Given the urgency, don't we have to work through the existing institutions?

True. We have very little time. We must act immediately to do what we can to reduce carbon emissions using the kinds of economic incentives that motivate the existing system. At the same time, we must be clear that a system driven solely by financial incentives is incapable of taking us where we need ultimately to go. Here is the larger picture in brief outline.

1.      Consumption: Growth in human consumption resulting from a combination of population growth and growth in consumption per capita is depleting the natural life support system of the planet, disrupting hydrology and climate systems, and threatening human survival.

2.      Inequality: Unconscionable and growing concentration of financial power in a world engaged in an ever more intense competition for a declining base of material wealth is eroding the social fabric to the point of widespread social breakdown.

3.      Institutional Pathology: Our most powerful governing institutions are global financial markets and corporations dedicated to growing consumption and inequality. They convert real capital into financial capital to increase the relative economic power of those who live by money, while depressing the wages of those who produce real value through their labor. They can offer little more than palliatives that leave the deeper cause of our potentially terminal environmental and social crises untouched—because they are the cause.

Our future depends on a dramatic cultural and institutional transformation to:

1.      Reduce aggregate human consumption.

2.      Achieven an equitable redistribution of economic power from rich to poor.

3.      Increase true economic efficiency by reallocating material resources from harmful to beneficial uses. Examples include reallocation from military to health care and environmental rejuvenation, from automobiles to public transportation, from suburban sprawl to compact communities, from conversion to reclamation of forest and agricultural land, from advertising to education, and from global financial speculation to investment in self-reliant local economies.

4.      Invest in the regeneration of the living human, social, and natural capital that is the foundation of all real wealth. This requires reversing the current process of converting the real wealth of living capital into the fictitious wealth of financial capital and accepting the resulting negative returns to financial capital. It may take us awhile to recognize that just as increasing financial capital at the expense of living capital makes us collectively poorer, increasing living capital at the expense of financial capital makes us collectively richer.

5.      Accelerate social innovation, adaptation, and learning by nurturing cultural diversity and removing intellectual property rights impediments to the free and open flow of beneficial knowledge.

These are imperatives of the 21st century and it is difficult to identify a constructive role in addressing them for corporations chartered solely to serve the narrow and exclusive private financial interests of its investors and top managers. See "Only One Reason to Grant a Corporate Charter."