Year 2, Month 12, Day 2: He’s Dead, Jim.

Forbes Magazine runs an article called “Climate Treaty Would Actually Be Good For Business.” Yup. But business would be bad for a climate treaty, apparently.

Businesses pay an additional price for these disturbances. In June the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) found that even normal weather variation harms the U.S. economy, to the tune of $485 billion annually in 2008 dollars, or as much as 3.4 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. The study was published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Every so often, I feel compelled to send a missive off to the belly of the beast. The bloated corpse of global capitalism is still capable of doing damage as it runs amok in full headless-chicken mode. Sent November 28:

For decades, the “can-do” attitude of American entrepreneurship was an inspiration to the world. Combining polymathic creativity with a healthy disrespect for established modes of operation, the nation’s inventors transformed first this country, then the planet. It seemed our collective heritage was one that transformed every obstacle into an opportunity for greater achievement; the greater the difficulty, the more likely we were to respond with paradigm-shattering innovation.

Contemporary American business leaders, by contrast, often ignore the troublesome realities of global climate change and the difficult choices which face the world’s people, treating physical laws as subordinate to market forces, and ethics as irrelevant. Their lack of confidence in our country’s R&D and manufacturing is profoundly troubling; their protests that a transformed energy system might be bad for business show contempt for the scientific and moral facts confronting our species. And they forget: an “evolutionary bottleneck” is bad for business, too.

Warren Senders