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The Next Big Thing: Profiting From The Fear Of Climate Change
Wolf Richter www.testosteronepit.com www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter
The last big thing was green tech – from wave-power generators to the smart grid. It was hyped in the bipartisan stimulus bill, promising gobs of jobs, billions in revenues, and untold riches through the eventual market capitalization of these outfits. Private investors plowed in billions too. It ended up in a massive pileup of capital destruction. Fatalities were everywhere.
One was Solyndra that – after devouring close to $1 billion, including $385 million from the Federal Government and $25 million from nearly bankrupt California – declared bankruptcy in 2011. There were scores of other boondoggles. Some were startups. Others were projects run by mega-corporations like GE and Siemens. But the euphoria has since hissed out of the construct. Private investors and taxpayers alike grabbed what they could and fled. And not just in the US.
The PEW Charitable Trust reported that in 2012, G-20 green-tech asset financing dropped 20% from 2011. Within that, venture-capital and private-equity funding plunged 34%. And public-market funding plummeted 55%. I know several people with PhDs in arcane fields whose jobs evaporated in 2012 when their startups were shuttered or became mere skeletons. That industry was so ravaged that they had to move on to other industries.
Sure, the industry lives, but without the hype. Investors have jumped on to the next big thing: rather than profit from preventing climate change, they'd profit from climate change per se – or rather, the fear of climate change.
There are a few problemitas. One is the nature of climate change. It moves at snail’s pace for investors who have a quarter-to-quarter attention span. Many generations of tidal gauges in the San Francisco Bay, first installed in 1854, have recorded an 8-inch rise in the coastal sea level over the last century. Now the extrapolation starts. By 2050, as global warming melts glaciers and polar icecaps, coastal sea levels might rise 18 inches, some experts predict. It would threaten airports, neighborhoods, commercial districts, and farmland situated on reclaimed land. The Bay Area would have to deal with it: fight or flight. Climate adaptation. It would be costly. Some intrepid experts predict that the Planet would warm 3° to 8° Fahrenheit by 2100, by which time the sea level in the Bay might have risen six feet.
Whatever the outcome, for investors, it’s a tough sell. They want to profit now, not after they’re dead. The emphasis has to be on milestones, next year, ongoing profits, or an exit down the line; and on big issues happening now, like Superstorm Sandy. Climate change is mentioned in the same breath – thus immediacy. Let the money flow!
And it’s flowing, according to Bloomberg. “Climate risk is something people are paying more and more attention to,” said Barney Schauble, managing partner at Nephila Advisors, the US branch of an $8 billion Bermuda hedge fund that gambles in weather derivatives. In January, private equity goliath KKR acquired a 25% stake in it. “More volatile weather creates more risk and more appetite to protect against that risk,” Schauble said.
“Climate change for us is a driver,” said Marc Robert, Chief Operating Officer of hedge fund Water Asset Management in New York. It acquires water rights and invests in water treatment companies. For them, drought is a godsend. “Not enough people are thinking long term of [water] as an asset that is worthy of ownership,” he said.
“The cities that are close to the waterline continue to grow and have more money and need for protection; it’s almost a natural growth market,” said Piet Dircke of Arcadis, a Dutch company with $3.3 billion in revenues. The company calls him a “global expert in flood protection and climate adaptation for coastal and delta cities”; he’s now leading Arcadis' post-Sandy damage assessments and recovery plans. He said his phone was ringing nonstop after Sandy. “The climate is changing. Sea level is rising. That’s quite obvious,” he said.
San Francisco, dreading any further rise in sea level, is also on the company’s client list, as are other US cities. Entire industries have mushroomed around this concept of climate adaptation. A Google search for "adaptation conference" brings up thousands of relevant results. Like “green tech conference” used to. The UN believes that the infrastructure and technology needed to deal with the consequences of climate change will cost $130 billion a year by 2030. Accurate or not, it’s too far out for investors. For now, it’s the fear of climate change that is the next big thing, and they’re all scrambling to get their slice of that pie.
The Dow and S&P 500 are stumbling like drunken but determined sailors from one all-time high to the next, despite lousy employment and economic data, and declining corporate revenues. Bonds have done the same. And their 100-year graph has assumed the terrifying shape of open crocodile jaws, worse even than in 1999 and 2007. Read.... “The Mother Of All Shorts”
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George?
You out there somewhere??
Got any contradicting data????
Long term ill-defined fears used to sell short term remedies that were never designed to actually prevent the predicted disaster but put a whole shit load of money in someone's pocket while stealing our remaining wealth and freedoms, again and again and again. Besides if global warming believers are correct, everything should pretty much take a shit at the same time anyway. No sense wasting a perfectly good crisis when we could have "the perfect storm".
If you can choose between global warming and cooling, go for warming.
I froze my ass in Denver, CO this year.
"“Climate risk is something people are paying more and more attention to,” said Barney Schauble, managing partner at Nephila Advisors, the US branch of an $8 billion Bermuda hedge fund that gambles in weather derivatives."
The golden silk orb-weavers (genus Nephila) are a genus of araneomorph spiders noted for the impressive webs they weave.
Now THAT'S creepy.
And it gets better and better!
First OGM babies:
http://planet.infowars.com/offbeat/the-worlds-first-geneticallymodified-...
Should they have to be properly labeled?
CREEPY.
Relax, the global warming scam is done for. Goldman Sachs dumped their shares a year ago.
Fear of climate change...
Isn't fear what sells overpriced car, home, and health insurance, along with obscenely priced and advertised pharmaceuticals of dubious benefit?
South Seas, Black Tulips, and now Climate Change.
What was it P.T. Barnum said again?
Yeah, like that.
Read about regulating cow farts.
Email me for an application.
The EPA has been on it for over ten years; regulating farmers who raise cattle for their dangerous methane emissions.
Ignoring, of course, the giant herds of 60+ million Bison roaming the continent a little over 150 years ago and thousands of years before.
It's Bushs fault.
Not that it matters any more, but to correct one small little error:
The author stated that the energy subsidies were in the "Bipartisan Stimulus Bill". I'm pretty sure that isn't accurate. The stimulus bill passed both the house and senate with essentially 0 Republican votes.
TARP passed with bipartisan support, but that didn't include any funds for alternative energy. Bush and Obama did use TARP to save GM (more accurately, the UAW), and they make the Volt - but its a stretch to call the volt a bipartisan enterprise.
Climate education:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/
Climate change just like the libor rates, money printing and the gold price suppression is a scam.
The left wants power so what do they do? They come up with a boogey man that must be defeated. Turns out that we are the boogey man polluting the earth with extra CO2. What a great idea. Well somebody has to save the world so WE BETTER HIGHER PURPOSE PEOPLE CONTROL THE REST OF YOU MORONS TO SAVE THE WORLD! While they are doing that of course they will need mansions and private jets.
The rich 1% on the right want power so what do they do? They rig the game so that no matter what happens they win and the 99% lose.
My efforts to research the issue of Humans blamed for climate change ended up feeling like a dog chasing its own tail. My main conclusion was that human beings definitely do NOT understand the Sun, which means that they could not possibly understand or predict climate changes.
What I do believe I understand is other human beings, and that civilization was basically built by the biggest bullies, who spouted bullshit about everything. Therefore, it is not a surprise to discover that "climate change" is buried under bullshit, while that is being used for yet another excuse to allow some people to rob other people.
“Not enough people are thinking long term of [water] as an asset that is worthy of ownership” ???
Water scarcity could drive serious water wars (except that those wars could only make those problems become even worse.) The PROBLEM is that private property does not exist outside of some system of public violence. Therefore, privatizing water resources MUST depend upon having some system of organized coercion in order to enforce that claim.
All of those claims are currently based on a fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting system, since the "money" there is made out of nothing, as a debt, which is only possible because the banksters have taken covert control over governments, in order to appropriate the sovereign powers of governments to enforce that fraud. Furthermore, that is a runaway system, on an exponential growth curve, that will collapse if it can not continue, since that is its basic design structure, to constantly need to create more money out of nothing, as debts, in order to pay the interest on previous money created out of nothing as debts.
While it seems plainly obvious that we are seeing wilder weather, my view is that at least half the data is missing, while the models are seriously insufficient, especially since how the Sun really works is NOT understood. There is no doubt that climate change is an enormously important issue. However, the deeper problems are that our social responses to that are being mediated through the established social pyramid systems, which are based on organized lies, operating organized robberies, in which those who were the best at deceits, and backing that up with destruction, are actually controlling our civilization.
Furthermore, IF one thinks more deeply about this, it becomes plainly obvious WHY the death controls are the central controls, and why those who are the best at operating the death controls were also the best at being dishonest about doing that. Thus, our civilization is controlled by huge lies, backed by lots of violence. Therefore, our responses to the threats of real climate changes (including those which human beings might be blamed for) all end up having to go through the maze of infinite tunnels of deceits regarding everything that we are doing.
The supreme paradox that human beings are facing is the paradox of militarism. The murder system is the most important system, which is central to the rest of the human ecology, and therefore, the thing which has the greatest impact upon the evolutions of the emerging industrial ecologies, as well as the survival of natural ecologies. The monetary system evolved inside the military system, since money is backed by murder, and then the money pays for the murder system to operate in return. Everything with respect to some human beings staking any claim over some natural resource, such as water, is a lie, backed by violence. The more we privatize the natural environment, the more threats of violence there have to be to back those claims up.
Obviously, it is NOT possible for human beings to not operate their lives as robbers in their environment. It is NOT possible for human realities to ever be anything else than organized systems of lies, operating organized robberies. What we should be doing is evolving a better human ecology which develops better dynamic equilibria between those systems of lies and robbery. However, everyone who dominates the established systems were selected to be maximally psychotic and psychopathic, since for generation after generation, they had to be the best professional liars and immaculate hypocrites, in order to fulfil their social roles, while those they ruled over were selected to accept that kind of bullshit, since it was being enforced by the biggest bullies.
"Profiting From The Fear Of Climate Change" obviously fits into that overall system. Pretty well everything that the Neolithic civilization style social pyramid systems do is based on ignorance and fear, promoted by a few, in order to control the many. Therefore, it has become practically impossible to respond rationally to real threats from the natural environment, BECAUSE, the greatest threat to human beings is other human beings, not the natural world!That is manifesting as the currently runaway systems of global electronic fiat money frauds, backed by the threats from atomic bombs. Every decision that we are making is being made through a fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting system, in which the history of the violence which enforced that fraud is almost totally denied by those who have been actually doing that. The ways that the rulers operate through deceits, which of course they deny, is matched by those who were ruled having adapted to accept believing in those deceits, and the denials of those deceits.
The supreme paradox is that human beings DO have an ecology, which was primarily crafted by the history of warfare, which was the oldest and best developed social science, BUT, the success of that was based on being the best at tricking other people. That system of lies backed by violence evolved to be the current systems of bankster controlled governments, which are the Fraud Kings controlling the War Kings.
THAT is the god damn awfully insane system through which we are attempting to scientifically assess the threat of climate changes, and THAT is the context in which economic decisions are being made about what to do about those threats. The irony of this paradox continues to be that the murder systems are central to all other human systems, including the possible responses to the realities of possible climate changes, however, those murder systems are buried as deeply under bullshit and denials as it is possible to bury them. Therefore, attempting any kind of genuinely scientific, and sensible response to climate changes, as the ways that the human energy systems should adapt to the greater energy systems which we operate within, is all mediated through human societies being controlled by triumphant runaway deceits, primarily in the form of fundamental financial fraud, in the sense of making "money" out of nothing (which only works because that fraud is enforced by governments, against their own people.)
Of course, it makes sense WHY the human energy systems are controlled by the people who were the biggest bullies, who were the most able to spout their kinds of bullshit social stories, and enforce those. However, THAT is the deeper problem regarding how problematic it is for those human systems to adapt to the larger natural systems. At the present time, human civilization is a runaway social insanity, based on being controlled by force backed financial frauds, which those doing them get to continue to promote, because those kinds of organized lies operating organized robberies have made them personally successful.
However, the most basic laws of nature, as far as we now know, are that nothing can be made out of nothing, and nothing can be sent to nothing. Yet, our financial accounting system is based on making money out of nothing, in ways which flatly contradict the principles of the conservation of energy, momentum and matter. Of course, the money made out of nothing is NOT actually made out of nothing, but rather is the result of a runaway system of organized crime, through which a few people are able to rob many other people. That is the reality of our entire global civilization today. That is what drives our responses to climate change to become just more of the biggest bullies' bullshit, piled on top of previous bullshit.
In the end, there is no way to rationally avoid the core concept at the center of these issues. The real response of human beings to real climate changes are the changes in the human death controls. Those then underpin the changes in the debt controls. Those then direct which kinds of economic developments happen. Obviously, therefore, the ways that human beings are responding to climate changes are manifesting primarily as an ever deeper tunnel of almost infinite deceits, as more "money" gets made out of nothing, as debts, in order to control what kind of economic developments will be invested in.
More and more, water resources are the leading edge of that process of privatization, through the monetary system, which is based on frauds, backed by force, staking claims to own that asset. The problem is that those claims to own such assets are ALL operating through the established systems of electronic frauds, backed by an abundance of weapons of mass destruction. Every other decision we make is just as totally insane as that overall system has become! The energy system of human civilization responds to its natural environment by some people lying to other people, and backing those lies up with violence. Therefore, when there manifests real forces from the surrounding energy systems, such as in the form of real climate changes, those end up being expressed through bigger lies backed by more violence, and that is why the corporations which are profiting from their so-called environmentalism are tending to be one boondoggle after another ... Things are about as BACKWARDS as they could possibly be, since everything is controlled by the maximum possible deceits.
There must be a murder system, and there is, and that does back up the money system. However, both of those have become totally insane, after technologies amplified them trillions of times ... So far, no change of political state has manifested in any way which adequately reflects those technological changes. Therefore, we continue to have our human energy systems adapt to the changes in the environmental energy systems in ways which are consistent with the ways that energy systems operate, which continues to mean that the same groups of people who were the most labile components in the human systems, i.e., the biggest bullies, spouting bullshit, who were the best at being dishonest, and backing that up with violence, are the components which control the human systems, while the vast majority of people continue to be conditioned to go along with that.
We understand the Sun, but the MSM doesn't, and the IPCC hides it:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/solar/
"Wilder weather" is a propagandized myth:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/climatic-phenomena-pages/extreme-weather-page/
Atmosphere? Oceans? Ice? Check out their other reference pages.
Well, The Joker, that is certainly an interesting reference page, with an information overload about Solar astronomy. However, I still believe that the basic theories about how the Sun works are up in the air at the present time, and that nobody understands that well enough ... These days, I tend to ask a lot of crazy questions about Solar Flare Co-incidences?
Climate changes, by definition, would be "wilder weather" ... for which we are not yet able to have enough perspective to say for sure ... However, my point of view, within my own little life time, is that it used to never rain in the winter time, while for about only the last five or so years, it has been raining in the winter! I remember the summers being sunny and hot, while the winters were still sunny, but always cold. Today, everything seems all mixed up, with rain in the winter during the last several years being the most blatant example to me that our weather is wilder, because that never used to happen before during my life!
James Hansen and David Hathaway were off on their predictions for solar cycle 24. First, a peak of 160 would not be one of the highest in the last 50 years, that's laughable. I don't think they claimed that either but you can go to the source at NASA's website to see if he did. The peak was close to 200, which is lowest since the Dalton minimum of the 1880s, and damn near the Maunder minimum (little ice age in the 1700s). The peak of SC22 pushed 450 in the early 1990s. A lot of scientists, not climate scientists are predicting solar cycle 25 to approach the Maunder minimum. Yes, climate is changing, it's getting colder and will into the 2030s, but not due to CO2. There is a 60 year cycle, 30 years of warming, 30 years of cooling, that follows the PDO. Yes, the climate warmed up from 1970 to 2000 and from 1915 to 1945. The climate cooled from 45 to 70 and is cooling again. Climate is measured over centuries and eons, glacial periods. Weather is not climate and the number of hurricanes and tornadoes have decreased in the last few decades. Look up Scaffeta's work on the topic, if you are interested. Where I live for the early half of the 2000s I used to golf for two weeks in January, now it's fucking freezing in January as the real winters of the 70s are coming back. Follow the PDO if you want to know what the climate is going to do.
Edit: Where are we headed?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PDO.svg
Call it what it is. Its not climate change, its police state regulation of every single thing we do: slavery.
San Francisco is all hills, if not small mountains.
Here's FEMA's map of the flood plains, pink areas look like beaches and Tourist piers.
http://sfgsa.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=1761
The prison is closed, so it doesn't count!
Too bad we didn't have the Internet during Vietnam war. Mighta saved some lives.
There's a bloody near permanent, at least for a billion years, nuclear explosion only 90 million miles away. It's the reason we're here.
The weather men even get tomorrow's forecast wrong, give me a break.
Adonisdemilo, I suggest checking out the thunderbolts of the gods Web site, for an explanation of the electric universe theory. The theory that explains the way the Sun works as due to perpetual nuclear chemistry is dubious... There are now way too many counter-examples, so that, at least, the mainstream astronomy theories of how the Sun works are incomplete and inadequate.
http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/
I also like how they speak about the problems of current live issues in the paradigms of science. The established systems deliberately ignore anything that they do not like, because those can not fit into their old paradigms. As astronomy develops new technologies which generate awesome new sources of data, which were never available before, that data is demolishing mainstream astronomy. However, of course, you will not hear about that in the mainstream mass media.
Pretty well on every front, our society is controlled by its ESTABLISHED systems of lies, and astronomy is no exception ...
"that data is demolishing mainstream astronomy"
It's fairly easy to "demolish" astronomy. The field is dominated by untested theory, not that anyone holds that against them. Demolishing it would therefore represent a service and would demonstrate that astronomy had finally become a science with an experimental foundation.
"Electric universe" theory is hardly outside mainstream thought. We lack only a unified field theory to put all this to rest. At which point "electric" verses "gravitational" verses what-have-you will have become a moot point.
But until then someone can make hay by teaching the controversy. In that regard, this is monkey business as usual.
Astronomy is OBSERVATION, and experimental tests are performed all the bleeding time! Have been since Galileo.
Cosmology, astrophysics and nucleosynthesis THEORIES is what you're referring to.
These are not even from the same disciplines.
It was COSMOLOGY that had virtually zero experimental basis whatsoever (until WMAP) and was flimsy as hell (and absolutely still is).
Climate change derivatives.
It's worse than I thought.
Suckers....the 8 inch rise couldnt have anything to do with this http://www.sfgenealogy.com/sf/history/hgoe26.htm
Just more do nothing non-productive jobs that waste resources paid for by deficits and the dwindling real work force. Only the big crash will trigger the reset.
"The Next Big Thing: Profiting From The Fear Of Climate Change"
No I dont think so, the scam former known as "Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming" - later renamed to "Anthropogenic Global Warming" later re-named to "Global Climate Disruption" and now "Climate Change" - is so 16 years ago
Global warming stopped 16 years ago, Met Office report reveals:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2261577/Global-warming-stopped-1...
the CO2 has gone into the deep oceans, which have not been this acidic for AT LEAST 15 million years.
The commenters on this site are (mostly) myopic fools.
In any case, we won't value ecosystems/resources until they are gone..
"the CO2 has gone into the deep oceans.."
Sure - the CO2 has gone into the deep oceans to help Trenberth find the Missing Heat
From the CRU letters, 2009 (ClimateGate):
"The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't"
well, duh, al gore made 200 million doing that
I have some property on Hudson Bay for sale. Soon to be a tropical resort. Any buyers?
I'm interested in a remote location.
As soon as I secure some VC money for The Bunga Bunga Adult Nudist Colony.
That boat have already sailed. How do you think Al Gore got his $200 million?
Climate Control is DOA,temps globally have BARELY eked out a 1* gain in the past 10yrs!.
It's all BS, nature has cycles, were are in one,there is strong argument for in fact a Global Climate Cooling.(I want them to fight those scientists).
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/05/02/us-headed-for-the-coldest-...
Just don't look for anything about it in the MSM.
And yet the Arctic sea ice is rapidly disappearing.
http://haveland.com/share/arctic-death-spiral-1979-201303.png
Believe it or not, there is a rational explanation that explains both a melting Arctic and flat (even relatively cold) temps.
Hint: think about how a home air conditioner works and then extrapolate to a global scale with the Arctic ice cap as the "air conditioner" for the Northern Hemisphere.
What happens to your home air conditioner when the coolant runs out?
So "melting arctic ice is colder than frozen arctic ice? Ok, got it, I need to write that down.
"What happens to your home air conditioner when the coolant runs out?" Oh my god!!!, You are not thinking of the fucking air conditioner repairman are you?
In other news the arctic ice will form again and melt again and form again and melt again and form again and melt again and form again and melt again and form again and melt again and form again and melt again and form again............................................................................................................................................................................>
Did you look at the link? The maximum volume of Arctic ice is declining rapidly every year. From the data it appears it will soon not come back in the winter. When the ice doesn't come back then that air conditioner is broken and it won't be fixed.
Did you happen to look at the corresponding growth of ANTARCTIC ice, you northern hemispheric focused numpty?
or even the very long term temp charts of the planet?
OK the sky is falling chicken little. I seem to remember something about on a long enough timeline. We are but bacteria to the planet. It doesn't care if we're here or not. Only we do. As a species we seem to shit where we live. It's a self correcting problem. I'll be long gone as will many generations before this thing plays itself out.
I seem to recall back in the early 80's we were going to enter the next ice age. Now we're worried about the planet burning up just 30 years later. I highly doubt it's due to human factors. We seem to think we have a greater impact because somehow we're of greater importance. Natural factors such a volcanoes are much more an influence than we are.
Never let a good crisis go to waste! Make sure you're buddies profit from it.
Wake up!
Yes, Booboo, the climate has geological cycles along with its astronomical changes since the planet's days as a burning ball. I suppose this particular ice melt could be related to those fiery days, though:
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/5589
Iced tea, allegedly.
Strangely there has to date been no increase in the rate of global sea level rise since 1900...
http://www.google.ca/search?safe=off&hl=en&q=historical+global+sea+level...!Recent_Sea_Level_Rise.png%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.globalwarmingart.com%252Fwiki%252FFile%253ARecent_Sea_Level_Rise_png...
A term used to describe a common user of the music-based community site www.GroundZeroProjects.com. Where they listen to 100's of TB of music everyday!
Yo, that foo' is a true zero-head. He be on this joint 24/7!