I want the major candidates – Obama, Romney, Kaine, Allen – to explain my homeowners insurance mailing last month. Travelers – that friendly red umbrella company – sent me a terrifying color flier with my bill. It depicted an all-American home (two stories, garage) with ominous storm clouds bearing down on it and a full-blown tornado roaring toward a direct strike. Millions of customers like me got this you-could-be-Dorothy-in-Kansas-soon image under this headline: “How the Property Insurance Marketplace is Evolving.”
Evolving? How? Well, next to the twister about to hit the house, Travelers lists some raw stats on the flier: Federal natural disaster declarations set a record in 2011. Thunderstorms alone cost $25 billion, doubling the previous annual mark. And winter storm losses have almost doubled since the 1980s.
Why is this happening? Travelers refers customers to a 2011 report from Munich Re, one of the most respected insurers in the world. That report catalogs the mainstream scientific consensus that the combustion of oil, natural gas, and especially coal is driving global warming, which is triggering more extreme weather, which is causing a spiraling uptick in insurance losses.
Hence the Dorothy-in-Kansas flier in my mailbox.
Now that the climate crisis has hit main street, what are the candidates saying? Next to nothing, because while insurance companies try to sound the alarm, the fossil fuel corporations lavish cash contributions on the candidates. In the first Presidential debate Romney said, “I love coal.” Obama talks about the energy unicorn “clean coal.” Virginia Senate Republican candidate George Allen adores coal too. And his opponent, Democrat Tim Kaine, has gone all-out for the black stuff. Kaine ran a TV ad last month showing him hovering in a helicopter over a massive new coal-fired power plant in Southwest Virginia. It vents thousands of tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every day. With ten-story-tall smokestacks just below, Kaine gushes praise for the plant in the ad — even though, as Governor of Virginia, his own climate commission endorsed studies showing fossil fuel combustion as the main driver of global warming.
Now come the insurance companies. As the Travelers flier makes clear, we are way past worrying about faraway Arctic ice melt. Your house and mine are in trouble. You can’t get more mainstream — more 100 percent — than that.
From Kaine to Romney, future historians will surely shake their heads. How could they? And how could we let them?
