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What's set to be the biggest risk to financial stability in the future? Many of us will probably think of excessive debt or asset bubbles, those kind of things. But Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, said this week one of the biggest threats is climate change. How? Well, extreme weather events are expensive for insurers, and limits on carbon emissions mean that all those oil and gas fields that energy companies have bought rights to may actually never be developed and so be worth a lot less than many people think. Everyone, Mark Carney warned, should think carefully about what they're investing in. I put it this way, and just to put some figures on this. Depending on your carbon budget, which is anestimation, but a scientific estimation, so we just take those as given, really only about 1/5 or 1/3 of all the oil and gas and coal reserves that are proven today could be burned and still be consistent with a so-called two-degree world, a world with manageable climate change. What's important is not what I think, what's important is that investors, banks, insurance companies, the general population has the information they need in order to invest accordingly to take a view on this question. | 
