Only A Price On Carbon Will Save The U.S. Economy

Federal Report Warns of Financial Havoc From Climate Change; A report commissioned by President Trump’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued dire warnings about climate change’s impact on financial markets.

Coral Davenport and Jeanna Smialek, September 8, 2020 (NY Times)

“…Climate change threatens U.S. financial markets, as the costs of wildfires, storms, droughts and floods spread through insurance and mortgage markets, pension funds and other financial institutions.

‘A world wracked by frequent and devastating shocks from climate change cannot sustain the fundamental conditions supporting our financial system,’ concluded the report, “Managing Climate Risk in the Financial System,” which was requested last year by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission…

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…[Those observations] carry new weight coming with the imprimatur of the regulator of complex financial instruments like futures, swaps and other derivatives that help fix the price of commodities like corn, oil and wheat. It is the first wide-ranging federal government study focused on the specific impacts of climate change on Wall Street…

Perhaps most notable is that it is being published at all. The Trump administration has suppressed, altered or watered down government science around climate change as it pushes an aggressive agenda of environmental deregulation that it hopes will spur economic growth…The new report asserts that doing nothing to avert climate change will do the opposite…

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The commodities regulator, which is made up of three Republicans and two Democrats, all of whom were appointed by President Trump, voted unanimously last summer to create an advisory panel drawn from the world of finance and charged with producing a report on the effects of the warming world on financial markets…

…[The report] includes recommendations for new corporate regulations…[including the reversal of the Trump administration-proposed policy that would forbid retirement investment managers from considering environmental consequences in their financial recommendations. It also] emphasizes the need to put a price on carbon emissions, which is often done either by taxing or through an emissions trading system that caps carbon emissions and allots credits that polluters can buy and sell under that cap… click here for more

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