Hedge Funds are Buying up Land in Africa and Water Rights in Australia
Journalist McKenzie Funk's fabulous new book on the business of climate change, talks about hedge funds buying up land in Africa and water rights in Australia and the American West.
Funk
visits Greenland secessionists who imagine the mineral wealth made
accessible by a thawing tundra will bankroll their cause, as well as
Israeli snow makers, Dutch seawall developers, geoengineering patent
trolls, private firefighters, Big Oil scenario planners, and the
scientists deploying mutant mosquitoes against dengue fever—a horrific
tropical disease that's crept into Florida of late.
In
one particularly surreal chapter, he finds himself in Senegal meeting
with African military officials overseeing the first phase of a quixotic
4,700-mile-long foliage barrier against the encroaching Sahara. In
short, rather than waste our time on a settled question (duh, it's
real!), Funk offers an up-close-and-personal glimpse of climate change's
potential winners—and inevitable losers. The book is as fascinating and
readable as it is unsettling.
In
the excerpt below, a greatly trimmed version of Funk's chapter "Uphill
to Money," we meet a fund manager for whom the recent predictions of
severe drought in the West can only be good for business. After that,
we'll circle back for a chat with the author.
Source: Mother Jones