A journalist on the wild business schemes to avoid climate change catastrophe

From record heat in the Pacific Northwest to wildfire smoke covering the skies, we're seeing more negative effects of climate change. Can business avert catastrophic climate change — and do it while making a profit?

Five years ago, Seattle-based reporter McKenzie Funk published ‘Windfall: The Booming Business Of Global Warming.'

He says the business of global warming is still booming, especially in the last year.

“I've seen tons of new schemes coming out and at the same time a lot of the ones that I reported on in the book have failed,” Funk said.

One idea that didn’t work out was Deutsche Bank.

“It had a big splashy advertising campaign promoting its new climate change funds around 2008," Funk said. "It involved setting up a fake Amazon jungle on Wall Street and a snowboarding park in Beverly Hills. They invested in a mitigation which would have cut emissions but that fund closed down in about 2015."

The journalist said a lot of companies were betting that the climate would change and that more money would go toward protecting the cities where they did business. But Funk said their time frame was too far off. Usually investors want to see returns in one or two years.

The New York Times reported this week on a Swiss company that hopes its technology can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to actually cut carbon emissions. Funk said for a while in 2009, this idea was like the great white whale.

“There were four or five different schemes for carbon dioxide removal," Funk said. The wildest idea was to dump iron and other things into the ocean to cause an algae bloom and then suck the carbon dioxide out of that.”

Funk said, as far as he knows, there hasn’t been a business that’s been able to figure out a way to profit from the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere and reduce the impact of global climate change.

One entrepreneur wants to offer consumers a one-click app that will show you how many tons of CO2 you just burned and while it automatically charges your credit card to remove the CO2 that you just put into the atmosphere.

Funk said the app could work, since people are constantly tracking how efficient they are with things like Fitbits. But he said that individual action isn’t enough; we need to push for political action. It's about putting a price on carbon and that’s the responsibility of governments, he said.

Climate change has also led some entrepreneurs to make money off of water rights. In 2008, hedge funds were buying up water rights in places like Brazil and Ukraine where farmland will likely stay viable for another 40 or 50 years and there's plenty of cheap water.

An intergovernmental panel on climate change released updated information last year about the impacts of global warming. Temperatures 1.5 degrees Celsius higher would result in "far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society."

Funk said those higher temperatures will be seen in the next 30 years.

“It’s within the lifetime of mortgages. It's in the lifetime of many of the people on this planet and certainly all of our kids,” Funk said.

And ironically, he said, that’s within the horizon for investors to see a return. There are more businesses now, he said, that have us use less water, alternative kinds of energy or less energy.

What Funk worries about is that as we continue to not do enough to stop climate change, more attention will go toward the places that can afford to protect their own patch. That's things like seawalls for New York City and securing farmland for a richer countries.

“In addition to cutting emissions,” Funk said, “we have to make sure that adaptations are fair and not just for the rich.”