On BNY Mellon Profiteering From Environmental Disaster

So I recently saw this absolutely horrifying TV ad, one breath-taking in its cheerful cynicism and opportunism.  It involves an investment company (it doesn't matter which one) outlining how global warming's catastrophic effects on Peruvian anchovie populations will in turn set off a horrific chain reaction that will drive up food prices across the globe.  But this ad is no mere environmental alarmist warning!  Oh, if only--no, this ad instead happily explains how this particular investment company uses this data to "identify innovative new investment possibilities" or some other collection of buzzwords staggering in its inhumanity.

Chew on that for a second: this investment company not only frankly admits that global warming will cause terrifying food shortages, but uses that data not to try and avoid such cataclysms, but instead to profit from it!  Note that their vaunted research endowments merely fund marine biologists to study Peruvian anchovies, not restore them (and with notepads underwater, no less!)--oh, they've worded their ad carefully, oh so carefully, covering all their legal bases, as though wording will save them! 

Meanwhile, global rises in food prices will lead to widespread famine, starvation, and civil unrest (as we are already seeing in the Arab world), and all this investment company can think of is how can I profit from this?!  I don't know what to find more galling: their frank indifference to the future suffering of millions if not billions, or their (sadly, probably correct) assumption that a mass television audience won't care, either.

I never thought I'd pine for climate change deniers, but this ad but proves again that honesty is useless if it's not married to some basic human decency.  For the sad truth is that this shameless investment company is completely honest and frank about the obvious and awful effects of global warming, but their ethical response to this data is only to figure out how to exploit it for their own gain.  My goodness, at least climate change deniers implicitly acknowledge through their denial that climate change would be awful for everyone if it were true. 

This ad is the gated-community mindset on a global scale: it's the wealthy's assumptions that they are somehow separate from the world around them, that they are in some manner above and disconnected from the surrounding world community, that they can stand back comfortably and safely from all the mayhem they have both helped create and continue to profit from (if this ad is any indicator).  It's a comforting illusion I suppose, but also a dangerous one.