There's A Huge Cost To Doing What We're Doing

From today's EEI newsletter:

U.S. Insurers Making Systematic Responses to Climate Change
The U.S. insurance industry is creating new models for hurricane damage that consider the influence of climate change, creating a task force on climate change, and seeking help from Congress to prepare for the increased havoc wrought by natural disasters, the Hartford Courant reported.

Although European insurers have far outpaced their U.S. counterparts in addressing climate change, an April report from insurance broker Marsh warned that U.S. insurers need to address the influence of lawsuits related to climate change and future emissions limits, and expand into new green markets.

Evan Mills, an analyst at U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said "profound developments" have occurred over the last year, including studies showing that 84 percent of warming has gone into the oceans instead of the atmosphere and the seismic activity created by massive glacial movements. Mills predicted that the difficulty of discerning risk levels in a world with unstable climate conditions will significantly disrupt insurers and put "a chill on the insurance market."

Mills said paying a price for climate change is inevitable: "It's an illusion to think we have the freedom to choose about paying. You pay for the impact [of climate change] or you pay for the cost of lower emissions."
Hartford Courant , July 9.

I think the final sentence is the most important. "It's an illusion to think we have the freedom to choose" whether or not we'll have to pay for what we're doing to the environment. We can do it in the form of new technology that reduces or eliminates carbon emissions or we can do it in the form of huge lawsuits and insurance costs that result from doing nothing. But Bush and the oil companies are lying when they say that cleaning up the environment will bankrupt us. What will bankrupt us and destroy our economy is continuing to rely on oil and doing nothing about global warming.