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The protection gap

Ah, language… you’re we’re soaking in it.

A growing disparity between economic loses from natural disasters and the amount of those losses covered by insurance is bringing together some strange bedfellows. I know, the entire world is now one giant mixed metaphor:

Insured losses from natural catastrophes may reach $145 billion this year — well above the 10-year average — as population growth, urban sprawl and climate change combine to supercharge risks, according to an estimate in April from the Swiss Re Institute.

The rising costs make it essential that the insurance industry “reach out not only to regulators and supervisors, but also to broader policymakers, government departments outside of insurance, academia, and even customers to work together and figure out how to tackle this issue,” Ariizumi said.

Ariizumi spoke near Durban, South Africa, ahead of a panel focused on the protection gap on Thursday. The event, held alongside the G-20 finance chiefs’ meetings, is expected to be attended by World Bank President Ajay Banga and the chair of French insurer Axa SA.

To address losses from natural disasters, Ariizumi said various forms of collaboration are possible such as the public sector agreeing to take on part of the risk when an event is deemed too great for private financial institutions to handle the costs on their own.

Once again, no shade to Bloomberg – they’re just the messenger explaining this through their prism – but this article raises question about t-shirts that say climate change is too expensive to address already answered by those t-shirts.

And this is why, in order to have nice things, massive collection action collaborations by governments to help businesses, which include insurers and media companies alike, to change courses, practices, and tactics toward the betterment of all humans remains job one. We can come back around to it under other guises, but collaboration is socialism collaboration. One day, we’ll come around to that and see how silly all of this was.

And it would be best for everyone if that day is tomorrow.

Image: a corner of Dukes County from the sky, via.

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Grrr… utilities

Investor-owned utilities, that is. It remains an outrage that power utilities continue to tout their efficiency in delivering us as much power as we want to use, when we want to use it. That’s it. That’s where the conversation is and that’s why nothing about our carbon output changes, except for its ever-upward trajectory. But there is much more they/we can do, because the government sets their rates and other guidelines. Charge us for using more. create incentives for power companies to get us to use less energy. Loosen Pry them/us from the reality that solar is bad for profits:

Solar panels have dropped in price by 80 percent in the past five years and can provide electricity at a cost that is at or below the current retail cost of grid power in 20 states, including many of the Northeast states. So why isn’t there more of a push for this clean, affordable, safe and inexhaustible source of electricity?

First, the investor-owned utilities that depend on the existing system for their profits have little economic interest in promoting a technology that empowers customers to generate their own power. Second, state regulatory agencies and local governments impose burdensome permitting and siting requirements that unnecessarily raise installation costs. Today, navigating the regulatory red tape constitutes 25 percent to 30 percent of the total cost of solar installation in the United States, according to data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and, as such, represents a higher percentage of the overall cost than the solar equipment itself.

In Germany, where sensible federal rules have fast-tracked and streamlined the permit process, the costs are considerably lower. It can take as little as eight days to license and install a solar system on a house in Germany. In the United States, depending on your state, the average ranges from 120 to 180 days. More than one million Germans have installed solar panels on their roofs, enough to provide close to 50 percent of the nation’s power, even though Germany averages the same amount of sunlight as Alaska. Australia also has a streamlined permitting process and has solar panels on 10 percent of its homes. Solar photovoltaic power would give America the potential to challenge the utility monopolies, democratize energy generation and transform millions of homes and small businesses into energy generators. Rational, market-based rules could turn every American into an energy entrepreneur. That transition to renewable power could create millions of domestic jobs and power in this country with American resourcefulness, initiative and entrepreneurial energy while taking a substantial bite out of the nation’s emissions of greenhouse gases and other dangerous pollutants.