Climate change–induced damage to the Gulf Stream was a hot Davos
topic in 2003.
Some of the world’s largest oil and auto companies also acknowl-
edge the perils of climate change and are positioning themselves for a
new noncarbon economy. BP is now the world’s leading provider of
solar systems. Shell has created a new $1 billion core company to pro-
duce renewable energy technologies. Ford and DaimlerChrysler,
together with Ballard Power Corporation, have entered a $1 billion joint
venture to produce fuel-cell-powered cars. And both Honda and Toyota
are marketing 50- to 70-mile-per-gallon climate-friendly hybrid cars in
the United States.
The strongest corporate concerns about climatic instability come
from the world’s property insurers. During the 1980s, the insurance
industry lost an average of $2 billion a year to damages from droughts,
floods, storm surges, sea-level rise, and other extreme weather events.
In the 1990s, it lost an average of $12 billion a year—$89 billion in
1998 alone. “Man-made climate change will bring us increasingly
extreme natural events and consequently increasingly large catastro-
phe losses,” an official of Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurance
company, said recently.
But the impending damages go far beyond insurance losses. In early
2003, Swiss Reinsurance said it anticipates losses from climate impacts to
jump to about $150 billion a year within this decade. Munich Re estimates
that within several decades, losses from climate impacts will amount to
$300 billion a year.
The largest property reinsurance company in Britain has projected
that, unchecked, the impacts of climate change could bankrupt the global
economy within 65 years. According to that scenario, the warming-
driven damages from property loss, disease spread, crop destruction,
and the disruption of infrastructures for energy, transportation, manu-
facturing, and public health—which are currently growing by about 10
percent a year—would exceed the world’s annual gross domestic product
in about 65 years.
While die-hard elements of the fossil fuel lobby continue to attack
the findings of mainstream science, they are becoming increasingly
isolated. For years, the Washington, D.C.–based Global Climate
6 Introduction