Last month, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) announced it had developed a new asset class and accompanying listing vehicle meant “to preserve and restore the natural assets that ultimately underpin the ability for there to be life on Earth.”
Called a natural asset company, or NAC, the vehicle will allow for
the formation of specialized corporations “that hold the rights to the
ecosystem services produced on a given chunk of land, services like
carbon sequestration or clean water.”
These NACs will then maintain, manage and grow
the natural assets they commodify, with the end goal of maximizing the
aspects of that natural asset that are deemed by the company to be
profitable.
Though described as acting like “any other entity” on the NYSE, it is
alleged that NACs “will use the funds to help preserve a rainforest or
undertake other conservation efforts, like changing a farm’s
conventional agricultural production practices.”
Yet, as explained towards the end of this article, even the creators
of NACs admit that the ultimate goal is to extract near-infinite profits
from the natural processes they seek to quantify and then monetize.
NYSE chief operating officer Michael Blaugrund alluded to this when he said the following regarding the launch of NACs:
“Our hope is that owning a natural asset
company is going to be a way that an increasingly broad range of
investors have the ability to invest in something that’s intrinsically
valuable, but, up to this point, was really excluded from the financial
markets.”
Framed with the lofty talk of “sustainability” and “conservation,” media reports on the move in outlets like Fortune couldn’t avoid noting that NACs open the doors to “a new form of sustainable investment” which “has enthralled the likes of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink over the past several years even though there remain big, unanswered questions about it.”
Fink, one of the world’s most powerful financial oligarchs, is and has long been a corporate raider,
not an environmentalist, and his excitement about NACs should give even
its most enthusiastic proponents pause if this endeavor was really
about advancing conservation, as is being claimed.
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Russ Winter & Eric Gajewski