Nobody important gives a damn whether the state of Florida ends up underwater a century from now. Let's be blunt about this. The whole state could be reduced to a flotilla of tied-together rafts and they'd still get two senators. The talk shows would still host pundits bobbing around in life vests muttering that this was all natural variation caused by an improper number of sunspots and there's no use in getting worked up about it. This has been established for a good long time now, and has been made into something close to the official policy of numerous state and local governments alike, and not even losing Mar-a-Lago to the incoming tides will make a dent in any of it.
It's when corporate America, the names behind the symbols on the stock market tickers, begins to take hits to the bottom line that we'll begin taking truly urgent action on climate change. And the good and bad news is that we are very close indeed to that point. Last year's Carbon Disclosure Project reports show that the responding 215 of the world's 500 corporations expect to lose, by their own measures, $1 trillion in climate-related costs. The individual warnings suggest that corporate accountants, at least, are planning for a future in which climate change fundamentally alters entire regions and industries. From The New York Times:
Hitachi Ltd., a Japanese manufacturer, said that increased rainfall and flooding in Southeast Asia had the potential to knock out suppliers and that it was taking defensive measures as a result. Banco Santander Brasil, a large Brazilian bank, said increasingly severe droughts in the region might hurt the ability of borrowers to repay loans. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, Inc., noted that rising temperatures could increase the cost of cooling its energy-hungry data centers.
There are potential upsides as well. U.S. drug manufacturer Eli Lilly noted that escalating temperatures could produce new infectious disease pandemics, which could boost demand for certain of its medicines. So that's a plus! But the majority of upside, for companies not in small-arms manufacturing or mercenary provisioning, would come from repositioning themselves to take advantage of the shift to higher-tech, lesser-polluting means of energy production and use. There's a fortune to be had in producing solar modules that outperform the competition by a few percent, in new battery design, or other advances. Some corporate offices are making such plans; others, to put it mildly, are not.
To that point, it is also noteworthy that "companies in the United States, China, Brazil and Mexico were far less likely" than European counterparts to report "significant" potential impacts. You can also take this lack of disclosure to mean that U.S. companies are also far behind their European competitors in identifying those impacts, and in plans to profit from the new worldwide demand for cleaner energy. That is bad news for shareholders, but it's also par for the course in a corporate culture now so obsessed with immediate, megabonus-producing quarterly returns that longer-term strategizing is now seen as stuffy anachronism.
So the bad news is that Florida is still likely doomed. The also-bad news is that in the efforts to dodge trillions of dollars worth of damage and to transition corporate strategies to take advantage of new, greener markets, U.S. companies are lagging behind better-prepared global rivals.
The good news? Some of the largest, most influential companies in the world are indeed beginning to pay attention. Nobody listens to the scientists when it comes to plans to save the U.S. coastline but at some point Walmart is going to realize it can't sell imported crap to underwater towns. Then they'll unleash their own array of lobbyists to point that out, and we'll see some speedy lawmaker action indeed.