This article originally appeared in the赫芬顿邮报

由Climate Counts的总监Mike Bellamente合着，该组织是一家消费者外展组织，该组织对公司的测量，减少和报告其温室气体（GHG）排放量进行评分。

作为个人和家庭，我们为许多不太可能的事情购买保险，例如伤亡保险，以弥补严重风暴中房屋的损失，或者是汽车保险，以涵盖车祸造成的损失。这些事情实际上发生的几率因您的居住地或开车方式而异，但实际上很少有人期望这些事情发生在它们身上。在2013年政府间气候变化（IPCC）的第五次评估报告发布后，我们现在知道我们自己的行动使气候变得温暖，并且其影响实际上可以肯定会破坏我们生活的经济学。尽管我们不能真正确保地球，但我们可以采取措施来降低风险，但是我们的决策者已经采取了完全避免问题的方式，使它们立即使它们不负责任和无能为力。令人震惊。

But why is it that climate change has become such a third rail in Congress and beyond? How can it be that a nearly200-year-old concept就像二氧化碳温室效应一样，既可以仍然是硫化公众辩论的基础，也可以是国会震耳欲聋的沉默来源？

尽管逻辑表明，我们应该在人类在气候下扮演的角色达成共识，但当局对该主题的调查结果 - 例如政府间气候变化小组（IPCC） - 在他们甚至发表之前都受到袭击，通常是由像每日邮件和福克斯新闻. Shackled to ideology and ratings, it is this type of lazy journalism, quick to cherry-pick and distort scientific findings, that fuels public distrust of scientists.

Distrust of science goes back centuries and it is not all bad; science progresses by endless testing of perceived truths to get at real truths. If everyone trusted the word of scientists all the time we might all still believe the earth was flat. But spending money to make people distrust science when (1) the consequences of disbelief are enormous, and (2) it's only for political gain and not the pursuit of knowledge, is both dangerous and foolish.

Yet, there is still a great deal of money being injected intodisinformation和政治游说旨在抹黑气候科学。陪审团对美国思想的篡改如此有影响力，只有少数美国人认为气候变化是由人类造成的。10中的四分之四听起来可能不会太糟糕，除非您认为这是根据Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, 97 percent of the people who actually spend their careers researching and analyzing this phenomenon, the climate scientists, are firm believers, vs. only 41 percent of the American public. It's also worth considering that a lot of the money spent making the argument that the climate either isn't changing, or that people aren't responsible even if it is, have their own dogs in the fight -- they stand to lose a lot of money if policymakers acted as though climate change is real and could disrupt existing patterns of economic activity. If 97 percent of physicists agreed that black holes exist, and they turned out to be wrong, the consequences for the human race would likely be minimal. In this case, if the climate deniers convince enough policymakers that climate change is a myth (or at least a harmless fact) the consequences could be catastrophic. The precautionary principle applies, but policymakers aren't acting that way.

So where and how does this vicious cycle end? How can we have a reasonable debate about climate change when we live in such a fragmented media age where 10 out of 10 people rely on different outlets for their daily news intake?

Enter the private sector. Although in the wake of the financial crisis, Americans are still wary of big business, it is worth noting thattrust in big business实际上几乎是国会信任程度的两倍。公司实际上有可能成为我们打破气候否认的愚蠢的救世主吗？是的。

With the latest release ofCDP的标准普尔500climate report, the message from corporate America is clear: the uncertainty of climate change presents an unwelcome risk to business and is therefore being dealt with as any other risk or threat -- through investment of time and money. The price for being wrong on climate policy for a politician may be unpleasant, but the price of being wrong for a corporation may be disastrous. Corporations, in short, have less luxury to refashion truth to match their stripes than politicians do. That is probably why more than 700 companies have signed theClimate Declaration呼吁国会制定气候和清洁能源立法。由创新气候和能源政策业务领导的该倡议的签署者（BICEP），包括微软，Acer America，通用汽车，联合利华，Levi Strauss，Nike，Intel，Swiss RE，Stonyfield，Gap，Mars，Mars，Ebay和EMC，以及数百家小型企业，他们通常被视为任何政策中最激烈的对手这可能导致监管行动。

Businesses sign up to initiatives like this because they understand that, whether they're major emitters or not, the impact of a changing climate could well affect them, and those effects can be quite painful. Following the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons, nearly half the top 100 companies in the S&P 500 reported in their annual reports that there had been impacts from those two dreadful hurricane seasons, and with a couple of exceptions all the reports were of damage to the businesses (though the businesses that did report increased sales due to the hurricanes were who you would predict: those selling home improvement goods and services). It is noteworthy that several of the businesses signing on to the Climate Declaration are ski resorts, whose businesses have in many cases already been hurt by warmer winters and changing patterns of precipitation.

有人可以说，很容易签署任何园艺，而另一种支持实际的立法或拟议的法规很容易。足够了。但是，请尝试记住上次签署的700家企业，以提高政府行动，您将了解我们的观点。无论您是否相信，气候变化都在发生，没有数量spin-doctoring由否认或政治上的狂热将改变这一点。长期以来，公司就在其中，如果他们走上了耗时火车的道路，那么尝试为此做些事情才是明智的。公司越来越多地走上盘子，我们的决策者就越有可能从气候昏迷中醒来，并采取所需的行动来避免灾难性后果。