Wired has a great article about how businesses are actually listening to the scientists and changing their business practices based on the reality of global warming. Some businesses, like global shipper Beluga, are using new Arctic Sea routes that weren’t open even a couple of years ago. Other businesses like insurance companies are betting that global warming is real. Corporations cannot afford to listen to science-denier politics. A corporation has to, you know, actually exist in the real world of facts and make money in that world. Here is a short quote from an unusually good article from Wired. I would encourage you to read the whole thing.
Companies, of course, exist to make money. That’s often what makes them seem so rapacious. But their primal greed also plants them inevitably in the “reality-based community.” If a firm’s bottom line is going to be affected by a changing climate — say, when its supply chains dry up because of drought, or its real estate gets swamped by sea-level rise — then it doesn’t particularly matter whether or not the executives want to believe in climate change. Railing at scientists for massaging tree-ring statistics won’t stop the globe from warming if the globe is actually, you know, warming. The same applies in reverse, as the folks at Beluga Shipping adroitly realized: If there are serious bucks to be made from the changing climate, then the free market is almost certainly going to jump at it.
