Banks see a dire climate future — and ways to profit By ARIANNA SKIBELL 03/31/2025 06:00 PM EDT The nation’s top banks are quietly advising their clients on how to build a financial life raft — or perhaps life yacht — from the wreckage of runaway climate change. Make no mistake: The forecasts coming from Wall Street’s leading financial institutions are bleak. But they also point their clients to potential profit-making opportunities from the havoc spreading across the planet, writes Corbin Hiar . For one thing, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and the Institute of International Finance all predict that the world will blaze past the warming threshold that the U.S. and about 190 other nations had agreed to treat as their red line. The banks don’t believe that governments will prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, according to forecasts hidden away in their quotidian investment reports. It’s worth noting Wall Street’s own climate commitments seem to have exited with the Biden administration. “We now expect a 3°C world,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote earlier this month, citing “recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts.” It’s difficult to understate how catastrophic this warming would be. Each fraction of warming leads to an uptick in the severity and frequency of dangerous heat waves, storms, wildfires and other disasters. Scientists say 3 degrees could lead to the collapse of numerous ecosystems, months-long heat waves, widespread drought and crop failure, mass coral bleaching, rapid ice sheet melting, and other potentially irreversible events. So where should one invest, given this dystopian future? Air conditioning stock, according to Morgan Stanley. The bank’s analysts predict a 3-degree warming scenario could more than double the growth rate of the $235 billion cooling market, from 3 percent to 7 percent, every year until […]