Amid all the bad climate news flowing out of the Trump administration, you might have missed a quiet new consensus congealing in think tanks and big business. The targets set out by the Paris climate agreement, they argue—to limit global temperature rise to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit)—are a lost cause. It’s time to prepare for a world warmed by at least three degrees Celsius.
Owing to “recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a research report last month, they “now expect a 3°C world.” The “baseline” scenario that JP Morgan Chase uses to assess its own transition risk—essentially, the economic impact that decarbonization could have on its high-carbon investments—similarly “assumes that no additional emissions reduction policies are implemented by governments” and that the world could reach “3°C or more of warming” by 2100. The Climate Realism Initiative launched on Monday by the Council on Foreign Relations similarly presumes that the world is likely on track to warm on average by three degrees or more this century. The essay announcing the initiative calls the prospect of reaching net-zero global emissions by 2050 “utterly implausible.”
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 [that] 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.”
As emissions continue to rise from emerging economies, Sivarum calls on policymakers to treat climate change as a “top national security priority—on the level of averting nuclear war and engaging in great-power competition with China,” working with allies to penalize countries whose emissions continue to rise. Acknowledging that such an approach is “fundamentally unfair,” Sivarum makes the case for an America First climate policy. “Nevertheless, the fact is that foreign emissions are endangering the American homeland,” he argues. “Every tool of the U.S. and allies’ arsenals, spanning diplomatic and economic coercion to military might, should be on the table.”
Donald Trump and his top allies don’t seem to think climate change is real, or that it’s a bad thing. But as the White House threatens to invade Greenland for its minerals and disappears people into Salvadoran prisons, it’s helping to build precisely the kinds of climate resilience that the Council on Foreign Relations—with its roster of Biden and Obama White House alumni—seems to be championing. Bleak as warming projections are, a planet where governments and businesses fight to the death for their own profitable share of a hotter, more chaotic planet is bleaker still. The only thing worse than a right wing that doesn’t take climate change seriously might be one that does, and can muster support from both sides of the aisle to put “America First” in a warming, warring world.