The oil companies who donate to NPR continue to get their monies worth. Yesterday evening, they did an interview with an author who has written a book about people who are looking to make money off global warming/climate change. NPR asked if he thought those who stand to profit from climate change are "deliberately influencing public policy to discourage efforts to halt global warming". Mr. Funk replied that he had not seen evidence of that people who stand to make money off the effects of climate change are trying to encourage it. It is not unknown for people to create damage in order to get business, but that is generally on a small scale for immediate benefits, like the window repair man who broke shop windows.http://wabe.org/post/entrepreneurs-looking-windfall-cash-climate-change
It is apparent to me that the NPR program deliberately set up a straw man argument. The question was carefully worded to not include those who we already know are trying to block efforts to slow climate change for the sake of their profits - the fossil fuel industry. They have funded climate change denialist organizations. They are starting to stop their acknowledged donations of these organizations at the same time as the organizations are starting to receive an equivalent amount of "anonymous" donations. Gee whiz, who could be making the anonymous donations, I wonder? [sarcasm]
It's just like the tobacco companies, and some other companies whose products have turned out to be harmful, including auto and drug makers. In fact some of the scientists who are currently being paid by the fossil fuel companies to deny the reality of global warming also got paid in the past by tobacco companies to deny the harmful effects of smoking. But I don't know of anybody who thinks the people who make money with products or programs to reduce smoking, or at least the harm it causes, are trying to get more people to smoke in order to make more business for themselves.
I have heard nobody claim that these companies created their product for the sake of doing harm. They created the products to make money. But when it turns out that their products do harm, they try to hide the fact in order to make money. They continue to market their deadly products. Just as banks and other financial institutions have hidden financial losses and outright fraud in their own institutions. There are cases of factory and mine owners hiring people to beat up, even murder, workers who went on strike. We see this kind of thing over and over, in any kind of business. But we are supposed to believe it couldn't possibly happen in the fossil fuel industry. As with those who exposed the dangers of smoking, the scientists who have warned us about the dangers of global warming have gotten death threats.
They funny thing is that, human nature being the way it is, simply by asking the question, NPR has probably planted the idea in some people's minds that those who stand to profit from climate change might actually be encouraging it, even thought the answer was in the negative.
Afterthought 2/21/2014
After posting this, I realized there is a sizable population of people who are trying to bring on problems for the world - those who believe Armageddon in coming soon, and who are trying to force God to bring it on sooner because they imagine they will be saved. Conceivably, some could be encouraging global warming, although my guess is that such people would not be scientifically inclined and are more likely to be dinialists.
Originally published on Tue January 28, 2014
In 2008, as scientists documented a record melt in the Arctic ice and Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth was in theaters, a half dozen major investment houses launched mutual funds designed to take advantage of financial opportunities offered by climate change.
In Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming, journalist McKenzie Funk looks into how some entrepreneurs and even some nations stand to benefit from a changing climate. He talks with Fresh Air's Dave Davies about some of his subjects, ranging from investors buying water rights and farmland around the world, to private wildfire protection services for affluent homeowners, to the nation of Greenland, which will be able to exploit new mineral deposits as its ice melts.
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DAVIES: You know, your book describes, you know, private interests that see a chance to make money from the effects of climate change and sovereign states that appear to be positioned to profit. Do you see either the private interests or the governments deliberately influencing public policy to discourage efforts to halt global warming? Are we seeing people who will, you know, happily destroy the planet to make a buck?
FUNK: I have not seen that, no. I think it's an important point to say that the people I have talked to, I don't think they were necessarily bad people. Now, they were looking to make a buck but I don't think many of them were wanting, OK, let's let the planet burn so I can make this buck. It's more that they were sort of hopeless about the prospects. And I don't think there's any lobbying against sort of climate action.
But I wouldn't doubt that the fact that many of us are not going to be as bad off as, say, your average Bangladeshi slows action on climate change. There's - the charge levied at, say, Halliburton that it likes war. I always find that a bit dubious. I think that's the same for these companies. I don't think that they like climate change. I think they're looking to make money in it and I think if there was more of their bottom line at risk that maybe they'd be more pro-climate action. Maybe they'd be pushing harder to stop it.
But actively working against it, I never saw any evidence of that. No. That, for me, after years working on this book was the major takeaway, was this sort of imbalance, the idea of this unevenness of the effects. You know, some of us will get rich off climate change. Some of us will at least be able to pay for the technologies that can protect us.
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