If there’s one industry that ought to be concerned about the threat of global warming, it’s the insurance industry. OK, the ski industry, too, but I digress.

Dave Jones, California’s insurance commissioner, recently put it this way: “Climate change is an obvious physical threat to us all, but increasingly it also poses a serious financial threat to the insurance industry…” When extreme weather causes damage, insurers pay.

So you’d expect insurance companies to be among the most forceful voices in corporate America calling for the regulation greenhouse gas emissions.

Uh, no. They’ve been eerily quiet.

And, at the least, you’d expect them to be proudly steering some of their massive investments to clean energy or energy efficiency projects aimed at reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.

Wrong again.

“It’s surprising, in a sense, because they have so much to lose from climate change,” says Sharlene Leurig, senior manager of the insurance program at Ceres, a nonprofit coalition of investor and environmental groups. But, she notes, insurance is a conservative business. The industry is all about risk, but it doesn’t want to take the risk of speaking out on climate change.

This is the second of two blogposts about the insurance industry and climate. Yesterday, I blogged about federal and state-backed programs that are insure risky properties from flood and storm damage, creating potential liabilities for all of us. Today, I’ll ask why U.S. insurers–in stark contrast to the big European reinsurance companies–have been missing in action during the Washington climate wars.

Consider: The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, an alliance of big companies and environmental groups calling for a cap on carbon emissions, includes 21 companies–seven utility companies, industrial giants GE and Siemens, chemical firms Dow and DuPont, Alcoa, Shell, Rio Tinto, Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo and not a single insurer since the departure of AIG (for reasons unrelated to climate).

Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy, or BICEP (which is a project of Ceres), another coalition pushing hard for policies to drive a low-carbon economy, includes Nike, Starbucks, Timberland, eBay, Gap, Avon and the Aspen/Snowmass, among others. No insurers.

Now…this isn’t to suggest that insurers have been entirely absent from the climate debate but mostly they’ve focused on their parochial interests. Some companies, for example, have asked the federal government to provide wind as well as water coverage in the event of hurricane damage. Others proposed want the federal government to offer reinsurance — that’s insurance for insurance companies — to protect against a major catastrophe, or “mega-cat” in industry argot. Fireman’s Fund, a unit of the German financial services firm Allianz, has been writing “green insurance” policies for building owners. (See my blogpost, Fireman’s Fund: an insuror that isn’t dull.)

But the industry has been a non-factor on the big issues, unlike the European reinsurance firms which have repeatedly warned of climate risks. Way back in 2007, Andrew Castaldi, head of the catastrophe risk unit for Swiss Re America Corp, told a Senate committee: “We believe unequivocally that climate change presents an increasing risk to the world economy and social welfare.” In a 2009 report, Lloyd’s of London warned of climate change contributing to “resource-driven conflicts; economic damage and risk to coastal cities and infrastructure; loss of territory and resultant border disputes; environmentally induced migration; government fragility; political radicalisation; tensions over energy supplies and pressures on international governance”. Munich Re, the world’s biggest reinsurer, said last year:  “It would seem that the growing number of weather-related catastrophes can only be explained by climate change.”

When I emailed the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America to ask why the industry hasn’t been more vocal, David Kodama, senior director of research and policy analysis for PCI, replied:

Climate change is one among many of important strategic risks for insurers. Broadly speaking, insurance companies assess and monitor developments associated with climate change and, as appropriate for the individual insurer, incorporate the relevant information into their business model and practices.

However, climate change is a particularly complex issue and its causes, effects and the relevant variables that impact it are multifaceted and not well understood.

…It is prudent for the many insurers to continue to study the issue.

Could the association be any more cautious? “Climate change is a heavily politicized issue in the US,” Ceres’ Sharlene Leurig says, when I ask her why the companies have stayed on the sidelines. “Why put your neck out there and start messaging about a topic that many consumers are confused about and, in some instances, downright hostile to?” Of course, that’s exactly what bolder companies like Nike and Starbucks are doing with BICEP.

There may, however, be another reason why insurers have been loathe to speak out: They write liability coverage for corporations, including oil and coal companies, which are being sued over climate-related liability.

An aerial view of Kivalina, Alaska

Claims have been filed against fossil fuel companies that remind some people of  class-action suits against tobacco and the asbestos makers. In Comer v. Murphy Oil, plaintiffs sued corporate defendants claiming personal injury and property damages caused by the allegedly climate change-induced impacts of Hurricane Katrina. In Village of Kivalina v. ExxonMobil, a native Alaska group sued oil and gas companies and US utilities claiming that coastal erosion caused by global warming would force them to relocate their fishing village.

In a fascinating interview with an Australian newspaper, Gerald Maples, the lead attorney in the Comer case, said he’ll go after those fossil fuel companies that misled the public about the dangers of climate change, just as tobacco companies sowed doubt about the danger of smoking: “It’s pretty much accepted history that asbestos and tobacco are the role models for climate change litigation now.”

How can Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry talk so irresponsibly about global warming–and get away with it?

Have we really reached a point where, in order to appeal to the hard core of the Republican Party, candidates have to ignore the fact that the earth is getting warmer, and that human activities are responsible?

Let’s hope not. Because if true, that’s sad and worrisome. Without Republican backing, no serious effort to regulate greenhouse gas emissions can be enacted by the U.S. Congress.

To be sure, Democrats aren’t much better when it comes to straight political talk. Just ask Barack Obama, Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi how they plan to close the federal deficit. But they are at least operating in a universe that resembles the one in which we live.

Not so Perry, who describes evolution as “a theory that is out there,” who rails against an “idiotic” federal regulation of tractors that does not exist, and who would have us believe that climate crisis is being drummed up by scientists who fudge their data to keep research grants rolling it.

Here’s how Perry put it last month:

I do believe that the issue of global warming has been politicized. I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. I think we’re seeing it almost weekly or even daily, scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change. Yes, our climates change. They’ve been changing ever since the earth was formed. But I do not buy into, that a group of scientists, who in some cases were found to be manipulating this data.

This wasn’t a slipup. In his book Fed-Up: Our Fight To Save America From Washington, Perry says that the “so-called science (of global warming) may not stand the test of time” and calls Al Gore “the false prophet of a carbon cult.”  While Perry’s attack on climate science generated a flurry of media attention, most of the reporting tiptoed around the fact that, well, he just doesn’t know what he is talking about.

An exception was Glenn Kessler, who in an excellent Fact Checker feature in The Washington Post, reports that Perry is simply wrong when he says skepticism about the man-made climate change is rising among scientists:

To the contrary, various surveys of climate researchers suggest growing acceptance, with as many as 98 percent believing in the concept of man-made climate change. A 2010 study by the National Academy of Sciences, which surveyed 1,372 climate researchers, is an example of this consensus. After all, it was first established in 1896 that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could help create a “greenhouse effect.”

On its website, the Union of Concerned Scientists has collected statements supporting the “growing scientific consensus on climate change” from such organizations as the American Meteorological Society, the American Physical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Geological Society of America, the American Chemical Society, the U.S. National Academies of Science and the U.S. (government) Climate Change Research Program, which said, quite simply:

Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced. Global temperature has increased over the past 50 years. This observed increase is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases.

Are all these groups on the take?

So what’s going on with Rick Perry? Three possibilities. First, he knows better and he is playing to the Republican base: A Pew Research Center poll last year found that only 38% of Republicans believe that there is “solid evidence” the earth is warming and only 16% believe that the warming is happening because of human activity. Second, he is simply ignorant and ill-informed. Third, he’s seen and considered the evidence and for whatever reason chooses not to believe it.

Reporters covering the campaign should be pressing Perry, hard, on these questions.

I say this not as a partisan. If anything, as regular readers of this blog know, I’m more than open to arguments that favor markets, limited government and decentralization of power, the kinds of arguments that you’d expect to hear more from Republican than Democrats.

But I take science seriously, and so I fear that we’re running out of time to deal with the climate crisis.

On the climate issue, Rick Perry is dangerous. I wish my colleagues in the mainstream press would do more to hold him accountable.

John Latham

In 1990, a British cloud physicist named John Latham wrote a letter, [PDF, download] to the journal Nature, in which he suggested that injecting tiny droplets of water into marine clouds to increase their reflectivity might be a way “to inhibit or neutralize global warming.

And then? “Nothing happened for 10 years except for a couple of angry letters saying it was a horrible thing to play God and why didn’t I go knock on the door of the president and tell him to stop burning fossil fuels,” Latham recalls.

But as greenhouse gas emissions kept growing,  Latham’s odd idea gained traction. It spawned a succession of peer-reviewed scientific papers, sparked debate in the scientific community and eventually led to the organization of a loosely-knit group of international scientists who now want to see if brightening marine clouds might actually be a feasible way to slow down or stop global warming.

“We’d like to move towards a limited area field experiment,” Latham says.

I met Latham–a leading thinker in the emerging field of geoengineering–last week during a fellowship at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). He is 73 years old, semi-retired and unpaid, but passionate about putting his scheme to a test. Latham is  collaborating with  about two dozen scientists, including “a couple of other geriatrics” (his words, not mine) who play key roles: Stephen Salter is a British engineer who came up with the idea of using unmanned, satellite-controlled, wind-powered ships (below) travel the oceans and disseminate the seawater  and Armand Neukermans is an inventor and entrepreneur (he helped develop inkjet printer technology at Hewlett Packard) who is working on developing a sprayer able to  deliver very fine seawater droplets to the clouds. Interestingly, Neukermans’ research has been supported by a small grant ($300,000) from a fund established by Bill Gates to support innovative climate and energy research.

Latham recognizes that there are dangers in trying to manage, on a global scale, a system as complex as the earth’s climate–the very definition of geoengineering.

“Geoengineering is a horrible word,” he said. “It makes people think of Dr. Strangelove.”

“I don’t know anyone working in geoengineering who wants deployment to happen,” he added.

The trouble is, he said, as greenhouse gas emissions rise–they reached a record high in 2010, according to the International Energy Agency–so does the risk of catastrophic climate change.

“There are no signs that we are behaving responsibly with respect to future generations,” he said. It would be irresponsible, he argues, not to look into alternatives since mitigation has failed, so far, to do the job.

Marine cloud brightening is one way to manage solar radiation; others include injecting sulfate particles into the stratosphere. [See my 2010 post, Geoengineering research, getting real]  Marine clouds cover roughly one-fifth of the earth’s surface, Latham told me, and they already play a role in keeping the earth cooler by reflecting the sun’s rays away from earth. If their surface area could be enlarge, they would be even stronger cooling agents.

Research by Latham and others, using climate models, indicates that “by increasing seeding steadily, we could hold (the earth’s) temperature more or less constant,” he said. Studies also suggest that cloud brightening could have a greater effect in the polar regions, a good thing because the poles are especially susceptible to global warming. Melting of the Arctic ice caps could have dire effects on sea levels and accelerate warming because the ice has a global cooling effect as a reflector of the sun’s rays.

Latham acknowledges that marine cloud brightening is in no way a cure-all.  It will probably alter rainfall patterns. It does nothing to stop ocean acidification, which is caused by CO2 emissions. And cloud behavior, he says, is not as well understood by scientists as you might imagine.

“These clouds–they look very thin, they look very simple, but they are complicated and we need to learn more about them,” he says.

Nor are the engineering issues simple. “Producing the right particles and getting them into the right places is a big problem,” he says.

But marine cloud brightening could be a way to “buy the time needed” to replace the burning of fossil fuels with cleaner energy, he said, and the best way to understand if the strategy can work is to test it.

Latham says his group has in mind a three-phase experiment conducted over a period of about four to five months and an area of about 100 square kilometers. Because of its limited size and scope, it would not affect the global climate, he said. It’s entirely unclear who, if anyone, has the authority to regulate such an experiment. And, in any event, Latham said his group won’t be ready to go forward for several years.

What, Lathan was asked, needs to happen to get the U.S. Congress  to take the climate crisis seriously?

“Major flooding in New York would probably focus the right attention,” he replied. “I don’t mean to be cynical about that. But Bangladesh could go under with a billion people, and I’m not sure that would provoke the wealthy countries to act.”

I hate to say it, but I think he’s right. Which is why we all need to think hard–and learn more–about geoengineering.

Meet the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

Actually, you don’t want to meet this little lady, who bites for blood that she needs to mature her eggs.

The Aedes aegypti spreads dengue fever, which affects about 100 million people a year. Most are in tropical and subtropical regions–South and Central America, southeast Asia and Africa. Dengue fever is rare in the U.S. except along the border with Mexico.

That’s changing–in part because of climate change.

“The range of the mosquito that causes dengue is creeping upwards,” says Andrew Monaghan, a meteorologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

I’ve been meeting with scientists like Andrew this week as part of a journalism fellowship at NCAR, which is home to some of the world’s most prominent client scientists. They are delivering mostly–but not entirely–sobering news about the dangers of climate instability.

This idea that dengue fever is spreading into temperate climates isn’t new. In 2009, the National Resources Defense Council reported that “mosquitoes capable of transmitting dengue fever can now be found across at least 28 states.”

According to Reuters:

Nearly 4,000 cases of imported and locally transmitted dengue fever were reported in the United States by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 1995 and 2005; if cases along the Texas-Mexico border area are included, that number rises to 10,000.

Andrew’s group at NCAR is now studying the habits of the mosquito more closely, particularly in Mexico. He is working with colleagues at the Center for Disease Control and NASA, as well as scientists in Mexico, to model the activity of the mosquito.

These mosquitos, it turns out, have odd habits. “They only breed near humans,” Andrew said. “For the most part, this is a very urban mosquito.” The mosquitos  like to breed in tires and trash, so one way of preventing the spread of dengue fever would be better sanitation and trash pickup. Another, of course, would be to take the climate threat more seriously.

The good news: Dengue fever isn’t usually fatal, and for now it’s a minor problem most in the U.S. [Below is a 2009 map tracking its spread from the Centers for Disease Control.)

The bad news: The disease is very unpleasant–symptoms include severe headaches, rash and achy muscles that last about a week.

Stepping back a bit from dengue fever, it’s been estimated by the Climate Institute, a respected nonprofit, that “climate change contributes to 150,000 deaths and 5 million illnesses each year.” It’s hard to know exactly what that claim means–many other factors (the effectiveness of public health systems, education, income) besides climate affect disease, so isolating the impact of climate change is difficult. In a new book called Changing Planet, Changing Health., Dr. Paul Epstein of Harvard Medical School and journalist Dan Ferber  argue that climate change is literally making us sick.

I know I have no interest in becoming lunch for the Aedes aegypti. It’s one more reason, not that we need one, to take the climate threat seriously.

Commerce, Missouri: April 27, 2011

It’s sometimes said that no individual storm, flood, drought or wildfire can be specifically attributed to climate change.

That may be true but Kevin Trenberth, one of the world’s most prominent climate scientists, says it misses the point.

Sure, we’ve always had extreme weather events. But, he argues, they are more frequent and more intense because of climate impacts. And that’s important.

“The environment in which all storms form has been changed by human activity,” Trenberth says. Thus the storms have been affected, too.

Kevin Trenberth

Trenberth spoke to a group of reporters at National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), where I’m on a fellowship this week. An MIT-trained meteorologist and a native of New Zealand, he was a lead author of the 1995, 2001 and 2007 IPCC reports and he has led NCAR’s Climate Analysis Section since the late 1980s. In other words, he knows his climate science.

Let’s be clear about the claim he is making: Trenberth is not saying that climate change caused this year’s severe Mississippi River flooding, Texas drought, Arizona wildfire, heavy rains in Memphis or tornadoes in Joplin or Tuscaloosa.

He is, however, saying that those extreme weather events — those storms, as well as last year’s floods in India and Pakistan, and a heat wave in Russia — were almost surely made more extreme because of climate change.

His argument is logical and not complicated: Climate change has increased air temperatures — 2010 was the warmest year on record — and so the atmosphere can absorb more moisture. For each degree C of warming, the air can hold about 7% more water, he said. At the same time, higher temperatures lead to greater evaporation and surface drying, thereby increasing the intensity and duration of drought.

In a recent report [PDF, download], Trenberth wrote:

Hence, storms, whether individual thunderstorms, extratropical rain or snow storms, or tropical cyclones, supplied with increased moisture, produce more intense precipitation events. Such events are observed to be widely occurring, even where total precipitation is decreasing: ‘it never rains but it pours!’

To be sure, other scientists are reluctant to draw connections between global warming and the frequency and intensity of storms.  Some argued after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that the Atlantic Ocean was then at the peak of a natural 20- to 30-year-storm cycle. Here’s another skeptical view of the climate-hurricane connection  from the conservative American Enterprise Institute. But Trenberth by no means alone in his view. Here’s a very readable paper [PDF , download] on hurricanes and global warming that he co-authored with NCAR’s James Harrell and Greg Holland, Robert Corell of the American Meteorological Society and Michael McCracken of the Climate Institute–all of them highly-respected scientists.

This debate matters, for obvious reasons: The human as well as the economic costs of extreme weather are staggering.

Those costs are rarely factored into the equation when opponents of climate regulation say that the U.S. economy can’t afford to put a price on CO2, or switch to cleaner fuels. But they are undeniably real.

NASA satellite image of Hurricane Earl 9-1-2010

Greg Holland of NCAR, a hurricane expert, also made the case to reporters that climate change causing storms to be more intense. Citing an article in Nature Geoscience signed by 10 hurricane experts, at least one of whom had raised skeptical questions about mainstream climate science, he said: “Almost everyone is saying that the intensity of storms is increasing by five to 10%.” (Intensity refers here to wind speeds.) Rainfall, he said, is consistently projected to increase by 20% because of human-caused climate change. “There is no reasonable scientist who does not accept that,” Holland said.

There’s disagreement, however, about whether climate change is resulting in more frequent storms. He thinks the frequency is increasing, but says “good scientists have the opposite viewpoint.” A summary of The Nature Geoscience report says that climate models actually “project decreases in the globally averaged frequency of tropical cyclones, by 6–34%” by 2100.

How the economics of all this shake out is open to debate. Munich Re, the big global reinsurance company, estimated the costs of natural catastrophes in 2010 at about $130 billion. That figure includes major earthquakes in Haiti, China and Chile which have no connection to global warming, as well as the heat wave in Russia and floods in Pakistan.

The company said:

The high number of weather-related natural catastrophes and record temperatures both globally and in different regions of the world provide further indications of advancing climate change.

Batten down the hatches, friends. Until we dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions–and then for many years afterwards, because CO2 lasts a long time in the atmosphere–the forecast is for more extreme weather.

Recently, FORTUNE sent me to Omaha to write this story about the Union Pacific, America’s biggest railroad. Impressive company in a fascinating industry without which our lives would be very different. Here’s how the story begins:

The strawberries on your cereal. Your laptop, cell phone, and TV. The coal that’s burned to power them. The car you drive. The roof over your head. We may work in a knowledge economy, but Madonna had it right: We live in a material world.

That’s why the Union Pacific railroad, No. 164 on the Fortune 500, has played a vital role in the U.S. economy since 1862. With $14.1 billion in revenue last year, the UP, which is based in Omaha, is America’s largest railroad. Close behind is its chief rival, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNI) (2009 revenues: $14 billion), headquartered in Fort Worth, which was acquired this year by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) for $26.4 billion. The deal put a spotlight on the often troubled railroad business — in a good way. “It was a vote of confidence in the industry,” says Jim Young, the 53-year-old chairman and CEO of Union Pacific. “He sees the long-term value in the rail franchise — how unique it is in America.”

The story goes on to talk about how Young led a turnaround at the railroad, which suffered from lousy service, not once but twice–in the late 1990s after its merger with the Southern Pacific and again in 2004-2005 when the company cut back too deeply on equipment and staff and wasn’t prepared for a burst of economic growth. As Young told me: “We were the best marketing arm of our competitor.” The UP’s competitors include the Burlington Northern, which also operates in the west, and, interestingly, long-haul trucks.

In its battle for market share with trucks, the railroad industry is touting its environmental advantages. They are real. While my FORTUNE story didn’t get into much depth on the topic,  Young and his colleagues spent a fair amount of time telling my why the UP is an environmentally-friendly way of moving goods around the country. On its website, under the headline A Green Railroad, the company says:

Did you know that railroads are one of the most environmentally friendly modes of freight transportation? It’s true. Freight trains are almost four times more fuel-efficient than over-the-road trucks and have less impact on greenhouse gas emissions than trucks.

The UP has gone to great lengths to cut down on its fuel use, as I reported in the magazine:

The Union Pacific has also become more efficient. Trains are longer — on average, 5,800 feet, or more than a mile long — and instead of just pulling the freight cars, locomotives are distributed throughout the trains so that they push as well. Information technology helps too: Locomotives with GPS track the fuel efficiency of every engineer, and those who use the least fuel get a share of the savings, between $200 and $400 a month.

That has enabled the Union Pacific, with the rest of the railroad industry, to tell a nice-sounding environmental story: The rail industry as a whole carries about 43% of all freight (as measured in ton-miles), but trains consume just 7% of the energy used to move freight. Trucks, by contrast, move 31% of the tonnage but use 66% of the energy. UPS,  a big customer of Union Pacific, uses trains rather than trucks to move ground packages that travel 750 miles or more. “The economies of steel on steel are better than rubber on concrete,” says Kelley Anderson, general manager for rail at UPS.

There’s much more to UP’s greening. The locomotive in the photo at the top of this blog, known as a Genset, was designed by the railroad for use at its yards. Mike Iden, UP’s director of freight car and locomotive engineering, who has led many of the efficiency efforts told me: “It’s an ultra low emitting yard-switching locomotive.” It’s based on technology developed by the U.S. Department of Energy to improve diesel truck emissions.

So what’s wrong with this green story? Well, the UP carries a lot of coal, America’s dirtiest fuel–as much as 10% of the coal burned by utilities, by one estimate. You can’t really blame the railroad for this–no company can be expected to turn away its most important customer.

But the Union Pacific also has opposed legislation to cap greenhouse gas emissions and put a price on carbon. This is interesting because anything that raises the cost of fossil fuels will give the railroad a competitive advantage over less efficient trucks. So that’s the problem with the climate change bills, I asked Young. He told me he was worried about the effect of the legislation on coal, the economy and jobs:

I’m concerned about what it means to coal, long-term, and what it could do to the cost of electricity in America, and moving jobs offshore.

The Midwest has some of the lowest costs of power in America. Google built a new data center right over here on the Missouri River. They did it because the cost of power is so low.

Coal’s got to be part of the energy equation, long term…The cost of the renewables? You’ve seen the math.

Well, yes, I’ve seen the math and the EPA estimates that the Senate legislation to regulate carbon emissions would cost an average family about $79 to $146 a year. This seems like a reasonable price to pay to offset the potential costs of global warming. Young obviously disagrees, as do many people in the coal-dependent heartland. Which is why it’s so hard to get Washington to act on climate change.

I’ve long believed that we’d be better off if more successful business people entered politics. They tend to be pragmatic and action-oriented, they’re proven leaders, they understand economics and they’re not beholden to special interests. Look, for example, at the job Michael Bloomberg has done in New York City.

And then there’s Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett Packard, who is running for the U.S. Senate in California, hoping to unseat the incumbent Democrat, Barbara Boxer. She is giving business a bad name, notably with a new TV ad about climate which is unfair, stupid and destructive.

In the ad (below), a shrunken image of Boxer says:

One of the very important national security issues we face, frankly, is climate change.

To which Fiorina replies, dismissively:

Terrorism kills—and Barbara Boxer is worried about the weather….I’ll keep you safe.

My goodness. I’m no fan of Boxer (who comes across as perhaps the least appealing character in Eric Pooley’s excellent new book, The Climate War), but she is well within the mainstream in seeing climate change as a national security issue. Others who link climate to national security include so-called green hawks like James Woolsey, the former head of the CIA, and the military and intelligence analysts at the National Defense University, as the New York Time reported last year.

Last fall, the CIA opened a Center on Climate Change and National Security to study

the national security impact of phenomena such as desertification, rising sea levels, population shifts, and heightened competition for natural resources.

So Boxer’s right and Fiorina’s wrong: climate change is, in fact, a national security issue. Indeed, it’s a pretty good bet that climate change will kill more people that terrorists in the next decade or two.

Fiorina’s derisive comment that Boxer is “worried about the weather” is even more objectionable because Fiorina surely knows the difference between weather and climate. Not long ago, she talked up climate change as a serious issue. In 2008, as an advisor to  John McCain during his presidential campaign, Fiorina told Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones:

I think it’s important that when we think about taking on some of the great challenges now as opposed to leaving them to future generations, we have to talk not only about Social Security and medical care, but also about leaving our planet cleaner for the next generation than we found it.

I suspect that’s what she really thinks, but Fiorina is now running hard for the Republican nomination as a conservative and so she appears willing to say anything to get elected–even if it muddies the debate about climate.

Maybe the key difference between Mike Bloomberg and Carly Fiorina is their respective track records. He built a great company from scratch and made a fortune doing it. She worked her way into the job of CEO of Hewlett Packard, did a lousy job running the company (but a good job promoting herself) before she was sent off by the board with an undeserved $21 million severance package. She’s now using some of her wealth (which rightfully belongs to HP shareholders)  to finance ads like this one.

It really is shameful.

He is the most innovative and ambitious housing developer in New Orleans, but c’mon folks, let’s be real.

]]> http://www.marcgunther.com/2009/12/13/cop15-everything-is-going-to-be-fine/feed/ 0 http://www.marcgunther.com/2009/12/12/cop15-ceos-in-hamlets-castle/ http://www.marcgunther.com/2009/12/12/cop15-ceos-in-hamlets-castle/#comments Sat, 12 Dec 2009 22:05:06 +0000 Marc http://www.marcgunther.com/?p=3232

As humans, we’re wired to focus on the now. I want a new gadget now. I want a slab of pie now. I’m busy now, so I don’t have time for politics. The consequences—consumer debt, a sagging waistline, a Congress beholden to special interests–all arrive later.

You can think about global warming as a now-and-later problem. Governments need to take unpopular actions now to deal with a problem that will do most of its damage later. Businesses need to look beyond the next quarter to the next quarter century.

This evening in Elsinore, Denmark, top executives from such companies as Coca-Cola, Duke Energy, Goldman Sachs and Google took the long view in a fitting venue: Kronborg Castle, a 15th century castle best known as the setting for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Sitting in a magnificent castle that’s been preserved for six centuries makes you wonder what impact the goings-on on Copenhagen this week will have on the world in 60 or even 600 years.

In that context, it seems prudent to invest now to insure against a climate catastrophe, no matter how distant–even if the short-term result is  a slight drag on short-term economic growth

As Tracy Wolstencroft, global head of environmental markets for Goldman Sachs, put it: “The economy is a wholly owed subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around.” That is, if we ruin the environment, there’s no economy left.

Or, as Muhtar Kent, the CEO of Coca-Cola said: “It is absolutely imperative that our voices be heard and our commitments to low carbon be fully understood.”

It turns out there’s a big contingent from corporate America in Copenhagen.  Among the high-profile companies here: GE, Microsoft, Cisco, DuPont, Johnson Controls, Nike and North Face. (Here’s a column by Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres, about efforts by some companies to lobby for a strong climate deal.)  Not surprisingly, most favor a global agreement to regulate carbon emissions.

A strong agreement, they said, will drive companies  to make the investments needed to usher in low-carbon economy.

As an example, Wolstencroft recalled that China’s five-year released in 2005 made a commitment to low-carbon energy. What followed, he said, was a $5.4 billion acquisition by Toshiba of Westinghouse’s nuclear energy business and capital investments  of another $5 billion in Chinese solar power companies, which have since emerged as world leaders.

“What we hope comes out of Copenhagen,” Wolstencroft said, “are even clearer rules that help give investors the confidence…to put money into clean technology.”

Clean tech, he said, is “one of the largest emerging markets the world has seen.”

Duke Energy’s CEO, Jim Rogers, also said that China has the ability to both plan long-term and act rapidly. “They lead in the production of solar panels and wind turbines,” he said. “They’re building 13 nuclear panels with more on the drawing board. They’re ahead in battery technology.”

Duke has a joint venture with a Chinese firm to build a coal plant that, if all goes according to plan, will capture and store carbon emissions.

“The Chinese can scale and deploy this faster than in the U.S.,” Rogers said. Duke’s investment in so-called clean coal won’t pay off in the short run, he said, “but we need a full-court press to make that a reality.”

Google, too, is investing in energy and climate projects with long-term horizons, said Dan Reicher, the firm’s climate guru. Its engineers have reconfigured Toyota Priuses into plug-in electric cars, and they are deploying Google Earth software to track deforestation.

Google’s Power Meter, which is being tested with utilities around the world, gives consumers real-time information about their electricity use, to incentivize them to conserve energy. Waving his cell phone, Reicher said: “I can get information about electricity use at my home in California on this smart phone.”

Several of the execs noted that many low-carbon technologies are available today, albeit at a price. Denmark gets 20% of its electricity from wind turbines, but wind-powered electricity costs more than coal-fired power. Denmark also has big plans for electric cars, but they require just-as-big government subsidies.

In theory, at least, there’s a future payback for those current outlays. Anders Eldrup, president and CEO of Copenhaven-based Dong Energy, which has 1 million customers in northern Europe and is shutting down many of its coal plants, says clean energy technology has surpassed agriculture as Denmark’s leading export.

While there’s no way to know for sure, my sense is that the companies here in Copenhagen don’t reflect the mainstream of corporate America, where big lobbies like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers oppose the climate bills pending in Congress. They’d rather pay later than pay now.

That’s a big a gamble, of course. It’s been a long time since I studied Hamlet but, to the best of my recollection, at the end of the play, just about everybody dies.

Let's hope the Copenhagen climate talks are not much ado about nothing

If you want to understand why it will be hard to get rich and poor countries to agree on how to deal with climate change, consider the reaction to a remark by Todd Stern, the U.S.’s chief negotiator, when he arrived here in Copenhagen the other day. Stern said:

We absolutely recognize our historic role in putting emissions in the atmosphere up there that are there now. But the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations–I just categorically reject that.

In response, Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations, said:

Admitting responsibility for the climate crisis without taking necessary actions to address it is like someone burning your house and then refusing to pay for it. Even if the fire was not started on purpose, the industrialized countries, through their inaction, have continued to add fuel to the fire. As a result they have used up two thirds of the atmospheric space, depriving us of the necessary space for our development and provoking a climate crisis of huge proportions.

In Bolivia we are facing a crisis we had no role in causing. Our glaciers dwindle, droughts become ever more common, and water supplies are drying up. Who should address this? To us it seems only right that the polluter should pay, and not the poor.”

We are not assigning guilt, merely responsibility. As they say in the US, if you break it, you buy it.

There you have it. Bolivia happened to speak up, but it could just as easily have been China, India,  Indonesia or Kenya.

The world’s poor countries want to get richer. Producing energy and economic growth in a cleaner way–by using wind or solar power, or nuclear energy, or electric cars–costs more than burning coal or oil. That expense, the poor countries say, should be borne by the U.S., the EU and Japan, which have emitted most of the greenhouse gases now in the atmosphere. Even now, the wealthy countries where 19% of the world’s people live account for 51% of global GHG emissions.

The principle is  simple–polluters should pay because they made the mess. Some people call this climate justice.

But where will the money come from to finance clean technology for China, India and the rest of the world? (Not to mention the money needed by some poor countries to adapt to climate change.) There’s talk in Europe of a global tax on financial transactions.  Island countries, including the Maldives, have called for a global tax on aviation.

Today, EU leaders said that they’d come up with $3 billion for a fund next year and President Obama has said he’ll support limited funding for adaptation and clean energy, but the Euros and dollars don’t add up to what the poor countries want or even what independent experts said will be needed. Besides that, there are big arguments brewing about who would manage the fund.

Much of the debate in Copenhagen will turn on these questions of morality and money.