CEOs See Global Warming as a Threat to Business

But not in the way you might think.

Bay Area CEOs think global warming is a threat to local business, according to a survey from the Bay Area Council.

The survey, released Thursday, said 77 percent of Bay Area chief executives who responded think that environmental warming is a serious threat to the local economy and to the region's quality of life. Just 6 percent of CEOs in the study said it wasn't at all a serious problem.

The council polled 510 Bay Area CEOs and top executives for the study. Those who responded overwhelmingly supported legislation to require cuts in pollution that could raise the atmospheric temperature. One third of them said they knew of business opportunities connected to global warming and restrictions on pollution.

That's the spirit, you wonderful San Franciscans.

There's money to be made in creating ethical options for consumers. It's refreshing to see business folks acknowledge the actual physical threat of climate change instead of the politicians' fear of the threat of "alarmism." The latter threat is usually described as the great destroyer of industry by many conservatives - including folks like the Ayn Randians and the Southern Baptist Council - but here we have the majority of Bay Area business leaders saying just the opposite.

We all talk about a change - in business, in politics, in religion, in response to our environmental problems - and we should continue working towards one, but if the change comes too rapidly, we could find ourselves in an equally precarious situation. Thud made this all too clear in a response to Ed's post about ethanol and Pimentel:

Two things become clear. First, the science is so incredibly politicized at the moment that it's nearly impossible for a lay-person to sort out. Especially if you rely on reading other people's characterizations of the research...

Second, no matter what we do, it's going to cause a significant amount of economic and political upheaval. Replacing oil upsets everyone's apple cart and is going to have carryover effects we haven't even begun to think about yet. And just replacing it probably won't be sufficient because that will have environmental costs of its own, and those are also horribly unclear. Even monkeying around the edges here with ethanol has agitated the economy of the western hemisphere.

It's enough to make a body anxious.

It's enough to make a body write.