{"id":94427,"date":"2016-08-17T10:00:40","date_gmt":"2016-08-17T14:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/countingpips.com\/?p=94427"},"modified":"2016-08-17T07:01:08","modified_gmt":"2016-08-17T11:01:08","slug":"the-global-war-on-global-warming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/2016\/08\/the-global-war-on-global-warming\/","title":{"rendered":"The Global War on Global Warming"},"content":{"rendered":"
August 17, 2016<\/div>
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By WallStreetDaily.com<\/u><\/a> \"The<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to put numbers and titles on them now, there are so many.<\/p>\n

What was once the Great War, or \u201cThe War to End All Wars,\u201d only two decades later became World War I with the start of World War II.<\/p>\n

The United States then segued almost immediately into the Cold War, which, with hot flashes such as Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan, certainly merits at least a debate about whether it was World War III.<\/p>\n

And now, for nearly 16 years, we\u2019ve engaged in the global war on terror, which seems like a workshopped euphemism for \u201cWorld War IV\u201d to me.<\/p>\n

So ready for yet another one?<\/p>

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How does the \u201cThe Great Global War on Climate Change\u201d sound?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s World War V \u2013 the \u201cWarm War.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an article published on Aug. 15, 2016, by The New Republic<\/em>, environmentalist and author Bill McKibben argues that the next president of the United States must declare war on climate change in the same way as FDR did in 1941, when we formally threw in with the Allies and took on the Axis powers.<\/p>\n

The mobilization before Dec. 7 as well as after that Day of Infamy constitutes one of the most intense experiments in countercyclical government spending ever conducted.<\/p>\n

Harnessing the power of the American private industry for the massive Lend-Lease program helped feed and arm the United Kingdom, Free France, the Republic of China and the USSR. And it helped us retake control of the Pacific from the empire of Japan and simultaneously chase Hitler\u2019s Wehrmacht across Europe.<\/p>\n

Seventeen million new civilian jobs were created, industrial productivity increased by 96% and corporate profits after taxes doubled.<\/p>\n

By 1944, as a result of wage increases and overtime pay, real weekly wages before taxes in manufacturing were up 50% compared with 1939.<\/p>\n

The effort also resulted in the creation of entire new technologies, industries and associated human skills.<\/p>\n

That war ended the Great Depression once and for all.<\/p>\n

So of course, policymakers have replicated the model ever since. And the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned of in his Jan. 17, 1961, farewell address fits the very definition of \u201cubiquitous.\u201d<\/p>\n

(How ironic that Ike\u2019s path to the presidency started with his appointment as supreme allied commander in Europe during World War II, the conflagration that resulted in the ascendance of the American empire.)<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not that global warming is like<\/em> a world war,\u201d writes McKibben. \u201cIt is a world war. And we are losing.\u201d<\/p>\n

His prescription: \u201cDefeating the Nazis required more than brave soldiers. It required building big factories, and building them really, really fast.\u201d<\/p>\n

That message is likely to resonate with the next president.<\/p>\n

American scientists, McKibben explains, \u201chave been engaged in a quiet but concerted effort to figure out how quickly existing technology can be deployed to defeat global warming,\u201d describing these efforts as a \u201cmodest start\u2026 for a mighty Manhattan Project.\u201d<\/p>\n

McKibben cites research from Stanford University that concluded that each state could be powered 100% by the sun, wind and water by 2050.<\/p>\n

That translates to approximately 6,448 gigawatts (GW) of clean energy, or the equivalent of 295 solar factories the size of SolarCity Corp.\u2019s gigafactory under construction in Buffalo, New York.<\/p>\n

The downside risks of global warming already factor into the investment equation.<\/p>\n

According to a report prepared by Morgan Stanley<\/strong> (MS), The Investor\u2019s Guide to Climate Change, a recent Global Investor Survey found that 81% of asset owners and 68% of asset managers viewed climate change as \u201ca material risk or opportunity across their entire investment portfolio.\u201d<\/p>\n

And The Economist Intelligence Unit has estimated \u201cthat private investors are at risk of losing $4.2 trillion between now and the turn of the next century because of a warming planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, according to Bloomberg Business, investors with nearly $800 billion in assets have shifted money into more climate-friendly investments such as wind and solar energy.<\/p>\n

So there\u2019s opportunity, too. And a mini-mobilization is already underway.<\/p>\n

Indeed, we\u2019re going to have a new president in five months. Models incorporating polls as well as macro factors indicate a win for Hillary Clinton.<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t say with absolute certainty who\u2019ll take the oath come Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, 2017.<\/p>\n

But if I were a gambling man, I\u2019d put my money on the Washington consensus neoliberal, the reliable caretaker of the American Empire\u2026 the statist who believes in anthropogenic climate change.<\/p>\n

Mrs. Clinton has clearly expressed economic policy ideas redolent of \u201cKeynesianism.\u201d (Her rival for the White House, Donald Trump, has dismissed man-made climate change as a \u201choax,\u201d but he has also endorsed a Keynesian-style infrastructure spending spree.)<\/p>\n

But we\u2019re not here to debate the virtues and vices of that particular economic theory.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re here to understand how public policy choices will impact investment portfolios.<\/p>\n

There are companies already engaged in the Global War on Global Warming, including small-caps SolarCity, which installs solar energy systems for homes and businesses, and First Solar Inc. and SunPower Corp., both of which produce solar panels.<\/p>\n

Stocks of solar energy technology companies have been hammered due to the steep decline in prices for fossil-fuel commodities.<\/p>\n

There are big-cap companies on the front lines, too, including NextEra Energy Inc., which owns the largest fleet of clean-power generating capacity in the United States.<\/p>\n

NextEra, which continues to perform well, based on its old-school utility business model, is a conservative way to play the switch to solar, sun and hydro power.<\/p>\n

Innovation is going to play a massive role in the effort to counter the impact of global warming. Existing solar tech companies will benefit. So will forward-looking utilities such as NextEra.<\/p>\n

And there will be new technologies and new companies propped up by focused fiscal attention on the issue.<\/p>\n

An effort like McKibben advocates would certainly accelerate the innovation-deployment-cost reduction cycle.<\/p>\n

NBNBC<\/h2>\n

Even large companies \u2013 like \u201cBig Blue\u201d\u2013 can do crazy new stuff to advance the innovation ball.<\/p>\n

As Singularity Hub reports: \u201cThanks to a sleek new computer chip developed by IBM, we\u2019re one step closer to making computers work like the brain.\u201d<\/p>\n

The neuromorphic chip that IBM scientists have created \u201cis made from a phase-change material commonly found in rewritable optical discs.\u201d<\/p>\n

This \u201csecret sauce\u201d enables the chip\u2019s parts to act like neurons: \u201cThey can scale down to nanometer size and perform complicated computations rapidly with little energy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The full research paper, published by the journal Nature Nanotechnology<\/em> on May 16, 2016, is available here<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Smart Investing,<\/p>\n

David Dittman
\nEditorial Director, Wall Street Daily<\/i><\/p>\n

The post The Global War on Global Warming<\/a> appeared first on Wall Street Daily<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By WallStreetDaily.com It\u2019s hard to put numbers and titles on them now, there are so many. What was once the Great War, or \u201cThe War to End All Wars,\u201d only two decades later became World War I with the start of World War II. The United States then segued almost immediately into the Cold War, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","no-post-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94427"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":94446,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94427\/revisions\/94446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmacro.com\/forex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}