Insurance Companies On Climate Change: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

Great, you lived through Hurricane Sandy, now just call your insurance company. What do you mean, it’s an unlisted number? (Photo by Wavlan/Flickr)

Great, you lived through Hurricane Sandy, now just call your insurance company. What do you mean, it’s an unlisted number? (Photo by Wavlan/Flickr)

Property-insurance companies are just like politicians in that they don’t want to talk about climate change, because if they did they would be expected to explain what they are doing about it, and they aren’t doing anything about it. Unlike politicians, who seem to be getting away with pretending ignorance, insurance companies are being presented with ever more claims, that are ever more expensive, for more and more losses. To stay in business, they are finding, they have to not only appear to be doing something, which is all we ask of politicians, they are going to have to actually stop the hemorrhaging. Tricky, when you can’t admit the patient has been injured.

In the best traditions of American Free Enterprise, the insurance companies are striding forward into the far distance, girding to protect their policyholders against any risk except those which actually exist. These are some of their favorite methods: Continue reading

Virginia: The State of Denial, Sinking

The harbor at Norfolk Virginia

Norfolk, Virginia, on one of the world’s great harbors in the world’s largest estuary, has long prospered because of its proximity to the sea. That tide is changing. (US Navy photo)

The rising waters of climate change are lapping at the foundations of Virginia’s second-largest city, and are repeatedly rolling over one of its premier tourist attractions. Norfolk city officials and National Park Service managers on Assateague Island are trying desperately to deal with the rising threat. But they get no help or even encouragement from the state government, whose official position is that there is no such thing as climate change, therefore the sea cannot be rising. Continue reading