a sibilant intake of breath

Crazy heat out west

In the Pacific northwest of the US and Canada’s western provinces and territories a severe heat wave is breaking all-time temperature records.

The region generally benefits from moderate year-round temperatures, both because the nearby and massive Pacific ocean takes in heat in the summer and releases it in the winter and because prevailing winds from the west come from the ocean rather than over land. As a result, homes, infrastructure, wardrobes, and lifestyles are not suited to extreme temperatures.

Laser cut piano kit

Shadows on the Lego ISS

The insurance industry as a leverage point for fighting climate change

One of the revelations about fighting climate change that seems to have echoed broadly since 350.org started the fossil fuel divestment movement is the degree to which the industry can be suppressed by denying it access to financial services.

That includes denying it the ability to borrow from banks and institutional investors, who are increasingly concerned both about the reputational risk of supporting a world-wrecking industry and the financial risk of contributing to new fossil fuel projects which will need to be shut down to avoid worst-case climate change scenarios.

It also includes the insurance industry. To begin with, they face enormous financial risks from climate change impacts as diverse as rising sea levels, extreme storms, and wildfires. The concept of insurance is that the premiums are reasonable because things won’t go wrong for everyone at the same time; you can get affordable fire insurance, for instance, because in most cases the insurer can be confident that only a small fraction of insured properties will burn each year. That calculation changes when climate change coordinates risks for billions around the world, whether that’s coastal property at risk to rising seas and hurricanes or towns in wildfire zones that now face an existential risk every time there is a bad fire season. With those kinds of risks now evident, it’s unsurprising that the insurance industry is expressing concern and calling for action.

In addition to those insured against climate change risks, insurance is also necessary for fossil fuel project proponents. That leverage point is being made use of by anti-pipeline activists in B.C. who are pushing for insurers to refuse to cover the Trans Mountain pipeline:

Over the course of the week, Indigenous rights and climate activists from Vancouver to Kiribati to Sierra Leone called on Liberty Mutual, Chubb, AIG, W.R. Berkley, Lloyd’s of London, Starr, Stewart Specialty Risk Underwriting, and Marsh to publicly pledge to refrain from doing any future business with the project.

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Argo, one of the companies that currently insures Trans Mountain, recently confirmed it will not cover the pipeline or its expansion project, which would carry an extra 590,000 barrels of oil a day from the Alberta oilsands to British Columbia. Since then, two other insurance companies that had previously insured Trans Mountain but are not current insurers, Scor and Lancashire, have cut ties too.

No doubt this will lead to howls from pro-fossil entities, but in the long run blocking these projects has the promise of avoiding massive further investment in unusable energy.

The fossil fuel industry has been able to impose as much harm on the world as it has because there haven’t been mechanisms to make it care about the losses being suffered by others. If that freeloading dynamic changes, the world will have a better chance of avoiding climate catastrophe. Insurers can play an important role in driving the shift.

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COVID summer ’21

As COVID-spring turns to COVID-summer, Canada’s government is saying that everyone eligible should be able to get fully vaccinated by the end of July.

Core photo gear

The biodiversity crisis

The concept of the Anthropocene holds that human beings have made changes of such enormity to the planet that they will be chemically identifiable into the distant future. That includes our changes to the atmosphere and disruption to the climate, as well as the radionuclides generated from nuclear tests, accidents, and power stations.

The human impact will also be identifiable through the vast and uncountable number of species we have driven to extinction, probably chiefly through habitat destruction but also from causes as diverse as industrial fishing and the introduction of endocrine disruptors as pollutants.

How exactly this relates to the crisis of climate change is complex and disputed. Certainly, the impact of our GHG pollution on the climate is one of the drivers of extinction, for instance for species which have shifted northward or uphill in response to rising temperatures and which eventually run out of space, or species that have had their life cycles disrupted away from those they have symbiotic relationships with, like when insects act as pollinators for plants.

Some scholars are highlighting how some climate change solutions could exacerbate the biodiversity crisis. For instance, the pursuit of biofuels as alternatives to fossil fuels may drive further habitat loss as land is converted to energy crops. Others have emphasized simultaneous opportunities to both protect biodiversity and climate stability, notably by setting aside territory for nature that will also continue to retain or draw down potential atmospheric carbon.