"HANK PAULSON: Climate Change Risk Is The New Housing Bubble"

HANK PAULSON: Climate Change Risk Is The New Housing Bubble

by Rob Wile at Business Insider

http://www.businessinsider.com/hank-paulson-on-climate-change-2014-6

"SNIP.................

Few were more intimately involved with manging the financial crisis than Hank Paulson, President George W. Bush's treasury secretary.

In a new op-ed in the New York Times, Paulson says he's seeing the same stresses that nearly brought down the banking system, and which led to the Great Recession, are playing out in climate.

Looking back at the dark days of the financial crisis in 2008, it is easy to see the similarities between the financial crisis and the climate challenge we now face.

We are building up excesses (debt in 2008, greenhouse gas emissions that are trapping heat now). Our government policies are flawed (incentivizing us to borrow too much to finance homes then, and encouraging the overuse of carbon-based fuels now). Our experts (financial experts then, climate scientists now) try to understand what they see and to model possible futures. And the outsize risks have the potential to be tremendously damaging (to a globalized economy then, and the global climate now).


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/hank-paulson-on-climate-change-2014-6#ixzz35QMvv8Th



..................SNIP"