Moody’s Buys Climate Data Firm, Signaling New Scrutiny of Climate Risks
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This is just branding for more clients
We can't really expect them to ascertain the true state of things, because that is impossible and nobody can do that. And if they could do that, they'd put their knowledge to use as a trading firm rather than telling people what is going on.
Their job is to compile what 'everyone' knows and report it because that is all they can reliably do. That is something that can be achieved consistently, and that their customers probably do want to know.
"the subjects of their analysis are also their clients." sounds less like failure and more like fraud. 'Failure' is what they hope it's seen as, to avoid legal consequences.
Also, if you're holding any high grade/investment bond ETFs you're very likely to own some mortgage backed securities in there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Progr...
Don't think that people won't devise ways to make a fortune from this disaster.
I've been frequenting r/collapse and one of the perspectives there is that increasing heat in the north will create desertification and thus not a very hospitable place to live. Which leaves me wondering, where at all would be? Maybe no where... I live near the equator at low elevation and I can't imagine it will be better here either.
The main problem with the free market has been lack of accountability and dollar damage projections on environmental damage.
Most fossil-fuel energy companies have lobbied against it because it would make their product a lot more expensive to produce if their customers had to pay a market-rate fee for it's burning/disposal. The ammount of carbon that can be dumped out is finite, yet the cost is artificially set to zero/free which makes no sense unless you live in a communist system.
By accounting this into credit risk, it makes it more expensive for governments to ignore the environment. It means they have to pay a lot more interest on their debt which puts maximum political pressure on them to address the money problem regardless of their ideology beliefs.
This also makes clean energy companies actually competitive at market rate since they have very little carbon dumping to pay for.
It also puts a lot more pressure to improve the measurement accuracy of carbon emission if it is actively being traded. It also greatly increases insurance costs for new fossil fuel development because now they can face liability when people's homes are flooded for the first time.
On the positive side, It also makes local farming produce more competitive and economically stable too because it needs to burn a lot less gas, thus pay for less carbon waste for delivery compared to a similar product that's shipped from extremely greater distances.
Because shipping does not pay a market rate for carbon waste, it creates some absurd situations.
For example a lot of pepper farmers here in Ontario actually ship their produce all the way to China for packaging and then ship it back here to sell because it saves them a small margin this way in the current cost.
By enabling the market to factor in environmental costs, you're basically letting a distributed graph-based computer, a giant hive mind, the market, address the problem a lot more efficiently and with massively more processing power than you would have with central planning.
Take a look at these graphs:
1. Annual worldwide CO2 emissions by region: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...
That graph keeps growing every year (save for major recession years). Consider how much effort it would take just to reduce the growth to 0, where we would still be very much screwed.
2. Global CO2 concentration: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-co-concentration-p...
Again, up and to the right, consistently, for decades, with no sign of slowing down.
3. Same graph of CO2 concentration, but over a longer timescale, to really freak you out: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-concentration-long-te...
I'll start having optimism when I see even a small change in the direction of these graphs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJFtdvrTZs4
By no means are they safe or anything, the environmental impact is vast and with many unknowns. However at some point in the passing decades it will be unethical not to use them. The environmental damage of the continuing warming will be greater that the possible environmental damage of the geo-engineering methods. Therefore we will most likely use them.
The 2 most practical methods that can be enacted by a single nation today are ocean fertilization to spur growth of oxygen producing plankton and spraying of reflective sulphur dioxide dust in the stratosphere, even if all the permafrost melts, methane in the atmosphere has a half life of only 7 years.
The carbon is the main problem. At 1000 ppm we can still breathe despite the impact it has on our cognitive health. Most likely we'll offset that with massive tree planting at scale. Other carbon capture methods are not that scalable in my opinion. Wood is basically captured carbon, it makes great building material and certain species of it can grow pretty fast over and over again like bamboo which grows 91cm/3ft per day. Genetically modified derivatives of it are quite likely to be developed too.
Not to mention that market economies of many different kinds have been proven over and over to be more efficient than centrally planned economies. For example, China authoritarian and socialist market economy miracle of rising almost a billion people out of extreme poverty in strong contrast to the centrally planned disaster with the Great Chinese Famine where at least 15 million people died of starvation. Or Holodomor in Ukraine with 4 million people starved to death.
Centrally planned economies are responsible for more deaths and misery than the whole Holocaust.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/breakthro...
There're still a lot of practical problems with the Northwest Passage - notably, the most direct routes are too shallow, there remain lots of icebergs and ice sheets, it's not well-mapped, and there are few resupply ports along the way. I'm not sure I'd agree with all the criticisms in the article (notably, they assume the Northwest Passage will always have ice in winter, but in many "greenhouse earth" scenarios the arctic is ice-free year-round), but it's decades out, not years.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004
According to the above (2016) Nature article, 25% to 50% of the globe shows greening, with only 4% showing browning.
Additionally if the greening is occurring in previously permafrost soils that are not very useful for farming then there is not an increase in the food produced by that green area.
https://apps.fas.usda.gov/psdonline/circulars/production.pdf
It's glacial maximums that are really concerning to me personally. It's very unlikely that we could feed so many billions of people as we do now if we ever enter another ice age.