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?
A 33-year-old fund manager has poured over $100 million into startups trying to dim the sun to cool the planet — risky technology with unknown effects on weather, food, and politics. 'It would be definitely better if we lost all our money and this wasn't necessary,' he admits. A new wave of investors sees global warming not just as a tragedy but as a business opportunity.
Key concepts
- Solar Geoengineering
- Deliberately reflecting sunlight away from Earth to cool it — cheap and fast in theory, but with unpredictable, uneven effects on rainfall and crops; a 'fix' that could itself become a disaster.
- Moral Hazard
- When the existence of a remedy makes people take bigger risks — if we believe geoengineering can rescue us later, we may feel freer to keep emitting now, so the cure can worsen the disease.
- Perverse Incentives
- When someone profits from a problem, they gain a reason to prolong it — an industry built on a warming world has, buried in its model, an interest in that world staying warm.
- Disaster Capitalism
- Profiting from catastrophe — selling the response to a crisis, or benefiting from causing one; the ethical core: when does making money off a disaster cross from helping into exploiting?
What to know
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Profit can mobilize solutions — the same motive driving these investors funnels serious money and talent into technologies that might genuinely help, so 'profiting from warming' isn't automatically villainous; markets are how many real fixes get built.
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