The Whole World's Watching: Decarbonizing the Economy and Saving the World

There is morality and then there is money, and the two do not necessarily go hand in hand. Sometimes it is not always clear whether an action motivated by money is moral or not, and nothing illustrates this better than one particular financial “transaction” that existed in the USA in the late 1980s and early 1990s. During this period, Aids was spreading rapidly in the gay community in America, and there was no short- or long-term treatment for the disease on the horizon. An HIV positive blood test amounted to a death sentence, a process lasting six months to a year, and in its final stages, a variation of pneumonia was typically the cause of death. Naturally, those who tested HIV positive were desperate for any experimental drugs that could delay the onset of Aids, but these drugs were not sanctioned by any insurance companies. As a result, the infected individuals often had to fund experimental treatment from their own savings. As their savings dwindled to nothing, so did the opportunities of finding some means of arresting the course of the disease. As would happen only in America, capitalism came to the rescue. A mini-industry was created that bought the life insurance policies of desperate HIV positive patients at discounted prices and sold

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