A 3°C world ...

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Yours truly has waxed "poetic" about climate change as you, my loyal readers know. Now that 1.5 C has been surpassed vis a vis the Paris Agreements, the march toward 3C begins in earnest, particularly with Agent Orange bent on boosting fossil fuel production to the max no matter what the cost may be. Now, banks are sweating the program because profits are at risk in a changing world promising disruption in ways never experienced by man.

The recent reports — from Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and the Institute of International Finance — show that Wall Street has determined the temperature goal is effectively dead and describe how top financial institutions plan to continue operating profitably as temperatures and damages soar.

"We now expect a 3°C world," Morgan Stanley analysts wrote earlier this month, citing "recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts."

The stunning conclusion indicates that the bank believes the planet is hurtling toward a future in which severe droughts and harvest failures become widespread, sea-level rise is measured in feet rather than inches and tropical regions experience episodes of extreme heat and humidity for weeks at a time that would bring deadly risks to people who work outdoors.

The global Paris Agreement, from which the U.S. is withdrawing under Trump, aims to limit average temperature increases to well below 2 degrees Celsius. Scientists have warned that permanently exceeding 1.5 degrees — a threshold the world breached for the first time last year — could lead to increasingly severe climate impacts, such as the demise of coral reef ecosystems that hundreds of millions of people rely on for food and storm surge protection.

3°C & Counting ...

But you gotta make money ...

"Financial institutions need to recalibrate targets to reflect that 1.5°C are no longer suitable as strategic goals," the briefing said. "Reputational concerns may arise in the absence of an aligned view amongst stakeholders on how such processes should be handled, and what criteria may need to be applied."

The banking industry can support the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy but capital will only move "at scale when the economics make sense," Mary Kate Binecki, a spokesperson for the Institute of International Finance, said in an email. The institute represents about 400 members from more than 60 countries, including JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley.

Gotta love the language. Complexification to the max applies.