Insurance Companies will Solve Climate Change
A singer-songwriter posted the tweet “Just had some dude write me on a dating site saying, yeah crypto has good uses, but I’m afraid of the effects on climate change.”
Assuming sarcasm, I tweeted back that this wasn’t such a crazy comment (especially on a dating site) and that it was a topic of discussion. The songstress’s snarky response was, “It’s considered a laughable point by experienced people in the space. Also, climate change is a guise to usher in more control, so that’s a double whammy.”
Not to pick a fight with “the space,” but, a simple Google search “Cryptocurrency effects on climate” produces 1.75 million results. So, someone is writing about it, laughable or otherwise. Google Scholar with the same search produced 3,650 results.
Patrick Kiger wrote in May of this year for a site called howstuffworks.science, “Bitcoin already uses 149.63 terawatt hours annually, more than entire countries such as Malaysia and Sweden, according to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index. The folks at Cambridge throw climate shade at gold mining, which is understandable, and air conditioning. In fact, air conditioning is a real environmental problem. But, here in Las Vegas, we would consider AC, well, essential.
Lionel Laurent wrote a piece for Bloomberg in January of this year entitled, “Bitcoin is an incredibly Dirty Business.” Laurent starts his piece with “Institutional Investors.” That, increasingly, is the crypto space the song scribbler tweets of. People managing lots and lots of other people’s money, rightly or wrongly, have to worry about how their investment decisions are perceived by climate activists, who recently landed three board seats at Exxon.
Of course, the singing “Crypto revolutionary” believes climate change is a government conspiracy to control us. It seems funny that a “peace & liberty advocate” would assume that government force provides the only answer to climate change, if there is such a thing.
Today’s New York Times front page provides a clue where the response to climate change is going to come from. The print edition featured “Collapse Raises New Fears About Florida’s Shaky Insurance Market” the online home page, “Scorched, Parched and Uninsurable: Climate Change Hits Wine Country.”
“Climate change is actually accelerating the degradation of buildings,” Tulane’s Dr. Jesse Keenan told the Times.
“It all comes down to profitability for the insurance companies,” Adam Lopatin, senior vice president at USI Insurance Services said. “And right now, writing business in Florida is not profitable.”
In wine country, Dario Sattui’s Napa Valley wineries lost millions of dollars in property and equipment, as well as 9,000 cases of wine.
Mr. Sattui later realized the precious crop of cabernet grapes which survived the fire had been ruined by the smoke. Goodbye 2020 vintage.
A freakishly dry winter led to an empty reservoir meaning little water to irrigate Sattui’s new crop.
By March Mr. Sattui’s insurers said they had had enough, they would no longer cover the winery which had burned down. All other insurers passed as well.
This is real life, real livelihoods, and real money. Not a conspiracy. It’s also not a job for the government. It can be viewed like national defense. Besides, as Hans Hoppe wrote in The Myth of National Defense, “there exists no greater danger to our life, property, and prosperity than the U.S. government.”
Hoppe quotes Murray Rothbard, “Defense firms would have to be as freely competitive and as noncoercive against noninvaders as are all other suppliers of goods and services on the free market. Defense services, like all other services, would be marketable and marketable only.”
“Widespread agreement exists among liberal-libertarians such as Molinari, Rothbard, and the Tannehills, as well as most other commentators on the matter,” Hoppe wrote, “that defense is a form of insurance, and defense expenditures represent a sort of insurance premium (price).”
For libertarians who will stop the conspiracy talk and read Hoppe, the climate change, or whatever you want to call it, answer lies with insurance companies just as in the case with national defense. “Within the framework of a complex modern economy based on worldwide division of labor, the most likely candidates to offer protection and defense services are insurance agencies,” Hoppe explained. “The better the protection of insured property, the lower are the damage claims and hence an insurer’s costs. Thus, to provide efficient protection appears to be in every insurer’s own financial interest.”
In the west, where water is the issue, the answer already exists, desalination. I’m not sure what enterprising entrepreneurs are waiting for. Elon, Jeff and Richard should forget about space and start desalinating some water.
Israel is as dry as bone and they figured it out, “Up to 80% of water flows from desalination plants at one-third of the cost during the 1990s,” the Irish Times reported in 2019. “Just a few years ago, in the middle of its worst drought in 100 years, Israel’s water reserves were approaching the red line. Now it has a surplus.
“The country’s water revolution was accomplished through a combination of a national campaign to conserve and reuse dwindling water resources and a new wave of state-of-the art desalination plants.”
Writing about providing defense, Hoppe pointed out, firms “must possess the economic means—the manpower as well as the physical resources—necessary to accomplish the task of dealing with the dangers, actual or imagined, of the real world. On this count insurance agencies appear to be perfect candidates, too. They operate on a nationwide and even an international scale, and they own large property holdings dispersed over wide territories and beyond single state boundaries. Accordingly, they have a manifest self-interest in effective protection, and are ‘big’ and economically powerful.”
In perhaps his most important point, Professor Hoppe continued, “Furthermore, all insurance companies are connected through a network of contractual agreements of mutual assistance and arbitration as well as a system of international reinsurance agencies, representing a combined economic power which dwarfs that of most existing governments.”
The other motivation insurance companies have: to make any money, they need life, assets and property to insure. Don’t look to the state’s force, climate change resolution will come from State Farm, Liberty Mutual and Gen Re.
