Climate-Change Debate Aside, Sandy Inspires ‘Resiliency Planning’ for Extreme Weather
Eli Lehrer, president of the conservative think tank R Street Institute, said insurance companies planning for climate change helped cement his view that human-caused global warming is real.
“It’s quite true that every sizable insurance company implicitly or explicitly thinks about climate change and incorporates it as a risk factor and that’s a very strong market signal that it’s a real problem,” said Lehrer, who works closely with major insurance companies and who until this spring worked at the libertarian Heartland Institute, a group at the forefront of the movement to undermine climate science. Lehrer left the group after it ran a series of billboard ads featuring Ted Kaczynski (better known as the Unabomber) with the words, “Do you still believe in global warming? I do.”
Lehrer said people who doubt human-caused climate change is real are undermined by the insurers’ actions: “Insurance companies want to make money, they make money by assessing risk accurately, and if it were a fraud and a hoax they wouldn’t do this, because they wouldn’t make money.”
