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Editorial: Business has important role in curbing climate change

Editor's note: Second in a series

Global warming, besides being a human catastrophe, will damage the world's economies. It will elevate the costs of doing business — among other devastating impacts, it will result in great migrations of human populations and in making resources harder to find.

In other words, there is every reason for businesses of all stripes to get proactive in developing climate change policies now. One hopes that the current political leadership in the U.S. will eventually see the error of rolling back environmental protections and dismissing climate change as a hoax, but business — like the rest of the planet — can't afford to wait for a hoped-for change of heart.

Action is required now, and businesses are a big part of what must happen next — not only for humanitarian reasons but for pragmatic, economics-related ones.

Successful businessmen and women are notoriously pragmatic. They have to be. CEOs have many things to concern themselves with, and whatever their personal feelings about climate change, they'll go where their customers and investors go. And increasingly, the public has been moving toward demanding action on climate change.

A 2019 Pew Research Center study finds that compared with a decade ago, more Americans today say protecting the environment and dealing with global climate change should be top priorities for the U.S. The same study also indicates that millennial Republicans are more likely than their GOP elders to say the Earth is warming due to human activity.

Moreover, many CEOs are seeing the benefits of proactively adapting their strategies to a likely future world: Witness Ford, Volkswagen, BMW and Honda striking a deal with California to steadily reduce the amount of pollution emitted by their new cars, despite President Trump's attempts to roll back the higher EPA standards set during the Obama years.

Another thing business understands: A healthy, comfortable workforce leads to increased productivity. A peer-reviewed 2011 EPA study found that more than 13 million lost workdays were avoided in 2010 alone because of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990.

But the opposite is also true. A global 2018 University of Chicago study found that a 1-degree increase in the 10-day temperature average “increased the probability that a worker would be absent by as much as 5 percent.”

If our political leaders are unwilling to take us out of the wilderness on climate change, other leaders will have to fill the gap. American businesses, rather than be dragged unwillingly along, need to be among them. Indeed, in some cases they already are.

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