how big business is hedging against the apocalypse - all in one solar street light

In April 11, 2019, investors finally began to focus on climate change.
It's not what you want.
Investors have finally begun to focus on climate change.
It's not what you want.
2019 Rex Tillerson stands under 32
Morton H. 's foot organ
The Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas explains how the world works.
That was May 2015, in the middle of oil mining.
Prices plunged, and profits at Exxon fell 46% from the same period last year.
But Tillerson, then chief executive of Exxon, told shareholders to be confident in the future.
Oil and gas provide cheap and reliable fuel for billions of people, including the poor.
The weak fiscal quarter is not easy to deny this fact.
Tillerson said: "Our view reflects the reality that modern life is enabled by abundant energy.
Later that morning, a French monk stood up and spoke. A so-called faith-
Michael Crosby is a group of religious leaders who buy shares in listed companies and want to have a moral impact on them.
While Tillerson is one of the world's largest oil companies and a power broker in international geopolitics, he is used to ignoring protesters, but it turns out that cross is more tactical than most.
He filed a motion to appoint climate.
The switch of experts from Exxon's board of directors gave him a few minutes to speak.
Later, he attacked Tillerson, saying he was "unmentioned" about climate change ".
He asked why Exxon didn't spend anything, but Saudi Arabia invested in solar panels?
"You live in the past," he told Tillerson . ".
At Exxon's annual meeting
Like most rooms where important business happens
People speak in a gentle pattern of corporate jargon, a language that masks the reality it describes.
So at 2,000-
The seating auditorium, which takes a little time to appreciate the gravity that Crosby actually describes, is not a few numbers on the balance sheet, but a number closer to the fate of the species.
Global energy consumption is soaring every year: the Energy Information Agency expects global energy consumption to grow by another 28% in a generation.
Hydropower, wind and solar contribute about 22% of the total and are growing every year.
However, the net energy generated by hydrocarbons is also increasing year by year.
Because demand is on the rise, all this is on the rise.
At the same time, global producers of hydrocarbons have stocked so many products that even if they burn half, it will make us worse than the head --or-
Chances of living under twodegree-
This could lead to mass famine, drought, floods and fires, according to the climate model. [
A well-known American institution is ready for the upcoming climate chaos: Pinkerton. ]
Tillerson saw the monk from the position below the organ.
"Whether you like it or not," he said, "in the coming decades," the world will depend on fossil fuels --
Until the middle of this century.
Whenever people ask Tillerson about the future of hydrocarbons, this is his route: to remind them of how dependent they are and to portray alternatives as childlike fantasies.
Tillerson said the climate change bill
The expert lost.
He thinks they are a fool when it comes to renewable energy.
"To be frank, Father Crosby," he said, "We chose not to lose money on purpose.
The audience at the Symphony Center applauded him.
Three years later, an Irish man named Declan Flanagan, CEO of renewable energy company Lincoln clean energy, issued a mysterious statement to his shareholders in Copenhagen.
Lincoln will build a solar farm in the second stack basin, he said.
Center of West Texas oil country-
Funded by "Blue"
Chip trading rivals
"Flanagan had the matter put on hold for a while in the room as he easily completed the latest news on regulatory matters.
He finally returned to the story.
"I mentioned blue --
He reminded his audience.
He said in a strong Irish accent, "That's Exxon oil.
From Exxon's meeting in Dallas to franagan's statement in Copenhagen, the oil giant has appointed a new chief executive.
Tillerson left Washington for a short stop-
But there has been no inner change.
No decision has been made to carry out piracy from hydrocarbons.
Exxon's executives, like everyone in the energy industry, have witnessed a declining cost of renewable energy in Texas.
The tense power lines carry electricity from the bright windy plains and narrow strip of the far west to the thirsty city below.
Instead of worrying, Exxon saw an opportunity.
Hydraulic fracturing is a very electric
An intensive method for extracting hydrocarbons.
Some of Exxon's operations in Texas use solar energy alone to save electricity and keep more cash.
It can make a profit by turning renewable energy into existing hydrocarbon energy.
Exxon's arrangement in Texas reflects, at a micro level, the indecision of our country to respond to the best approach to climate change.
As per your requirements, climate change does not exist, either as an engineering issue or as a global mobilization is required, or can be addressed by simply pushing free markets to take action.
Without a coherent strategy, the opportunistic can subtly step in and benefit from a changing environment. Tax-
Texas-backed renewable energy has taken coal-fired power plants off the line, but it also supports oil extraction.
Technology is improving, but the system is improving.
In the face of this turmoil and chaos, the system does what it does best: it looks for profit in the short term.
Unlike almost all other future events, 100% of climate change is sure to happen.
What we don't know is everything else: what does the location, way, time or change of Facebook, Pfizer or Chinese notes meanGovernment debt.
In theory, navigating these intricate jungles is something Wall Street is good;
The industry is proud of its ability to price risks for the economy as a whole to determine the value of the company based on the likelihood that the company will generate revenue.
But traders are paid quarterly or annual results, not their vision.
On 2030, when your colleague has reason to short, it takes confidence to walk into your boss's office and talk about the sea level in Mozambique.
Turkish lira sold this week.
In fact, no one in the financial system will be directly motivated to worry about the biggest risks in the short term.
The simplest response is to continue to invest in companies like Exxon and do business as usual when it is possible to adapt.
Another response is to forget what's in front of you and go further on a more sustainable bet.
For example, Al Gore, he wasted his time on climate change.
The dedicated fund is called Power Generation Investment Management.
Huge banks and mutual funds, sitting on slightly higher planes, continue to invest traditionally, but use "climate analysis" to see where their portfolios may contain problems, like a public utility that could go bankrupt because of a wildfire. [
Read David Leonard's article on the economics of climate change. ]
Other strategies are smarter.
Electric cars and green grids require valuable minerals and metals as batteries.
Spot prices of nickel and cobalt fluctuate twice
The share of the Commodity Exchange reached a number, while investors focused on lithium stocks.
Strategists at Merrill Lynch are predicting a future food crisis, advising customers to snap up vertical farms and "smart water farming ";
They expect water shortages and suggest investing in Chinese waste water.
Recycling business.
As the Earth heats up, the air becomes less dense.
In Phoenix in June 2017, airlines stopped flying multiple jets because their wings were at 119-degree heat.
Assuming 119 more-
Aerospace companies like MTU engines and Rolls Royce
Royce is making "lightweight" adjustments to some of their machines.
In Australia, an agricultural conglomerate waits for family farms to fail due to insufficient rainfall and then considers buying land at a discount.
In the case of drought, the chief executive told The Australian Financial Review last year, "we see more opportunities than normal.
A Dallas real estate manager told Bloomberg that he bought a hotel before Hurricane Harvey to take advantage of short-term demand.
And achieved a return of 25 to 30%.
The Harvard Endowment Fund bought California's vineyards and gained their water rights in a long drought.
By the middle of this century, the climate in the southeastern United States is likely to be tropical, no longer ideal for peach trees, but perfect for Egyptian mosquitoes --
Mosquitoes.
In response, some investors are making long-term investments in companies that conduct clinical trials of dengue and Zika vaccines: an asset manager told me that he knows a variety of "Zika strategies ".
Pharmaceutical companies foresee strong demand for anti-malaria drugs, which are often confined to poor countries;
They can look forward to markets in the rich world.
The researchers warned that in Miami, expensive neighborhoods are located near the water, and there may be a wave of "mass relocation" because taking off from the coast is to "make the higher places mild"
An altitude community like Xiaohai land.
A study warns speculators may already be "hedging the risk of gradual outflows from South Florida to the central and northern parts of the state ".
In Greenland, mining companies buy previously useless land rights in order to mine minerals that will soon be exposed to melted ice.
Except for uranium and molybdenum
A silver metal used in steel alloys
Miners expect to find the abundant oil reserves they fully expect to burn.
The Greenland drama is best reported by McKenzie Fink (McKenzie), whose 2014 book, fortune by accident, describes the first generation of climate profiteers.
Conspirators linger on these pages.
London climate-
The "Change Fund" invests in Russian farmland and is expected to be in the "drought-
The global food crisis.
"The same thing bet, the former partner of. I. G.
Planes to Sudan hit farmland
A lease with the rebel generalA former C. I. A.
Analysts bought "billions of gallons of water" in the southwestern United States and Australia ".
An Israeli entrepreneur has long been committed to desalination (
Some coal-driven, Funk Notes).
Many of these climate changes depend on assumptions that are so complex about the future, and the strange thing is how short-sighted they look.
They believe the world will change around a stable, fixed point.
The weather in the United States will gradually weaken and Tennessee will become an incubator for malaria, but banks and patent lawyers on Wall Street will stroll as usual.
The rising ocean will flood coastal financial centers under several feet of deep water, while the commodity market will pay the highest price for US dollar uranium.
These assumptions sound suspicious.
But overall, they reflect what is happening on Wall Street.
The previous year's temperature data is burned every year, but the stock market continues to break records.
A disturbing fact on Wall Street today is that some people who accurately predict the real estate bubble are now describing another bubble, and its collapse will make the financial crisis in 2008 look mild.
Perhaps the most famous is Jeremy Grantham, the founder of Boston. based asset-
Management CompanyM. O.
Commander of the British Empire.
In 2005, Grantham began writing to his investors, saying that the real estate market seemed to be over-leveraged;
On 2007, he warned that it was "the first real global bubble ".
His latest forecast masks the previous one.
'We are in a historical period of mispricing, 'he said.
Because the global economy relies on hydrocarbons, virtually every asset in the world has some connection to oil and gas.
Grantham believes that hydrocarbons will be priced or regulated.
Based on this belief, not only are the shares of oil companies, but almost everything else on the market is falsely exaggerated. [
Read New legal strategies for getting the world's largest polluters to pay for climate change. ]
In the past few years, Grantham has invested all his money into the project in addition to 2% of his personal wealth.
Energy storage, pesticides, light vehicles
This may help save us in the event of two degrees of warming.
On June 2018, he delivered a keynote speech at an investment conference in Chicago.
Two previous speeches by Grantham were called "cash flow in a balanced way" and "ETFs that understand multiple factors ".
Grantham called his speech "the race we live in ".
"You can call this speech a story of carbon dioxide and Homo sapiens," he began . ".
He then gave a speech for nearly an hour on topics such as glacier runoff, lack of food and lithium batteries.
He explained how the efficiency of the turbine increased exponentially with the length of the blade.
In the raging North Sea, he says, wind farms at sea will soon provide the cheapest power on earth.
He rose to a technology.
Utopian propaganda, talking about our obligations to our grandchildren, decent rather than profit.
Despite Grantham's clear remarks about climate change, he represents a complex and chaotic paradox.
When he was at the top of the market, he had a strong sense of responsibility for the market's failure to solve the problems that most troubled him.
However, he continues to help regulate a company worth $70 billion, a major source of his wealth.
If someone lives in a conflict between the market and the climate that afflicts people
Between our modern economy and its ultimate external costs
I thought Grantham was the one.
When I knocked on the door of his Beacon Hill townhouse at 8: 45 a. m. on Friday, the door opened and Grantham appeared on the stairs of 80 and impish, wearing a dark purple sweater on pinkand-
Green striped shirt.
"Have you waited a long time? ” he said.
I followed him.
The winter sun flooded the bay window, the story sitting room on the hand-
From the 17 th century, the Dutch children's sleigh was painted.
Grantham took my coat and asked me to sit on the sofa.
Every once in a while, somewhere behind me, a heat pipe hisses.
When Grantham founded the Grantham Foundation, the climate fund, in 1997, many Wall Street asset managers saw his work as a side-by-side pursuit.
"There is a dark stream, 'Oh, this is a pile [expletive],’u2009” he said.
Over the past two years, however, hurricanes, droughts, floods and displaced teams have prevented Wall Street's courteous business community from maintaining the same level of denial.
That doesn't mean climate.
Investment-based strategies have become popular.
The opposite is true: no one is willing to risk the climate of all the "professional units" Grantham calls.
"The problem of doing this accurately is certainly huge," he said . " He is talking about climate change. “It’s a fast-
More uncertain moving areas than the uncertain world.
This is the frontier of uncertainty.
Grantham's fund will invest in lithium and copper for a long time, which he believes will form a vascular system for renewable energy in the future.
Power Super Grid
His confidence stems from a strange and concrete belief that "there will be a carbon tax sooner or later" and that most of the market value of leading oil and gas companies will be erased.
"You are sure," he said . "
"It will happen.
Otherwise, we will move towards a failed civilization.
"It took me a little time to deal with what that meant.
Grantham said the bet on a carbon tax in the future is yes, because no carbon tax means a civilization disaster.
If he is right, he can make billions.
If he is wrong, it doesn't matter, because the world will catch fire.
"The logic is very good," Grantham said . " The old radiator around him grunted gled.
If Grantham's logic is so perfect, why don't everyone see it?
Wall Street often says that the price of the stock market reflects all the information available --
A concept called effective market theory.
The idea has dominated the financial industry for half a century.
If it is very obvious that the carbon bubble is about to explode, this theory believes that prices should reflect this --
In other words, Grantham has no advantage and his paper doesn't make sense.
"They say everything has a price," I said boldly . ". “Complete [expletive]
Said Grantham.
He then began to explain in detail why, summarizing John Maynard Keynes's theory of occupational risk --
"Traditional failure is better than unconventional success "--
Back to Now-
The Wall Street Journal, driven by short selling by asset managementterm self-
Fear of retreating interests on climate issues or direct denialrelated bets.
In the face of such irrational behavior, effective market theory seems to be swaying. “It’s [expletive]
Grantham continued: "Because people are incompetent, this is [expletive]because —”Around 10 a. m.
His cell phone rang and a woman's voice said, "Jeremy, you have to go to the next meeting.
For a second, Grantham looked almost sad.
He raised my coat and asked me to wear my arm over.
Then he burst into the snow downstairs.
The future location of Lincoln's solar farm built for Exxon, the second stack basin, is the hilly and semi-arid areas, with the white caliche road extending towards the oil rig and being punctured by natural flames at nightgas flares.
Sometimes, when the wind blows, the highway smells like sulfur.
In recent years, the second stack has become the region with the highest oil production. and-
With the advancement of horizontal drilling and fracturing technology, it is possible for US gas fields to break tightly packed shale.
Exxon, Chevron and their peers now have access to previously inaccessible natural gas and oil, as well as organic materials deposited about 0. 2 billion years ago by rough seas and sinking land.
If the second stack is a country, it will become one of the largest oil countries in the world.
Every cliché about the oil boom now applies to the second stack: 18-year-
The old man driving the truck earns six digits, Dr. petrochemicalD. Living in human beings
Camps, overburdened public schools and doctor's offices.
Unemployment in Midland, where there is the headquarters of Permian energy, where George W. Bush is also there.
This winter, Bush was raised and hovered around the 2 Th.
2%, fourth-
The lowest urban rate in the country.
However, the striking feature of the landscape is not the drilling infrastructure.
First of all, the hydraulic fracturing technology is applied underground, 10,000-
No more than 8 inch in diameter, only one wellhead marked foot tunnel.
On the other hand, you can't take your eyes off the wind turbines, which in some counties seem to be inlaid on every acre of land in the ranch.
Texas has more wind power than the rest of the country, four times the number of runners-up --up, California.
The Texas grid has inspired awe.
The Texas electric power reliability board calculates the cheapest power generated by each generator in the state every 24 hours and every five minutes every day, and then, sends the power along the path of least resistance to the customer.
From Ercot's point of view, it doesn't matter whether the cheapest power comes from solar panels or coal, or whether the customer is a greenhouse or an oil rig.
In last April, Texas consumed about 25.
7 million megawatts of electricity.
62% of them come from hydrocarbons and 27% from wind and solar energy.
All power supplies flow into the Ercot grid like a tributary.
Although Exxon's deal with Lincoln is one of the most obvious examples of fossils.
Fuel companies that use renewable energy, in fact, all the second stack mining agencies are consuming renewable energy, whether they intend to do so or not, simply because the design of the grid is for them.
In 2017, electricity demand in West Texas increased by 8%, compared with 1% for the entire state.
Warren lahill, senior director of Ercot systems planning, told me that most of this change came from oil and gas.
Frosty Gilliam, an independent oil worker, greeted me at the reception desk at the office on a sparse commercial highway in Odessa, Texas.
, And motioned me into a conference room that he called "the feeling of Tuscany", decorated with marble, hand-made
Light of plastering and antique.
Gilliam sat opposite me, on the dim table, he was small, silent, sparkling eyes and short hair.
Gilliam grew up in West Texas, got A degree in petroleum engineering in Texas A & M, graduated from 1980 of the oil boom and easily found A job in Amoco, from John D.
Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company
After 80, many small-time oil-and-
In the past, gas entrepreneurs in Texas, Gilliam began to build their own businesses by fighting for mineral rights.
His company, Aghorn Energy, now controls about 1,100 wells in the second stack, making him a relatively lightweight company. [
How does climate change affect your region?
We want to hear from you. ]
The atmosphere in the office was pleasant and I hesitated to ask a question that would be harmful to the office, but after half an hour I asked him what he thought about climate change.
Gilliam stared at me across the table for 14 seconds with a smirk in his mouth.
"Now you have arranged a bunch of hate mail for me," he said . ".
Personally, he does not see climate change as an important issue.
He said that when he saw data on sea level rise or high temperatures, he suspected that it was forged or manipulated to advance the political agenda.
Gillem is skeptical that many large energy companies are investing in renewable energy.
"The politically correct thing is, 'We will increase our renewable energy production by 10% a year '. K. ?
But actually, their business is selling oil and gas, right?
Gilliam spoke to a large extent in the first person and he stressed to me that he just made his own comments.
However, at the end of our time together, he turned into a collective voice to explain the reaction you would have caused if you appeared on Tesla in West Texas.
"We won't put tar and feathers on you," he said . ".
"We just think that he has his point of view, but our point of view is that there is no problem.
Tensions between individuals and species, Gilliam and "we" run through the heart of capitalism and have always existed.
In economics, there is a theory called the Lauderdale Paradox, which Scottish politician James Maitland elaborated in the early 19 th century.
The theory holds that capitalism undervalues public resources, such as air, water and soil, because they are very rich and overestimate private and scarce resources.
The price of oil per barrel is $50 or $60, however, the emissions of these oil do not appear on anyone's balance sheet.
When the paradox was first articulated, the British mill industry was transitioning from water to coal, a long and controversial process.
Coal allows factory owners to build factories in cities with lower wages and run their machines at any time.
But the water is cheaper, cleaner and more plentiful.
In newspapers and private clubs, politicians and journalists have had a heated debate about the merits of each fuel source, and the UK has hovered between the two possible futures for decades --
As scholar Andreas marm tells in the capital of fossils, the History of Early Industrialism
More aggressive city factory owners won and the country turned to hydrocarbons.
It is very grim to see the whole problem like this, due to the economic arrangements, not the relentless fate or the flaws of the human character, but also a little optimistic.
One system can dominate for a period of time, and then another system can secretly occupy its position.
At the far end of the Gilliam conference table, a map of the surveyor was opened and its corner was protected by the weight of the brown leather file.
The map depicts a mineral game of interest to Gillem, which may contain hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil.
Temporary and confidential documents are stamped in red at the bottom.
The map depicts typical hydrocarbon infrastructure, such as well position and large container barrels called storage tank batteries, displayed in blue and yellow rectangles.
But a board of gray lines is drawn on these features, dividing 3,700 acres of land into clean or even Square.
I asked what is Gilliam square.
"The solar farm," he said casually.
Earlier versions of this article incorrectly describe G in one example. M. O. , the asset-
Manage the company.
It is a company, not a fund.
The article erroneously states Jeremy Grantham's role in the company.
He did not manage the company;
He helped supervise.
The article also misrepresented the title of Grantham's speech.
This is "the race of our lives", not "protecting the earth and making a profit from the green cause ".
Jesse Barron is a writer in Los Angeles.
The last time he wrote an article for the magazine about environmental activist David bukel.