Money and climate change
For once, have some good news. It looks like Katrina was a wake-up call for one group that realized it had a
lot to lose from climate change: the insurance industry. And because insurance companies are very big, they have direct influence over the polluters at the same time that they're exposed to risk from the polluters screwing up. (If they were smaller and more specialized, that wouldn't be the case -- an insurer just of power plants wouldn't be nearly as worried about flood risks as a general insurer) So apparently, they're
starting to do things about it.I see this as really promising: It's a case where being very big gives a company a much broader perspective on consequences. (It reminds me of some recent articles comparing HMO's to the VA. Since the VA is stuck with people for their whole lives, in essence, it makes them think a lot more about preventive care, general quality-of-life, and so on, rather than on short-term solutions whose long-term costs they can remove by dumping patients. Sometimes, a company being big can be a very good thing for the world.)
