Quit worrying about the economic cycle. The internet and climate change …

will matter more

Climate change is perhaps the best example there is of what economists call market failure. If the market produces an undesirable outcome, it will normally self-correct the problem, so that, for instance, if there are so many cars on the roads that traffic grinds to a standstill, either more roads will get built or people will abandon their cars and take the train instead.

Yet because consumers are selfish, buy on price, and are generally not prepared to pay the extra for protecting the environment, the system breaks down. This is particularly the case with climate change; the adverse consequences of global warming won’t, for most people, become apparent until it is too late to do anything about it. The upshot is that a solution which may or may not be necessary must be imposed.
In any case, a global consensus is building around the need for action. The big constraint on the future of economic development used to be thought of as the finite size of world oil and gas reserves. There is now every possibility that the world will be forced to become carbon free well before those reserves run dry. This is a huge change that business is going to have to come to terms with over the next 10 to 20 years. Plan for it, or be damned.

The Independent