Tuesday 4 October 2016

Debates over the Missing Contingency in US Financial Report: Climate Change

What I found in the news
In A New Debate Over Pricing the Risks of Climate Change, Tabuchi and Kraus(2016) show disagreement within Congress over the topic whether all risks relating to climate change should be accounted in financial reports and whether quantifying these risk is pragmatic and useful. Trump deemed the idea as a practical joke, yet the practice is applied in Europe. Scientists estimated that to achieve the goal of Paris Climate Accord, three-third of fossil fuels need to stay underground.
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My response
Climate change? I think most people don't really aware of the climate change that gradually change our life. This topic make me think of many things many news that come across my eyes in the past few months. One of them is picture of animals suffering from junks we dumped like in the picture on the right hand side. I am not sure about the source because my friend send it to me via a private chat. Even though it's not really the result from climate change, it is a unarguably ramifications of human activities. For someone who are not convinced and might think that these have nothing to do with us, human who are at the zenith of ecological chains. you are wrong. The video from national geographic in this link will show you how do these affect us. Perhaps We are just an individual but many individuals can become powerful.

I was done taking about climate change and environmental aspects. Let's now move to Exon and its oil business. I don't think the name is familiar to Thais but it is really a big company in the US I think it ranks in top five of US business maybe next to Walmart. As we can see that the advent and improvement in technology of shale gas and other alternative energy sources such as wind energy, water energy, solar energy etc. make oil price plummet. This might be good news for people owning cars but might be bad news for climate change situation. Anyway I am happy that I don't have to pay a lot of gasoline cost recently.

When I heard of the word climate change and international convention I would think of Tokyo protocol. I don't know why but I think that it's good to know that there are also other convention relating to the matters.

Accounting system should be transparent and include everything in the report so that they can be easily comparable. Unfortunately accounting system now are divided into US system and international system. For Thai accountants, we also have another version of accounting system so I'd say that it's inviable to compare performance of companies that use different accounting system. I just wish there is only one system so that analysts can make a better judgement on companies' performance. I think it is a good idea to include everything in the reports even though it is hard to estimate, I think investors that is so fastidious that they read whole financial reports will know what is the risk that they should take into their calculation and what is not I think that they don't have to worry about accuracy of the estimation; just provide investor with assumptions and the number. I don't think there will be any problem.

Why Trump just pop out of nowhere in my summary? I don't know. I jus think that someone might be interested in the States' politics and talk about it in comments. His ideas are not really.... Well you may fill in the blank anyway.

My ideas was a bit scattered but feel free to share your ideas.


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Reference
Tabuchi, H. & Klauss, C.(2016, September 26). A New Debate Over Pricing the Risks of Climate Change. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/business/energy-environment/a-new-debate-over-pricing-the-risks-of-climate-change.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fearth&action= click&contentCollection=earth&region=rank&module=package&version =highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront .

Ministers Approve EU Ratification of Paris Agreement.(2016, August 30). European Commission Website. Retrieved from http://ec.europa.eu/clima/news/articles/news_2016093001_en.htm .

Tanner, A.(n.d.). Are You Eating Plastic for Dinner? National Geographic. Retrieved from ://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/short-film-showcase/are-you-eating-plastic-for-dinner?utm_source=Facebook &utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_fb20160819video-vodplastic2&utm_campaign=Content&sf33753102=1 .

8 comments:

  1. An old friend and I have been having very warm debates about climate change for years now. He tends toward the Trump notion that it's a Chinese conspiracy to weaken the US economy. Well, maybe he's not that kooky, but he is resistant to the idea that climate change, global warming, is something we should worry about.

    What most amazes me are his supporting arguments for saying that the scientists are all wrong, apart from the minority who favour his own opinion. His main argument is that since climate scientists have a financial interest in provoking worry and research, what they say is not to be trusted. This seems a terrible argument to me. As bad as when he argues that religion promotes good morals more than atheism because Hitler, Stalin and Mao were atheists!

    But I enjoy a good argument, and Brian might get annoyed, but he does stick to the rules of debate, and our friendship has survived many years of mutually rewarding argument. And I'm sure it is healthy to seek out and engage with people who think differently to us, which is one of the great benefits of attending university and meeting people from different backgrounds. And some of my friends think some of my opinions as awful as I think theirs, but that's not a reason to break off the friendship: thank goodness we can come together over lamb shank, red wine and a deep agreement on some basic principles.

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    Replies
    1. Well, that was a fun five minutes of writing.
      I'm doing a Coursera course at the moment, and having written my second essay over the weekend, I've just spent a couple of hours peer reviewing the work of others doing the course with me. A bit of light blogging was very relaxing.
      But now I might watch a silly action series or something for a bit. And then come back to do a bit more work.

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    2. Trump ... he's a regular source of argument between me and one of my oldest colleagues at AUA. I can't wait to see what the US decides on November 8. In the meantime, the lead up is almost as diverting as the silly action films I like to relax with.

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    3. Peter what Coursera course you are doing? I did some of machine learning and quantum mechanic. For me, I dont really know whether global warming is real or not. Saving animal makes me think about Church of Euthanasia but I still think this church is a joke.

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    4. Basing his argument on probable incentives, Trump believes that ideas other than his are wrong? I think I know why people dubbed him a bigot.

      For conspiracy theory, I am not a fan of the theory though. I don't think it's just a fear pushing this ideas. We just fear that there is a group of people supervising us and controlling everything in our life but what people are they? The answers vary from Yews, Russian, American to Chinese or whoever the people responding hate the most. Having this assumption in mind, things of which are accused as a result from the group are most likely just happened and was simply moved by the rule of nature.

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  2. In my experience I think most people know that what is climate change and they also know how to make it better but they didn't do it because they don't think that just themselves can fix this problem.

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  3. At present, I think people are more concern in global warming effects. We can see from the basic educational curriculum of primary school, ,the advertisement and out-of-home-billboard, the CSR of each company, and the debate of carbon credit that mentioned in the news.

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  4. I have to admit that I never actually care about Climate change that much but since I've seen many news about it, it make me worried. I have no idea how we could face this problem because it's huge and associated with the world. Even we can find the solution for it I'm sure that requires all the people in this world to agree on and follow it which is the impossible thing we can control.

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