As climate change rapidly spirals out of control, big business is preparing for the inevitable.
According to a new study from the environmental organization CDP, at least 1,300 corporations, including Goldman Sachs, Disney, and Microsoft, either have an internal carbon pricing plan or are about to put one in place.
The thinking here is simple.
At some point or another (and hopefully sooner rather than later) we, as a civilization, are going to have to institute a carbon tax on all fossil fuel emissions.
It's the most practical way to stop climate change, and it's only way to recoup the costs of all the damage Big Oil, Big Coal, and Big Gas have done and continue to do to our planet.
Giant corporations like Microsoft know this, and so they want to be as prepared as possible for the day when they too have to start paying for their emissions or the increased cost of energy produced by fossil fuels.
This should be a wake-up call to everyone about just how real the crisis we're facing really is.
These corporations are conservative and self-interested by nature, and they wouldn't be adding extra costs to their budgets unless they thought they had to.
Factoring in the cost of another tax is literally the last thing they want to do, but in the long run having a functioning society is better for their bottom line than a society devastated by climate change, so they're sucking it up and going forward with their carbon pricing plans.
Welcome to the future.
Accepting the reality of climate change and the financial, social, and political challenges it presents is something every single company, every single government, and every single agency is going to have do in the coming years and decades.
Corporations like Goldman Sachs, Disney, and Microsoft are getting a head start on this with their internal carbon pricing plans.
So is the
Pentagon's with its warnings that climate change represents a grave threat to national security, and so is the
insurance industry with its urgent reminders that extreme weather events could bankrupt many providers.
Basically anyone with any reason to worry about the future -- financial, political, you name it -- accepts the reality of climate change and the necessity of doing something about it.
And then there's the Republican Party.
The so-called Grand Old Party, the party of Lincoln, is the only major political party in the developed world that denies man-made climate change.
