:

“Look at our neighbours: Germany and Denmark are leading the world on this issue. They have very strong economies, they innovate, they have thousands of people working in the green business. They are about to reduce 40 per cent of their emissions by 2020. Netherlands needed to be held to account.”

Last June in a landmark decision, a Netherlands court agreed and ordered the state to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25% over the next five years in order to fulfill its duty of care to protect its citizens from the harmful effects of climate change.

Now the same lawyer is consulting with environmental advocates around the world to prepare similar suits.   He thinks the Canadian government is a prime target and spoke at a conference here last week to help lawyers get started.  After all what are Charter rights and freedoms without a viable biosphere to live in?

“Canada will be 26 per cent above the 1990 emission levels in the year 2020. For a developed nation, that is just shocking, it’s unbelievable. I did not know (Canada) was so far. I would hope that the legal community here would look into the possibility (of) a similar litigation.”

See:  How a legal revolution could fight global warming.

Pablo Tittonell is professor ‘Farming Systems Ecology’ at Wageningen University and one of the worlds most famous experts in the field of agriculture and ecology. He advocates intensification of agriculture by making optimal use of natural processes and the landscape to meet the worlds growing demand for food.  Here is a direct video link.

“Nature doesn’t have waste.  Waste is a human invention”.

Article today You Deserve a better Financial Advisor,  points out the outrageously low licensing requirements to become a sell side ‘financial advisor’.  In Canada and the US candidates are required to pass a three hour exam that covers a cross-section of law and investment-related subjects–a task most can manage in just a few weeks of self-study.

The author rightly declares this woefully inadequate and dangerous to the public:

Compare this laughably low bar with the prerequisites to practice medicine, law or accounting. Each of these professions requires formal education, a famously rigorous licensing exam, and then continuing education — none of which is required of investment advisers. My guess is that very few people would trust a doctor, lawyer or accountant whose only credential is passing a three-hour exam. So why aren’t we demanding more of financial advisers?

Advisers have the power to profoundly improve lives by encouraging saving and responsible investment. But like other professionals, they also have the power to do great harm, as we are reliably reminded every few years in the media or the courts with a fresh variation on the financial scandal theme…

It’s time for financial advisers to join the family of professions in substance, and not just in name. We should require that aspiring advisers complete a minimum amount of undergraduate or graduate-level coursework in finance, accounting, or economics, and pass a multi-day comprehensive exam…

Advisers should also be bound by a code of ethics that aims higher than what current regulations mandate. Given the ever-increasing pace of financial innovation, continuing education should simply be mandatory for maintaining a license.

But these suggestions, while all fine, miss the main problem which cannot be corrected by more education alone:  financial sales representatives are allowed to talk and market themselves as professionals while conducting themselves in the best interests of their profits above all else.  Indeed, the industry continues to lobby tooth and nail every day to duck the legal fiduciary duty that requires professionals offering advice to place the best interests of their clients ahead of all other considerations.

Doctors, lawyers and accountants all have accepted a fiduciary duty of care to the patients/clients they are advising.  The financial sales business markets itself as a profession while rejecting the mantel of liability and duty that comes with a patient/client’s vulnerability to those they rely on for advice.  This is indefensible, immoral and the real reason that harmful financial advice is so systemic and damaging today.

It’s long past time, to hold everyone calling themselves a financial or investment ‘advisor’ to a fiduciary standard. A civil society simply cannot afford to have it any other way.