| | | Climate Change May Cost Rich Investors TRILLIONS…NOW Will They Do Something?
Worried about human-made climate change? Here’s some good news for a change: The wealthy investors who rule the world (and who control our GOP-run congress) may begin turning over a new leaf. Why? Because the catastrophic effects of global warming may wind up costing them huge amounts of money, that’s why.
Most information on climate change come from scientists, but the latest damning report comes from an unlikely source: Those doughty old toffs over at The Economist. According to Senior Editor Brian Gardner (who isn’t actually “old”) writes that a furious Mother Nature may wreak a whopping $4.2 TRILLION in havoc upon rich investors’ portfolios if they don’t act NOW.
“Assets can be directly damaged by floods, droughts and severe storms, but portfolios can also be harmed indirectly, through weaker growth and lower asset returns.”
Referring to climate change as “a problem of extreme risk,” Gardner explains that even if today’s Masters of the Universe are wealthy enough to not starve, drown, or get Mad-Max-ed like the rest of us when the Zombie Apocalypse arrives (because everything’s better with zombies), they may experience something even worse, God forbid: The inability to “fulfill their fiduciary duties.” Bleeding red ink seems like such a horrible way to die.
“Investors currently face a stark choice. Either they will experience impairments to their holdings in fossil fuel companies should robust regulatory action on climate change take place, or they will face substantial losses across the entire portfolio of manageable assets should little mitigation be forthcoming,”
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The Guardian adds that only seven percent of “asset owners” take the carbon footprints of their portfolios into account, and only 1.4 percent say they’re actively seeking to reduce it.
Meanwhile, on this side of the Pond, environmentalists have also found some unexpected allies: Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, billionaire hedge fund manager Tom Steyer, and the banker and former (GOP) Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. The trio has formed a group called the Risky Business Project, which put out a report with similar findings last year. The goal of their project is to convince U.S. business leaders to approach the impacts of climate change as they do just about everything else: By quantifying them, assessing the costs, and taking steps to reduce their risks.
The Risky Business Project’s report presents the data and urges investors and business leaders to take action, but stops short of proposing specific solutions in hope of first building consensus. Yet, in an interview with Judy Woodruff on the PBS Newshour, Paulson bucks his party’s leadership and many of his cohorts by acknowledging that there is a role for the U.S. government to play:
“That’s the role of government. People expect to government to come in. We all pay. These are big economic costs that go along with these. And what you find is, if you look at it carefully, if there was spending today, relatively small amounts of spending, to harden infrastructure, be smart about where you build plants, that we could avoid a fair amount of these costs.”
And sure, I’d prefer the world’s plutocrats to push for tackling climate change because it’s the right thing to do. But I’ll gladly settle for greed working in rational people’s favor for once. |
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