Perspectives
September 19, 2024 | By Richard Moore
Policy Issues

A “Red” in every glovebox

Lawmakers need to end insurance commissioner’s Stronger Wisconsin climate mitigation program.

When I was growing up, Democrats used to love to mock Republicans by saying conservatives believed that communists were everywhere— “a Red under every bed,” so the saying went.

Turns out, conservatives weren’t so far off. Communists may not have been under every bed, but the far left was in front of a whole lot of classrooms, K-12 as well as college, and they were busy infiltrating just about every other major institution in society, from major media companies to union bureaucracies to corporate boardrooms.

Not to mention government agencies.

The ensuing multi-generational indoctrination of the masses by a revolutionary vanguard of the left has truly moved the West ever closer to having an actual Red under every bed, only now we call them “Far Left Progressives.” Exhibit A is Kamala Harris.

It doesn’t stop in mass information industries. For instance, the next time you get in your car to drive to, say, the grocery store, just remember that you have a fellow traveler riding shotgun—your auto insurance policy. Or more accurately, your climate-change tax, camouflaged as auto insurance.

These days, there’s a Red in every glovebox, and one state agency—the Bolshevik-sounding Office of the Commissioner of Insurance (OCI)—works overtime to keep it that way.

Oh sure, there’s some real auto insurance in there somewhere, but, in sum, progressives long ago captured many state insurance regulatory agencies to drive a radical climate-change agenda. For more than 15 years now, a bevy of those state agencies has hawked climate change as the principal reason for high insurance rates, and they have pressured corporations, insurance companies, and local governments to tailor their investments, pricing strategies, and spending and taxation to respond to their doomsday agenda.

The Wisconsin OCI is not only one of those fellow-traveling regulatory agencies—there are some state holdouts—but it actually was one of the early activist proponents of the strategy. Gov. Jim Doyle’s state insurance commissioner, Sean Delwig, was one of two insurance commissioners instrumental in having the Securities and Exchange Commission require all public companies to disclose their climate risks to investors and consumers, and, as a result of his efforts, many states now require climate disclosure risk assessments from corporations, as well as statements about how they plan to mitigate that impact.

The short story is, corporations that continue to engage in perceived climate-risky endeavors face an assortment of pressures, from disinvestment and boycott campaigns to higher insurance premiums to no insurance at all. Those investments not only impact industrial manufacturers but residential development—there are penalties for developing in areas prone to climate-change-related natural disasters.

The idea is to cudgel insurance companies into pressuring their policyholders, especially energy companies, utilities, retailers and homebuilders, to adopt “best management” practices and policies for climate change.

On the individual and community level, auto and home insurance costs are part of the scheme. Car insurance premiums nationally are expected to rise by 22 percent year-over-year by the end of 2024, and in Wisconsin by 25 percent. There are a variety of reasons—higher repair costs, more car crashes, overall inflation—but, according to insurance regulators, climate change itself is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, culprits.

In their view, climate change is the reason we are having a tsunami of weather-related disasters compared to the past, and it’s these weather-related disasters that are driving your premiums higher because of the severe property damage caused by those events.

The message is clear: If the public wants lower auto and home insurance rates, they need to pressure their local communities and local governments to adopt impressively expensive climate-change mitigation strategies, along with the needed higher public spending, higher taxes, and bigger government those will entail. While corporations and insurance agencies get pressured from above, insurance policyholders get knuckled from below.

Here’s what the website of the OCI says about “the face of our changing climate”:

“Wisconsin faces many threats: flooding, wildfires, tornadoes, extreme temperatures, and man-made disasters. In recent years, Wisconsin has experienced more intense and frequent heavy rains causing flooding, washed out roads and bridges, failed dams, injury, and illness. Help reduce the impact from these disasters by understanding risk and taking action to minimize potential damage from hazards before they occur.”

What kind of action?

Well, according to the OCI, we and our local communities are supposed to pursue “mitigation opportunities,” working closely with government “partners” such as the Department of Safety and Professional Services (DSPS) and Department of Financial Institutions (DFI), to overcome “climate resiliency barriers” in pursuing said mitigation. Lest you miss the point, the OCI and its big-government deep state partners—the DFI and DSPS—are out and about on an ongoing tour, making sure the message is converted into action through an initiative they call Stronger Wisconsin.

In 2022, to cite just one example of their “tour,” state insurance commissioner Nathan Houdek, then DSPS secretary Dawn Crim (she has since moved on to become the UW-Green Bay vice chancellor for Inclusivity and Community Engagement), and DFI secretary Cheryll Olson-Collins met with local leaders and consumers in Sparta and Eau Claire to encourage flood risk mitigation.

Among other things, they reviewed Eau Claire’s participation in a Community Rating System (CRS) with the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). Thankfully, Eau Claire was one of only about 20 municipalities in Wisconsin that participated in the system because it requires the adoption of practices that exceed the NFIP’s minimum requirements. Those required “higher regulatory standards” might lower insurance premiums but they cause much higher building costs.

It’s a way to discourage building in certain areas altogether … or else. Naturally, the Stronger Wisconsin folks like that.

Crim and the others also said they had learned a lot in their climate-change journeys urging communities and local governments to fork over tax dollars for disaster mitigation but that they were nowhere near the end of the line: “We’ve learned a lot in these discussions and will continue to use our agency roles to support climate resiliency.”

That was meant to be reassuring. It was not.

Stronger Wisconsin also wants everyone to know that they are there for communities of color because fighting climate change means … DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion).

“We already knew that communities of color suffer disproportionately in natural disasters for a multitude of reasons,” Crim said. “They are geographically located in areas more prone to flooding, and they often lack access to governmental resources to help them recover. As our weather events continue to grow more severe and more frequent, the inequities these communities and people of Wisconsin face will continue to grow.”

Translated, climate disaster mitigation means wealth redistribution and not just to government-defined disaster-prone areas but to specific communities within those high-risk zones, a likely unconstitutional gambit based on race alone.

All in all, Stronger Wisconsin is about fear-mongering. Here’s what you get unless you listen to the lords of climate mitigation, the OCI proclaimed in one statement, quoting financial services firm McKinsey & Company: “The projected escalation of climate risk, such as the occurrence of more floods and wildfires, may lead to underinsurance—or to no insurance at all. The result, substantial market dislocation, will include premium loss, higher rates of self-insurance, and an increased demand for disaster relief from the public sector.”

The OCI crows about its next steps, all of which involve more government regulation: implementing the restrictive Community Rating System; pursuing sustainability that supports resiliency; and enacting climate-focused building codes.

So, you had better get busy with that mitigation.

All of this disaster education and regulatory promotion is being touted not just as common sense but as necessary, and it is being driven by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) severe weather data. In early 2023, in Property Insurance Report, Houdek was quoted as noting the significant “increase in severe climate-related events, like hailstorms, droughts and even wildfires. Since 2000, the state has experienced 43 billion-dollar disasters, including 34 that involved severe storms and two that involved flooding, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).”

The report goes on to observe that “extreme precipitation is projected to increase, potentially increasing the frequency and intensity of floods, especially in the spring. Warming temperatures

will also reduce the state’s snowfall, according to NCEI.”

And naturally, there was Houdek touting the Stronger Wisconsin initiative to “raise awareness around building, insuring and financing more resilient homes and businesses. The initiative works together with other state agencies, the insurance industry, and financial services stakeholders to educate consumers on pre-disaster mitigation.”

A look at the current NOAA NCEI database is alarming indeed. From 1980–2024, there were 61 confirmed weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each in the state, including nine droughts, four floods, one freeze event, 43 severe storms, and four winter storm events.

The costs alone expose the unfolding calamity around us, NOAA informs us. In inflation-adjusted dollars, 28.8 percent of the total costs of those billion-dollar events since 1980 have occurred in just the past five years and 17 percent in the past three years. So nearly 30 percent of damage was done in the latest 11.1 percent of the subject time period. In contrast, only 8.3 percent of the total costs—again, in inflation-adjusted dollars—occurred in the first 10 years of the time period, or less than 10 percent of the damage spread over the earliest 22 percent of the comparison period.

If that doesn’t yell climate change emergency, I don’t know what does. But wait! It yells climate-change emergency only if you believe the government, and who believes the government these days?

Thankfully, there are some skeptics who refuse to swallow the government’s data hook, line and sinker, and U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology committee chairman Frank Lucas (R-Oklahoma), environment subcommittee chairman Max Miller (R-Ohio), and investigations and oversight subcommittee chairman Jay Obernolte (R-California) are among them.

Recent information coming to them suggests that NOAA’s weather-disaster data—particularly the inflation-adjusted cost data that drives so much of the fear-mongering—could be an elaborate imposture. As such, on September 3, they sent a letter to Dr. Rick Spinrad, the NOAA administrator, raising concerns about not only the potentially deceptive data but its lack of accessibility in NOAA’s annual publication of weather-related disasters.

“The committee has learned that NOAA could be releasing misleading data in its annual publication of weather-related disasters that exceed one billion dollars (‘reports’),” the lawmakers wrote. “NOAA’s reports are broadly cited and used to justify policy decisions on climate change. Therefore, it’s critical that the information endorsed by NOAA is accurate and trustworthy.”

Especially so because a peer-reviewed article (University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke’s “Scientific Integrity and U.S. ‘Billion Dollar Disasters’” in Nature has uncovered apparent flaws in the methodology NOAA uses to calculate costs associated with weather-related disasters, the lawmakers wrote:

“Since 2011, the report’s cost estimates of all past disasters in the dataset have been updated annually to account for inflation in today’s dollars,” they wrote. “However, despite adjustments for inflation, the reports have not been adjusted for increases in population or wealth in the same capacity. Due to these increases in population and wealth, even mild storms can sometimes appear to cause greater damage today.”

In other words, in any given location, there’s more developed property—and more expensive developed property—to damage, so that a storm today in an area highly developed compared to 1980 is going to cause more property damage than a storm of the same severity then.

In the case of Florida’s Hurricane Idalia, the lawmakers wrote, NOAA estimated a cost of $3.6 billion.

“Yet according to statistics from the state itself, the total insured losses amounted to approximately $310 million,” they wrote. “Even accounting for losses on uninsured property, it is unclear how NOAA could arrive at a figure that is nearly twelve times the insured losses. Furthermore, the article highlighted that the general public and greater scientific community are unable to replicate NOAA’s calculations because NOAA does not make public its ‘sources, input data, and methodologies employed,’ in these reports. As a result, the keystones of the scientific method, independent verification and analyses, are currently impossible.”

Ans, whoops, there are other flaws, they wrote, again citing Pielke (Billion Dollar Disasters on Steroids and Scientific Integrity and U.S. ‘Billion Dollar’ Disasters). For one thing, previous “billion-dollar disasters” have suddenly appeared and disappeared from the dataset, they asserted.

“For example, between December 2022 and July 2023, ten weather events appeared and three disappeared without any documented justification or passing explanation,” they wrote. “This sporadic, unexplained change in the data misleads other agencies and citizens that use and consume the dataset.”

What’s more, they continued, the dataset’s application of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to adjust for inflation is inconsistent.

“According to the article, most weather events between 2022 and 2023 were adjusted

with inflation rates between 4.5 percent and 6 percent,” they wrote. “At the same time, nine events in the same time frame were adjusted from 6.6 percent to 145 percent, while one event was reduced by about 75 percent. Given that CPI is used as a proxy for annual inflation rates, adjustments for CPI should be consistent across all weather events.”

The lawmakers demanded answers from Stinrad that were due this past week. Still, there’s enough troubling evidence that the books are cooked that all policy based on the numbers needs to be suspended pending Congress’s investigation of the matter. Pielke himself effectively says the numbers are toast, because there’s no way they can be right. He put it this way:

“It is clear that NOAA is risking a significant science scandal—simply because the agency has implemented flawed methodological choices with the resulting effect, in each instance, of artificially boosting counts of billion-dollar disasters, and there is no methodological or data transparency that would allow NOAA to justify these choices,” he wrote on his Substack.

Here’s his punch line: “The juicing of the counts of billion-dollar disasters matters not because the tabulation is of significant scientific importance—it is not— but because NOAA has promoted the tabulation so heavily as being scientifically important. The list of disaster counts has also variously been adopted as a scientifically-meaningful dataset by the U.S. National Climate Assessment, the U.S. president, in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, across the major media, and by decision makers in many public and private sector settings.”

And, of course, let’s include the Wisconsin Office of the Commissioner of Insurance in that list. In short, the agency’s notion that climate change is a main driver of higher insurance rates is baloney, based on misleading data from the federal government.

Still, beyond exposing what is not causing higher insurance premiums, there’s still the question of what is causing them. Obviously, one reason is the aforementioned anticipation of severe disasters: not climate change but the fear of climate change brought to you by fear-mongering insurance regulators. Not surprisingly, that has led to serious conflicts of interest between the industry and its regulators. For instance, NOAA and the Reinsurance Association of America (RAA) have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) “to collaborate on the shared goal of analyzing and communicating weather and climate hazard risks to key stakeholders.”

Specifically, NOAA is helping to pay for the industry’s climate risk modeling. Any takers on what the models will predict?

“Weather and climate extremes continue to pose a significant risk to communities and our economy,” Spinrad said in announcing the partnership. “We know that certain extreme events are increasing, and we know that more people and physical facilities are in harm’s way. This partnership will help improve our ability to make the scientifically informed decisions needed to improve resilience.”

So NOAA is paying to keep the climate narrative in place and to keep the insurance industry silent while using flawed methodological data to guide insurance rates up and down the line and to pressure policyholders to support decarbonization policies. Given Spinrad’s language, the lawmakers shouldn’t expect much cooperation in correcting NOAA’s methodological flaws.

There are others reason for increasing premiums, and most if not all are caused by Democratic policy-making. In Wisconsin, there’s a tough regulatory climate—the preferred way Democrats like to imprison their citizens. Motorists here have to pay an uninsured motorist fee that only 20 states have, to cite one example.

There’s overall inflation, and rising prices mean rising insurance rates. Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s inflation policies have caused a chain reaction—higher costs for car repairs and higher priced cars and homes mean higher rates as insurance companies scramble to recoup their underwriting losses and undervalued dollars.

Apart from inflation, there are higher costs associated with car theft and home invasions and vandalism—another problem that can be laid at the doorstep of Democratic politicians and prosecutors who refuse to charge criminals for such crimes. Insurers also cite traffic congestion from high-population density—that’s due to restrictive zoning and progressives’ desire to herd everyone into smaller and denser residential zones, sometimes called 15-minute cities. Again, Democratic policies.

And then there is Covid, which spiked reckless driving. For whatever reason, lousy driving since the pandemic has resulted not only in more accidents and in more fatalities but in more severe claims in general—and higher costs. There were other pandemic impacts—closed schools, no work or church or other contact outside the home—that drove a mental health crisis and even riskier behavior, on the roadways and elsewhere.

And whose policies contributed to that mental health nightmare and loss of independence and civil liberties? Send your thanks to the Democratic Party, the soulmate of de facto civilian incarceration.

There is certainly climate change going on in the world, there’s no denying that because it has always been the case. Some small portion of it is even human caused. But none of it is causing higher insurance premiums. If ever there was a time to change leadership in Washington and Madison, it is now. It is also the time for conservative lawmakers and policy leaders to call out the Stronger Wisconsin program and its agenda of ever more regulation, based on faulty data.

Indeed, the legislature should immediately convene hearings to investigate the entire regulatory agenda of the OCI as it relates to climate change to see just what the agency is up to. They might not find a Red under every bed, but no doubt there are quite a few lurking in the backwaters of insurance regulation.

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