For climate change reality, watch the insurance companies and local officials

Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley speaks at Maryland Climate Change Summit, 2013

The Obama Administration’s latest move to battle climate change — new Environmental Protection Agency rules designed to cut power plant emissions by 30 percent — will likely set off a Republican response not unlike their response to the Affordable Care Act. We can expect lies, delays and lawsuits from Republicans and their Big Coal corporate backers to block the EPA rules. However, while many Republicans have the luxury of being climate change deniers to score political points, insurance companies and state and local officials do not have this luxury. Even insurance companies run by Republicans, and Republican state and local officials, will have to deal with the actual effects of climate change, such as an increase in claims by homeowners and business owners for damage related to rising sea levels, storm surges and fires, increased health care claims, and state and local budgets depleted by disaster response and rebuilding. That’s why it will be important to watch what these insurance company executives and public officials do.

We are already seeing the beginning of this insurance company response. Last month, Illinois Farmers Insurance Co. sued the City of Chicago for failing to take action to prevent flooding due to climate change, leading to increased claims for sewage backup damage by the company’s policyholders. Illinois Farmers is a subsidiary of Zurich Insurance Group, whose other subsidiary, Steadfast Insurance Co., was involved in a climate change-related lawsuit in 2012. In that case, Steadfast’s policyholder was an electric utility in Alaska that was sued by the city of Kivalina for contributing to climate change by emitting carbon dioxide. At least as far back as 2005, experts began predicting these kinds of risks to insurance companies due to climate change.

On the human health side, the EPA has laid out an extensive range of dangers from the effects of climate change related to power plant emissions, including increased asthma to which children are especially vulnerable,  and more lung diseases for adults. Health insurance companies will thus receive more claims for such illnesses, and at some point they may balk.

Public officials under increasing pressure

Then there are the effects of climate change in cities and towns across the U.S. (and as we saw recently with record flooding in the Balkans, the rest of the world has the same problem). As the New York Times pointed out two years ago in an article about rising sea levels:

Insurance companies got out of the business of writing flood insurance decades ago, so much of the risk from sea level rise is expected to fall on the financially troubled National Flood Insurance Program, set up by Congress, or on state insurance pools. Federal taxpayers also heavily subsidize coastal development when the government pays to rebuild infrastructure destroyed in storm surges and picks up much of the bill for private losses not covered by insurance.

This raises the issue of whether government at the local, state and federal level can continue to afford subsidizing coastal development and flood insurance when the evidence points to increasing flood damage in the future. The worse this flooding gets, the more and more public officials may come to reality and say that we must fight climate change. Norfolk, Virginia is the latest U.S. city to face this climate change reality, but it won’t be the last one.

Republican ideology under attack

Climate change-related damage also increases dependency on the federal government, which undercuts the Republican Party ideology. Indeed, Governor Chris Christie had to face climate change reality when Superstorm Sandy devastated New Jersey in October 2012. Christie could have stuck to GOP ideology and shunned President Obama and a lot of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) aid. Instead, Christie embraced President Obama, welcomed the federal aid, and praised Obama for his swift and thorough federal response. Christie then became a pariah in the Republican Party, many of whose members accused Christie of helping Obama look good just before the 2012 election, which, they say, helped hand the election to Obama.

We also saw this Republican disagreement in the recent Idaho Republican Gubernatorial primary debate, where several of the GOP candidates said they wanted to take back federal land in Idaho and manage it themselves. However, incumbent Idaho Republican Governor Butch Otter said:

Two years ago, my fire bill was $220 million. And that wasn’t an exceptional year, but two years ago, $220 million. I actually paid $14 million of it, Walt, and the federal government paid the other $206. Now let’s say we have all that land here. Now I’ve got a $220 million dollar bill, where are you going to get the $206 [million]?

In the future, this wedge may be driven deeper into the GOP. While much of the Republican Party still turns a blind eye to climate change, you can bet that insurance companies, as well as state and local officials, are watching this problem closely, and they don’t like what they see. Therefore, it’s not unthinkable that many more Republicans who are directly involved in this issue will become the environmentalists’ allies on climate change in the near future. Ironically, therefore, the more Republicans fight efforts to stem climate change, the more climate change consequences we are likely to have, and the more the GOP may become further marginalized. Alternatively, the more Republicans who are forced to face reality on climate change, the more they will be in a civil war with the Republicans who stick with their climate-denying ideology, which will also marginalize the GOP.

Photo by Maryland GovPics, used under Creative Commons license. http://is.gd/MPBTgr