You might have thought that the biggest opportunity in the climate changed world was the ice-free Arctic. And it may be so. But there’s another whopper of an opportunity: Naomi Klein mentioned in the July 15th 2008 Democracy Now that Monsanto is looking at a drier, hotter world as an opportunity to sell drought-resistant strains of seeds.

In a certain sense, this is a no-brainer: of course the king corporation of genetic modification would be interested in genetic techniques for making crops which are able to resist drought and other climate-change-related maladies (saline soil, for instance). The company has done an impressive job getting many farmers hooked on strains of crops resistant to Roundup (coincidentally, another Monsanto product), as well as many other kinds of plants, and this step into a hotter world is a small extension of that.
The interesting thing here, however, is that Monsanto is trying to position itself as a “winner”, even if all hell breaks loose via global warming. In other words, a hotter world will have winners and losers, and Monsanto very much wants to be a winner, and potentially a big winner. (Along with, oh, energy and security companies.)
We seem to need to leave behind the idea that global warming is an unmitigated disaster for all people. For some so-called “people”, also called “corporations”, global warming may be just what the doctor ordered.

A recent article in the New Scientist suggests that Atlantic oceanfront and low-lying have more to fear, short-term, than the same types of places in and on the Pacific Ocean, from the melting of Greenland. According to the simulation, performed at Hamburg University,

most of the melted water will stay in the Atlantic for at least 50 years, where sea levels will rise much faster as a result. Only small amounts will make it into the Pacific Ocean in that time.

This simulation suggests that the flood risk in places like New York, Miami, and Atlantic City (in the US) and Lagos, Abidjan, and Casablanca (on the west coast of Africa) is quite a bit higher than we might have thought.

The meltwater is predicted to move in a “slow wave” around the globe, and isn’t supposed to cause major havoc in the Pacific or Indian Oceans until, oh, the end of the century.

Do we, as an earth ecosystem, have too many people? Maybe that is the wrong question, Jared Diamond is urging us to consider. In his interview on Living on Earth earlier this year (mp3), as well as a New York Times Op-Ed, he suggests that it ain’t the people, it’s the consuming.

[W]e’ve got the equivalent, not of the six and a half billion people we can’t support now but the equivalent of 72 billion people who we won’t be able to support even faster.

America and the rest of the so-called “first world” (Western Europe, Japan, Australia) have produced the consumption template which many other people around the world are trying to use. India, Brazil, China, Russia, Argentina, Vietnam, the entire Middle East, Nigeria, and so on, have images in their heads and on their buildings of success, happiness, and a worthy life, and all of it has to do with using more stuff.

One wonders what it would take to internalize and act on these facts on large scale, rather than individually and occasionally. Is there something which could actually create adequate counter-force to the inertia of creeping worldwide consumerism? That exercise is left for the reader.

I’ve wondered for a while how litigation might get going on global warming. There are an awful lot of nasty situations either here or on their way, and one wonders if some enterprising lawyers will figure out how to start suing the biggest corporations in the world.

One approach currently seems to be: Find a distinct entity having measurable damages plausibly caused by global warming, and then have that entity sue the largest carbon-emitting or carbon-selling companies for those exact measurable effects. That’s the approach of the 400 Inupiat villagers of Kivalina, Alaska, whose village will be washed away soon since its ice protection is all gone. With the help of Stephen Sussman (ironically, a lawyer for Philip Morris during the medicaid-cost-recovery lawsuits of the last 15 years), they are suing a bucket of oil, gas, and electric companies for recovery of the costs necessary to move their village. He calls it a “nuisance case.” Amy Goodman of Democracy Now discussed it with him on Thursday, July 3, 2008.

Conspiracy to deceive is part of this particular lawsuit. In other words, this bucket of companies is charged with misleading the public in general, through funding organizations which have obscured reality. I’m not sure how this helps the nuisance lawsuit, but something similar helped the states when suing tobacco companies, so maybe it helps.

We have to decide, however, how or why it is fair to go after oil, gas, and electric companies. We have to remember, at all times, that we, each of us, are buying the gasoline, using the electricity, and consuming the products fired by fossil fuels. The companies will argue, with some plausibility, that they were and are filling an ever-growing demand for energy, and that individual purchasers share responsibility for the effects of that purchase.

Maybe this is where the “conspiracy to deceive” comes in. If you deceive the consumers of your products about consumption’s effects, then the consumers are (plausibly) less responsible for those effects.

I urge readers with some legal expertise to chime in on this one.