Big Banks Quietly Prepare for Catastrophic Warming
Big Banks Quietly Prepare for Catastrophic Warming
www.scientificamerican.com
Big Banks Quietly Prepare for Catastrophic Warming
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21 comments
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How does one prepare for global catastrophe?
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In the case of climate change and being a profit seeking business, I'd assume attempt to identify things whose demand will increase, like land in the areas predicted to remain most comfortable to live, farmland in areas least likely to lose productivity, companies that produce things like water desalination infrastructure, etc, and buy those things early before they become more expensive.
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Buy up primary resources that are unlikely to devalue from climate change (such as indoor farming, solar panel factories, and housing in walkable areas that are less vulnerable to climate disaster like Dublin).
Buy up the tools by which the powerful will desperately cling to power (such as the military industrial complex, media/propaganda channels, and privatized human rights like health care).
Bribe politicians, fund authoritarian-capitalist propaganda, and organize coups to put fragile dictatorships in charge of valuable strategic/industrial resources (like lithium, rare earths, fossil fuel, uranium, etc.).
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Maintain. Profits. Jesus fucking Christ it will never end.
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future of air conditioning stocks, which it provided to clients on March 17. A 3 degree warming scenario, the analysts determined, could more than double the growth rate of the $235 billion cooling market every year, from 3 percent to 7 percent until 2030.
This is not banks preparing for catastrophic warming. It is the stock brokerage division of banks giving their boiler room reps a "hot tip" lead.
Banks should be worried about their fractional reserve lending (about to be deregulated to a lower fraction requirement) in housing, and the affordability issues created by tariffs, high interest rates from government debt unsustainability, and importantly insurance.
Poor insurability of housing and farmland is incompatible with high property values. Tropical Atlantic temperatures are already extreme, and forest fires/flooding all going to intensify.
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It is the stock brokerage division of banks giving their boiler room reps a “hot tip” lead.
"When it gets hot, people will use more air conditioning." Thanks Morgan Stanley, that's some real insider knowledge.
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Yes, banks should worry about all these risks. Climate change is a large systematic risk so it make sense to worry about it as well.
Meanwhile, megabanks like Wells Fargo are backsliding on their previous climate pledges and exiting from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a United Nations-backed group that encouraged members to slash their emissions in line with the Paris Agreement.
Multiple US banks and entities are backtracking their goals of lowering emissions, wich is the main solution to limit the risks of climate change.
They're setting themselves up, and us collectively, for higher risks of flood, drought, sea rise, ...
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“Fuck the little guy, hoard the assets, build bunkers.”
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Banks trying to take profits buying air conditioner stocks while society and the biosphere is crumbling around them is a perfect encapsulation of this crisis. I'm doing my best to laugh at the absurdity of it all, because the alternative is paralyzing depression.
If you're interested in the more fundamental dynamics at play here, I'd highly recommend giving these a watch:
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There’re many sources of greenhouse gas emissions however it is clear that electricity, transportation and industrial processes are the big ones. Agriculture is in there but is nowhere near electricity. So electrify everything is the best bang rather than large social engineering projects.
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21 comments