The Bleak, Defeatist Rise of “Climate Realism”
The prescriptions that flow from those assessments are bleak. Naturally, Wall Street is looking to find investment opportunities and avoid risks to its clients’ portfolios amid severe droughts, feet of sea-level rise, and widespread crop failures. As reporter Corbin Hiar noted for E&E News, Morgan Stanley projects that a three-degrees warming scenario “could more than double the growth rate of the $235 billion cooling market every year, from 3 percent to 7 percent until 2030.”
Banks joined other corporations in bragging about their climate goals over the last several years. These more recent reports, by contrast—consistent with their widespread abandonment of those climate goals—are in keeping with what they’ve always done, and will always do: try to make money. When governments were eager to pour billions of dollars into subsidizing green technologies, banks and other companies advertised their willingness to take advantage of those incentives and cozied up to the wealthy, climate-minded governments that were offering them. Times have changed. While it’s no longer fashionable for corporations to broadcast their green bona fides, financial institutions with an obligation to make money for their clients and shareholders still have to take costly climate risks—from rising insurance premiums to supply chain disruptions—seriously. They just aren’t calling themselves climate champions for doing so.
The brand of climate cynicism being voiced by the Council on Foreign Relations is more novel. In an essay outlining the founding principles of the Climate Realism Initiative, Varun Sivarum—the program’s director and a former top aide to Biden-era U.S. climate envoy John Kerry—describes a zero-sum, catastrophically climate-changed world where “other countries will single-mindedly prioritize their own interests” and the United States should do the same. Facing climate-fueled mass migration “of at least hundreds of millions of climate refugees could upend the international order, and increasingly grisly natural disasters,” the U.S. “should provide the support it can, cooperate with countries on building resilience capabilities, and protect its borders,” as well as “prepare for global competition for resources and military positioning that is intensifying in the melting Arctic.”