Bill McKibben writes:

Sometimes the human trauma of the climate crisis is too painful to recite, and this is one of those times: the busiest hurricane season ever recorded is continuing on into the late fall, with consequences so horrifying one can hardly stand to look. Right now, Hurricane Iota is mashing Central America; it will likely be a few days before we know the precise results. So let’s talk about what has already happened in Honduras, when Hurricane Eta dropped torrential rains on the city of San Pedro Sula, triggering floods that have caused more than sixty deaths (the toll is still rising), destroyed twenty-three bridges and “partially ruined” forty-three more, and wrecked a hundred and forty-three highways. Three million people—a third of the country’s population—were “seriously affected.” As of the weekend, authorities said that they had no contact with sixty-nine towns, home to a hundred thousand people. And Hurricane Iota has just crashed into the same terrain, dropping yet more torrents on the saturated country, which was already dealing not just with covid-19 but with a bad dengue outbreak. Here’s the bottomest of bottom lines: Eta alone, in a few days, cost Honduras the equivalent of around twenty per cent of its gross domestic product. (Hurricane Katrina, among the worst recorded in American history, cost the U.S. about one per cent of its G.D.P.) Needless to say, the President of the United States did not bother even to tweet about the disaster; the U.S. Agency for International Development offered a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.

Again, let’s keep to numbers, the clinical (very nearly cynical) calculation of dollars and cents that hide both broken bodies and the basic immorality of the crisis. (Honduras, it almost need not be said, has done next to nothing to cause global warming.) Dollars and cents may be our best chance to attack the underlying cause of climate change in the years ahead—the Biden Administration, absent a Democratic-controlled Senate, will struggle to pass straightforward climate legislation, but it should be able to put new pressure on Wall Street that could begin to starve the fossil-fuel industry and bankroll the desperately needed conversion to clean energy. Less than a week after the election, the Federal Reserve started catching up to where European regulators have been for years, Politico reports, encouraging “financial firms to provide more information about how their investments could be affected by frequent and severe weather and could improve the pricing of climate risks, ‘thereby reducing the probability of sudden changes in asset prices.’ ” The next day, the Fed requested to join other central bankers in the international Network for Greening the Financial System. That pressure will likely intensify, as new regulators take over in January. “Leading Democrats,” according to Politico, “want to go even further by forcing lenders to abide by disclosure rules and stress tests to make sure they aren’t the source of a new crisis. The fear is that destructive climate events—as well as a costly transition to a lower-carbon economy—will wreak havoc on the banks’ portfolios and destabilize the financial system.”

The extent of that pressure will likely depend on how interested key personnel turn out to be. The Sunrise Movement, for instance, supports Elizabeth Warren for Treasury Secretary, a move that may be less likely since the Massachusetts House of Representatives last week rejected an amendment insuring that, if she joined the Cabinet, the person appointed to fill out her Senate term would be a Democrat. The movement’s second choice, Sarah Bloom Raskin, has impeccable credentials as an Obama-era Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, and has long been outspoken about climate change. The Federal Reserve Board member Lael Brainard, cited by pundits as another top candidate for Treasury Secretary, has been talking about the issue for at least a year. [Continue reading…]