Academia and government agencies provide a refuge for climate alarmists. From their perch, they promote catastrophism and devise schemes for averting it, and with tenure and civil service protections, they believe themselves to be isolated enough to withstand the economic pain of their proposed policies. Some of them also believe that they are clever enough to benefit. It is these that wander off into entrepreneurial endeavors with the hope of getting rich off their schemes. The founders of First Street are just this sort of grifter, inflicting pain on others and benefitting in the process.
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First Street’s company profile states this:
We leverage the most advanced climate science and engineering approaches to quantify and communicate the risk for every property in the world[.]
The founders benefit by practicing a form of alchemy they lifted from academia called “attribution science.” Don’t be deceived by its name. There is nothing scientific about it. It is a form of voodoo that claims to be able to predict in detail, far into the future, the role of climate change in shaping events at the local level. First Street has made it into a product to assess the risk of climate change on individual real estate properties.
I am not talking about a FEMA flood map. First Street employs a proprietary model with a crystal ball devised to go well beyond that. Moreover, because it is proprietary, no one has any idea on how First Street determines a property’s climate risk. First Street is using a page right out of the playbook of rating agencies during the heyday of mortgage-backed securities and derivatives. With proprietary models no one could be certain how agencies arrived at their rating, and we all know how that turned out.
First Street provides major online real estate platforms such as Zillow, Realtor.com, Homes.com, and Redfin with predictive climate-risk scores, report cards that impact the market valuations of homes. It has provided untold headaches for homeowners trying to sell their homes.
Last month, Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) acquired First Street for $120m cash, and will be consolidating it into MSCI’s Sustainability and Climate segment, so I guess First Street founders’ hunch was right. Climate grifters can profit off the pain of others.
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