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A Massive New Assessment Of Climate Change’s Economic Risks Is Ready For Business
A Massive New Assessment Of Climate Change’s Economic Risks Is Ready For Business
BY JEFF SPROSS ON JANUARY 13, 2014
CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK
A new venture aimed at building a sophisticated and sweeping assessment of the risks climate change poses to the American economy just announced its Risk Committee lineup Monday.
The Risky Business initiative is co-chaired by its three founders: former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and environmentalist billionaire Tom Steyer. The three will sit on the Risk Committee, along with former CEOs, senators, and U.S. secretaries including Robert Rubin, Olympia Snowe, and George Schultz. The group is tasked with reviewing the initiative’s eventual assessment, as well as helping with messaging and sharing the results with the regions, industries, and markets that face the greatest risks from climate change. Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Office of Hank Paulson, and Next Generation — groups associated with the three co-founders — as well as the Skoll Global Threats Fund, are providing staff and support for the project.
The assessment itself has two main goals: One, to provide an independent assessment, drawing on models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Chnage and the National Climate Assessment, along with independent research, that divides the U.S. into eight regions and presents the climate risks for each as a range of probabilities. That report will be released in 2014, after which the second goal, an effort led by the Risk Committee to raise awareness of the findings, will begin.
When he talked to Bloomberg News about the project this past October, Steyer recalled an August 2012 meeting with a group of major financial players in which he warned them that arguably climate change posed the biggest future risk to the U.S. economy. “It’s like I was saying that what’s going to make a difference in the economy is unicorns,” said Steyer. “I thought to myself: These guys need to be made aware of the risks here.”
Steyer quit his 26-year career as a hedge fund manager that December...
BY JEFF SPROSS ON JANUARY 13, 2014
CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK
A new venture aimed at building a sophisticated and sweeping assessment of the risks climate change poses to the American economy just announced its Risk Committee lineup Monday.
The Risky Business initiative is co-chaired by its three founders: former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and environmentalist billionaire Tom Steyer. The three will sit on the Risk Committee, along with former CEOs, senators, and U.S. secretaries including Robert Rubin, Olympia Snowe, and George Schultz. The group is tasked with reviewing the initiative’s eventual assessment, as well as helping with messaging and sharing the results with the regions, industries, and markets that face the greatest risks from climate change. Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Office of Hank Paulson, and Next Generation — groups associated with the three co-founders — as well as the Skoll Global Threats Fund, are providing staff and support for the project.
The assessment itself has two main goals: One, to provide an independent assessment, drawing on models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Chnage and the National Climate Assessment, along with independent research, that divides the U.S. into eight regions and presents the climate risks for each as a range of probabilities. That report will be released in 2014, after which the second goal, an effort led by the Risk Committee to raise awareness of the findings, will begin.
When he talked to Bloomberg News about the project this past October, Steyer recalled an August 2012 meeting with a group of major financial players in which he warned them that arguably climate change posed the biggest future risk to the U.S. economy. “It’s like I was saying that what’s going to make a difference in the economy is unicorns,” said Steyer. “I thought to myself: These guys need to be made aware of the risks here.”
Steyer quit his 26-year career as a hedge fund manager that December...
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/01/13/3156851/risky-business-committee/