Arkady
President
I'm convinced that nearly all the climate-change denialism among the very wealthy and business leaders is phony. Your typical Fox News drone or chat forum wing-nut really does (insanely) believe that there's an unprecedented conspiracy among tens of thousands of scientists and public bodies to deceive the public. But sophisticated and educated people know better. They may pretend to reject the scientific consensus on the topic, as a tactic for delaying regulation, but when their own money is on the line, they show they know better.
I say that as someone who sees these people in action in my business life. There are all kinds of long-term strategic business decisions that need to factor in the likelihood of continuing global warming. Let's say, for example, you're considering expanding some shipping facilities a few feet above sea level on Long Island, or spending more money to raise them higher above the potential flood. Your risk/reward calculus needs to factor in the likelihood of another Superstorm Sandy-level event. If such events are likely to become more frequent, it could change your decision. Or say you're a utility deciding whether to put a stretch of transmission line underground, at higher initial cost, or to have it above ground, at higher long-term cost. Part of your long-term cost depends on how fast trees in the area will grow (and thus how much you have to spend trimming them back from your lines), and that, in turn, depends on whether the area will stick to established climate patterns for the region, or will become warmer and wetter, thereby accelerating tree growth. Depending on what you project, it might be more profitable to put the line above ground or underground, so you need to guess the probabilities of each scenario. Or what if you're an insurance company deciding what to charge people to insure against wildfire? You can't simply assume the wildfire risk will be roughly the same in the future as in the recent past, if you've got reason to think wildfire risks are rising because of global warming.
I've been in board meetings where those kinds of decisions are made, based on 30-year projections of expected climate conditions. What strikes me is how matter-of-fact even the most politically conservative of plutocrats are about the probability of continued global warming. They take the scientific consensus as the best guess and bet big money on it, with the same reliance on expert consensus they show in any other area. When what matters is getting things right, they give incredible deference to the climate scientists. Only later, when what matters is influencing the political discussion, do they pretend they believe there's a serious likelihood the scientists are completely off-base (or that they're lying).
You might argue that this only shows that the business leaders believe that global warming is happening (an indisputable fact that's been so definitively proven even most prominent deniers don't dispute it), not that they accept that it's happening because of human greenhouse gas emissions (a much tougher thing to prove). However, that's not true. The people I'm talking about aren't just weighing in on whether global warming has happened over the past 30 years (it obviously has). Instead, they're wagering on whether it'll happen over the next 30 years. If they thought global warming had been happening because of unknown natural processes, there's no particular reason they'd ascribe a high probability to it continuing over the next thirty years, the way they do. They might, in fact, project global cooling over the next thirty years (since we're currently at an unusually hot point, the best guess would be that we're going to regress towards the mean, other things being equal).
They're guessing that global warming will continue because almost all the experts are projecting that, and they're doing so based on climate models linked to rising anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. When business leaders take as a matter of very high probability that global warming will be continuing rapidly over the life of a long-term investment like that, they are, essentially, taking as a matter of very high probability that the vast majority of the scientific community is correct about human greenhouse gases causing rapid global warming.
They only pretend they don't believe that when they're trying to talk the rubes out of supporting political efforts to head off that disaster -- efforts that, in the short and medium term, will be hugely expensive for many of these same business owners. Take, as an example, an oil tycoon. He needs to be very honest with himself about what he thinks will happen to the climate over the next few decades, because it influences all sorts of decisions he'll make (e.g., whether an oil platform in hurricane alley is likely to pay dividends). But he also needs to be very dishonest with those outside his immediate business circles, because the more the government does to limit carbon emissions, the harder it will hit his own industry.
This puts business leaders today in a position similar to tobacco companies back in the days when they were pretending the science didn't support a cancer link. They knew better. They NEEDED to know better, to make their own internal business decisions, so behind closed doors and in confidential memos, they gave complete credence to the scientific consensus on the topic. Only to the public did they feign skepticism about it. Many years later, those memos and internal discussions came to light, and were part of the case that resulted in billions of dollars of liability for those businesses. No doubt many years from now, the public will likewise come to realize just how dishonest the Masters of the Universe were being when denying climate change. But, for now, it's still behind closed doors.
I say that as someone who sees these people in action in my business life. There are all kinds of long-term strategic business decisions that need to factor in the likelihood of continuing global warming. Let's say, for example, you're considering expanding some shipping facilities a few feet above sea level on Long Island, or spending more money to raise them higher above the potential flood. Your risk/reward calculus needs to factor in the likelihood of another Superstorm Sandy-level event. If such events are likely to become more frequent, it could change your decision. Or say you're a utility deciding whether to put a stretch of transmission line underground, at higher initial cost, or to have it above ground, at higher long-term cost. Part of your long-term cost depends on how fast trees in the area will grow (and thus how much you have to spend trimming them back from your lines), and that, in turn, depends on whether the area will stick to established climate patterns for the region, or will become warmer and wetter, thereby accelerating tree growth. Depending on what you project, it might be more profitable to put the line above ground or underground, so you need to guess the probabilities of each scenario. Or what if you're an insurance company deciding what to charge people to insure against wildfire? You can't simply assume the wildfire risk will be roughly the same in the future as in the recent past, if you've got reason to think wildfire risks are rising because of global warming.
I've been in board meetings where those kinds of decisions are made, based on 30-year projections of expected climate conditions. What strikes me is how matter-of-fact even the most politically conservative of plutocrats are about the probability of continued global warming. They take the scientific consensus as the best guess and bet big money on it, with the same reliance on expert consensus they show in any other area. When what matters is getting things right, they give incredible deference to the climate scientists. Only later, when what matters is influencing the political discussion, do they pretend they believe there's a serious likelihood the scientists are completely off-base (or that they're lying).
You might argue that this only shows that the business leaders believe that global warming is happening (an indisputable fact that's been so definitively proven even most prominent deniers don't dispute it), not that they accept that it's happening because of human greenhouse gas emissions (a much tougher thing to prove). However, that's not true. The people I'm talking about aren't just weighing in on whether global warming has happened over the past 30 years (it obviously has). Instead, they're wagering on whether it'll happen over the next 30 years. If they thought global warming had been happening because of unknown natural processes, there's no particular reason they'd ascribe a high probability to it continuing over the next thirty years, the way they do. They might, in fact, project global cooling over the next thirty years (since we're currently at an unusually hot point, the best guess would be that we're going to regress towards the mean, other things being equal).
They're guessing that global warming will continue because almost all the experts are projecting that, and they're doing so based on climate models linked to rising anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. When business leaders take as a matter of very high probability that global warming will be continuing rapidly over the life of a long-term investment like that, they are, essentially, taking as a matter of very high probability that the vast majority of the scientific community is correct about human greenhouse gases causing rapid global warming.
They only pretend they don't believe that when they're trying to talk the rubes out of supporting political efforts to head off that disaster -- efforts that, in the short and medium term, will be hugely expensive for many of these same business owners. Take, as an example, an oil tycoon. He needs to be very honest with himself about what he thinks will happen to the climate over the next few decades, because it influences all sorts of decisions he'll make (e.g., whether an oil platform in hurricane alley is likely to pay dividends). But he also needs to be very dishonest with those outside his immediate business circles, because the more the government does to limit carbon emissions, the harder it will hit his own industry.
This puts business leaders today in a position similar to tobacco companies back in the days when they were pretending the science didn't support a cancer link. They knew better. They NEEDED to know better, to make their own internal business decisions, so behind closed doors and in confidential memos, they gave complete credence to the scientific consensus on the topic. Only to the public did they feign skepticism about it. Many years later, those memos and internal discussions came to light, and were part of the case that resulted in billions of dollars of liability for those businesses. No doubt many years from now, the public will likewise come to realize just how dishonest the Masters of the Universe were being when denying climate change. But, for now, it's still behind closed doors.
