Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

The Bush administration may not believe in climate change, but the insurance industry sure does.  The buzz has been there for some time, but insurance companies are beginning to realize what it will mean to be covering property owners in those places most vulnerable to chaotic weather conditions caused by global warming — like the coasts, for example.

With predictions of rising sea levels accompanied by more extreme weather, like hurricanes, insurance companies are beginning to drop homeowners and business property owners all along the coasts, especially on the east coast most prone to hurricanes.  Record devastation in Florida and along the Gulf Coast has cost insurance companies billions upon billions of dollars in recent years.

They are no fools.  They are business people.  The result is already apparent.  They are refusing insurance to new homeowners along the coasts and refusing to reinsure many others. 

You can read about it here, in the Washington Post.

Now, folks who want their beach home dreams may grumble, but neither does it make sense for all of us to be paying for the folly of building on the shore with higher premiums and more.

But here’s the other interesting point: while this administration refuses to acknowledge the incontrovertible truth of the science, at the same time, the woeful Federal Emergency Management Agency (under this administration, surely on oxymoron) is redrawing its flood risk maps to include larger swaths of coastline and other low-lying areas prone to flooding.  As this article notes, that pretty much precludes the possibility of insurance, and that makes getting a mortgage pretty much impossible.

So it seems that some people in this administration actually do know something…

In Florida, lack of access to home insurance is becoming a crisis for thousands of homeowners, as the industry adjusts to the record hurricane seasons of recent years – four powerful hurricanes hammered the state in 2004, followed by three last year.  For them, this is simply business realism.

But the problem affects more than homeowners, as you can see here, an article on how the insurance crisis is hitting Florida’s schools.

This is going to get very expensive, folks, especially if we deal with climate change by reacting to its impacts, rather than making rational plans to adapt, to reorganize populations, to conserve resources like crazy, and to do all we can as quickly as we can to reverse the human causes of global warming — reducing greenhouse gas emissions and stopping immediately the destruction of more of the planet’s crucial carbon sinks — forests, wetlands, grasslands, urban forests, and all those other natural wonders with which the Earth keeps its atmosphere in balance.

So if anyone you know still needs convincing that climate change is real and immediate, well, tell them to follow the money, insurance industry money.

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P.S.:  My thanks to my favorite dog, Roxie, who first brought the Washington Post article to my attention.  I am grateful to this very eco-friendly quadriped who helps keep me on my toes, so to speak.