You’ve done a good job. You have much of the media buying into your message that climate change based on human driven global warming is a “controversy” which deserves an equal hearing of both sides, despite the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists (i.e., those who actually study and monitor climate change) and despite all the evidence that indicates the climate scientists are right (melting ice caps, disappearing glaciers, widespread drought, increased desertification, soaring temperatures, more intense weather events, more frequent and more intense wild fires, etc.).
You have also convinced a number of “no nothing” conservatives and various loons on the right to believe that “global warming” is actually a conspiracy cooked up by Al Gore, “environmentalist wackos” (to quote Rush Limbaugh, patron saint of all far right morons) and climate scientists who just want to grab more “government welfare money” for phony research in order to get rich off US taxpayers.
That said, you’re losing an important demographic: hard headed capitalists whose livelihoods are directly impacted by climate change. They see the writing on the wall, and are doing everything they can to ameliorate the risk they recognize to their businesses. People like the good folks in charge of multi-billion dollar pension funds, for example:
Calpers, the biggest U.S. pension fund, said on Wednesday that regulators already have the ability to require publicly traded companies to disclose material risks relating to climate change.
Calpers, which manages more than $250 billion, as well as other institutional investors, environmental groups and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, had petitioned the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in September to force publicly traded companies to disclose climate-related risks.
The potential impact on companies’ financial performance has garnered the interest of federal lawmakers, who held a hearing on Wednesday to discuss disclosure.
“There is sufficient authority currently at the SEC to compel disclosure,” said Russell Read, Calpers’s chief investment officer.
The coalition says risks associated with climate change can include effects on a company’s performance and operations ranging from physical damage to new facilities to additional regulatory costs.
It’s got to be little harder for you to dismiss the concerns of the chief investment officer of a $250 billion institutional investor like CALPERS as part of Al Gore’s traveling global warming freak show, now isn’t it? People with that many assets to direct, and that much money to put into the stock market, don’t fit the stereotype of environmentalists as granola eating, tree hugging, pot smoking hippies that you have spent so much time and effort fostering on the American public. Nor are mega billion dollar investment funds the only business people who have bought into the “global warming hoax,” as James Inhofe, the Senator from Exxon, likes to portray it. There are also the good folks who manage our insurance industry who know a little something about assessing risks when they see them:
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Insurance companies, who like to stay out of the limelight, are becoming leading business protagonists in the assault on global warming.
• Next week, Travelers, the giant insurance firm, will offer owners of hybrid cars in California a 10 percent discount. It already offers the discount in 41 other states and has cornered a large share of the market.
• This fall, Fireman’s Fund will cut premiums for “green” buildings that save energy and emit fewer greenhouse gases. When it pays off claims, it will direct customers to environmentally friendly products to replace roofs, windows, and water heaters.
• In January, Marsh, the largest insurance broker in the US, will offer a program with Yale University to teach corporate board members about their fiduciary responsibility to manage exposure to climate change.
The insurance industry’s clout is sizable. It’s the second-largest industry in the world in terms of assets, and has a direct link to most homeowners and businesses. It insures coal-fired power plants as well as wind farms, so it can influence the power industry’s cost structure. With its financial muscle, the industry could help advance the use of new financial instruments designed to allow companies to trade greenhouse-gas emissions in the same way that commodities are bought and sold. […]
“Climate change represents an ever- increasing risk, a risk far too great to ignore,” says Clement Booth, a member of the Board of Management at Allianz AG, one of the world’s largest insurance firms.
So enjoy the monies bestowed on you by Exxon and all the other companies whose profits, like the energy companies and utilities, are directly tied to continuing to burn fossil fuels, while it lasts. Because, just like the tobacco companies and their decades long fraudulent scams to deny the dangers of smoking, a day of reckoning is coming, and its may be coming much sooner than you think. Too bad it can’t come fast enough to stop all the harm and human misery from the effects of climate change to which your disinformation efforts have and will continue to contribute, now and for the indefinite future.
