Insurance for the Planet | Green Energy News

June 13, 2004 – Vol.9 No.12

INSURANCE FOR THE PLANET.

Here’s another way to think about climate change. Consider today’s fossil-fuel-driven industrial economies an experiment. Never in history has man built so much, traveled so far and so often, and lived in such comfort all because of easy access to energy, albeit a source of energy leaves a trail of waste in its wake.

What’s going on now is a first for mankind - never done before. It’s an experiment.

Since it is an experiment, like any experiment, we also don’t know how it will turn out. The outcome is unknown. We’re hoping everything will be okay, but how do we know?

So if we consider today’s fossil-fuel-driven industrial economies an experiment, we would, if we were really smart, be buying some insurance to protect ourselves from an unknown outcome, in case we are wrong. Isn’t that why we buy insurance anyway - to protect against the unknown and unpredictable?

The insurance we could buy would be preventive action against the long-term effects of climate change. That preventive action, that insurance we could buy, would be a move to clean energy sources that drastically reduce greenhouse gas-emitting fuels.

A group of ten leading U.S. climate scientists spoke this week asking for more urgent action on climate change. In a paper published through the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) - The Reality of Global Warming - the scientists warned that climate models now in use might grossly underestimate rises in temperature that might soon occur. They conclude that current levels of CO2 of 370 parts per million could easily reach 1000 parts per million in 150 years. At that point they say the world will be a very different place.

They urge a major shift to cleaner fuel technologies to constrain the rapid growth of greenhouse gases.

Daniel Schrag, of Harvard University, noted that taking precautionary measures now could be viewed as a sort of insurance against the risk of a catastrophe in the future. Further he said that that catastrophe may never happen but that's not why you buy insurance: Insurance is bought against the possibility that it might.

Insurance, in the form of an investment in cleaner fuels, would also offer triple coverage for one premium. The new sources of energy would also take the place of crude oil now dwindling as well as eliminate the air and water pollution that affects our health and well being.

For The Reality of Global Warming visit the AAAS at http://www.aaas.org/ .