There are very, very few people I would say this about, but the world is a better place with David Koch dead.
There is a solid case to be made that climate predatory delay meets the standard of crimes against humanity... and no one has done more to delay climate action (and sabotage American democracy) than the Koch brothers.
All humanity has been robbed by these creeps.
Their corruption turned ecological challenges into a planetary emergency.
Your children will live diminished & more dangerous lives because of them.
And a great many poor children will simply suffer and die because of their greed.
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"Starting this summer, 30,000 California policyholders will be told they are being dropped by California’s largest home insurer... as turmoil in California’s insurance industry continues."
"Since 2019, a California state law has protected homeowners affected by wildfires from being immediately non-renewed by their insurance companies. But the moratorium lasts for only a year after a declaration of emergency... So communities hit by fires from 2019 through 2022 are now vulnerable to nonrenewals due to their wildfire risk."
A huge number of homes and businesses (indeed, whole towns) are about to take serious hits to their value, as major risks begin to be more accurately priced into insurance and finance.
Long-running catastrophic failures of policy and planning.
Twenty years ago, the idea that the world was becoming uninsurable was one of our big themes on Worldchanging — and one of the major reasons I began talking about a "brittleness bubble."
Today, we find ourselves in "the uninsurable world."
"If yearly losses stick above the $100bn level, and firms are forced into further price rises and pullbacks to protect their balance sheets... there will be growing 'patches' where buying insurance is uneconomical, Swiss Re has predicted."
H/t @AssaadRazzouk
(The brittleness bubble describes all the assets that are overpriced for the world we live in, now, given their exposure to risk.)
They're fighting so hard because it isn't just their far future profits that are at stake, but their political power & financial clout in the near term.
Making fossil fuels look "too big to fail" is the central pillar of their political strategies of predatory delay.
In "Is the unsustainable too big to fail?" I made the point that civic sabotage — the overt weakening of policy and diplomacy meant to tackle climate change — produces not only useful delays but also *more confidence in the durability of unsustainable and untenable systems*.
Climate response — readying systems/ places for compound impacts; overcoming risk acceleration and disinvestment; creating platforms for building sustainable wealth; using resulting resources to increase societal returns on further ruggedization — will end up defining the next few decades more than mitigation.
"[E]very year in which emissions continue to rise eats up the available “carbon budget” and means much more drastic cuts will be needed in future years."
The longer we delay, the more likely a scenario of severe warming AND disruptive action becomes.
We should talk more about one injustice inherent in timid climate response: not only have poor people been economically forced into more dangerous places, but also many of those places are likely impossible to save in any realistic way as impacts worsen over coming decades.
I mean, we should be talking a lot more about just how many places around the world are likely to fail as they experience the steepening of losses from combined climate/ecological discontinuities, geopolitical upheaval and structurally inadequate adaptation.