A couple of months ago, I spent the day at a climate change conference at Columbia Business School, my alma mater. Columbia has more than a couple dozen professors, backed by scores of data scientists and McKinsey-type advisors using the latest supercomputers from Nvidia to plot of the impacts of climate change over across the planet.
The conclusions that these professors and data scientists are drawing are scary. They cannot be denied.The impacts of climate change are already here and the projections show further definitive, widespread and severe impacts on our climate and ecosystem over the next five years. The impact over the rest of this Century if we continue to pump carbon into the atmosphere could be catastrophic for human life on Earth.
As I looked at the attendees, it was clear who is funding all of Columbia’s research and who is benefiting from it. A few companies like Toyota and the major oil producers are still trying to use Ivy League research to tailor to their own climate-denying narrative, but the balance of Columbia’s participants are the country’s largest financial institutions.
These banks and insurance companies are using this research today to make key credit decisions – deciding which farms can survive a 30 degree change in temperature, which residential areas can survive the wildfires and rise in sea levels that are coming immediately, etc.
Their senior employees cannot consume this information without recongizing clear that Earth is at a turning point, and there are broader conclusions that need to be drawn and actions to be taken.
More than 18 months ago, I wrote an article indicating that the climate crisis could lead to a banking crisis. Schools like Columbia Business School are now giving them the raw data upon which they can stress test their exposures and see that it may even be too late to preserve their portfolios.
Brian Moynihan and Jamie Dimon have been going to Davos and speaking with climate leaders for years now. They are smart leaders and have said the right things to buy the time they need.
Their people now have the tools. Wind, water and solar are so cheap that they can still, if quickly and effectively deployed, save us and future generations from the worst outcomes. Studies at Stanford show that investments in these technologies have short and effective payback periods.
The time is now for them to direct their staffs to devote all of their resources to funding these technologies and to even abandoning of their most detrimental investments (banking syndicates have the power and the tools to close down the carbon projects they fund). Acting now is not only in the interests of the globe, but also their shareholders.
Add your Comment
or use your BestCashCow account