Thread by @paraschopra

To see how serious is climate change, look at what businesses are doing: nytimes.com/interactive/20…

1/ “gigantic banks and mutual funds, which continue to invest traditionally but use climate analytics to see where their portfolios might contain problems, like public utilities that could be bankrupted by wildfires.”

2/ “Anticipating future food crises, strategists at Merrill Lynch advise clients to snap up vertical farms and smart hydroponics”

3/ “anticipating water shortages, they also recommend investing in Chinese wastewater-recycling businesses.”

4/ “In Australia, an agribusiness conglomerate waits for family farms to fold for lack of rainfall, then considers buying their land at a discount.”

5/ “In Greenland, mining companies buy previously useless land rights in order to extract the minerals that melting ice will shortly expose”

6/ “A former C.I.A. analyst buys “billions of gallons of water” in the American Southwest and Australia. An Israeli entrepreneur goes long on desalination plants”

7/ Grantham is the guy who predicted housing crisis and made money from it.

Here’s what he says:

8/ “The theory says that capitalism undervalues public resources, like air and water and soil, because they are so plentiful, and overvalues whatever is private and scarce. A barrel of oil sells for $50 or $60, yet the emissions from that oil appear on no one’s balance sheet.”