Run a google search of "World Bank" and "climate change" and you'll discover that this month the World Bank released a major study predicting a global "cataclysm" if world-wide temperatures increase by a predicted four degrees celsius (that's roughly 8 degrees fahrenheit).
But the articles reporting that information, at least here in the US, will be almost entirely business magazines like Bloomberg/Businessweek, or Forbes. Check the New York Times, and you won't find the story, at least so far, and it's already at least four days old. The Washington Post had the story on Monday, but it was tucked away in its business section, which is how it was treated by most publications that bothered to report on it. The one exception to this covereage pattern is USA Today, which on Nov. 19 ran a short piece on the World Bank report in its news pages.
Is the news that the World Bank is predicting catastrophe for billions of people and for life on this entire planet a business story?
Certainly not!
Any idiot could tell you, speaking objectively, that the so-called "Fiscal Cliff," an entirely political crisis in which Republicans in Congress have decided to threaten to crash the US economy by cutting $600 billion from the federal budget while raising taxes on everyone unless Democrats agree to cut Social Security and Medicare spending and to extend a decade of extraordinary tax cuts for the wealthy, is a minor story compared to a report that the earth is headed towards climate disaster this century unless dramatic action is taken to reduce the pace of global warming caused by the rapacious burning of fossil fuels. Yet it's the "Fiscal Cliff" crisis that is getting page one play, and not just on one day, but every day.
The truth is, when I talk to business leaders, economists and stock market analysts in my "other" role as a business reporter, they tell me that they aren't really worried about the country going over that "cliff." The common refrain -- and the reason you don't see the stock market already plunging to half its value in anticipation -- is that this is a political game in Washington, all for public consumption by the masses, and that in the end, there is no real cliff, and no will in either party to push the country over one...
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