Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming Author: McKenzie Funk | Language: English | ISBN:
B00DMCV4A8 | Format: EPUB
Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming Description
A fascinating investigation into how people around the globe are cashing in on a warming world McKenzie Funk has spent the last six years reporting around the world on how we are preparing for a warmer planet. Funk shows us that the best way to understand the catastrophe of global warming is to see it through the eyes of those who see it most clearly—as a market opportunity.
Global warming’s physical impacts can be separated into three broad categories: melt, drought, and deluge. Funk travels to two dozen countries to profile entrepreneurial people who see in each of these forces a potential windfall.
The melt is a boon for newly arable, mineral-rich regions of the Arctic, such as Greenland—and for the surprising kings of the manmade snow trade, the Israelis. The process of desalination, vital to Israel’s survival, can produce a snowlike by-product that alpine countries use to prolong their ski season.
Drought creates opportunities for private firefighters working for insurance companies in California as well as for fund managers backing south Sudanese warlords who control local farmland. As droughts raise food prices globally, there is no more precious asset.
The deluge—the rising seas, surging rivers, and superstorms that will threaten island nations and coastal cities—has been our most distant concern, but after Hurricane Sandy and failure after failure to cut global carbon emissions, it is not so distant. For Dutch architects designing floating cities and American scientists patenting hurricane defenses, the race is on. For low-lying countries like Bangladesh, the coming deluge presents an existential threat.
Funk visits the front lines of the melt, the drought, and the deluge to make a human accounting of the booming business of global warming. By letting climate change continue unchecked, we are choosing to adapt to a warming world. Containing the resulting surge will be big business; some will benefit, but much of the planet will suffer. McKenzie Funk has investigated both sides, and what he has found will shock us all.
To understand how the world is preparing to warm,
Windfall follows the money.
- File Size: 7642 KB
- Print Length: 321 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1594204012
- Publisher: The Penguin Press (January 23, 2014)
- Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00DMCV4A8
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #24,225 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #1
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Economics > Environmental Economics - #1
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Green Business - #3
in Books > Business & Money > Green Business
- #1
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Economics > Environmental Economics - #1
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Green Business - #3
in Books > Business & Money > Green Business
First off, this book is just fun to read. The author has found some great people and places, and built unforgettable sketches around them, and embedded the disparate material in a coherent narrative. He takes a technical, unsexy and complex topic and makes it as entertaining as escapist fluff. It's journalism at its best. It will remind you of writers like Michael Lewis and Jim McManus. I wish McKenzie Funk a long career.
The book consists of investigations into a variety of people hoping to make money from climate change. A major distinction, which the author curiously does not recognize, is between the pay-me-now and the pay-me-later folks. The first group claims to be able to predict climate change (or its consequences or the consequences of specific policies) and wants money today whether they are right or wrong: investment management fees, research funding, salaries to legislate or agitate, subsidies. The pay-me-later group is spending its own money today in projects that will pay off later only if they are right.
As you would expect, the differences between these types of people are dramatic. Among pay-me-now people, "the assumption is that climate change now suffers mainly from a PR problem." They put great stress on "consensus" and never fail to mention "overwhelming evidence." Given the variety of questions related to climate change, I'm pretty skeptical of someone who claims overwhelming evidence for everything, especially without a track record making money from successful prediction.
In order to illustrate the true depth of Climate Change (aka Global Warming), McKenzie Funk literally follows the money. For as much as the mainstream media wants to highlight the specious "debate" over climate change, it's accepted not only by 97 percent of scientists but by many in finance and industry. Unlike scientists, however, these entrepreneurs aren't going to suggest unsexy solutions like conservation or efficiency; those don't make anyone a lot of money. They are instead looking at ways that they can pull a profit. But is that going to be as difficult as, say, pulling excess carbon out of the atmosphere?
Some of the technological solutions seem reasonable at the outset. For example, Israel has been a pioneer in water desalination for decades, and as the more of the world's water becomes salt water, the rest of the world will need that kind of expertise. However, as Funk points out, the desalination process requires a lot of energy, which emits a lot of carbon, which increases warming, which will lead to less freshwater and more saltwater- which will necessitate more desalination. He describes the process as a serpent biting its own tail; "vicious circle" would work as well.
As technically feasible but even more questionable are the ways in which Arctic governments (of which the United States is one) and energy companies are taking advantage of the now less-frozen region for everything from increased agricultural activity to oil drilling. Interestingly, while more northern Canada is primed to be able to take advantage of these resources even more than the U.S., they are aware that their "new" resources coupled with their relatively small armed forces will actually increase their vulnerability.
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