“Cap and trade” is dead. “Clean energy” mandates are dying. Is the future of coercive environmentalism called “sustainable insurance”?
Climatewire reports:
Influential insurance companies are developing principles that could pinch the global industry’s support for controversial projects affecting the environment, like hydroelectric dams and fossil fuel plants. Call it a climate conscience for corporations.
It’s a movement meant to urge huge companies that play a key role in large projects worldwide to consider more than just the earnings derived from individual deals. Before offering insurance, the companies might examine whether a project increases emissions, destroys natural habitat or enables illegal logging…
“Because if climate change is real — regardless of your view — if it’s real and it has an impact on the atmosphere, it means things like hurricanes and tornadoes, and any weather event you can think [of], having a different outcome in years to come,” Tony Kuczinski, CEO of Munich Reinsurance America Inc., said last week at a U.N. conference in Washington.
“From hail to tornadoes to thunderstorms … all of them seem to be getting more severe,” he added. “Whether there’s something to it or not, you know what, we’ll find out in years to come. But it’s important for us to gather that information.”
Munich Re is one of several insurers to support the new voluntary framework being developed by the U.N. Environment Programme. It’s named the Principles of Sustainable Insurance; it will be revealed next June at the United Nations’ conference on sustainable development in Rio.
Sustainable insurance essentially means “no insurance” for politically incorrect projects.
Unless this is some sort of greenwashing effort by insurance companies, this will be the end of them as the enviros consider all development to be unsustainable.
Tony Kuczinski appears to want to do the right thing, but does not, apparently, want to do his homework. “Whether there’s something to it or not, you know what, we’ll find out in years to come. But it’s important for us to gather that information.” If he had bothered to inquire, he would already have some answers, including refutation of his suspicion that “From hail to tornadoes to thunderstorms … all of them seem to be getting more severe[.]”
Sigh….