Guess Who Sees Climate Collapse As A Business Opportunity? Private Security Forces - NYT
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The scene was a stark contrast to the big-data wonkery I was pitched in the car ride over. But Paz Larach explained that their statistical and tactical approaches were fundamentally connected. All businesses exposed themselves to risk, which had to be mitigated, insured or, more relevantly, defended against. Even if the Pinkertons couldn’t predict the specific risks of the future, they had a general sense of what it might look like — and what opportunities they might avail themselves of as it materialized. According to the World Bank, by 2050 some 140 million people may be displaced by sea-level rise and extreme weather, driving escalations in crime, political unrest and resource conflict. Even if the most conservative predictions about our climate future prove overstated, a 1.5-degree Celsius rise in temperature during the next century will almost certainly provoke chaos, in what experts call climate change’s “threat multiplier”: Displacement begets desperation begets disorder. Reading these projections from the relative comforts of the C-suite, it wasn’t difficult to see why a company might consider enhancing its security protocols.
For Pinkerton, the bet is twofold: first, that there’s no real material difference between climate change and any other conflict — as the world grows more predictably dangerous, tactical know-how will simply be more in demand than ever. And second, that by adding data analytics, Pinkerton stands to compete more directly with traditional consulting firms like Deloitte, which offer pre- and postdisaster services (supply-chain monitoring, damage documentation, etc.), but which cannot, say, dispatch a helicopter full of armed guards to Guatemala in an afternoon. In theory, Pinkerton can do both — a fully militarized managerial class at corporate disposal.
Later, after Paz Larach took his turn on the range — during which he emptied a Galil ACE assault rifle into a human-shaped cardboard cutout, then quickly drew his nine-millimeter, grouping four shots in the chest-cavity bull’s-eye — he offered the example of Hurricane Maria. On the day the Category 4 hurricane made landfall in Puerto Rico in 2017, he received more than 30 calls from American businesses and multinationals. He wouldn’t go into detail but explained that many chief executives felt blind to the situation and effectively tendered a blank check if Pinkerton could provide security. Over the next few days, as the company deployed hundreds of agents to the island, some of them, Paz Larach claimed, reported seeing firearms brandished at gas stations. “We had to escort the cargo with real agents, have cars chase the main truck,” he said. “Those who did not have protection were having their cargo hijacked.”
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Listening to Paz Larach pitch the agency’s future — all of it rendered in the gauzy language of consulting — I was struck by its relative simplicity, which belied, in part, just how far most companies and governments are from accepting the reality of climate change. Even if Pinkerton’s core competency still lies in tactical response, the means of preparation are not exactly the province of big data: Put food in a warehouse, aggregate news, consult the latest open-source modeling. Pinkerton doesn’t even see this strategy as climate-related, per se. The company doesn’t have a dedicated climate division, nor climate experts; from its perspective, that would be redundant. Pinkerton sells safety, or its pretense, in the face of catastrophe, and the only real differences between the catastrophes of this century and the 19th, on some level, will be rate and severity. As Jack Zahran, the president of Pinkerton, put it to me, Pinkerton is a 150-year-old start-up, still pitching the same basic vision: You aren’t prepared enough, and the government is too clumsy to save you.
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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/10/magazine/climate-change-pinkertons.html
