Investors representing staggering sums of money gathered at the headquarters of United Nations to hear a day of discussions on climate risk and energy solutions this week.
The packed room included bankers, pension fund executives, policy-makers and the usual crowd of climate change professionals largely made up of consultants that cycle in and out of public and private organizations wearing different hats but often propounding the same message. Their message is one that seemed welcome in the last decade -- that markets could be harnessed to solve climate change problems, that a price on carbon emissions would be good not just for health but for businesses currently facing (in the oft-quoted Nicholas Stern phrase) "a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen."
Before the Great Recession diminished the appeal of markets, and before President Obama's anticlimactic appearance at the climate change negotiations in Copenhagen, banks and insurance companies were gearing up to provide business with the host of services that a trade in carbon emissions would require. From data services and engineering to legal interpretations and trading desks, a new industry representing ever-more lofty amounts would be created by finally encompassing all the world's largest economies in a single program, the promise went.
None of that happened. Climate change negotiations straggle on, bearing half the carcass of the Kyoto Protocol process with them as they attempt to bridge still-enormous gaps between developed and developing nations in a fast-evolving economic and political power structure.
It is hard to blame the U.N. or the enterprises with climate change businesses models for getting bogged down in the latest morass of global history. The organization was perhaps never the ideal body for handling the issue, but now it is in charge and a bureaucracy is entrenched to handle the ever-proliferating details of an ever-shrinking program.
But the biggest question for presenters at the U.N. event, sponsored by Ceres and its Investor Network on Climate Risk, went largely unasked: Where is the greed?
Greed is a strong word, but if the climate change community is serious about finding a market solution to the crisis they are so good at describing, it is also an effective one. Greed is an essential -- if sometimes toxic -- element in markets.
At the U.N. this week, esteemed scientists rolled out the dire forecasts based on compelling and huge data sets everyone is now familiar with. Dying species, costly weather events and sick children all were raised as specters of climate change, and there was little reason to discount the evidence.
Pension funds and state treasuries have led in responding to these fears, and as the appointed guarantors against our fears of destitution or havoc their actions are logical. The interest of the banks that must devise investments to sell them was equally self-evident, as was the presence of large data providers that will need to quantify everything so lawsuits can be avoided.
But no one made a compelling case for action. Fear is one emotion thoroughly covered by the climate change industry, greed is not.
The other side of the coin, the question of how money is made and how resource allocation based on ambition rather than horror are motivated to fight climate change through investment in reducing carbon emissions has yet to be answered by the climate change industry. Passing mention was made at the Ceres conference of new industries created by regulatory fiat in the past, but the examples of history largely fail to match the reach and pervasiveness of a subject like climate change and the resulting implied, or even explicated, doom.
To close the gap on climate change action, to reach a real and widely-held consensus, the debate needs to move beyond the science. For most people, the science barely matters in their individual and daily lives; increasingly only the doctrinaire on either side of the debate bother to argue it. Fear and greed drive markets in turn.
Climate change markets have fear down pat. Where is the greed?
This AOL Energy Comment reflects the views of the author alone, in this case, AOL Energy Managing Editor Peter Gardett. Join the AOL Energy discussion by leaving a comment below or joining a conversation on our Discussions page.
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Toni Johnson: The Debate Over Aviation Emissions
Green energy investment have beat the daylights out of fossil and nukes.,
So what is your beef?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-25/fossil-fuels-beaten-by-renewables-for-first-time-as-climate-talks-founder.html.
Problem is,there is ZERO agreement as to what can and/or should be done to slow this...or are we shooting for reversal....or is it too late & we need to move to adaptation? Green icon Jim Lovelock says a) it's already too late, and b) the ONLY thing that MIGHT work would be a global shift to 100% nuclear power in 10 years or less.
Who controls & receives the $hundreds of billions$ in carbon taxes you're talking about? Who decides if we should focus near term (switch from coal to natural gas) or long term (solar/wind/tidal)? How much is funneled to 'studies' and 'research'...how much to governments...how much to green companies? Which nations get how much?
Admit it, you KNOW it would be the most corrupt, geo-political money-grab in human history & would just devolve into global wealth redistribution. Surely, we'd be looking at maybe 10-25% of the money actually being used to 'do something' about climate change.
Look at how most states handled their 'big-tobacco' lawsuit money. It was supposed to be used for anti-smoking programs & to pay the healthcare costs they incurred, but MOST of the money got funneled into their general-fund accounts & used for everything EXCEPT what it was intended for.
Now imagine that on a global scale...yikes!
By Madeline Morgenstern
http://www.globalclimatescam.com/2011/12/north-pole-%E2%80%98melting%E2%80%99-global-warming-alarmists-launch-%E2%80%98santa-is-drowning%E2%80%99-campaign-to-raise-cash/
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2012/01/20110105_Figure3.png
or just go to www.nsidc.org and browse for all kinds of good stuff.
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/
Germans actually modeled their response to the obvious environmental, economic and climate issues facing the world by ENGAGING AND INCLUDING regular people, not killing their wilderness and jacking up their rates for greenwashed power. Every person there has an opportunity to participate in the green economy as a PRODUCER of clean energy from their rooftop, and be paid fairly for doing so.
Contrast that with Bright Source (aka Chevron, BP, Morgan Stanley, etc.) bulldozing thousands of acres of healthy tortoise habitat to hugely hugely overbill us for solar power while our legislature forces us to buy this deadly wasteful power and refuses to implement the FIT that would make non-deadly local solar power available at half the cost. Corruption, greed and crony capitalism are alive and well in "climate change markets" as we speak.
The real question is - where is the populism? Where are the occupiers and tea partiers who should be demanding energy independence, economic benefits, property value increases and refusing to accept the eminent domain, destruction of recreational areas and crippling corporate welfare of Big Solar and Big Wind?
The Koch Brothers own the GOP, the Tea Party movement, and Congress. They also saturate the media with phony advertising. In addition oil companies get an $ 8 billion annual subsidy.
Green technology is an emerging market, but thanks to the GOP, we are destroying this market - at least in America. Abu Dhabi is investing heavily in solar energy. If an oil shiekdom recognizes that the Petro Party is over - what's wrong with the US?
clean, democratically-owned, affordable energy could be produced on our rooftops with a German style FIT, but our legislators and Big Enviros are fighting that, and instead greenwashing Chevron, BP, Goldman Sachs and friends. if anyone's gonna clean this Big Energy and Big Bank mess up, it will not be industry, government or corporate NGO's - it will have to come from the grassroots.
Here's a sales pitch to businesses: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT-g__695Go&feature=player_embedded#!
The web site for more info: http://rmi.org/ReinventingFire
"A senior environmental official at the United Nations...says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed.....Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of "eco-refugees", threatening political chaos...governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control...."
Link
http://tinyurl.com/6x8r9yc
http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/03/9909971-australia-in-grip-of-fierce-heatwave
You are out of touch with reality. Take a break and read up on what is really happening now.
I'd recommend http://climate.nasa.gov for a good overview, especially the key indicators section for the long term trends.
http://news.sky.com/home/world-news/article/16133817
You are out of touch with reality. Take a break and read up on what is really happening now.