Disaster Capitalism and an end to Acts of God

There's a small chapter in Tim Flannery's The Weathermakers called The Last Act of God?  that sent chills down my spine at the end of a very spine-chilling book... It starts with this:

Some time this century, the day will arrive when the human influence on the climate will overwhelm all natural factors. Then, the insurance industry and the courts will no longer be able to talk of acts of God, because even the most unreasonable of us could have foreseen the consequences. Instead, the judiciary will be faced with apportioning guilt and responsibility for human actions resulting from the new climate. And that, I think, will change everything.

No sh*t...... I think we're beginning to see a bit how that could possibly look....  

Lawsuits are already starting to emerge in world courts:

The Inuit's existence is threatened by global warming

The Eskimos, or Inuit, about 155,000 seal-hunting peoples scattered around the Arctic, plan to seek a ruling from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that the United States, by contributing substantially to global warming, is threatening their existence.

Representatives of poor countries and communities - from the Arctic fringes to the atolls of the tropics to the flanks of the Himalayas - say they are imperiled by rising temperatures and seas through no fault of their own. They are casting the issue as no longer simply an environmental problem but as an assault on their basic human rights.

Last month, an assessment of Arctic climate change by 300 scientists for the eight countries with Arctic territory, including the United States, concluded that "human influences" are now the dominant factor.

and insurance companies and policy holders are up to their necks...

Ever since Hurricane Katrina raked across the Gulf Coast in August 2005, the phrase "stripped to the slab" has come to mean more than just a home's total destruction.
It's meant that hundreds, maybe thousands, of homeowners couldn't get compensated by their insurance companies. After 140-mph winds and a 30-foot flood surge hit, there just wasn't enough left to prove what caused the damage: wind or water.

Most homeowners insurance covers wind damage, not flooding. But a settlement reached Tuesday with State Farm Insurance and 35,000 homeowners in Mississippi changes that equation — for those homeowners, at least.

er....feeling the burn......

Residents now purchase fire coverage as part of their homeowner's insurance, but that coverage does not always cover full replacement costs. And it's unclear what will happen to rates and restrictions after the fires subside and insurers assess their losses.

Citing Allstate Corp.'s decision to stop selling new homeowner policies in California, Feinstein said: "Companies must not be allowed to cherry-pick the United States and only insure areas that are safe and secure . . . so we are rethinking this area."

The insurance industry says no government intervention is needed.

But Witt, who headed FEMA in the Clinton administration, said the federal government should work with states to set up catastrophic-insurance funds, backed by a national fund that states could tap in major emergencies. The funds could insure against natural disasters ranging from wildfires to hurricanes. Such a proposal is being advanced in the House by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.)

ahem... evaluating what the impact will be on their industry,

Over the past 30 years, insured losses from catastrophic weather events with damages amounting to over $1 billion have increased 15-fold, the authors calculate. They point out that these losses have far out-stripped premium increases, inflation and population growth over the same time period.

Even before Hurricane Katrina, consumers and businesses in many parts of the United States were seeing higher premiums, lowered limits and increased restrictions in coverage due to rising weather-related losses in Florida, Texas, California and elsewhere.
In Florida, last year's wave of hurricanes prompted seven private insurers to stop writing new homeowners policies this year or to exit the market completely, even after they won substantial rate increases.

A recent report by the Association of British Insurers and two of the big-three U.S. catastrophe modelers stated that under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario - where carbon dioxide levels double from today's levels, as predicted by many leading climate models - wind-related insured losses from extreme U.S. hurricanes could jump to $100 to $150 billion. This increase is equivalent to two to three Hurricane Andrews in a single season in 2004 dollars. Such losses would require insurers to boost their capital requirements by 90 percent, resulting in substantially higher premiums and other adverse consumer impacts, say the authors

But the rich? They have options....

Carrier is a certified firefighter, but he doesn't work for a government agency. He's an employee of Firebreak Spray Systems, which partners with the insurance company American International Group Inc. to protect the mansions of the moneyed.

AIG's Wildfire Protection Unit, part of its Private Client Group, is offered only to homeowners in California's most affluent ZIP Codes -- including Malibu, Beverly Hills, Newport Beach and Menlo Park -- and a dozen Colorado resort communities. It covers about 2,000 policyholders, who pay premiums of at least $10,000 a year and own homes with a value of at least $1 million.

Carrier and his 15 crew mates sprayed retardant on and around more than 160 homes in Malibu, Lake Arrowhead and the hardest-hit areas of Orange and San Diego counties this week. They claim to have saved a dozen homes.

While I agree with the LA Time article that it's good to be able to buy protection for yourself if you have the money, it leaves large segments of the population completely on their own in an era where funding for local, county and state government services is dropping more every quarter and the availability of public emergency response services is less and less.... It's not a pretty picture.....

Naomi Klein paints an even bleaker picture,talking about how the Bush Administration is building industry, building capitalism around disaster and destruction, and using it as an excuse to fulfill a political agenda under the radar.....

The plans Pascual's teams have been drawing up in his little-known office in the State Department are about changing "the very social fabric of a nation," he told CSIS. The office's mandate is not to rebuild any old states, you see, but to create "democratic and market-oriented" ones. So, for instance (and he was just pulling this example out of his hat, no doubt), his fast-acting reconstructors might help sell off "state-owned enterprises that created a nonviable economy." Sometimes rebuilding, he explained, means "tearing apart the old."

Few ideologues can resist the allure of a blank slate--that was colonialism's seductive promise: "discovering" wide-open new lands where utopia seemed possible. But colonialism is dead, or so we are told; there are no new places to discover, no terra nullius (there never was), no more blank pages on which, as Mao once said, "the newest and most beautiful words can be written." There is, however, plenty of destruction--countries smashed to rubble, whether by so-called Acts of God or by Acts of Bush (on orders from God). And where there is destruction there is reconstruction, a chance to grab hold of "the terrible barrenness," as a UN official recently described the devastation in Aceh, and fill it with the most perfect, beautiful plans.

Back to Tim Flannery's The Weathermakers:

With all of this in mind it's hard to avoid the idea that any solution to the climate change crisis must be based upon principles of natural justice. After all, if democratic governments do not act voluntarily according to these principles, the courts are liable to force them to do so.

In that case the principle of "polluter pays" will become paramount, for this principle also implies that the polluter should compensate the victim.

Prior to the Kyoto Protocol, all individuals possessed an unfettered right to pollute the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Now, only the ratifying nations have an internationally recognized right to pollute within limits. Where one wonders, does this leave the nonratifying signatories? It is a matter that must be under consideration in chambers of law around the world.