Insurance Companies and Climate Change

By Jessica In our case on Travelers Insurance, we learned about the immense effect climate change can have on insurance companies: claim volume has been climbing year over year and catastrophes like Hurricane Sandy can cause drops in profits of over 50%. As climate change increases the amount of catastrophic natural disasters, insurance companies have […]

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Silence on the Climate Front

By Alex Auden Schendler from the Aspen Skiing Company was adamant about the need to get Fortune 500 CEOs to speak more openly about climate change. Through this comment I’d like to explore some key reasons why CEOs aren’t going on record with a firmer stance on climate change. It’s my hope that elucidating some […]

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Dear Mr. Liveris: Please Join the Fight Against Climate Change

By Anonymous. Earlier this month, Auden Schendler, the Vice President for Sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company, posed a scenario to our class: “imagine you are working a large company and your CEO asks whether the company should join the fight against climate. What do you recommend? Should the company speak out about climate change?” In […]

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A Green Climate Fund for the USA

By Blake In the Katrina case, we discussed the challenges that cities face from climate change and how they can address them. Some of the proposals mentioned were to change building codes, use property taxes to discourage building in riskier locations, modify insurance policies, and redo zonings to discourage building in undesirable areas. All of […]

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Response: Our Erstwhile Saviors Mr. Democracy and Sir Capitalism are Destroying…

By Seth A student from the class in 2013 put forward a provocative and interesting hypothesis that democracy and capitalism may simply not be up to the task of mitigating climate change due to their inherent focus on the short term (https://innovbusenergyenviro.wordpress.com/2013/10/19/our-erstwhile-saviors-mr-democracy-and-sir-capitalism-are-actually-together-destroying-our-planet/). Commenters at the time pointed out that it is not clear that other […]

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Facilitating Linkage of …Climate Policies… Through a Future International Agreement

By John Macomber IBEE classmate Seth Hoedl and colleagues have just published a discussion paper,  ” “Facilitating Linkage of Heterogeneous Regional, National, and Sub-National Climate Policies Through a Future International Agreement”    This work is part of the KSG Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Story and link to paper here. “The Harvard Project on […]

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Can Geo-Engineering fix climate change?

By Andres H. Nearly two decades after the world’s first climate change treaty in Kyoto, that failed to stop the rise of carbon emissions, the announcement last week that the US and China reached an agreement about new targets for CO2 emissions, sounded positive and encouraging. However, experts immediately stated that last Wednesday’s announcement does […]

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Should we re-invest in high-risk areas in New Orleans?

By Anonymous (with many family links to Tulane University and New Orleans) Should we re-invest in high-risk areas in New Orleans? This issue came up during our discussion of the Katrina situation. I think it’s extremely important to focus on the low-risk areas, especially in the New Orleans decision. First, the majority of the money […]

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How can we further encourage climate change insurance?

By Daniel An issue raised during the Aspen Skiing Corp case focused on the varying levels of susceptibility of companies to the impacts of climate change. It makes intuitive sense that the industries an companies most exposed to the threat of climate change are loudest in leading the call for change. Despite this, there is […]

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What is moral with respect to climate and carbon?

By John Macomber Here are two op-ed pieces from this week regarding morality, carbon, and climate.   Reconciling these points of view might make a thought provoking set of blog posts and comments.   One approach would be to suspend your own going-in position and assess both arguments based on some level of objective or evidence-based analysis.     […]

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