Morgan Stanley Sees Big Profits For A/C Manufacturers, Thanks To Global Heating

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In a post by Emily Atkin on her HEATED Substack blog today, she reports that Morgan Stanley is bullish on the air conditioning industry because the Earth is getting hotter, which will lead to increased demand for air conditioning equipment. It suggests people should invest in A/C companies now and reap the rewards in the future as the value of those stocks rises. That seems to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that capitalism has no conscience. Talk about profiting from human misery!

The basis of Atkin’s reporting is a piece by Corbin Hiar for Politico’s E&E News published on March 31, 2025. Hiar found a rather stunning statement tucked into a mundane report on the financial prospects of the air conditioning industry: “We now expect a 3°C world,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote, citing “recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts.” Those “recent setbacks” are directly related to the climate-killing policies of the current administration that is favoring fossil fuels and disparaging clean energy policies designed to reduce the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Hiar writes the Morgan Stanley analysts determined that if the world does in fact warm by 3º C, that could double the growth rate of the $235 billion cooling market every year from 3 to 7% by 2030. O, rapture! O, joy! There is money to be made! Maybe there is an upside to this global warming stuff after all, at least for the investor class. If you’re not in it, sucks to be you. So sorry…NOT!

“The political environment has changed, so some of them are conforming to that,” Gautam Jain, a former investment banker who is now a senior research scholar at Columbia University, told Hiar when asked about Wall Street’s increasingly dire climate projections. “But mostly it is a rational business decision.” Of course it is, if your concept of capitalism fails to include the economic value of a sustainable Earth. Other megabanks like Wells Fargo are backing away from their previous climate pledges and leaving the Net Zero Banking Alliance, a United Nations-backed group spearheaded by Mark Carney, a former governor of the Bank of England and new prime minister of Canada.

Morgan Stanley Shrugs Off Climate Harm

Atkin notes that the capitalist stooges at Morgan Stanley did not seem at all concerned about what a 3º C world would look like, so she penned her own analysis. “A world warmed by 3° C is one that’s rapidly falling apart. Every single coral reef in the ocean is dead. Entire regions of the world are too hot for human life. Nature is continuously throwing tantrums — droughts, wildfires, powerful storms, and unimaginable rain, location depending. There are food shortages and mass extinctions. Up to 40 percent of the world’s economy is wiped out.”

The fact that the analysts skipped lightly over the horrors a warmer world has in store only serves to illustrate the total absence of humanity in the cold, dark hearts of these analysts. But, hey…they are only acting on the training they received in B School. They are the symptom, not the cause. For a visual representation of what a 3º C means, please see the video from The Economist at the end of this article.

“We expect cooling — critical to human health and productivity in many climates — to be a potent long-term growth theme,” the analysts wrote. As the world gets hotter, they predicted the global air conditioning market could grow by 41 percent by the end of the decade, up to $331 billion. The analysis also “outlines several dozen air conditioning businesses around the world that are likely to profit from a hotter world,” wrote The Guardian reporter Oliver Milman, who also obtained a copy of the report.

But wait, it gets worse. Since December, the six biggest US banks — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs — have all quit the Net Zero Banking Alliance. “We are clearly seeing a broad retreat on climate from the finance sector,” Paddy McCully, senior analyst at Reclaim Finance, a group that pushes financial firms to act on the climate crisis, told Milman. “It is to a very large extent being influenced by Trump and his agenda of accelerating climate change, although also due to banks using Trumpism as an excuse to roll back commitments that they had never actually intended to keep.” Morgan Stanley’s investor research on air conditioning is “mind numbingly cynical”, McCully said. “Especially as it comes just months after they first weakened their decarbonization targets and then quit the Net Zero Banking Alliance.”

“I would not characterize our view being that ‘climate change brings many upsides,’” Stephen Byrd, Morgan Stanley’s global head of sustainability research, told Milman. “I would instead suggest that we will see large volumes of capital deployed to mitigate the impacts of climate change, and cooling (among other products, such as smart power grids) would be one such category of increased capital allocation.” Byrd wants us to believe that Morgan Stanley has no moral attachment to this finding, Atkin says. Its analysts are simply reporting what they see and telling their clients, as is their obligation.” What he likely doesn’t understand is that the banks’ air of detachment is precisely what that makes this report so nauseating, because Morgan Stanley is in no way detached from the future outcome of climate change. Indeed, if the world does reach 3° C, it will be in part because of them.”

Morgan Stanley is the sixth largest investor in the fracking industry. It knows these investments cannot continue if the world is to preserve a safe climate, which is why in 2021 it made a pledge to significantly rein them in. The bank was one of the founding members of the Net Zero Banking Alliance, but meeting its goals would necessarily mean phasing out funding for new fossil fuel projects. Four years later, it feels like joining the NZBA was simply a ruse to get everyone off banks’ backs for a while, Atkin writes. In fact, from 2022 to 2023, Morgan Stanley increased its annual funding of fossil fuels from $14.7 billion to $19.1 billion. In a 2024 study, researchers at MIT said, “Our evidence suggests that NZBA banks are neither divesting nor engaging differently from banks without a commitment.”

Today, banks like Morgan Stanley have a perfect excuse to act like the planet’s future is out of their hands. Shortly before the most recent inauguration, Morgan Stanley left the NZBA, but said in a statement that its “commitment to net zero remains unchanged.” Its website says the bank still has aggressive climate targets it intends to hit. Horse puckey. Morgan Stanley and its sister banks are grasping for every last penny they can find and could care less if the Earth becomes an overheated cinder partly because of their failure to act in a moral and responsible fashion.

Can Nothing Save Us From Capitalist Greed?

There is only one force that can restrain the unquenchable greed of the banking industry. If the insurance industry stops insuring fossil fuel investments, the gravy train will end and there are indications it is starting to think about doing exactly that. It all comes down to gozintas and gozoutas. If more money goes out of the insurance companies’ coffers than goes in, their behavior will change, not because of any moral concerns about destroying the Earth but because the profits they are used to will disappear. Nothing strikes fear into the hearts of capitalists like financial losses. The only question will be whether the great awakening in the insurance industry will come soon enough to prevent a planetary catastrophe. Readers will probably have an opinion on that topic.