"For most of the planet, the specter of global warming is ominous, but
as journalist McKenzie Funk reveals in his book
Windfall:
The Blooming Business of Global Warming there are those who
view the Earth's dangerous meltdown as a golden opportunity...Funk's
original, forthright take on this little-discussed profit-taking trend
in the climate change sweepstakes is very unsettling."
In short, Funk reports on the long line of individuals, corporations
and financial investors who are betting on climate change to make a huge
profit from catastrophe.
The following is an excerpt from the introduction
:
For three decades we have all known, at some level, about global
warming. As a point of scientific inquiry it is older, first identified
by the nineteenth-century researchers John Tyndall and Svante Arrhenius,
but as a source of popular anxiety and conversation it dates to the
first sophisticated computer models of the early 1970s and the first
World Climate Conference in 1979 and landmark congressional testimony by
the NASA atmospheric physicist James Hansen in 1988. It has been around
long enough to become a cliché—I thank it for the heat wave I'm
experiencing in Seattle as I write this—and long enough to have birthed a
newer cliché: the idea that we have so changed the planet with our
engineering and our emissions that we now live in the Anthropocene, a
new geologic epoch of man's own creation. Long enough, certainly, for
something to have been done about it. In the new millennium, which has
brought us Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, Lord Nicholas Stern's
seven-hundred-page Economics of Climate Change, and a string of failed
climate legislation and UN conferences, the warnings have been ever
louder and more sustained.
The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, our principal
contribution to the climate and the principal driver of warming, has
only been rising. It is now 40 percent higher than preindustrial levels,
higher than it has been anytime in the last 800,000 years. In New
York's Madison Square Garden, a seventy-foot doomsday clock, recently
unveiled by Deutsche Bank, is tracking greenhouse-gas levels in real
time: 2 billion metric tons added each month, or 800 a second, for a
total of 3.7 trillion tons and counting. The ticker has thirteen red
digits, but when you stare at it from Seventh Avenue, the last three are
a blur. They're spinning too quickly to see.
This book is about how we're preparing for the world we seem
hell-bent on creating. It's about climate change, but not about the
science of it, nor the politics, nor directly about how we can or why we
should stop it. Instead, it's about bets being placed on a simple,
cynical premise: that we won't stop it anytime soon. It's about people,
and mostly it's about people like me: northerners from the developed
world—historically the emitter countries, as we're called—who occupy the
high, dry ground, whether real or metaphorical.
I'm interested in climate change as a driver of human behavior—as a
case study, the ultimate case study, in how we confront crisis. Warming
will reshape the planet, and in broad strokes we already know how: Hot
places will get hotter. Wet places will get wetter. Ice will simply
melt. Poor, mostly tropical countries, those least responsible for the
consumption that fuels the factories that produce the emissions that
cause the warming, will be hit hardest, but wealthier, higher-latitude
regions—Europe, Canada, the United States—are not entirely immune. The
change is so vast, so universal, that it seems to test the limits of
human reason. So it should not be surprising that the ideologies that
led us here, those that have guided the postindustrial age—techno-lust
and hyper-individualism, conflation of growth with progress, unflagging
faith in unfettered markets—are the same ones many now rely on as we try
to find a way out. Nowhere is humankind's mix of vision and tunnel
vision more apparent than in how we're planning for a warmed world.
The idea that people are irrational has lately been in vogue. We can
thank the global financial crisis for that. Behavioral economists have
reminded us that the market, far from being a collection of fully
logical individuals, is hostage to Keynesian "animal spirits," the
emotions, prejudices, impulses, and shortcuts that are part of nearly
every human decision and every financial bubble—and part, no doubt, of
our apathy about reducing carbon emissions. In the United States, nearly
98 percent of the federal climate-research budget goes to the hard
sciences, which have produced mounds of evidence for global
warming—enough to make a believer of anyone who gives it an honest
look—and produced increasingly refined computer models predicting an
increasingly dire future. One recent prediction, from MIT, is of a
median warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100 if we don't curtail
emissions—a temperature spike that could entirely melt the polar ice cap
in summertime, turn much of Central America and the southern United
States into a dust bowl, and wipe island nations off the map. The
remaining 2 percent of the federal research budget goes to social
scientists, such as those with Columbia University's Center for Research
on Environmental Decisions, who probe what may now be the most
important question: If we know the risks, why aren't we doing anything?
The center's director, Elke Weber, suggests that at both levels where
humans make their decisions—emotional and analytical—there are
roadblocks. The emotional block: What we don't see doesn't scare us.
"The time-delayed, abstract, and often statistical nature of the risks
of global warming does not evoke strong visceral reactions," Weber
writes. At the analytical level, there is, along with the tension
between individual and systemic risk—an apparent tragedy of the
commons—something economists call hyperbolic discounting. It goes like
this: Offer to give someone either $5 today or $10 next year, and he'll
probably take the $5.
Among many activists, politicians, and scientists, the assumption is
that climate change now suffers mainly from a PR problem: If the proper
nudges can be found or the reality of it finally made visceral, the
public will take action. Unspoken and scarcely examined is a second,
much bigger assumption: that "taking action" means trying to cut carbon
emissions. That taking action will take a certain shape: Green roofs.
Carbon caps. Green cars. Solar panels. Footpaths. Forests. Fluorescent
bulbs. Bicycles. Insulation. Algae. Inflated tires. Showers.
Clotheslines. Recycling. Locavorism. Light-rail. Wind farms.
Vegetarianism. Heat pumps. Telecommuting. Smaller homes. Smaller
families. Smaller lives. We hope our collective fear of global warming
will push us inevitably toward collective behavior. But what if the
world as we know it goes on even as the earth as we know it begins to
disappear? There's another possible response to melting ice caps and
rising sea levels, to the reality of climate change—a response that is
tribal, primal, profit-driven, short-term, and not at all idealistic.
Every man for himself. Every business for itself. Every city for itself.
Every country for itself. There's the possibility that we take the $5.
Taken from here
In many areas the public is taking action, as can be recognised from the last paragraph: individual and local action. And while the public takes action those with the power probably laugh behind our backs. What power does the public have to make any serious impact on the problems of global warming or any other matter that should be in the public domain for serious discussion and decision making policies? How does the public gain the power, currently denied to it, to be the driving force in decisions that impact on the vast majority of the world? Capitalism and its profit motive is the problem, the stumbling block for the public - it is that that must go before we will be in a position to seriously address the problems facing us all. The only alternative for the long haul is socialism.
JS