thehill.com/newsletters/sustainability/4636194-sen-whitehouse-climate-change-could-crash-the-financial-system/
Climate change could crash the financial system, says Senator Whitehouse
This is becoming more and more of a reality and this is what will drive action. Expect our economy to make some major swings towards sustainability and climate tech in the coming years.
Unfortunately, it also means that things are going to get more expensive, especially items/experiences with high carbon footprints.
Indeed. I expect my insurance rates to be as high as my mortgage rates eventually....and hence trying to pay the house down so I can afford it in the future.
And things like this are going to have very real impacts on people’s ability to grow wealth.
Real estate is the number one driver of wealth creation among the middle class, and things like insurance rates going up is going to shift the ROI on real estate investing. This is going to not only make things more expensive, but is going to have serious impacts on things like income inequality and social mobility.
I’m personally optimistic that we will be able to adapt to the coming challenges, but it is going to turn the status quo of our current economic system upside down.
People will find better ways to accumulate wealth than housing that chances are, it will become a liability.
The problem is that housing as a store of wealth makes sense because it’s also a basic human need that people are going to need either way. If people’s wealth is stored somewhere else, rentiers can gouge them with high housing costs that deplete whatever other way they’re trying to build wealth.
Nothing can really replace housing as a store of wealth because it’s not just an investment, it also removes you from the rental market which is a huge sinkhole of wealth for working people.
it doesn't because it generates nimbyism, the old homeowners forcing the young into homelessness or high rent burdens to increase their wealth adding no positive value while spreading misery around
also everything that's fixed like housing will be taxed like there's no tomorrow to pay for aging costs and bloated healthcare costs
Awesome, now that I finally own a home it's just aliability lol. Seems that way with anything I purchase.
shrink that liability as much as you can, even switching from lawn to clover helps keep maintenance demands down
we are in reverse mc mansion mode
Re more expensive, you could reframe to look at it this way: prices will become more accurate, that is to say, prices will include what are now negative externalities.
We've built the current economic system on avoiding these costs. As we reach 10b people, we'll have to readjust. It won't be easy, it won't be cheap, but there won't be much of an alternative, either. Had we started correcting course decades ago, when we first started noticing pollution and climate change, we may have moulded the current system into a more balanced one.
Financial interests prevented that from happening, keeping things cheap so that more people could afford them so that more things were sold. Now we're addicted to more, cheaper, bigger - except they're shorter-lasting, worse quality, and immediately-obsolete.
BP popularized the concept of a personal carbon footprint with a US$100 million campaign as a means of deflecting people away from taking collective political action in order to end fossil fuel use, and ExxonMobil has spent decades pushing trying to make individuals responsible, rather than the fossil fuels industry. They did this because climate stabilization means bringing fossil fuel use to approximately zero, and that would end their business. That's not something you can hope to achieve without government intervention to change the rules of society so that not using fossil fuels is just what people do on a routine basis.
There is value in cutting your own fossil fuel consumption — it serves to demonstrate that doing the right thing is possible to people around you, and helps work out the kinks in new technologies. Just do it in addition to taking political action to get governments to do the right thing, not instead of taking political action.
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Increasing prices mean reduced consumption. This isn’t a bad thing from an environmental perspective.
The article ignores the fact that all insurance risk is manage globally by reinsurers. So, increasing insurance risk in places like Florida, eventually affects the cost of all insurance globally. Many, increasingly large disasters worldwide like flooding and wildfires affect costs in the reinsurance market.
If the insurers abandon Florida, then the risks and costs will be borne by Florida property owners.
I suspect the global regions of insurable geography will continue to shrink over decades and centuries.
Ya except this systemic shock won’t be recoverable from. It will be the new normal. When food scarcity continues to accelerate economies simply will not recover and we will all get a lot poorer very quickly
Don't forget to throw in wildfires for inland properties, Australia is a match waiting to be lit again, (as well as having the world's longest coastline), California, Greece, Italy Spain too.
Canada would like to participate in the forest fire competition. We have a good chance.
Sadly you will be admitted to the comp, though I hope you don't win.
This is why New Jersey is the safest place to live (in land).
Western Canada as well
Getting increasingly gnarly here year by year with fewer and fewer good years to re set in between
Yes, sorry, forgot about you guys. Awful up there.
They will find a way to get a bailout from the government and recoup their loses
My bet is once the corpos will really fear that it's about to burst soon, they'll lobby Congress and the Senate HARD to have them change the laws to protect them or bail them out.
This is pretty much it, they are all playing hoping the glass house crashes on somebody else’s watch. If it ends up being them, this is the back up plan.
Easy solution: make lobbying illegal.
Won’t this increase the value of houses not in dangerous climate zones?
There will be NO safe climate zone.
The places that might be winners from climate will still see change: Thar Desert in NW India may be one to watch. As it gets easier to grow crops there, will the current locals benefit: or be displaced?
Northeast seems pretty stable. Compared to everywhere else. Which is kinda funny bc everyone left the northeast for Florida….YOLO
There will only be slightly less worse regions. NO place on earth will remain unaffected by global warming.
I live in eastern Canada. Last year the smoke was so bad from western wildfires that it blotted out the sun. Elderly people and people with breathing issues were urged to stay inside for almost 2 months.
Yes. It will increase their value
Wow
Insert Gru and plan board meme.
Yep. Forcing fire sales to blackrock.
This is a Florida problem specifically and a gulf coast more generally and even in Florida It’s going to take several decades for sea level rise to make beach front property uninsurable. And this is mostly expensive property owned by rich people. They don’t need mortgages. Florida’s insurance problems are complicated by fraud and greed not just climate.
Most other coastal parts of the US it will be 50-100 years before the water level is high enough to affect the lowest elevations. That’s enough time for the economy to adjust. Where I live in Oregon coast they predict about 18-24” by 2100. It will have a small effect on a handful of homes built near rivers on the coast . My house is “on the beach” but it’s still 25 feet above mean sea level. A tsunami is more likely to be the problem not global warming in the next 100 years. Of course eventually the sea level rise will reach me. But that’s not going to crash the economy. If anything it may lead to a building boom inland
Yeah, but, climate change will destroy the economy later, but fighting it will hurt the economy now.
/s
I know you’re being sarcastic, but that is sadly the main reason why nothing is happening.
It’s almost like that was their point!
Are you f*ing kidding me? A single virus almost destroyed the entire financial system. What climate change has in store for us will make Covid look like a Disney vacation.
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30d
Wet bulb is terrifying
This is it right here. 👆🏻
The COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions. Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. That's why a graph of CO2 concentrations shows a continued rise.
Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero. We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns.
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Wed need a covid sized economic retraction (roughly 5%) PER YEAR, EVERY YEAR in order to reduce emissions fast enough to just stay within the terrible targets we set.
The COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions. Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. That's why a graph of CO2 concentrations shows a continued rise.
Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero. We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns.
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Was covid really even that serious economically?
The COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions. Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. That's why a graph of CO2 concentrations shows a continued rise.
Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero. We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns.
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Check out a chart of the DJIA for the year 2020. Note particularly the months of April and May. Now ask that question again.
It gets too hot, rolling blackouts happen, and businesses shut down
And their labor force, which weirdly (/s), is also their customers, die off.
Required reading: The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton
Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels wreak gradual havoc on the state’s infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches a small town on the southeastern coast. [...] Told in four parts—power, water, light, and time— The Light Pirate mirrors the rhythms of the elements and the sometimes quick, sometimes slow dissolution of the world as we know it. It is a meditation on the changes we would rather not see, the future we would rather not greet, and a call back to the beauty and violence of an untamable wilderness.
Its so obiouse that a system that is dependant on growth is not going to be handle repeated shocks of ecological collapse.
Obvious only if you're not a complete socio-pyschopathic narcissist.
Oh, well, if it’s going to affect the financial system then maybe we should do something (sarcasm)
Could lead to a hyperinflationary depression or a 70%+ economic crash
Could? Climate change can wreck the global economy in short order. Imagine mass migrations of people fleeing areas that are no longer inhabitable, crops failing, manufacturing slowing or just out right stopping. It will be madness.
Hunger, famine, disease and death. lol, and your worried about the economy? The 'economy' is a fragile thing just look at the supply chain issues that were caused by Covid and the inflation we are dealing with now. It will be much, much worse when coastal cities flood, people will die in droves; mass migration will cause panic, food supplies will fail.
We will be killing each other over water and something to eat.
And our money will be worthless.
The COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions. Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. That's why a graph of CO2 concentrations shows a continued rise.
Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero. We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns.
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Actually, I believe the reason that the emission reductions that occurred globally under COVID are not apparent in the atmospheric time-series data is that our present carbon observing systems haven’t the fidelity to resolve it against background variability or natural feedback processes.
The COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions. Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. That's why a graph of CO2 concentrations shows a continued rise.
Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero. We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
Believable.
I’d argue that the only way through climate change is if it does crash the financial system, ideally with a specific and obviously related problem.
I worry that our way of life is so dependent on that financial system that recovery won't be possible. Not unless government has contingency plans to keep people fed and happy without involving money.
Duh!
Can we replace the "could crash" with "will crash".. the only question is when?
Not could, WILL. Covid practically did that and economies are still recovering. And covid did’t represent a permanent change, which Climate Change certainly will.
The COVID lockdowns of 2020 temporarily lowered our rate of CO2 emissions. Humanity was still a net CO2 gas emitter during that time, so we made things worse, but did so more a bit more slowly. That's why a graph of CO2 concentrations shows a continued rise.
Stabilizing the climate means getting human greenhouse gas emissions to approximately zero. We didn't come anywhere near that during the lockdowns.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
I guess at least one good thing will come of climate change
Scientists have warned a long time ago that, if climate change goes untackled, it would eventually collapse our support systems. Meaning, the amount and size of concurrent emergencies (power outages, floods, fires, food shortages, etc) would overwhelm our capacity to respond. This is a known fact. We've known this for a long while. Yet we have yet to do anything about it. May I remind everyone, again, that scientifically speaking, once we've reached that point, it is too late, we can no longer "fix" the climate, there is no going back.
It's much worse. We've dismantled almost all emergency management infrastructure.
Consequences
Al Gore was right, inconveniently. And don't forget, he also won the at-large national popular vote in 2000.
Opportunities lost.
Uninsurable
An excellent word that's going to be more and more common.
And once they become uninsurable, they become unmortgageable. And once buyers can’t get mortgages for those properties, the values crash — because you’ll now only have cash buyers on the demand side.
And that was predicted by Freddie Mac to produce a systemic nationwide economic shock, akin to or greater than the [2008] mortgage meltdown.
...
You’re seeing it through South Texas. You’re seeing it in the Louisiana and Atlantic coast. Florida is getting first and worst because it has so much coast and a sketchy insurance market. But Florida would just be the leading edge of a problem that would hit coasts all around the United States.
Indeed. It's one thing to have a single disaster to dela with. It's a totally different thing to have simultaneous/concurrent disasters.
The thing about these climate [risks], is that unlike 2008 — where there’s panic and economic crash, the bottom falls out of markets, but then the values return. [But] if the underlying risk is that the property is going to be underwater, or that the house is going to burn four or five times during the course of a 30-year mortgage, then that [risk] that doesn’t go away. So there isn’t a rebound.
This is it. Perhaps few understand that repair and rebuilding isn't worth it. Sure, if you have a small shack or cabin like you have in vulnerable parts of developing countries, rebuilding is cheap in absolute terms. But this isn't about slum architecture.
The thing about these climate [risks], is that unlike 2008 — where there’s panic and economic crash, the bottom falls out of markets, but then the values return. [But] if the underlying risk is that the property is going to be underwater, or that the house is going to burn four or five times during the course of a 30-year mortgage, then that [risk] that doesn’t go away. So there isn’t a rebound.
This is the exact statement I was trying to form a few days ago.
*will
Will not could
Good. Now let's do more of business.
Its funnysad because the entire financial system is literally responsible for our species current disposition
The word is ironic.
And yes, you are correct.
This is so scary when you consider insurance companies pulling out of areas. Society can’t operate without insurance.
Climate change will do severe damage to US agriculture, and already has. Check out Florida Citrus production (bushels of citrus per year over the last decade.
Then remember that farmers tend to hold a lot of debt. What happens to that debt when a citrus farm goes bankrupt? What happens when ENOUGH farms in an area go bankrupt? Financially.
You can add “economic contagion” to the list of fallout from failing farms due to long lasting “changes in the weather”. Of course, also consider failing farms, at scale, mean higher prices for food. Higher prices for food and a population of workers with a relatively fixed budget mean consumers have less money for discretionary purchases.
Fortunately this will be a slow moving disaster. Unfortunately that also means people will hardly realize what is happening as quality of life slowly deteriorates.
It's finally dawning on them.
Is it? All I hear is their lip service.
A 100 percent, this can happen and is also maybe the only excuse that would get the corporate robber barons and public at large to work in unison to combat the problem
On a BINGO list for what year?
This will not fix anything, insurance or finance companies can not stop pollution. They just spread the cost
"Crash the financial system? Okay, now I'll start caring."
fine, it's a cost heavy polluters are willing to take
Massive flooding in Brazil and massive tornadoes in Texas
YOU DON'T SAY
Uh, duh, no kidding dummy
Look, I don’t want to be obtuse. But I will be derivative, and I must say that’s one very relevant last name for a senator
No duh?
Fingers crossed!
I suspect the cure could cause more damage than the disease with this one if not managed carefully.
Here’s hoping.
President senate did not agree
The financial system can do that all on it's own, thanks.
B E A utiful
Could? Damn but these people live in fantasy land, and history shows, that never ends well.
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30d
The Daily Mail is not a reliable source of climate information. This post has been removed.
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At the start of the American industrial-revolution people were using things as fuel for their textile factories that failed emissions laws in the 1980s. Ok now in a country like Cambodia or El Salvador or India they are still using that banned type of fuel for their textile factories. Can the emissions standards of poor countries be upgraded ?
Yes, civilization will end and a new civilization will begin. Desolation is coming!
Appropriate: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rS401CI7TZg
Bombing the crap out of country’s is good for the climate.
Okay
Yeah but that’s a problem for future people
The only thing crashing the financial system is insane politicians and their money grabs
…crash everything.
Food doesn’t grow with poor weather conditions
Then crash it
Capitalism does that several times a century big whoop.
Test
"1934 is new hottest U.S. year after NASA checks records"
The brouhaha was triggered Aug. 4 when Steve McIntyre of the blog Climateaudit.org e-mailed NASA scientists pointing out an unusual jump in temperature data from 1999 to 2000.
When researchers checked, they found that the agency had merged two data sets that had been incorrectly assumed to match. [I'm sure it was an honest mistake 👍]
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-aug-15-sci-temp15-story.html
This week in 1934, Xian, China reached 112F, which was thirteen degrees hotter than their hottest this year.
https://twitter.com/TonyClimate/status/1680686260338429953?t=csV4wwmQIj3rmTOjtIPK-A&s=19
"Doctored Data, Not U.S. Temperatures, Set a Record This Year"
Raw temperature data show that U.S. temperatures were significantly warmer during the 1930s than they are today. In fact, raw temperature data show an 80-year cooling trend. NOAA is only able to claim that we are experiencing the hottest temperatures on record by doctoring the raw temperature data.
Doctoring real-world temperature data is as much a part of the alarmist playbook as is calling skeptical scientists at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, MIT, NASA, NOAA, etc., “anti-science.” Faced with the embarrassing fact that real-world temperature readings don’t show any U.S. warming during the past 80 years, the alarmists who oversee the collection and reporting of the data simply erase the actual readings and substitute their own desired readings in their place. If this shocks you, you are not alone.
Science blogger Steven Goddard at Real Science has posted temperature comparison charts (available here, and here) showing just how dramatically the NOAA and NASA bureaucrats have doctored the U.S. temperature data during the past several decades. As the before-and-after temperature charts show, government bureaucrats with power and funding at stake have turned a striking long-term temperature decline (as revealed by the real-world data), into a striking long-term temperature increase.
"The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever"
Two weeks ago, under the headline "How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming", I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.
This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world - one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.
"Kansas is literally flatter than a pancake" cites flatearther, entirely misrepresenting the actual issue.
Climate change has nothing on the rich bloated. Idiots that run the Democratic world. Financial collapse will happen because of them who run these countries long before climate change ever will.
It's a problem everywhere in every political sphere.
Lol, the absurd discussion around climate change needs to stop.
Everyone pack it up, this important redditor is actually smarter on the topic of climate than people who study it as a profession, no need to place attention onto it anymore.
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This is v important anchor to the conversation,
Whitehouse: There are very significant indicators and it’s going to be big, national, and even global. A number of studies show a very high risk to the world economy from calamities — and insurance is at the heart of that.
The Florida insurance market is more or less circling the drain right now in the way in which Freddie Mac’s chief economist predicted: that with the danger of sea level rise and coastal storm activity, coastal properties become increasingly expensive to insure and then they become uninsurable.
And once they become uninsurable, they become unmortgageable. And once buyers can’t get mortgages for those properties, the values crash — because you’ll now only have cash buyers on the demand side.
And that was predicted by Freddie Mac to produce a systemic nationwide economic shock, akin to or greater than the [2008] mortgage meltdown