Preparing now for climate change is smart business

Bruce Kennedy in Daily finance: …Believers in climate change warn that its future expense could cripple national and international economies. … But some observers remain skeptical about these numbers. "None of the data, none of the research studies or articles that I read are very clear on what the actual metrics are about costs," says Bruce Hutton, dean emeritus at the University of Denver's Daniels College of Business. Hutton has spent much of his career studying sustainable development, marketing research and corporate social responsibility. He believes some researchers are basing their estimates only on the negative costs -- without considering the increases in jobs, energy and economic performance expected from a growing renewable energy sector.

The current economic arguments over climate change, he says, are distorted by the "apparent fact-free political process we seem to be in, where it doesn't really matter what you say or what the truth is."

But Hutton says climate change is an industrial risk-management issue that cannot be ignored. "The World Business Council for Sustainable Development and some other organizations are having this conversation with businesses, about the idea of facing these mega-risks in our society," he says. "The question is: What happens if climate change is actually real and if it's somewhere in the vicinity of what most scientists say it's going to be? The question for a company -- or a community, for that matter -- is: What are the costs of that to me, in terms of how it's going to affect my business?"

…But Hutton doubts there's going to be a "gold rush" on sustainable energy in the near future. "Jeffrey Immelt at GE said we live in a kind of reset world now, from the financial markets going to hell to other stuff," he says. "We're not going to see what's been happening today as a cycle that's going to come back. We're in a time in which we have to create new stories."

And he hopes it doesn't take some climate change "mega-event" to get American industries thinking, planning and preparing. "The culture of the U.S. is we typically don't rise to the occasion until we're at the brink," Hutton says. "We have an amazing ability to respond to crises. The problem is that the issue we face today [is] a kind of [a] creeping crisis. It's a slippery slope problem. At some point we're going to have to adjust without the "defining moment" because the defining moment may be too damn late."…

Some bleak clouds, shot by Fir0002, flagstaffotos.com.au, Wikimedia Commons, nder the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 only