Profiting From a Warming World

Some investors are looking for business opportunities around the warming of the Earth. Explore some of those opportunities, then discuss with your team: should people be allowed to profit from rising temperatures? Could you imagine a company (or even a government) intentionally contributing to climate change, or other potential disasters, to benefit its own interests?

Key concepts

Moral Hazard: When the existence of a rescue makes people take bigger risks — if we trust that geoengineering can save us later, we may feel freer to keep emitting now, so the promised cure quietly worsens the disease.

+ 2 more concepts inside

What to know

01
Could a company intentionally worsen a disaster to profit? It is not a thought experiment — it is a documented pattern: an entity whose profits rise with a harm gains a structural interest in that harm persisting, which is exactly what perverse incentives predict.

Across subjects

History supplies the proof economics only predicts: the tobacco industry funded doubt about cancer for decades because it profited from smoking, and fossil-fuel

Theme connection

"Are We There Yet?"

Some are quietly betting on arrival — building businesses that pay off the hotter it gets. Is profiting from a warming world just clear-eyed adaptation, or does it corrupt the profiter into rooting for the disaster they should be fighting?

Practice — a sample

SOCFeeling freer to keep emitting because geoengineering might rescue us later is BEST described as —

A Moral hazard
B Economies of scale
C Diminishing returns
D Supply and demand
E Opportunity cost

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