The Economist (April 13)
Extreme weather incidents are increasing in frequency due to climate change. “In the decade from 2000 to 2009 only three thunderstorms cost the industry more than $1bn at current prices. From 2010 to 2019 there were ten. Since 2020 there have already been six. Such storms now account for more than a quarter of the costs to the insurance industry from natural disasters.”
Tags: $1bn, 2010, 2019, 2020, Climate change, Costs, Extreme weather, Frequency, Incidents, Industry, Insurance, Natural disasters, Storms, Thunderstorms
Washington Post (April 7)
Numerous conflicts are “pitting the environment against, well, the environment. Solar plants and wind farms, transmission lines and carbon-capture projects face opposition from conservationists and other environmental groups asking courts to stop new infrastructure from encroaching on wetlands, forests and other ecosystems.” Trade-offs like these “generally lean against developers,” but they were “written in an era before those developers included promoters of the green power that humanity needs to stave off climate change.” Things need fixing. We should not “let environmentalism sabotage green energy.”
Tags: Carbon capture, Climate change, Conservationists, Ecosystems, Environmentalism, Forests, Green power, Opposition, Solar, Trade-offs, Transmission lines, Wetlands, Wind
Washington Post (February 20)
“As it stands today, even the most heralded investor activism has done next to nothing to move the needle…. Somehow activists missed that each share a green investor sells is purchased by somebody with lesser green credentials, less interest in climate change. This substitution could actually lead to more rather than fewer carbon emissions.”
Tags: Activists, Carbon emissions, Climate change, Green investor, Heralded, Investors, Sells, Share, Substitution
Reuters (January 8)
“The world is full of danger. The planet starts 2024 with war in Gaza and Ukraine, superpower rivalry, climate change and slow growth. The possible return of Donald Trump as U.S. president is another risk…. It’s easy to see how the world’s multiple overlapping crises – what some observers have labelled the ‘polycrisis’—could feed on one another, creating a doom loop.” But none of this is inevitable. “There are more optimistic scenarios, and some silver linings in the pessimistic ones.”
Tags: 2024, Climate change, Danger, Doom loop, Gaza, Growth, Optimistic scenarios, Polycrisis, Risk, Rivalry, Superpower, Trump, U.S., Ukraine, War, World
Washington Post (October 16)
“Climate change is the catastrophe to end all other catastrophes.” Every other issue pales in comparison. “Even our boldest notions of how to improve the status of women — expanding access to education, health care, housing and liberty — will be meaningless if women are swept away in mega floods, buried in landslides or suffocated by wildfires.”
Tags: Access, Boldest, Catastrophe, Climate change, Education, Floods, Health care, Housing, Landslides, Liberty, Meaningless, Status of women
New Yorker (August 28)
“Japan is the first nation to experience a demographic tipping point where more than twenty per cent of the population is over sixty-five years old.” This magnifies the effects of climate change. Hot summer weather in Tokyo now lasts “some fifty days longer in recent years as compared with the twentieth century.” The additional “heat has proven a silent killer of these older citizens. Thirteen hundred people die of heatstroke annually in the country, the majority of them elderly.”
Tags: Climate change, Demographic, Elderly, Heatstroke, Hot, Japan, Magnifies, Over sixty-five, Population, Silent killer, Summer weather, Tipping point, Tokyo
Council on Foreign Relations (August 25)
“American homeowners already coping with extreme weather now face a new risk: disappearing property insurance. Private companies have increasingly reduced coverage, concluding that the risks—and potential losses—threatened by climate change outweigh probable profits. As of now, this primarily affects a handful of coastal U.S. states, including California. In other states, insurers have substantially increased the price of property insurance.”
Tags: California, Climate change, Coastal, Coverage, Extreme weather, Homeowners, Potential losses, Private companies, Profits, Property insurance, Risks, U.S.
Institutional Investor (August 23)
“Proponents and critics of ESG claim it can change society. Both will be disappointed.” During the past five years, ESG investing has taken off. “By the end of 2022, global ESG funds had attracted more than $2.5 trillion in assets.” Regardless of this clout and “whether or not asset managers are ‘woke,’ ESG doesn’t hurt oil companies or provide capital for solutions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.”
Tags: $2.5 trillion, Asset managers, Assets, Capital, Change, Climate change, Critics, Disappointed, ESG investing, Impacts, Oil companies, Proponents, Society, Woke
New York Times (June 29)
The twin threats of “dangerous heat baking…the Southeast” and “the wildfire smoke filling the skies” in the Midwest “aren’t connected directly. But a common factor is adding to their capacity to cause misery. Human-caused climate change is turning high temperatures that would once have been considered improbable into more commonplace occurrences. And it is intensifying the heat and dryness that fuel catastrophic wildfires, allowing them to burn longer and more ferociously, and to churn out more smoke.”
Tags: Catastrophic, Climate change, Dangerous, Dryness, Heat, Human-caused, Improbable, Intensifying, Misery, Smoke, Temperatures, Wildfire, Wildfires
Bloomberg (June 17)
“European central bankers’ price stability mission is on a collision course with the goal of combating climate change, unless they change their ways.” Ultimately, the ECB may have to institute a special category of green lending to solve what appears to be an irresolvable dilemma. “The transition to a lower-carbon economy may fuel inflation — but raising interest rates in response to that could hinder investment in cleaner energy. So monetary policy and efforts to save the planet risk working against each other, casting a shadow over the prevailing consumer-price-targeting philosophy of the past three decades.”
Tags: Cleaner energy, Climate change, Collision course, ECB, Europe, Green lending, Inflation, Interest, Investment, Lower-carbon economy, Monetary policy, Price stability, Transition
