Federal Report Warns of Financial Havoc From Climate Change

Climate action is far less expensive than climate inaction.

A report commissioned by Trump’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued dire warnings about climate change’s impact on financial markets ....concluded that 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.

It is the first wide-ranging federal government study focused on the specific impacts of climate change on Wall Street.

“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....

Duh. Think Republicans will care now?  No.

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.  It includes recommendations for new corporate regulations and the reversal of at least one Trump administration policy.

Those observations are not entirely new, but they 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.

Pair this up with climate change accelerating at speeds that alarm scientists and should terrify all of us.

These kinds of dystopian weather events, happening often at the same time, are exactly what scientists have been warning about for decades. While extreme weather is a part of the natural cycle, the recent uptick in the ferocity and frequency of these extremes, scientists say, is evidence of an acceleration of climate impacts, some of which were underestimated by climate computer models.

It's not coincidence, it's climate change. 

.... though climate change does not cause the heat waves or fires, it sets the stage so that when conditions are ripe, like the summer and fall of 2020, heat waves are more intense and fires burn more fiercely. 

....the studies underestimate the influence of human-caused climate change. "So if anything, climate attribution studies are likely to under-attribute the role that climate change is playing with these persistent extreme weather events."

Sources: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/climate/climate-change-financial-markets.html

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-wildfires-snow-jet-stream-extreme-weather/