The incentives for business as usual are absolutely enormous. Your incentive is not to worry about climate change, your incentive is to write as many policies as you can. Same with almost all businesses. But the net effect of that is that basicy leaves us blind to long term threats. If the insurance industry, which right on the front lines of risk for climate change, can't really adjust, what other industries cant? Most of them.
Author and environmental journalist Eugene Linden's new book, Fire and Flood: A People’s History of Climate Change from 1979 to the Present, lays out how successive US governments managed to delay action on climate change when they should have been raising the alarm. It also looks at why the climate emergency will have a big impact on the global economy and why China and India, which could have taken a lead on renewables, double downed on coal to fuel their industrialisation in the 1990s. Our host for the podcast is the economist and broadcaster Linda Yueh.
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