The Business Of Climate Change - Making Money

Most writings on climate are tedious or polemical. Windfall, journalist McKenzie Funk‘s fabulous new book on the business of climate change, is neither. Funk’s reporting takes him all over the globe. We meet investors who are buying up land in Africa and water rights in Australia and the American West, and are wagering hundreds of millions of dollars that climate-related drought and food shortages will earn them a fortune.
Funk visits Greenland secessionists who imagine the mineral wealth made accessible by a thawing tundra will bankroll their cause, as well as Israeli snow makers, Dutch seawall developers, geoengineering patent trolls, private firefighters, Big Oil scenario planners, and the scientists deploying mutant mosquitoes against dengue fever — a horrific tropical disease that’s crept into Florida of late.

In one particularly surreal chapter, he finds himself in Senegal meeting with African military officials overseeing the first phase of a quixotic 4,700-mile-long foliage barrier against the encroaching Sahara. In short, rather than waste our time on a settled question (duh, it’s real!), Funk offers an up-close-and-personal glimpse of climate change’s potential winners — and inevitable losers. The book is as fascinating and readable as it is unsettling.

To read an excerpt from the chapter “Uphill to Money,” go here.
To read an interview with the author go here.