By Daniel Foty
Last week, fellow Tiger Tom Evslin noted a somewhat bizarre statement out of Montpelier - that a "climate change" provision was being considered for addition to the Act 250 process.
Tom noted - tongue-in-cheek - that if they're so concerned about that.... perhaps they should think it through and re-license Vermont's carbon-dioxide-emission-free nuclear power plant.
Tom, your logic here is impeccable. However - such a leap would require this lot to combine two irrationalities into one logical conclusion - "when pigs fly" indeed.
This crowd has been mindlessly and irretrievably opposed to nuclear power since (at least) the 1970s - and nothing is going to alter that now. And they've also had the blinds drawn so that they can just willfully ignore the way that the wheels have come spectacularly (both scientifically and politically) off the bus that has been the"climate change" narrative.
But no matter how hare-brained such an attempted addition to Act 250 may sound, there are a couple of possible implications of such an inclusion - and they aren't mutually-exclusive....
The second possible inclusion (which, again, is independent of the first one and in no way precludes it) would be that all projects must include some plan to be prepared for all of the new disasters and catastrophes that are supposed to begin (yep, any day now) due to "climate change."
This one is more subtle, but it could end up being more insidious (and generally expensive) - and you have to wonder how some of the folks who have been peddling various weather-based disaster scenarios over the past many years didn't see this one coming.
If all of these disasters are in the offing, who (from a purely business perspective) would be most concerned? The insurance business of course - since they're in the business of trying to compute the risks that they're exposing themselves to (financially and otherwise), and then calibrating their own business financials to ensure their own viability in the face of those risks.
And in this scenario, the insurance business could be a big winner - since all those "climate change"-induced disasters (due to show up any minute now) increase their risk.... and therefore require that they increase their premiums and other charges. (And when those weather disasters don't materialize.... well, those extra charges are just gravy to the bottom line.)
Lest you think I'm making this up out of the ether, this has already happened in (at least) Australia:
There was no apocalypse, no climate cataclysm. No change in our weather patterns.
Zilch. Nada. A big fat nothing.
But Sydney householders have still been hit with the bill for climate change disasters that never happened.
Your insurance premiums were mercilessly hiked last year, some by as much as 10 per cent, in preparation for what insurance experts [sic - ed.] labelled the "perfect storm" - a series of severe weather occurrences that were meant to pound our roofs and cars with rockmelon-sized hailstones, flood our lounge rooms knee-deep and leave us corner-bound, cowering from the environment's wrath.
(If you follow the link, you'll also see that the CEO of one of the Australian insurance outfits has the delightful name of Patrick Snowball!)
I have no idea what kind of "thinking" (sic) might be behind that Act 250 missive. But the results are pretty much predictable - they will amount to no-benefit gestures that will, in the real world, just increase costs and difficulties further.
