Interesting and timely observation from EnviroCan climatologist David Phillips. He says it's time for the public to ensure their government authorities are planning for climate change.
“The insurance industry is absolutely convinced that what they are seeing is the result of climate change. Since 2000 they are paying out gobs of money because of severe weather and flooding issues. It is something that we have to convince at all levels, municipal, provincial, and federal governments that we have to invest in our infrastructure.
“It’s a responsibility of government to protect us from ourselves and to prepare us for the future,” said Phillips. “If the future is going to be warmer, wetter and wilder, than we need to be forward thinking about this.”
I would be surprised if insurance companies did anything about climate change than their usual addition of more exceptions, in other words, declaring all climate related damages exempt from coverage as "acts of God" or perhaps as resulting from "acts of war," meaning man's war on the planet and the environment.
ReplyDeleteThe last thing insurance companies want to do is insure against actual risk, it gets in the way of the bottom line.
What's going on with the insurance industry is really quite interesting, KC. In the States, the federal government has had to step in to provide flood-insurance to all those Red States that recoil at the notion of "socialism." It was either that or see the rednecks driven back into caves.
ReplyDeleteBritain is going through the same thing. Now that megafloods seem to be setting in from Scotland to Wales and everywhere in between, the British government is having a tough time working out any deal to keep insurers on board.
The insurance industry is the miner's canary on global warming. They're in business to make money and I think they operate in a reasonably competitive environment. If they don't write policies they can't collect premiums, right? But they're not in business to bear undue risks and invite certain losses.