A new report, published on Tuesday, represents an attempt to change that. It’s called “Risky Business” and it comes from a year-long research project, convened and financed by Michael Bloomberg, Hank Paulson, and Tom Steyer. It’s the latest in a series of new reports that sound alarms about climate change: the health effects, glaciers melting, and impact on food nutrition, to name a few. But the researchers and scientists who produced Risky Business are trying to do something a little different. Using new, more sophisticated projections, they have broken down the U.S. into the same regions used in the National Climate Assessment and attempted to show what climate change will mean for each one. They are also trying to put a dollar value on the risk climate change represents in these regions, particularly for businesses.
That last part is important. The primary audience for the report isn’t really Main Street. It’s Wall Street—and corporate boardrooms. The backers include a number of people with credibility in this world—not just Paulson, who used to run Goldman Sachs and served as Treausry Secretary in the Bush Administration, but also George Shultz (Treasury Secretary under George H.W. Bush) and Olympia Snowe (the former Republican senator). Paulson, who has apparently been particularly active in this project, argued in a weekend New York Times op-ed that “risk management is a conservative principle.”New Republic
What Climate Change Looks Like on Your Front Porch
Rebecca Leber
A report for the country's leaders...
ReplyDeleteIt gives us a hint of what political issues they'll tell their Demo-Repubs to work on and how they can craft arguments in focus groups to divide the nations electorate over the issue in upcoming elections.
ok we can exhale now Hank's on it:
ReplyDeletehttp://online.wsj.com/articles/risky-business-report-aims-to-frame-climate-change-as-economic-issue-1403578637
"All climate scientists should announce they're going to take their entire life savings and invest in industries that will thrive under the conditions of global warming. All those in denial of global warming -- which tends to be some of the wealthier people of the nation -- won't do that. As global warming unfolds, that will be the greatest inversion of wealth the world has ever seen. That's all it takes," said Tyson, adding with a smile and a shrug, "I could get rich off this." — Tyson to Colbert
ReplyDelete"I could get rich off this."
ReplyDeleteright and now Hank's there as if right on cue....
rsp,
risk = known or presumed problem limits;
ReplyDeletewhich is completely different from complete uncertainty;
Once again, these fools are touting that they can ignore uncertainty while presuming known risks, while hoarding ever more in the process.
Risk of no longer being a rentier in control of renters seems to be the only type of risk Paulson can imagine.