Two videos with that title showed up within an hour of each other this morning on YouTube. The blog copied and edited transcripts of both to produce them here, Jack full of information about how 21st century vulture capitalists are cashing in on global warming and climate change. First from The Financial Historian, Canada. Who’s Getting Rich Off Climate Change? transcript follows:
YouTube channel from Canada, joined July 2025- Transcript:
Some people still argue about whether climate change is real. The market doesn’t. It’s already cashing in. Insurance companies are rewriting entire zip codes out of existence. Hedge funds are buying water rights like it’s gold. Energy giants are rebranding themselves as saviors. And governments? They’re not just fighting climate change— they’re trading in it. Because somewhere between the panic and the policy, someone realized this isn’t just a crisis. It’s an opportunity. A trillion-dollar one.
Welcome to The Financial Historian— where money, power, and history collide and nothing is ever as simple as it looks. For over two centuries, the same force that built empires has also threatened to destroy them energy. Coal powered Britain’s dominance. Oil built America’s century. Every empire’s wealth has been tied to what it burns. And every collapse began when that fuel ran out — or became too costly to control.
So when people say, “the climate crisis will reshape the global economy,” that’s not hyperbole. It already is. What’s new isn’t the crisis— it’s that this time, the crisis itself is the product. The smoke, the storms, the fear— they’ve all been turned into tradable assets.
The story begins long before solar panels and electric cars. It starts in the nineteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution turned coal into currency. By 1850, Britain was producing more coal than the rest of the world combined, fueling its factories, ships, and colonies. It wasn’t just an energy revolution — it was an empire expansion strategy. Every ton of coal exported from Newcastle was another pound of global dominance. And it came with a price.
Even then, scientists began noticing that industrial emissions were changing the air itself. In 1896, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius calculated that burning coal could warm the planet — a discovery largely ignored. For most of the twentieth century, climate change wasn’t an environmental issue; it was a business model.
Oil took coal’s place as the new empire fuel. From Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in the 1900s to OPEC in the 1970s, whoever controlled energy controlled wealth, war, and policy. Then, in the late 1950s, Exxon’s own scientists predicted global warming with eerie accuracy. Their internal memos warned that if fossil fuel use continued unchecked, the planet would heat by two to three degrees Celsius within a century. They were right — and they buried it. Because you can’t sell fear if it kills your product.
But here’s where the story takes a turn. When governments finally woke up in the 1990s, they didn’t punish pollution — they priced it. The Kyoto Protocol of was supposed to limit carbon emissions. Instead, it created the first global market for pollution. Under the new system, countries and corporations were given “carbon credits” — essentially, permits to emit a certain amount of CO2₂. If you polluted less than your limit, you could sell your unused credits to someone who polluted more.
It was capitalism’s solution to an environmental problem, turn emissions into assets.
Think about that.
We didn’t stop pollution. We just monetized it.
By 2005, the European Union launched its Emissions Trading System — the world’s largest carbon market. Today, it handles over a trillion dollars in carbon trades a year. On paper, it looks elegant. In practice, it’s a casino. Here’s how it works in simple terms imagine a company that emits one million tons of carbon a year. The government gives them a budget — say, 800,000 tons. They can either cut emissions, which costs money… or buy 200,000 tons worth of carbon credits from someone else.
And where do those credits come from? From projects that supposedly reduce or capture carbon elsewhere — like planting trees in Brazil or funding clean energy in Kenya. But the system is porous. Many of those projects were later found to have little to no real impact. Some forests didn’t even exist. In one case, corporations paid to “protect” land that was already under protection.
So instead of cutting emissions, we created a financial loop — where pollution is just the price of doing business, and “green” becomes a tradable narrative. The carbon market became Wall Street’s latest invention a way to speculate on salvation. And yet, the financial machinery around climate change didn’t stop there.
Once carbon itself became an asset, it was inevitable that everything connected to it — from renewables to catastrophe insurance — would follow. Renewable energy was next. By the 2010s, wind and solar were no longer fringe experiments. They were investment opportunities. Governments poured billions into subsidies. Investors poured trillions into funds promising to “decarbonize the future.” But when capital floods into a new sector, history tells us what happens next the gold rush. And this time, it wasn’t oil barons drilling the desert — it was tech moguls, venture funds, and green startups racing to dominate the next energy monopoly.
Tesla became the new Standard Oil. Its valuation soared past the combined market cap of Toyota, Volkswagen, and Ford — not because it made more cars, but because it sold the idea of a cleaner tomorrow. Behind the scenes, the race for raw materials began. Lithium in Bolivia, cobalt in Congo, nickel in Indonesia — the metals that make batteries. The new “clean” energy revolution was built on another extractive empire, one as dirty and exploitative as the old. Mines expanded. Workers suffered. Nations fought for control of what are now called critical minerals. And in that geopolitical shift, a new superpower quietly took the lead China.
It controls over 60 percent of global rare earth production and more than percent of refining capacity. In other words, while the West builds solar panels and electric cars, it’s China that controls the supply chain. If oil was America’s weapon of power in the twentieth century, minerals are China’s in the twenty-first. The names change — but the strategy is the same. Control the resource, and you control the world’s transition.
Meanwhile, the financial sector began to see opportunity in catastrophe itself. Insurance companies, once terrified of climate risk, learned how to monetize it. They raised premiums, withdrew from high-risk regions, and created new financial products — catastrophe bonds.
5.40
A catastrophe bond, or “cat bond,” works like this investors buy the bond and receive regular interest payments. But if a disaster — say, a hurricane or wildfire — meets certain parameters, the issuer keeps the investors’ money to cover losses. It’s a way to transfer risk from insurers to capital markets. In short, investors literally bet on whether disasters happen. And because risk has value, the worse the climate gets, the bigger the market grows.
6.08
By 2023, the global cat bond market surpassed $40 billion. Pension funds and hedge funds flocked to them, not out of philanthropy, but for yield. Because when everything else looks volatile, catastrophe has become a reliable business. And this is where we are now — a world where every flood, fire, and drought isn’t just a tragedy. It’s a balance sheet event. Meanwhile, behind closed doors, Wall Street was inventing new ways to brand virtue.
After 2008, when “too big to fail” nearly broke the system, the financial world needed redemption — or at least the illusion of it. The solution came gift-wrapped in three letters ESG — Environmental, Social, and Governance investing. The idea was simple enough: put your money where your morals are. Invest in companies that care about the planet, that treat workers well, that govern ethically. It was supposed to be the conscience of capitalism.
But like most good ideas that hit the markets, it mutated fast. By 2022, global ESG assets surpassed $ 40 trillion — roughly one-third of all professionally managed money on Earth. Every major bank, pension fund, and asset manager launched their own ESG funds. And then came the fine print. There was no single definition of what “sustainable” actually meant. A company could emit millions of tons of CO₂ yet still qualify as “green” if it checked enough boxes elsewhere — diversity policies, disclosures, or carbon offset purchases.
Fossil fuel giants were proudly listed in ESG portfolios. Coal miners suddenly had “transition plans.” Oil companies promised “net zero by 2050” while expanding drilling. In other words, sustainability became another marketing asset. Ratings agencies — the same ones that once stamped junk mortgages as AAA — now sold climate virtue scores. They turned ethics into a subscription service. The trick was psychological.
Most investors don’t want to destroy the planet. But they also don’t want to miss out on returns. ESG offered the perfect middle ground — a way to feel moral while staying profitable. And the result? Billions flowed back into the same institutions that caused the crisis, only this time under a green label. It wasn’t deception; it was branding.
Governments joined in too. Across Europe and North America, “green stimulus” became the economic engine of the 2020s. The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act alone pledged over $ billion in climate and clean-energy incentives. Officially, it was about reducing emissions. In practice, it was industrial policy — corporate subsidies at planetary scale.
Companies didn’t just line up for tax credits; they designed business models around them. Every EV factory, every hydrogen project, every battery plant came with a trail of incentives and political lobbying. The winners weren’t small innovators — they were the same old giants with new paint.
Meanwhile, the narrative of climate responsibility became geopolitical currency. The European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism — essentially a tariff on imports based on their carbon footprint— was sold as environmental justice. But it’s also economic leverage. It protects European industries while taxing others in the name of climate. And China, long painted as the villain of emissions, quietly turned the tables. It became the world’s top producer of solar panels, wind turbines, and EV batteries — not to save the planet, but to dominate its supply chain.
Western countries outsourced production, then imported the technology at a premium. Once again, the empire shifted east — not through conquest, but through supply dependency. Behind all of it runs the same thread control of scarcity. Whether it’s carbon credits, critical minerals, or green tech patents, whoever controls the bottleneck controls the world. And the climate crisis created a new kind of scarcity — not of oil or gas, but of stability itself.
Insurance companies no longer insure whole regions. Banks factor “climate risk” into mortgage rates. Agricultural funds bet on drought-resistant farmland. Every data model turns disaster into yield. The markets don’t deny climate change — they depend on it.
You can see it most clearly in the way capital now values the future. Traditionally, finance discounts it — a dollar tomorrow is worth less than a dollar today. But the climate economy flips that equation. The worse the forecast, the more valuable the hedge. Water rights, farmland, coastal property at higher elevation — all quietly appreciating as people price in catastrophe. Some hedge funds even call it “climate alpha” — the extra profit made from anticipating environmental chaos. It’s disaster capitalism in its purest form.
The irony is almost poetic. For centuries, we used nature as collateral for growth. Now, we’re using its collapse the same way. But this isn’t the first time fear became an economic engine. History’s full of it. During the Cold War, defense budgets soared under the logic of deterrence — profit through paranoia. After 9/11, the security industry exploded — profit through surveillance. And today, the climate crisis plays the same tune profit through apocalypse. The market doesn’t need to solve the problem. It just needs the problem to stay profitable.
Still, not everything is cynical. Real innovation is happening — cheaper solar panels, breakthroughs in battery storage, new models for sustainable agriculture. But the broader system ensures that progress never travels in a straight line. Because once money enters the equation, purity becomes impossible. Take the voluntary carbon offset market. In theory, it lets individuals and corporations compensate for emissions by funding green projects elsewhere. In reality, it’s a fragmented patchwork with minimal oversight. In 2023, investigations found that over percent of rainforest carbon offsets issued by one major certifier were essentially worthless.
Entire forests that “absorbed” carbon had already been cut down or burned. And yet, the trades continued. Because the belief — or rather, the illusion — of offsetting was good for business. It allowed everyone to keep going- airlines, oil majors, tech giants, consumers. It bought time. It sold forgiveness.
That’s the uncomfortable truth about the climate economy it thrives on faith. Not in nature, but in the system’s ability to reinvent itself every time it breaks. Because here’s the real secret capitalism never wastes a crisis. It adapts, repackages, and sells the solution — often to the same people who caused the problem.
That’s not conspiracy; it’s continuity. When the planet burns, the rich don’t panic. They invest. A billionaire builds a bunker in New Zealand. A tech founder buys farmland in Patagonia. A bank develops a new line of “resilience bonds.” The message is consistent survival is a premium product.
And for the rest of the world — the middle-class homeowner in Miami, the farmer in India, the renter in California — the cost of climate isn’t an abstract threat. It’s insurance that vanishes, food that doubles in price, electricity that never gets cheaper no matter how many wind farms are built.
That’s what makes this story different from other economic transformations. The climate economy doesn’t divide the world between winners and losers. It divides it between those who can afford to adapt — and those who can’t. Crises don’t create greed. They reveal it. The same psychology that drove investors to buy mortgage-backed securities before the 2008 crash now drives them to trade carbon futures and climate derivatives.
We tell ourselves it’s innovation. It’s just monetized fear. So when people say, “I don’t believe in climate change,” the correct response isn’t argument — it’s observation. The market already voted. Insurance, energy, agriculture, tech — all priced it in. Belief is irrelevant when capital believes for you.
History doesn’t repeat — but it rhymes with profit. The Dutch traded tulips, the British traded tea, the Americans traded oil. Now the world trades its own survival. Because climate change isn’t just the defining crisis of our century. It’s the defining asset class. And the only thing more powerful than fear of collapse… is the opportunity to sell protection from it. If this gave you a new perspective, hit subscribe. History has the answers — I’ll show you where to look.
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The Financial Historian, where money, history, and power collide, from Canada Joined Jul 25, 2025
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