The Insurance Industry Has Been Asleep

Scientific American is reporting on catastrophic flood projections in NY this century.

Wired magazine is describing similar catastrophic flooding in Miami.

Other coastal cities will experience similar catastrophe worldwide.

Two Questions:

Why hasn’t the insurance industry factored this enormous future cost into the premiums paid in coastal cities?

How and when will the insurance industry offload this enormous cost onto the public?

The insurance industry is supposed to inform its risk calculations with the best science. They didn’t.

Why?

Because the major insurers have for a few decades (at least since the merger mania during Reagan) considered themselves financial companies, not insurance companies. For this reason they’ve been more focused on the huge profits from fossil fuel investments during peak oil than on the huge costs that fossil fuel will precipitate through climate change as our major port facilities and coastal properties are flooded.

They’re all insured, by the way.

But major financial companies are too big to fail, so we will pay for their greed and the mistakes greed caused them to make. If, as purists say, capitalism and free markets are supposed to do our society’s thinking and planning, they’ve certainly failed us. They’ve all been asleep, selfish, self-centered, self-satisfied fools.