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?

Fifty funders, nine companies, a hundred and fifteen million dollars — all of it paid out only if the planet needs cooling. The question is what that does to their judgement.

Key concepts

Moral Hazard: When a promised rescue makes people take bigger risks. It is one case against a cooling industry: if investors can sell geoengineering as the fix for later, everyone else may feel freer to keep emitting now, so the business quietly worsens the harm it sells a cure for.

Every work — at a glance

Stardust (company)

The US-Israeli startup developing reflective particles to spray into the stratosphere, which has taken 75 of the 115.8 million dollars invested in the whole sector.

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What to know

01
What business chances does warming open? Far more than cooling the planet. Melting ice opens the Northern Sea Route over Russia, a shorter sea road from Asia to Europe. Warmer summers suit English sparkling wine: the Champagne house Taittinger bought land in Kent in 2015. The International Energy Agency expects the world's air conditioners to rise from 1.6 billion to 5.6 billion by 2050.

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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

SCIAmazon's checkout-free shops secretly ran on human reviewers. Someone counting on geoengineering would LEAST likely agree that —

A Stopping rebounds warming
B Cooling starts cheap
C Aerosols mimic a volcano
D One country suffices
E Rescue remains a hope

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