Greenpeace

An astonishing sight was to be seen the other day on the shores of Louisiana, where offshore oil workers, sidelined by the U.S. Government’s moratorium issued in response to the BP Deepwater Disaster, were clamoring to resume work on their rigs. The dissonance between the risks and rewards of this dangerous livelihood and the health and welfare of all of our lives is drastic.

View more images from the BP Deepwater Disaster and oil spill

These workers are not to blame for this dissonance. The overconsumption of our lifestyles and our nation’s idiotic energy policies are to blame, as well as some villainous oil lobbyists and a Congress that does not have the courage to stand up to the largest polluters nor to tell the truth about our urgent need to change our environmental ways.

These off-shore oil workers will likely have to move to other parts of the country for work, and it probably won’t pay as well. (Perhaps dangerous cleanup or rigging jobs will still exist.) Also, most of the Gulf Coast’s normal businesses will be shuttered. Tourism and fishing and all the businesses that depend on healthy coastlines will be harmed for generations – if not forever – by this sickening oil spill.  

We always talk about a transition to a clean energy economy, but treat it like a philosophical problem instead of the most urgent undertaking we have. These workers are standing next to a catastrophe caused by their work and they still demand to go back because they need jobs and money. The time for philosophical musing or political jockeying lapsed over ten years ago.

We have a global emergency.

We must transform our economy, retrain works, and retrofit and build new infrastructure. We must create a real Energy Revolution... NOW.

Climate change is the mother of all financial risks. In addition to its disastrous environmental effects, which will impact all of us, climate change is beginning to disturb supply chains, manufacturing, markets, water, and weather. In other words, global warming could soon make running a business almost impossible by transforming even well-run companies into subprime investments.

Which is probably why the SEC, which regulates our financial markets, recently ruled that corporations must show the risk of climate change on their books:

The Securities and Exchange Commission said on Wednesday for the first time that public companies should warn investors of any serious risks that global warming might pose to their businesses.

Although the agency has long required companies to reveal possible financial or legal impacts from a variety of environmental challenges, it has never specifically cited climate change as bringing potentially significant business risks or rewards.

A year ago, we showed that if the 4 largest coal companies in the U.S. were charged $1/ton for the CO2 emitted from their coal in 2007, this cost of carbon would wipe out their profits and cause most of them to lose over $150 million.



And that was being kind, because the going rate for CO2 in Europe is $12/ton.

What would have happened if these companies paid more of their true costs of doing business? Coal would no longer be considered a good investment or a cheap source of energy.