Global Economy or Climate Emergency. Is that our choice?

I rember watching the head of the Bank of England speak at a meeting of other govt financiers in 2016. Mark Carney explicitly warned that climate crisis would outstrip the re-insurance industry and undermine any new infrastructure in seashore regions like New York, London, Mumbai, Shanghai, etc... Who knew that most of our rulers would ignore reinsurers and put the losses on the 99%?

The insurance industry has already started the full abandonment of Florida. Get used to that concept.

An author I follow who writes on the Ghost "OK Doomer" just published an article titled "Panic. It's good for you" and made it very clear that it's not hysteria: "You admit you're scared. You admit you don't know what to do. You stop. You listen. You look for answers. You come up with a plan. You abandon your previous assumptions about reality. You adjust to the new reality in front of you. "Panicking doesn't have to mean riots and chaos. It could mean just admitting that we're scared and we don't know what to do. It could be the necessary step toward coming up with a plan that would leave something of a future for everyone." We desperately need to start panicking

15 years ago I wrote a list of signs of runaway climate change (with its attendant risk of societal collapse). One of them was the insurance industry becoming untenable. And here we are.

I worked for a business & magazine & edited its insurance section in Athens 1978 to 1982 the insurance companies were becoming exceedingly nervous at Climate Risks. Climate patterns held in Greece over the last three thousand years traced in literature changed violently from 1975 until I left Greece in 1984. Locals on 'my' Isle Sifnos told me there had been less rainfall for 50 years before 1974. Since I left the changes have become ever more extreme. The Greek PM states this is 'climate boiling' or words to that effect.

“The conclusions are ….. challenging”. You weren’t joking, the potential outcomes and negative impacts on us all is quite eye-opening. Having worked in coastal engineering research and looking at 1 in 50/100 year storm forecasts and building accordingly, I can imagine that there is a lot of recalculating going on….

I'm brazilian and we are experiencing a historic flood in the our most south state. The waters started to low, and then, the heavy rains reignited. Huge infrastructure losses (100+ bridges) and more than 400.000 people evacuated. Thousands os helicotper flights to rescue people. Starting to see never seen before events in Brazil. Crazy.

In 2010 I attended a conference on municipal resiliency in Vancouver BC. At that time those with potential to have major financial stress.from climate emergencies (mortage holders, insurance companies, etc.) Were very concerned with climate change. Unfortunately our various governments seem more concerned with protecting the economy instead of protecting humanity.

They'll wait until the last second and start the rapid transitions to a repair, refresh, renew, global remediation economy. Where the companies profit from cleaning up the destruction they've caused.

The sad truth of both politics and economics is that there's no point in worrying about the future when you're at risk of immediate destruction. Getting voted out or going bankrupt is functionally the same as death for politicians and businesses. No one in a position of power can afford to treat the climate crisis seriously if it might cause them to fall behind in the short term, because falling behind triggers a career death spiral in both cases.

We're already seeing insurance companies leaving areas that they obviously consider to be money losers either because they've already lost in these areas or they think the potential for extreme loss is becoming more evident.

I offer several thoughts. First, to those few of us who do catastrophe and disaster preparation and avoidance, none of this is in the least bit a surprise. More, it doesn't go nearly far enough. It is still far too focused on the near term and guarantees long term failure. Second and most disappointing is that it has become abundantly clear that people as individuals, and especially as collective groups put vastly more value on stuff (represented by money) than health, welfare and the environment which is viewed as speculative, expendable, or someone else's problem. Third, all of this has been painfully obvious since the 1960s (in my case) or earlier for those born before me. Based on evidence in the world, it was painfully obvious in the 1950s for those in the know. And a century before that for deep thinkers. Fourth, we are now so deep into the catastrophe, that no solution can preserve what was, and the only remaining sliver of a possibility to save anything like the world we know requires concerted unified massive effort that is simply not possible.

PBS Terra published a video documenting the obsolescence of historical flood risk assessment. Historical data is not relevant now and assessment must take into account the increased water vapor capacity of a warmer atmosphere. Dramatic stuff and points to the urgency for ecological restoration and urban greening because the locations facing dramatically higher risk are surprising. The distribution of risk has also changed due to warming. "100" year floods have become 35 year and 8 year floods in some areas.

We live in a world based on companies, where the most important thing is providing shareholder value. In particular, I suggest everyone have a look at how private equity companies are managing the majority of companies they buy. This is perfectly analogous to how we are treating the planet. If you keep voting for one of the two mainstream parties, even if it's just to keep the other one out, you are the source of the problem. We need to very radically overhaul the incentive system, and that is not going to be done by parties funded by private equity...

Having dealt with insurance companies, I am not impressed with their assessment of risk. I also find huge discrepancies from company to company. If it was actually based on data, most companies would converge to similar solutions when assessing risk. They are making so much up. There is also lots of financial incentive to exaggerate risk in order to raise premiums. Just price gouging. We need to be very careful about just accepting statements from organizations with financial incentives.

Thank you "Just Have a Think". Sadly becoming harder to find facts like this on-line.

I really appreciate your weekly videos - they deliver a message we all need to hear. I remain quite pessimistic, however, that we will do what's needed to avert a full climate catastrophe. I don't think people (at least the people here in So. California) are willing to accept the lower standard of living we need to achieve to markedly reverse CO2 emmissions.

And the orchestra assembles on the deck of the Titanic.

Having worked in a major insurance organisation in the past and having had a lot of experience working in risk management and governance - a good risk management framework operated by competent risk assessors and the ability to "action" the risks that are identified very much is a good way to deal with risks in a business context. I'm surprised it hasn't been tried for international response to the climate crisis. So it gets a cautious thumbs up from me.

The question is can we have global economic growth and ecological overshoot. The climate crisis is taking too much attention away from the other ecological problems we are causing/facing. We cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. It doesn't matter much how that growth is powered. In a survey of thousands of different wild animal populations showed an average decrease of 70 percent over 50 years. This is not due to climate change. We can and are destroying the biosphere without really needing the extra problems caused by fossil fuels. Degrowth has to be the primary solution.