Why a Bank Is Working to Debunk Climate Skeptics' Arguments

Well, I guess you can add Deutsche Asset Management - which handles very large sums of money for corporations, high net-worth individuals and other denizens of the most rarefied heights of market capitalism - to the stable of card-carrying socialists who buy into that hoaxy-fakey climate change thing, as Sarah Palin might phrase it.

Deutsche Asset Management, part of the German Deutsche Bank Group, sees climate change as a potent money-spinner - all that low-carbon energy plant and equipment that the world will need in the 21st century will require large gobs of capital investment, an opportunity for smart investors who want to get in on the ground floor.

The company's managers, analysts, and researchers have plenty on their plates, so surely they had better things to do with their time than researching and publishing a 51-page report knocking down climate change skeptics' bogus arguments, which continue wandering the media and political landscapes like B movie zombies.

Manufactured controversies can still create doubt among lay people who don't live and breathe climate science, however. In order to help investors sort fact from fiction, the report head-butts three categories of skeptics' arguments - that the Earth is not warming, that if it's warming, CO2 is not the cause, and that if the Earth is warming and CO2 is a factor, nothing should be done about it.

You've heard it before from many sources in many contexts, but Deutsche's report concluded what many other reputable reports have concluded: that evidence shows that the climate responds to forcing mechanisms, adding a heat-trapping gas to the atmosphere is one such forcing mechanism, short-term weather events neither prove nor disprove long-term climate trends, you can't blame the sun for the observed increase in global temperatures, and there is nothing to the loud assertions that an evil cabal of mad scientists cooked up the climate change story. Et cetera. Et cetera.

More news for high-flying clean energy investors: Ernst & Young's latest index rating of countries for their attractiveness to renewable energy investors places China in the top spot, pushing the U.S. to number 2. Woo-hoo, we're number 2. Ernst & Young fingered Congress' failure to adopt a national renewable energy standard, combined with the pending expiration of Treasury grant incentives, low natural gas prices and declining electricity demand as causes of the slip.

The index includes an overall rating and ratings for how attractive a country is for investing in individual renewables. China bests the U.S. in onshore and offshore wind. Still, there is hope that the U.S. has not yet given away the technology store to China completely, as the index rates the U.S. higher than China in solar photovoltaics, concentrating solar power, biomass, and geothermal.

Despite the best efforts of feckless Democrats and clueless Republicans to play small and stupid on energy, there is still a window for the U.S. to grab the pole position on pushing energy technologies that will build industries, cut pollution, and tamp down dangerous petro-geopolitics. It won't be open much longer.