From Salon: http://www.salon.com/2014/02/01/cashing_in_on_apocalypse_meet_the_people_making_a_killing_on_climate_change/
The individuals most to blame for global warming are also the most likely to profit, says author McKenzie Funk
Lindsay Abrams
Saturday, Feb 1, 2014
For some, the global climate change crisis has been a call to action, the occasion for some of the biggest environmental movements of our time. For others, it’s a business opportunity.
In Greenland, that’s meant rushing to mine and drill the Arctic. For the Israelis, it’s been a chance to market their mastery of artificial snowmaking (look for their techniques at work during the Sochi Olympics). The Dutch, no strangers to floods, are farming out their services to create sea-level-rise barriers, including to a post-Sandy New York. Major financial institutions in New York and London have recognized increased preciousness of water rights and farmland, and have invested their money accordingly.
Journalist McKenzie Funk spent the past six years traveling the world to document “the booming business of global warming.” He spoke with Salon about the resulting book, “Windfall,” which makes the compelling case that the effects of climate change are even more unequal than we’ve been led to believe. This interview has been lightly edited for space and clarity.
Profiting off the very thing that’s bringing us down – in some ways, you make global warming sound a lot like the financial crisis. Do you see the people you interviewed as being as complicit as those guys were?
In the financial crisis, people were basically shorting the economy and they were sort of betting on failure, right? This is kind of the same idea with these people, so I think there is a little complicity — but maybe not so much more than the rest of us have by not doing much at all.
I think these people are a little bit less aware of how they fit in the system. There’s a little bit of an indirect connection between someone buying water rights, for instance, and that sort of slowly causing the emissions that will slowly destroy the planet. There’s a slightly weaker connection than there was for the people in the financial world, who were actually seeing that the housing market was in trouble and who were betting on that failure.
Except when you talk about, say, the oil companies in the Arctic — that’s obviously a clear case of a problem opening up an opportunity. The ice pulls back, you can drill, and then that leads to more people drilling for oil, which then causes more [global] warming.
Continue reading at: http://www.salon.com/2014/02/01/cashing_in_on_apocalypse_meet_the_people_making_a_killing_on_climate_change/
