Can the insurance industry help boost action on climate change?
by David Atkins
I did a couple of guest posts at the Washington Monthly this weekend. My second piece was on a very important but deep under-the-radar development on the climate change fight:
Close followers of the climate change battle have been watching carefully for one major event that might serve as a bigger catalyst than any other to mobilize legislative action. But that event has nothing to do with weather or natural disasters. It’s about money. Specifically, the big money behind the insurance industry.
Close followers of the climate change battle have been watching carefully for one major event that might serve as a bigger catalyst than any other to mobilize legislative action. But that event has nothing to do with weather or natural disasters. It’s about money. Specifically, the big money behind the insurance industry.
You see, in the same way that net neutrality advocates benefit from having the support of companies like Google and Netflix, climate change advocates have been waiting for their own unlikely corporate allies in the insurance industry.
The reason is obvious in retrospect: rising sea levels and more frequent natural disasters will either make many areas uninsurable, or insurance companies will go bankrupt trying to insure them (and the same goes for insurance backed by the federal government.) Insurance companies have an existential need to get ahead of the curve on the climate question. It has just been a matter of when the battle would be joined.
That time is finally here, and that’s a very big deal.
Here's what happened:
A major insurance company is accusing dozens of localities in Illinois of failing to prepare for severe rains and flooding in lawsuits that are the first in what could be a wave of litigation over who should be liable for the possible costs of climate change.
Farmers Insurance filed nine class actions last month against nearly 200 communities in the Chicago area. It is arguing that local governments should have known rising global temperatures would lead to heavier rains and did not do enough to fortify their sewers and stormwater drains.
The legal debate may center on whether an uptick in natural disasters is foreseeable or an "act of God." The cases raise the question of how city governments should manage their budgets before costly emergencies occur.
"We will see more and more cases," said Michael Gerrard, director of the Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School in New York. "No one is expected to plan for the 500-year storm, but if horrible events are happening with increasing frequency, that may shift the duties."
Gerrard and other environmental law experts say the suits are the first of their kind.
Lawyers for the localities will argue government immunity protects them from prosecution, said Daniel Jasica of the State's Attorney's Office in Lake County, which is named in the Illinois state court suit.
"If these types of suits are successful - where is the money going to come from to pay the lawsuits? The taxpayers," he said. The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, also named in the suits, declined to comment.
Several class actions accusing the Army Corps of Engineers of failing to secure levees breached during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 were mostly dismissed last year on immunity grounds.
"It's a long shot for the insurance companies, but it's not completely implausible, and if you have enough cases like this going forward it might build some helpful precedent," said Robert Verchick, who served on the Obama administration's Climate Change Adaptation Task Force.
As I continued on with my post, it's unlikely that this legal strategy will work for the insurance companies. But it's the first play in a longer game. This is an existential threat for the insurance companies. They can't afford to pay on the increasingly large disasters that climate change is going to throw their way. They either need to help push for emissions reductions, or find a way out of their coverage obligations. They can, of course, try hard to do the latter, but communities aren't likely to go entirely uninsured, either. Something has to give.
Stay tuned...
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