Column: California wildfires to Florida hurricanes, how the rich game climate change
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When a fire in Southern California threatened to consume a community, the flames came within miles of the beach at Santa Monica. When a hurricane swept into Florida, destroying thousands of homes, only 20 miles inland from Miami, it was clear that the wealthy had begun to play a new game: using the science of global warming to drive their fortunes.
The world’s three largest natural-disaster-spending nations were spending $2 billion a week, on average, on disasters with a $10 billion price tag, the research reported recently in Nature Climate Change showed. Yet their spending on natural disasters had remained relatively constant, or even had even declined, for nine of the past 15 years.
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported last week that the world’s two biggest carbon-emitting nations, the United States and China, had surpassed the combined spending for three major oil-producing countries at the height of the global-warming crisis. It has long been obvious that the rich are using the science of global warming to make their fortunes and to reduce their environmental footprint.
This report, however, is among the first to show how global warming can also be a source of massive profit, and to examine how those profits are shifting.
“The science is clear. Climate change is costing lives and driving conflict, but because of strong political will, the rich are using it to grow faster and make profits,” said Joseph D’Aleo, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who wrote the report and helped to shape its findings.
It’s a picture of a world where rich people can no longer expect to keep their private property as they were accustomed to, but where they can still build a
