Weather Trading and Creation Care

¹⁰ The fields are devastated,
    the ground mourns;
for the grain is destroyed,
    the wine dries up,
    the oil fails.

¹¹ Be dismayed, you farmers,
    wail, you vinedressers,
over the wheat and the barley;
    for the crops of the field are ruined.
¹² The vine withers,
    the fig tree droops.
Pomegranate, palm, and apple—
    all the trees of the field are dried up;
surely, joy withers away
    among the people

 

Joel 1:11-13

We're watching the NBC family drama series This is Us, a title which turned us off until we decided to take a look on Netflix. It's a pleasant break from subtitled European shows or UK dramas where we turn the subtitles on anyway because we can't navigate the accents without them.


One episode has stand-up dad Randall (Sterling K. Brown) doing an excruciatingly lame song for a daughter's Parent Career Day in an attempt to make his job seem more exciting. He realizes that his work as a weather commodities trader is mystifying to everyone around him, including his wife, so he makes up the dismal ditty.

I was intrigued by what a weather trader or weather derivatives commodities trader actually does and, lo and behold, someone 'splained it in response to this episode. The explanation includes an example of a chicken farmer who lost 50,000 birds to extreme and unpredicted heat:

To safeguard itself against the elements, a company might call a man like Alejandro Turullols, who deals in products that protect against weather-related losses for energy brokerage Tradition Energy in Stamford, Conn. “We trade temperature,” he says of the industry — using various forecast models to predict how much higher or lower temperatures will go than historical norms. His role is like that of a real-estate agent — but for weather: He studies weather forecasts and then connects a company looking to capitalize on the financial impact weather might have on its bottom line, with a company, like an insurance company or financial firm, that offers a product that can do this.

As temperatures soar in the summers and polar vortices hit in the winter, America’s farmers — and utility companies, clothing retailers and others — face weather-related losses like the chicken catastrophe that can climb into billions of dollars in losses. From January through September of 2016 there were 12 weather or climate events in which losses exceeded $1 billion, the U.S. government estimates — more than double the average from 1980 to 2015.



I have written before about the regular attempts to pit the economy (bow down and worship here) against ecology (go hug a tree) when the facts suggest that not attending to the health of the planet actually undermines the health of the economy. Insurance companies and commodities traders are taking weather-related losses seriously for obvious reasons.

A recent report warns that a trillion dollars worth of real estate along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States is at risk due to rising sea levels, which are increasing faster there than the global average.

I would make up my own song about commodities trading and caring for Creation, but it would be even lamer than Randall's sad effort to explain his job.

Do you get these connections? Are you thinking about a new career as a weather derivatives commodity trader...or a songwriter?