Eduardo Porter, New York Times. For GSS Climate Change chapter 7.
Excerpt: If there were one American industry that would be particularly
worried about climate change it would have to be insurance, right?
...From Hurricane Sandy’s devastating blow to the Northeast to the
protracted drought that hit the Midwest Corn Belt, natural catastrophes
across the United States pounded insurers last year, generating $35
billion in privately insured property losses, $11 billion more than the
average over the last decade. And the industry expects the situation
will get worse. “Numerous studies assume a rise in summer drought
periods in North America in the future and an increasing probability of
severe cyclones relatively far north along the U.S. East Coast in the
long term,” said Peter Höppe, who heads Geo Risks Research at the
reinsurance giant Munich Re. “The rise in sea level caused by climate
change will further increase the risk of storm surge.” Most insurers,
including the reinsurance companies that bear much of the ultimate risk
in the industry, have little time for the arguments heard in some
right-wing circles that climate change isn’t happening, and are quite
comfortable with the scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is
the main culprit of global warming. “Insurance is heavily dependent on
scientific thought,” Frank Nutter, president of the Reinsurance
Association of America, told me last week. “It is not as amenable to
politicized scientific thought.” ...the industry’s analysis of the risks
it faces is evolving. One sign of that is how some top American
insurers responded to a billboard taken out by the conservative
Heartland Institute, a prominent climate change denier that has received
support from the insurance industry. The billboard had a picture of
Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who asked: “I still believe in global
warming. Do you?” Concerned about global warming and angry to be
equated with a murderous psychopath, insurance companies like Allied
World, Renaissance Re, State Farm and XL Group dropped their support for
Heartland. ...Eli Lehrer, a Heartland vice president who at the time
led an insurance-financed project, left the group and helped start the R
Street Institute, a standard conservative organization in all respects
but one: it believes in climate change and supports a carbon tax to
combat it. And it is financed largely with insurance industry money. Mr.
Lehrer points out that a carbon tax fits conservative orthodoxy. It is a
broad and flat tax, whose revenue can be used to do away with the
corporate income tax — a favorite target of the right. It provides a
market-friendly signal, forcing polluters to bear the cost imposed on
the rest of us and encouraging them to pollute less. And it is much
preferable to a parade of new regulations from the Environmental
Protection Agency. ...“We are having a debate on the right about a
carbon tax for the first time in a long time,” Mr. Lehrer said.
...global warming isn’t just devastating for society, but also bad for
business.... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/business/insurers-stray-from-the-conservative-line-on-climate-change.html. |
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