How can governments, including ours, say it would hurt their economies to fix climate change? Don’t they realize, as Al Gore pointed out in the scene in An Inconvenient Truth with the gold bricks, that losing life as we know it not only costs more but trumps, well, everything?

PAX World Mutual Funds’ Julie Gorte, senior vice president of sustainable investing, explains the attitudes of those who think we have the luxury to ignore, or postpone dealing with, global warming.

I sort of divide all problems into two types. There’s a wolf-at-the-door problem, which is how we think about things like terrorism and taxes, and then there’s the termites-in-the-basement problem, which is what climate change is. The termites will destroy your house much more quickly and much more surely than some of those wolf-at-the-door problems, but you always have the feeling that you can get to them later — that we can cut our energy consumption, that we can replace fossil fuels, that we can cut emissions next year or the year after that, when we can afford it.

And we end up never getting to those problems, and then we wind up in a world where the sea level rises not 35 millimeters but 35 feet, and the disease vectors have expanded so that tropical diseases are all over North America and they affect our food supply and everything else. There are so many things that climate change can do that will make this world something we never thought we’d see in our lifetimes that I think it’s the most important thing that we need to focus on.