
Moody’s Buys Climate Data Firm, Signaling New Scrutiny of Climate Risks - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/climate/moodys-ratings-climate-change-data.html
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blueboo
Moody’s, the security rating agency whose one job was to signal the diseased
state of asset backed securities leading up to 2008 and completely failed
since the subjects of their analysis are also their clients.

This is just branding for more clients

~~~
roenxi
I agree, but Moody's does have a reasonable defense against being called a
failure.

We can't really expect them to ascertain the true state of things, because
that is impossible and nobody can do that. And if they could do that, they'd
put their knowledge to use as a trading firm rather than telling people what
is going on.

Their job is to compile what 'everyone' knows and report it because that is
all they can reliably do. That is something that can be achieved consistently,
and that their customers probably do want to know.

~~~
deogeo
> Moody's does have a reasonable defense against being called a failure.

"the subjects of their analysis are also their clients." sounds less like
failure and more like fraud. 'Failure' is what they hope it's seen as, to
avoid legal consequences.

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projectileboy
This is the start of what I’ve been waiting for. But I don’t think we’ll see
real action until the risk starts getting priced into coastal real estate,
both directly and indirectly (i.e. insurance and reinsurance).

~~~
hollerith
I would have started with the assumption that the risks are already being
priced into coastal real estate (because real-estate investors are not
ignorant of climate change). What is your evidence that they are not?

~~~
projectileboy
Empirically, it doesn’t appear to be the case.
[https://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Miami-Florida/market-
tren...](https://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Miami-Florida/market-trends/)

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SantalBlush
Things brings to mind an issue that I haven't seen addressed. Profiting
directly from climate change will be an increasing threat. If investors start
snapping up real estate in northern Canada, for example, it creates perverse
incentives--not just to ignore climate change, as oil companies have, but to
encourage it.

Don't think that people won't devise ways to make a fortune from this
disaster.

~~~
spraak
> northern Canada

I've been frequenting r/collapse and one of the perspectives there is that
increasing heat in the north will create desertification and thus not a very
hospitable place to live. Which leaves me wondering, where at all would be?
Maybe no where... I live near the equator at low elevation and I can't imagine
it will be better here either.

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RickJWagner
Hmmmm. I'm not so sure I want big corporations becoming entangled with climate
change data. Sometimes those profit motives cause some less than optimal usage
of resources.

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harry8
Moody's rate co2 AAA. Just like distressed debt securitisation...

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nisten
Weirdly enough this actually gives me a lot of hope for humanity and is the
beginning of a realistic and scalable solution to climate change.

The main problem with the free market has been lack of accountability and
dollar damage projections on environmental damage.

Most fossil-fuel energy companies have lobbied against it because it would
make their product a lot more expensive to produce if their customers had to
pay a market-rate fee for it's burning/disposal. The ammount of carbon that
can be dumped out is finite, yet the cost is artificially set to zero/free
which makes no sense unless you live in a communist system.

By accounting this into credit risk, it makes it more expensive for
governments to ignore the environment. It means they have to pay a lot more
interest on their debt which puts maximum political pressure on them to
address the money problem regardless of their ideology beliefs.

This also makes clean energy companies actually competitive at market rate
since they have very little carbon dumping to pay for.

It also puts a lot more pressure to improve the measurement accuracy of carbon
emission if it is actively being traded. It also greatly increases insurance
costs for new fossil fuel development because now they can face liability when
people's homes are flooded for the first time.

On the positive side, It also makes local farming produce more competitive and
economically stable too because it needs to burn a lot less gas, thus pay for
less carbon waste for delivery compared to a similar product that's shipped
from extremely greater distances.

Because shipping does not pay a market rate for carbon waste, it creates some
absurd situations.

For example a lot of pepper farmers here in Ontario actually ship their
produce all the way to China for packaging and then ship it back here to sell
because it saves them a small margin this way in the current cost.

By enabling the market to factor in environmental costs, you're basically
letting a distributed graph-based computer, a giant hive mind, the market,
address the problem a lot more efficiently and with massively more processing
power than you would have with central planning.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
Wish I shared your optimism. It is simply too little, too late for humanity to
avoid serious, calamitous effects of climate change.

Take a look at these graphs:

1\. Annual worldwide CO2 emissions by region:
[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-
re...](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-region)

That graph keeps growing _every_ year (save for major recession years).
Consider how much effort it would take just to reduce the growth to 0, where
we would still be very much screwed.

2\. Global CO2 concentration: [https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-co-
concentration-p...](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-co-
concentration-ppm)

Again, up and to the right, consistently, for decades, with no sign of slowing
down.

3\. Same graph of CO2 concentration, but over a longer timescale, to really
freak you out: [https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-concentration-long-
te...](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-concentration-long-term)

I'll start having optimism when I see even a small change in the direction of
these graphs.

~~~
nisten
There are more drastic ways to cool the planet and they're actually
economically feasible too.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJFtdvrTZs4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJFtdvrTZs4)

By no means are they safe or anything, the environmental impact is vast and
with many unknowns. However at some point in the passing decades it will be
unethical not to use them. The environmental damage of the continuing warming
will be greater that the possible environmental damage of the geo-engineering
methods. Therefore we will most likely use them.

The 2 most practical methods that can be enacted by a single nation today are
ocean fertilization to spur growth of oxygen producing plankton and spraying
of reflective sulphur dioxide dust in the stratosphere, even if all the
permafrost melts, methane in the atmosphere has a half life of only 7 years.

The carbon is the main problem. At 1000 ppm we can still breathe despite the
impact it has on our cognitive health. Most likely we'll offset that with
massive tree planting at scale. Other carbon capture methods are not that
scalable in my opinion. Wood is basically captured carbon, it makes great
building material and certain species of it can grow pretty fast over and over
again like bamboo which grows 91cm/3ft per day. Genetically modified
derivatives of it are quite likely to be developed too.

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myth_drannon
Northern passage is opening up, trade with Chinese goods will be much cheaper.
There is a lot of profit to be made on top of dead bodies of millions of
future victims of the climate catastrophe.

~~~
refurb
Cheaper for who? The Panama Canal is a pretty direct route.

~~~
nostrademons
It saves about 4000 km and 4 days off of Vancouver -> Finland, which for one
early transit was worth about $200K:

[https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-
business/breakthro...](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-
business/breakthrough/will-cold-dark-northwest-passage-see-more-
ships/article16231502/)

There're still a lot of practical problems with the Northwest Passage -
notably, the most direct routes are too shallow, there remain lots of icebergs
and ice sheets, it's not well-mapped, and there are few resupply ports along
the way. I'm not sure I'd agree with all the criticisms in the article
(notably, they assume the Northwest Passage will always have ice in winter,
but in many "greenhouse earth" scenarios the arctic is ice-free year-round),
but it's decades out, not years.

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plouffy
Wouldn't this also be related to the European requirement for companies to
account in their filings a measure of how climate change may impact them ?

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diogenescynic
Why did it take this long? Serious question. Was weather not considered an
insightful input/value until now? Why?

