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posted by martyb on Tuesday August 13 2019, @01:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the what's-in-your-stocking? dept.

[Emphasis is from original. --Ed.]

The Conversation

The announcement by Suncorp that it will no longer insure new thermal coal projects, along with a similar announcement by QBE Insurance a few months earlier, brings Australia into line with Europe where most major insurers have broken with coal.

US firms have been a little slower to move, but Chubb announced a divestment policy in July, and Liberty has confirmed it will not insure Australia's Adani project.

Other big firms such as America's AIG are coming under increasing pressure.

Even more than divestment of coal shares by banks and managed funds, the withdrawal of insurance has the potential to make coal mining and coal-fired power generation businesses unsustainable.

As the chairman and founder of Adani Group, Gautam Adani, has shown in Queensland's Galilee Basin, a sufficiently rich developer can use its own resources to finance a coal mine that banks won't touch.

But without insurance, mines can't operate.

(Adani claims to have insurers for the Carmichael project, but has declined to reveal their names.)

Why are insurers abandoning coal?

By the nature of their business, insurers cannot afford to indulge the denialist fantasies still popular in some sectors of industry. Damage caused by climate disasters is one of their biggest expenses, and insurers are fully aware that that damage is set to rise over time.

It's becoming easier to finger climate culprits...

Until recently, the most immediate problem facing potential litigants has been demonstrating that an event was the result of climate change as opposed to something else, such as random fluctuations in climatic conditions.

[...] The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society has highlighted three extremes in 2016 that would not have occurred if not for the added influence of climate change:

[...] ...and to allocate liability

The second line of defence against climate litigation that has held so far is the difficulty of imputing damage to the companies that burn fossil fuels.

While it is true that all weather events have multiple causes, in many circumstances climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels has been a necessary condition for those events to take place.

Courts routinely use arguments about necessary conditions to determine liability.

For example, a spark from a power line might cause a bushfire on a hot, dry, windy day, but would be harmless on a wet cold day. That can be enough to establish liability on the part of the company that operates the power line.

These issues are playing out in California, where devastating fires in 2017 caused damage estimated at US$30 billion and drove the biggest of the power companies, PG&E, into bankruptcy.

[...] When governments are successfully sued...

The remaining line of defence for companies responsible for emissions is the history of courts in attributing climate change to decisions by governments rather than corporations.

In the Netherlands, a citizen action group called Urgenda has won a case against the Dutch government arguing it has breached its legal duty of care by not taking appropriate steps to significantly restrain greenhouse gas emissions and prevent damage from climate change.

The government is appealing, but it has lost every legal round so far. Sooner or later, this kind of litigation will be successful. Then, governments will look for another party that can be sued instead of them.

...they'll look for someone else to blame

Insurance companies are an easy target with deep pockets. Despite its hopeful talk quoted above, AIG would find it very difficult to avoid paying up if Californian courts found the firms it insured liable for their contributions to a climate-related wildfires or floods.

This is not a message coal-friendly governments in the US or Australia want to hear.

But the decision of Suncorp to dump coal, just a couple of months after the re-election of the Morrison government, makes it clear that businesses with a time horizon measured in decades cannot afford wishful thinking. They need to protect themselves against what they can see coming.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 13 2019, @03:02PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 13 2019, @03:02PM (#879678)

    It's not just coal. It's all hydrocarbons (coal, oil, natural gas, etc.). Our current economy is dependent on them. Period. If you want proof, do a correlation between world economic growth and the usage of hydrocarbons over the last 50 years. It's a linear relationship. To get economic increases, you need to burn more hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are the engine driving our economies, worldwide. Yes, look it up, it's true.

    If we want to reduce the amount of hydrocarbons we use, we need to;

    1) provide alternatives (nuclear is the only one that could scale significantly, but that's a no go today), or
    2) accept a flatline economy, or worse, a decline in economy, or
    3) reduce the number of people such that per capita economy is the same or larger, or
    4) a combination of all that makes significant impacts.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by RS3 on Tuesday August 13 2019, @03:36PM (2 children)

    by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday August 13 2019, @03:36PM (#879714)

    5) make fossil fuels so expensive that it forces the alternative - which has shown to be economically disastrous, but could be done gradually to allow the economics to balance (ever so slowly...)

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday August 13 2019, @11:02PM (1 child)

      by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Tuesday August 13 2019, @11:02PM (#879876)

      Number 5 should be easy enough. Remove all the subsidies fossil fuels get and make them pay their own cleanup costs.

      • (Score: 3, Touché) by RS3 on Tuesday August 13 2019, @11:16PM

        by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday August 13 2019, @11:16PM (#879882)

        What? Common sense? That's a thing the fiction writers use, right? We don't allow that sort of thing here. Harrumph.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by AndyTheAbsurd on Tuesday August 13 2019, @05:58PM

    by AndyTheAbsurd (3958) on Tuesday August 13 2019, @05:58PM (#879762) Journal

    Our current economy is dependent on them. Period. If you want proof, do a correlation between world economic growth and the usage of hydrocarbons over the last 50 years.

    Correlation is not causation. Just because we have been using the easily available hydrocarbons doesn't mean that they're the only possible energy source; it just means that their widespread availability made it easy to experiment with them and we were able to find reasonable balances of cost versus energy output.

    If we want to reduce the amount of hydrocarbons we use, we need to;

    1) provide alternatives (nuclear is the only one that could scale significantly, but that's a no go today), or
    2) accept a flatline economy, or worse, a decline in economy, or
    3) reduce the number of people such that per capita economy is the same or larger, or
    4) a combination of all that makes significant impacts.

    All of which sounds great to me. We could certainly start building larger and better solar electric plants rather than use nuclear, more wind farms, or other forms on "green" energy like geothermal or tidal energy production. And we should accept both a reduction in population (people suck and the life that future people are going to lead if we say on the same path is going to suck, too) and a flatline or decreasing economy (infinite growth is what cancer does, why should our economy be cancer?).

    --
    Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday August 13 2019, @06:32PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 13 2019, @06:32PM (#879775) Journal

    Sorry, but the current design of nuclear plants used in the US is not suitable for massive expansion. Solar + batteries would be better.

    OTOH, some of the advanced designs that have started showing up *do* show tremendous promise. E.g. the molten salt reactors, which can be based on the Thorium cycle and are reputedly able to consume the fuel from spent fuel rods. But traditional designs have slowed the work on the advanced designs, and currently only solar and wind are proven. and in most locations wind is too erratic. (OK, I left out geo-thermal, but that also only works in specific locations. And there's hydro, but most of the best locations are already in use.)

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Tuesday August 13 2019, @10:27PM

      by fido_dogstoyevsky (131) <axehandleNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday August 13 2019, @10:27PM (#879851)

      Sorry, but the current design of nuclear plants used in the US is not suitable for massive expansion...

      Although the total emissions of radionuclides from coal firing greatly outweigh* those from nucular plants.

         

      *Lots of references out there, but I can't be bothered looking right now.

      --
      It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 13 2019, @08:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 13 2019, @08:39PM (#879817)

    > If you want proof, do a correlation ... It's a linear relationship

    LOL. LOL LOL LOL! Correlation is definitely causation! And in the direction you claim! It's definitely coal driving progress, not progress consuming more generic energy.

    Would you like to know which starlet's film career correlates perfectly with rectal cancer? http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations [tylervigen.com]

    Why are oil shills even bothering here? Is this a textgenerator bot or are you human? How much do you get paid - is it by the hour, by the post, by the word? Do you get rated on how convincing you come across? Do you get bonus points if forums upmod or like or use whatever feature to mark you as good?