Climate change changes everything — massive capital flight from fossil fuels now under way

If one were to search for an example of the utterly and inherently life, climate, and economy destroying impacts of fossil fuel burning, they wouldn’t have to look too far. They could look to the rapidly destabilizing glaciers now putting our coastal cities, our island nations in dire peril. They could look to the droughts now ranging the world, forcing officials in Sao Paulo to make water out of mud, lighting understory fires in the Amazon rainforest, and setting off water scarcity crises from the US West Coast, to the Caribbean, to South America and on through broad sections of Asia and Africa. They could look to the nation-destabilizing crises that have already rippled through our world.

The collapse of Syria due to drought, the fractures running through both India and Bangladesh due to sea level rise, the immigration camps Australia has already set up to deal with a rising tide of island migrants — driven from their homes more and more by increasingly extreme weather and the swelling seas (see also Australia’s Immigration Detention Facilities). 158 million persons were displaced by extreme weather over the past 7 years. A flood that has swelled the ranks of refugees inundating the developed countries of the world from Europe to North America to Southeast Asia.

A So-Called Resource that is Instead a Curse

And all this just a brief and incomplete overview that doesn’t include the massive wildfires, the great species displacement and winnowing, the coral reef bleaching, the ocean dead zone expanding, or the amplifying feedback inducing nature of the 1 C warming we’ve experienced since the 1880s. More than 1/4 of the warming experienced over 10,000 years at the end of the last ice age. But this warming all crammed into a mere 135 years. A warming set off by a massive burning of fossil fuels that has continued to ramp higher to this day. A warming that will continue to worsen, setting off an age of Storms leading to a hothouse world that is not at all friendly to life or human habitation — if we do not stop lighting fossil fueled fires.