Skip to content
Menu
REDD-Monitor
  • Start here
  • About REDD-Monitor
  • REDD: An introduction
  • Contact
REDD-Monitor
Climate change, corporations and profit

Climate change, corporations and profit

Posted on 3 April 201418 January 2022

By Chris Lang

On Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its most recent report. “Human interference with the climate system is occurring, and climate change poses risks for human and natural systems.”

No surprises there, then. As Graham Readfearn points out in the Guardian the IPCC has been saying pretty much the same thing since its first report in 1990. The result? Since 1990, annual global emissions from fossil fuels have increased by 60%.

This time around, though, things are going to be different. Apparently. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, said about the report,

“I hope these facts will – for want of a better word – jolt people into action.”

And John Kerry, US Secretary of State, put out a statement in which he said,

The clock is ticking. The more we delay, the greater the threat. Let’s make our political system wake up and let’s make the world respond.

And the co-chairman of the working group, Christopher B. Field, an earth scientist at Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, seems optimistic that good things will come out of this report:

“I think that dealing effectively with climate change is just going to be something that great nations do.”

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change came into existence two years after the first IPCC report. And in more than 20 years it has failed to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels.

But while governments may be slow to take action, corporations, banks and investment firms are jumping at the chance to profit from climate change. “Environmental pain might be corporate gain,” as Fred Pearce puts it in his review of Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming by journalist McKenzie Funk.

Funk is a great journalist. The book is a beautifully written glimpse into our dystopian future. The companies that Funk looks at are not investing money to address climate change. Instead, they are figuring out ways of profiting from the climate crisis. Funk looks into investors buying up farmland in Africa, companies buying water rights in Australia and the USA, companies exploring for minerals in Greenland and for oil in the Arctic, companies building walls between countries to keep out climate refugees, snow makers from Israel, sea defence builders from the Netherlands, private firefighters, insurance firms, geoengineering firms, and scenario planners from Shell.

There’s not much in the book about either carbon trading or REDD. Which is a pity. It would have been interesting to read Funk telling, say, Pedro Moura Costa’s story and the US$10 million he made when he sold some of his shares in EcoSecurities, the carbon trading company that he co-founded. But maybe that’s a tale from a different age, before the collapse of carbon markets.

In a recent interview with Mother Jones, Funk explains that there are two messages that he hopes readers will take from his book. First, that mitigation is democratic, in that cutting emissions benefits everyone, but adaptation is “not at all democratic. In fact, it is deeply unfair.” For rich countries “to be able to buy our way out of this problem or to profit off it is systemically dangerous”, Funk argues.

Funk describes the second message from the book as not “a moral point, but sort of a practical point” – capitalism isn’t going to address climate change:

We can’t trust capitalism to just fix this. We can’t trust self-interest to fix this. If those who have the most to gain from climate change happen to be the ones who are emitting the most carbon — if I’m that person, am I really going to do too much about climate change, just to save myself?

 


CARTOON Credit: Kudelka.
 

  • Twitter
  • Linkedin
  • Reddit
  • email
  • Facebook

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

SUBSCRIBE!

Enter your email address to receive notification of new posts.

Recent themes
Natural Climate Solutions
WWF's conservation scandals
Aviation and offsetting
Conservation Watch

Recent Comments

  • Ian on Oakmount Management Partners, Oakwood Financial Management, Oakmount and Partners, Baron Traders, Emerald Knight, Oakmount Global Management, MH Carbon, DMD Media, Morgan Forbes, and Centrium Capital Markets: A network of scam companies
  • Chris Lang on Green IS Group: An FSC-certified Ponzi scheme
  • Tom Rayner on Green IS Group: An FSC-certified Ponzi scheme
  • Alan N. Connor on 30×30 target “not supported by the science”
  • Jeremy Sweet on 30×30 target “not supported by the science”

Recent Posts

  • Oakland Institute and Survival International call on UNESCO and IUCN to cut ties with the Tanzanian government over the most recent human rights abuses against the Maasai in Loliondo
  • Statement from Kichwa Indigenous communities about the Cordillera Azul National Park REDD (PNCAZ) project: “No to the false climate solutions offered as ‘Nature Based Solutions’ and ‘carbon neutrality’ by oil and mining companies that pollute in other regions of the world, such as Shell, Total, BHP, and others, who buy carbon from the PNCAZ.”
  • 30×30 target “not supported by the science”
  • Aby L. Sène on “Land Grabs and Conservation Propaganda” in Africa
  • NIHT Inc’s misleading statements about the company’s REDD operations in Papua New Guinea

Recent Comments

  • Ian on Oakmount Management Partners, Oakwood Financial Management, Oakmount and Partners, Baron Traders, Emerald Knight, Oakmount Global Management, MH Carbon, DMD Media, Morgan Forbes, and Centrium Capital Markets: A network of scam companies
  • Chris Lang on Green IS Group: An FSC-certified Ponzi scheme
  • Tom Rayner on Green IS Group: An FSC-certified Ponzi scheme
  • Alan N. Connor on 30×30 target “not supported by the science”
  • Jeremy Sweet on 30×30 target “not supported by the science”

Issues and Organisations

30x30 AB 32 Andes Amazon Boiler rooms California Can REDD save ... ? Carbon accounting Carbon Credits Carbon Offsets CDM Conservation-Watch Conservation International COP21 Paris Cryptocurrency Deforestation FCPF FERN Financing REDD Forest definition Fossil fuels FPP Friends of the Earth FSC Greenpeace Guest post ICAO Illegal logging Indigenous Peoples Natural Climate Solutions NGO statements Plantations Poznan R-M interview REDD and rights REDD in the news Risk RSPO-Watch Safeguards Sengwer The Nature Conservancy UN-REDD UNFCCC World Bank WRM WWF

Countries

Australia Bolivia Brazil Cambodia Cameroon Canada China Colombia Congo Basin region Costa Rica DR Congo Ecuador El Salvador European Union France Germany Guatemala Guyana Honduras India Indonesia Kenya Laos Madagascar Malaysia Mexico Nicaragua Norway Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Republic of Congo Sierra Leone Sweden Tanzania Thailand Uganda UK Uncategorized United Arab Emirates USA Vietnam West Papua
©2022 REDD-Monitor | Powered by WordPress and Superb Themes!