Insurance industry seeing the grim future
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Posted on December 29, 2006
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
We have made note of this before — the insurance industry is on to global warming. After the devastating ‘natural’ disasters of 2004 and 2005, they are beginning to realize what climate change, meaning far more severe weather events, will mean for their industry, for the ol’ bottom line. This is what may get more folks’ attention, and maybe even our government’s, to the seriousness of the global warming crisis.
Munich Re puts it fairly bluntly in this quote from a Reuters article:
“No one seriously disputes climate change any more. In the long term, it will be a factor which increases the number of severe natural catastrophes,” Peter Hoeppe, Head of Munich Re’s Geo Risks Research, said.
[NOTE: when you link to their website, click the article ‘The Further Outlook’ to find what they are saying about global warming]
Insurance companies are breathing a sigh of relief that 2006 gave them a bit of a break — plenty of bad weather, but no hurricanes. But this did not make these folks complacent. It was a lucky break, and they know it.
This trend in the insurance industry is trickling down quickly to homeowners, developers, and businesses with properties in areas vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, such as shorelines, river deltas, and sea-level islands.
At some point, one can imagine this industry getting a bit bolder about lobbying the federal government to come up with a plan to address global warming (for starters, with mandatory carbon emission reductions) and to begin passing laws and regulations about those vulnerable properties to reduce their financial exposure.
One thing I believe rather strongly — we taxpayers should no longer foot the bill to underwrite investment in these properties through government insurance programs for people who insist on owning and building on these places, or through high insurance premiums for the rest of us, or through absurd, wasteful, and futile Army Corps of Engineers projects to try to protect our shores from the rising seas or to build levees against the coming floods.
Even more, we have to get over this outdated, rather adolescent, religiosity about private property rights and commerce-above-all, and start passing laws and zoning regulations against development in the wrong places and creating tough rules for how corporations do business — that is, to bring them into balance with the Earth’s biosphere before we humans destroy that balance and bring about our own extinction. We have to begin to reduce our consumption across the board and start figuring out how to reorganize economies away from ‘growth, to operate within the limits– yes, that frightful word – the limits of this precious planet.
We are already dealing with the end of nature as we once knew it. Here I am in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where we are about to have 2 inches of RAIN on the last days of December. We had an inch and a half before Christmas. This area, despite the brief bout with winter some weeks ago, has been so consistently above normal in temperature that the daffodils have popped out of my mother’s garden — and this was at the end of November.
I miss winter. I miss the long snow cover. That world in which I grew up seems to be over. I am not talking about this one year. We have not had ‘normal’ winters in the past 15-20 years. Back where I live, in Maryland, it has been in the 60s much of the month. Do we really think ‘nature’ is not responding to these changes? Of course, nature is — trees, birds, insects, animal species of all sorts, including our own, are changing. Many will disappear. The landscape will change, the weather grow increasingly wierd.
Somehow, we have to find the space within our spirits to let our biology tell us what is happening, to get ‘tuned in’ to this altering nature. We have to ask ourselves how far we will let this go before we realize that we have to learn to live differently once again, to get our lives back into balance with this living planet.
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