“Climate Change Costs Are Starting to Bite Business”… How Not To Conjugate Verbs

Guest eye rolling by David Middleton

From the Sierra Club…

Climate Change Costs Are Starting to Bite Business
Corporate America wants a stable business climate, and climate chaos is anything but

BY PAUL RAUBER | APR 29 2019

What will it take for American businesses to get serious about fighting climate change? Maybe this: In January, facing $30 billion in liabilities for its role in recent wildfires, California’s mighty investor-owned utility Pacific Gas and Electric filed for bankruptcy protection. Overnight, the company lost half its value. “There is a fundamental shift taking place right now in business,” says Joel Makower, chair and executive editor of GreenBiz Group, “and the shift is from ‘What is business doing to the climate?’ to ‘What is climate doing to business?'”

If business does nothing, the downside is enormous. In North America, extreme weather events and natural disasters caused $91 billion in damages in 2018 alone, and the latest National Climate Assessment warns that if the world does not take strong action soon, annual losses to US businesses could total half a trillion dollars.

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The Bravo Sierra Club

• PG&E’s liability for “its role in recent wildfires” is not related to climate change.
• Weather is not climate.
• Warnings about mythical future perils are not “starting to bite business”… Misguided government policies in a futile war against the weather are definitely taking a bite out of business.

In arguendo let’s accept the claim that “extreme weather events and natural disasters caused $91 billion in damages in 2018.” Not all of these costs were to businesses, but we’ll run with that number. What else takes bites out of businesses?

1. March Madness $13.3 billion
2. Shoplifting $44 billion
3. Absenteeism $84 billion
4. Weather <$91 billion
5. Surfing the Internet $200 billion
6. Regulatory compliance $1,900 billion
7. Federal taxes $3,594 billion

Federal taxes includes personal income taxes, Social Security taxes, corporate income taxes, excise taxes and estate taxes because, ultimately, it’s business that generate the revenue that enables the taxation.

The IPCC calculated that it will cost $122 trillion to avoid 1.5 °C of warming relative to the alleged pre-industrial average. The average annual cost through 2050 would be $800 to $2,900 billion…

And there isn’t one shred of evidence that a $122 trillion Global War on Weather will have any effect on the weather.