At least, those of you who broke up the Net Zero Insurance Alliance 18 months ago.
I didn’t respond to your original letter in the heat of the moment. But the heat of the moment keeps returning in increasingly distressing ways – devastating people’s lives and safety.
You made accusations of collusion in the insurance market in relation to climate.
Your were right.
It’s true – there’s a deep collaboration between:
a) The laws of physics
b) Earth systems including the atmosphere, oceans and land
c) GHG emissions (e.g. via fossil fuels and deforestation)
It makes fires worse.
You successfully broke up the alliance. You wanted insurers to collectively disregard climate risks and protect fossil fuel interests. I’m wondering if you now worry that might become the least-popular populist policy, and whether now is a good time to reconsider?.
Your goal was to protect polluting industries responsible for climate change – pitting their interests against people. It worked. Fossil fuels made $3bn/day clear profit the past couple of years and expanded upstream oil and gas investment in 2024. All backed by insurance and banks. As Tzeporah Berman observed in The Guardian – Fossil fuels are the arsonists.
We now see climate change getting worse, exacerbating extreme weather events. Meaning more severe drought, floods, and fires.
Insurance can only spread risk around. Unless it was to invest in reducing the underlying risks (like addressing climate change which is exacerbating extreme weather events and consequential losses). Which it could, but save for a few rare examples, it doesn’t.
The crisis can’t be *solved* by government insurance or banning withdrawal of policies. Already FAIR-plan in California and CITIZENS in Florida have moved from being ‘insurers of last resort’ to first resort – and they can never have the capacity to absorb all the losses in the years ahead unless climate risk is addressed at source. Levying fees to private insurance makes insurance unaffordable (it already is for many) so more get left behind and become uninsurable.
Banking follows quickly leaving households and businesses unbankable.
Insurance was invented to keep people safer. It can’t do that without effectively and collectively working on shared systemic crises like climate change.
What we need is MORE collaboration on solutions that keep humanity safe, rather than protecting polluters pushing more risk on to people.
Dear US State Attorney Generals
