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.