r/finance • u/scientificamerican • 5d ago
Big banks quietly prepare for catastrophic warming
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/big-banks-quietly-prepare-for-catastrophic-climate-change/?utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit170
u/scientificamerican 5d ago
Top Wall Street institutions are preparing for a severe future of global warming that blows past the temperature limits agreed to by more than 190 nations a decade ago, industry documents show.
The big banks' acknowledgment that the world is likely to fail at preventing warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels is spelled out in obscure reports for clients, investors and trade association members. Most were published after the reelection of President Donald Trump, who is seeking to repeal federal policies that support clean energy while turbocharging the production of oil, gas and coal — the main sources of global warming.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/big-banks-quietly-prepare-for-catastrophic-climate-change
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u/legbreaker 3d ago
In a 4D chess move Trump will save us from global warming by causing a global economic depression and massive reduction in consumption
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u/No_Boysenberry9456 2d ago
You say that but during covid, I could see the sky without smog for the first time in decades.
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u/MaxRoofer 2d ago
That’s what he saying. Trump going to save the climate on accident, by ruining the economy.
Ruined economy will grind everything to a halt, similar to Covid. So Trump accidentally saved the day.
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u/solargarlic2001 3d ago
The guy that shits on a golden toilet driving people to consume less. What a time to be alive!
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u/midgaze 5d ago
If you want the truth watch how the money moves. Banks and insurance companies are exposed to the effects of climate change and their actions tell us what we need to know.
They will continue to lie though. It's not recent failures that led to 3C. It's a complete lack of action by capital to prevent societal collapse that they know is coming. They will pay dearly for this failing.
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u/fairlyoblivious 5d ago
They will pay dearly for this failing.
Gonna need a source citation for this one. Hollywood has ruined the brains of multiple generations, people STILL think "the good guys win" or "bad people get what's coming to them" despite so much evidence that simply isn't true.
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u/downrightwhelmed 5d ago
How could anybody look at Trump getting reelected and think there’s even a trace of justice in the world.
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u/Pip-Pipes 5d ago
There is a certain schadenfreude about the people who voted for this having to endure this hellscape too.
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u/ikaiyoo 4d ago
Nah it was those damn video games, No it was the television, no wait it was the damn rock and roll music on their record player, no wait it was that damn radio, no wait it was the bicycles, no it was the novels, it was those damn letters they are always reading and writing, No it was that damn theater rotting their minds, no it was all the paintings they were looking at corrupting their brains.
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u/fairlyoblivious 4d ago
Are you trying to say that despite thousands of studies proving me right, that pop culture does NOT shape our beliefs in any meaningful way? I'm not just making shit up here, there are literally THOUSANDS of studies backing this up.
You need to get yourself past "knee jerk" and realize that a lot of what you spew is provably wrong, literally just in 3 minutes using an internet search. We in fact ARE replacing a deeper expression of our collective experiences with things like "the biggest loser" and "the hangover" and it's evident in many ways.
I also think you fundamentally misunderstood "the problem" with the "moral panic" movements you're trying to tie me to with your knee jerking. They weren't wrong about influence, they were simply wrong about what they were trying to preserve. Those moral panics were trying to preserve cultures of hatred, exclusion, and control, and were mad that "pop" or "rock" or whatever at the time was making people's minds more open and tolerant, things antithetical to "the way things were". That is not what is happening today, today we're seeing a cheapening of ideas into sound bites, nobody is quoting Sartre or Voltaire or Alan Watts any more, they are quoting "Mean Girls" and nobody is really looking critically at what our society is becoming, they're coping with the bullshit idea that Hollywood implanted- The good guys always win.
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u/ikaiyoo 4d ago
Nope I think the US has been steadily fed a healthy diet of propaganda since before Hollywood. And by extension the rest of the world who consumed. I don't think it was Hollywood that ruined our brains. I think it was who it always is. The people who influenced legislation and molded education systems. And originally was at the church because they were the only ones who could read, and then it was the nobles and then it was the government who was controlled and shaped by the former nobles who are now aristocrats, then became the gentleman who were owners of industry and it's been them ever since and they've dictated everything through government. Hollywood is barely a minor player.
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u/Religious_Pie 5d ago
I help out with our firms Temp Alignment sector, and can confirm a lot of this sadly.
It’s not even just a case of Trump, but also that the entire industry can’t agree on a standard and methodology, causing a race to the bottom of the industries major regulatory bodies (of which most are nowhere near funded enough to be an effective body) reducing the strictness required to suitably report their environmental impacts. The recent CSRD release in the EU proved this too, with the EU rolling back requirements while companies were required to report on them.
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u/WinterHill 4d ago
Makes me wonder what it’s going to actually take to get society to take the kind of action required to halt global warming, let alone reverse it.
Even in the face of massive damages, our largest industries have come to the conclusion that it makes better business sense to ignore the problem and simply cope with the consequences when they arrive.
Dimon was right that it will take huge targeted economic policies and incentives to get capital to do anything about the issue. But at this rate who knows if or when that will ever happen.
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u/These-Resource3208 5d ago
The departments are just there to check a box. I’d hate to be working in one of those positions. You get the brunt force of execs while being funded peanuts to perform unrealistic results.
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u/critiqueextension 5d ago
Recent reports indicate that major banks like Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase now expect global warming to exceed 3°C, contradicting previous commitments to the Paris Agreement. This shift reflects a broader acknowledgment within the financial sector that current emissions trajectories are unlikely to change, prompting banks to recalibrate their strategies accordingly.
- Big Banks Quietly Prepare for Catastrophic Warming
- Banks see a dire climate future — and ways to profit - POLITICO
- Big Banks Quietly Prepare for Catastrophic Warming : r/climatechange
This is a bot made by [Critique AI](https://critique-labs.ai. If you want vetted information like this on all content you browse, download our extension.)
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u/Whaatabutt 5d ago
It’s not the world that’s at risk, it’s humans. The planet will survive humans, we’ll die.
Global warming is a risk to humans, not the planet. Repackage the message and maybe ppl will care.
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u/beliefinphilosophy 5d ago
Uh I'm going to call "back the F up".
Because we're either on the verge of or in the beginning of the sixth mass extinction event. Already species extinction is at 1k-10k above norm. The number of species that have died off in the last 500 years, would have taken 18,000 years without humans.
We're losing entire BRANCHES of Genera. Which affects how earths ecosystem operates.
"It's not the world that's at risk, it's humans"
ITS ABSOLUTELY THE ENTIRE WORLD IS AT RISK.
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u/TheRealCoolio 4d ago
He means the Earth will rebound. Roughly 75 percent of all life was wiped out within 24 hours of the asteroid that killed the Dinosaurs hitting the Yucatan peninsula.
The Earth will rebound from our impact… even if it takes thousands or millions of years.
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u/Robert_roberts82 4d ago
Did I read that the big recommendation was to invest in air conditioning stocks?
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u/saysjuan 5d ago
Easy. Buy the dip, short the vix and fuck bitcoin.
Maybe we should stop wasting non-renewable power and increasing greenhouse gases with frivolous technology such as Crypto mining, Artificial Intelligence and embrace remote work rather than worry about profits while watching the world burn.
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u/Pillars_of_Salt 5d ago
Stupidist thing is we will HAVE to do all that eventually, we will just be a lot more fucked because of this tremendous delay.
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u/ScandalOZ 5d ago
Mining crypto also floods the atmosphere with heat. It is a heat creating venture and if they ramp up the mining of it all over the world like they want to it will add greatly to climate change catastrophe.
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u/14446368 Buy Side 4d ago
I am exactly 0% surprised by the failure to hit the target (which was a pipedream to begin with) and this apparent reaction/planning.
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u/Popular_Position2730 2d ago
This article makes a lot of sense about the market we in
https://terreneglobe.com/2025/04/04/2025-bear-market-analysis/
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u/Background-Watch-660 4d ago
These kinds of timelines are based not our economy’s potential performance but on the history of its actual performance so far. The projection only works if trends continue as they have.
This track record is something we will need to reevaluate in light of a transformative new development just over the horizon: the invention and implementation of a Universal Income (UBI).
Most people talking about UBI see it as a welfare policy—or a safety net for workers displaced by robots in the future. These framings cause us to miss something far more important: the radical economic and environmental implications of labor-free spending money.
UBI enables a startling new perspective on the cause of our current environmental crisis: not excessive consumption but unnecessary employment. Without realizing it, we have been overworking ourselves and damaging our environment as a byproduct.
In our monetary system, the relationship between money and work makes our economy wasteful by design. In order to allow people to consume, we first have to come up with some sort of job in order to get them paid.
The problem with tying income to wages like this is that wages only get paid out to those who work. That means we have to make everybody work to get people on incomes—totally apart from the question of whether or not the economy actually needs all that work.
In other words, standard macroeconomic practices today is to maximize employment. Maximizing employment may maximize the distribution of wages; but deliver incomes in that way is the opposite of the ideal outcome so far as the environment is concerned.
If we’re creating jobs as an excuse to distribute money, that means we’re not creating jobs only when production requires them. And all these extra jobs use up scarce resources from the environment. They create waste byproducts, too, like greenhouse gasses.
The economy in theory could have a much smaller environmental footprint if we simply let people consume through a UBI, allowed employment to reduce, and discovered just how small our economy could get while still producing the maximum possible goods and services for people.
In an economy with $0 UBI and “maximum employment” policy instead, we can’t help but waste resources on superfluous work—even while some or many people stay needlessly poor. We live in one big resource-wasting machine that’s driven not greed or malice but by ignorance: our failure to institute a simple, efficient mechanism for enabling consumption.
When consumption is only allowed through work (resource-use) we have to use up way more resources than we need to sustain any given level of output. And it’s the use of resources—not the consumption of final goods—where waste products, pollution and greenhouse gasses are actually generated.
Climate change isn’t necessarily an inevitable result of markets or profits; it has resulted from our version of a market economy, an economy where consumption is only allowed through work; this creates a perverse incentive across all of society to create useless work as an excuse to consume. The environment gets chewed up in the process.
People who attribute environmental damage to rampant consumerism are missing the fundamental distinction between resource-use and production itself. Efficiency developments in theory should allow all of us to make more and consume more despite using fewer resources and being employed less often.
Our economy is the definition of inefficient. It’s designed to maximize “employment opportunities” rather than to maximize consumer outcomes. A well-intentioned but short-sighted commitment to employment itself is causing us to waste resources, hobble production, and bloat our industries’ collective environmental footprint.
It’s only after we implement a UBI and see how high it can go—and how far employment could fall—that we can discover just how clean our economy could really be. Climate change activists, business leaders and economists are all talking past each other on this issue; and the blind spot is UBI.
A simple, reliable source of consumer income that doesn’t depend on jobs being created is a crucial part of the monetary system. It’s how we receive economic benefit without wasting work.
The lack of this mechanism from our macroeconomic policy toolkit is very likely causing far more waste today than we realize.
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u/Moosebreath22 4d ago
"The arctic will be melted by 2013"
- Al Gore
I remember actually believing this too
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u/Major-Drumeo 4d ago
You believed a politician and because of that you'll ignore the true experts in the field of study.
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u/Moosebreath22 3d ago
You're completely delusional if you think C02 is doing anything other than greening the planet.
Keep eating their slop
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u/UncannyIntuition 5d ago
If only this was published in Mad Magazine or published to Facebook. Unfortunately, being published in a reputable journal means it won’t be taken seriously by the people who need to hear it most.