US-focused, but relevant to Australia. Financial collapse precipitated by climate change (or at least reactions to impacts of climate change) would undoubtedly affect consumers. Interesting that one of the steps suggested is to invest in power reticulation infrastructure.
… imagine that we stay on our current path, and we’re headed toward 3 or 4 degrees’ [Celsius] temperature change. And then imagine some of the nonlinearities kick in, which the climate scientists tell us about, and we face a Fukushima-style event. … … the success of the delaying tactics of the carbon lobby create a situation in which we’re then faced with the possibility of a sudden regulatory shock, something that really inflicts major losses. … Crucially, what makes it totally unlike the war is that there’s no happy end. There’s no moment where you win and then everything goes back to the way it was before, but just better. That’s a misunderstanding. This isn’t crash dieting; this is a permanent change in lifestyle, and we need to love that and we need to live it and we need to own it and we need to reconcile ourselves to the fact that this is for us and for all subsequent generations of humans. … … problems that we thought we’d fixed, like the Green Revolution and the feeding of the world population, for instance—totally not obvious that those fixes cope with the next 20 years of what’s ahead of us. The food problem that was such an oppressive issue globally in the 1970s may resurge in an absolutely dramatic way.
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