Sometimes the comments about an article are as pertinent as the piece itself. For instance: Susan Anderson, responding to this New York Times piece by Robert Shiller: Buying insurance against climate change.
Insurance is an interesting approach to climate change. Like the military, insurers are required to face reality (and unlike our House of Representatives, quoted below, in a shocking denial of reality*). Voting won’t change reality.
“Farmers Insurance filed nine class actions last month against nearly 200 communities in the Chicago area. It is arguing that local governments should have known rising global temperatures would lead to heavier rains and did not do enough to fortify their sewers and stormwater drains.
…. “No one is expected to plan for the 500-year storm, but if horrible events are happening with increasing frequency, that may shift the duties.”
…. “If these types of suits are successful – where is the money going to come from to pay the lawsuits? The taxpayers”
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Here’s how climate change is connected directly to your wallet. Once the insurance industry establishes that climate change must be a consideration by, at least, local government, failure to do so will have direct impact on (a) your ability to afford or even get insurance, and (b) the liability of you as a de-facto insurer by virtue of your role as a local-government taxpayer. In other words, you’re going to share in the liability, paying out successful suits against your municipality who, knowing (or should have known) that climate change would impact it, did nothing or so little as to be negligent.
Does that perversely explain why senior government legislators would deliberately prevent research and preliminary action on how our environment is changing and what might be done about it – for that is surely the intent of the amendment to the Defense Authorization Act by the Republican House.
* None of the funds authorized to be appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used to implement the U.S. Global Change Research Program National Climate Assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report, the United Nation’s Agenda 21 sustainable development plan, or the May 2013 Technical Update of the Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis Under Executive Order.
Similar examples, if less blatant, can be found in Canada.
In part it’s because conservative lawmakers want to be seen as denialists – a statement that they believe climate change is wildly exaggerated, fraudulent, a conspiracy, an attempt to redistribute wealth, an attack on energy companies, an attack on the American way of life, and something God would never countenance. And to demonstrate the strength and sincerity of their belief, they will scrub the budgets of any funding to study it and certainly not to report on it and, worst of all, to plan on mitigation as though it were something real.
And if by any remote chance they are wrong, well, who knew?
