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By Simmons Buntin, June 21, 2011 12:47 pm

By Brian Thomas

People judge risk badly. We worry too much about minor hazards and are nonchalant about more serious ones. We’re especially inept at judging chronic long-term risks – like climate change.

Insurance is a major part of how we deal with risk – can it lead us to more viable ways to address climate issues? The picture is mixed.

When we manage risk by buying insurance, we endure the slow, small pain of insurance premiums in exchange for a big compensation should something ugly happen. The insurers profit from our lack of knowledge about risk. Buying insurance goes against the grain, but paying our premiums gives us a little more security against fires, earthquakes, business interruption, and the numerous other events against which we can buy an insurance product.

Insurers review their policies annually and change their terms if they see a change in the probabilities. When no major losses occur, the industry pats itself on the back for judging their risks correctly for that year. They’re happy and profitable.  If the risk landscape changes, they absorb the payouts and adjust the terms accordingly.

The optimistic point of view is that insurance can play a major role in guiding businesses and individuals toward more climate-friendly decisions. In theory, insurers study the real probabilities of known hazards, figure out a viable premium that gives themselves a profit and the policyholders the agreed upon protection against the risk. When climate change raises the risks of flooding, business interruption, and other insurance hazards, the premiums go up, which can lead their policyholders to change their behavior. Financing for a new factory can be prohibitive or even impossible to get, if insurers won’t cover it.

In practice, though, this theory is faulty for several reasons. Climate change poses special challenges to insurers, not merely because they are on the hook for many weather risks such as hurricanes.

First, to single out one kind of insurance, many factors combine in extreme weather events. A hurricane has many causes, and global warming might only be two percent part of the overall risk. If that part grows from two percent to five percent, it seems negligible, but in fact it’s quite significant. As one insurance executive said, “Even a minor increase in a risk like that can mean billions of dollars in additional losses to insurers.” If the winds are a few miles per hour stronger, and the storm takes a path through a heavily insured area, insurers can be overwhelmed.

The same is true for other climate impacts. There have always been floods, extreme weather, and times when the water cycle intensifies. But if climate change is turning up the dial, these familiar events may break out of their boundaries and become more frequent, more intense, or changed in unexpected ways.

Second, insurers are people too, and the cognitive blind spots that afflict individuals also affect the risk business. In practice, the insurance industry’s grip on certain probabilities often relies on seat-of-the-pants methods that are subjective, and whose over-optimistic assumptions are sometimes rudely corrected by ugly surprises, especially when risks are constantly changing, as they are with climate change.

Like all of us, insurers want certainty, even when they know that certainty cannot be attained. At a 2007 conference about hurricane science for an insurance audience, the world’s top climatologists discussed various topics in modeling and hurricanes. The head of underwriting at a major North American insurer snorted at the hedged, qualified way the scientists state their conclusions. The underwriter then complained, “Why don’t the scientists give us numbers we can use!  These probabilities are too nebulous for us to write business with them!”  His impatience is widely shared, but the answer is no.

Third, insurance functions well when the risks of various hazards are truly independent of each other, and truly random. One trouble with climate change is that climate instability tends to make floods, windstorms, and other extreme weather more interrelated.

One force binding all these factors together more tightly is land use, which in the US is often part of a highly entrenched political juggernaut promoting the worst possible policies, such as building heavily in flood plains, or on beaches very prone to hurricane damage.

Consider Florida, where the laws, business practices and general culture are geared to developing every square inch of land near water – oceans, certainly, but also lakes, streams, wetlands. Even in the absence of climate change, this is an obviously dangerous policy. It’s also very popular. John Coomber, former CEO of Swiss Re, once grumbled that every American wants to live on the most vulnerable beaches they can find in Florida.

Governments occasionally try to buck the pro-development tide, but the political pressure against the anti-development forces is swift and merciless. Certainly no politician can withstand it. Rather than resisting, many property and casualty insurers have pulled away from vulnerable coastal property in Florida.

In response, Florida created its own public insurance pool. Result? Development continues, and the state fund is actuarially unsound – a major storm hitting a developed area would bankrupt the fund in short order. A few more storms would bankrupt the state of Florida, which would then call on the Federal government — as the stand-in for taxpayers in all other states — to bail them out.

These three factors mean that the insurance industry is weaker than it appears when in matters of changing social and economic policies. The only way to change these entrenched policies would be for other social forces to align with the insurance point of view. That will require energetic political leadership and vigorous regulation. The market alone cannot save us.

~~~

Brian Thomas left Swiss Re in 2006 and became a sustainability consultant with a focus on communications. He has developed green-themed projects for clients including Merill Lynch Global Markets and Investment Banking, Cofra Holding, Good Energies, Zurich Financial, Edelman, the City of Chicago, the City of New York, and others. He is currently a member of the New York City Panel on Climate Change, EnviroComm, and the Association of Green Technology Auditors, to name a few. Thomas started his blog, Carbon Based, in 2007, after requests from contributors to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He is the author of Climate Change Adaptation in 2010 and currently resides in West Cornwall, Connecticut, where he is an activist member of the Conservation Commission. For more information, please visit www.carbon-based-ghg.com, and his blog, http://carbon-based-ghg.blogspot.com.

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By Brian Awehali, March 22, 2010 2:06 pm

High tree line, Nantou County, Taiwan. Everything just grows here.

By Brian Awehali

I was taken on a lovely tour of the fog-wreathed high mountain tea country in Nantou County, in the central and only landlocked part of Taiwan. Here, especially in the east, near the Hualien coastline, it’s easy to see why the Portuguese dubbed this place “formosa,” which means “beautiful island.” Butterflies and lush vegetation abound.

One must dwell in beauty when contemplating strategies for military conquest and brutal political suppression.

Among the many interesting natural sites, I also saw the “bamboo house” that Nationalist (KMT) leader Lord Chiang would retreat to in the years after he lost his struggle against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and was forced to flee mainland China. I’m not sure if he went here before or after he contracted the gonorrhea that would eventually sterilize him and leave him with only one biological son, but it was definitely before he imprisoned or executed upwards of 140,000 people for opposing the KMT in Taiwan.

After the tour, I was invited to visit a local tea aficionado to learn more about the history, process, art, and etiquette of Taiwan’s second-most-acclaimed product (the first being the creation and modern defense of a functioning democratic Chinese society and government).

We entered and began the tasting: Spring and Winter varieties of Rose Oolong, Jasmine and Black teas were in the offing, and it was surprising just how distinct the flavor of each season’s tea was. I learned that the best tea is grown at the highest altitudes, where it takes the longest to mature. Winter tea is the most prized, and most expensive, though I personally favor the spring tea for its greener, and more precisely chlorophyllic aroma and color.

Chushan tea master, pouring

I am a mostly unapologetic hedonist, and I often have as much trouble limiting my enjoyment of something pleasurable or delicious as I do stopping an interesting conversation, or leaving a beautiful place. So I kept accepting one cup of fine tea after another as my host offered them. I was at this tasting with my partner F. and her parents, and courtesy dictated that if I accepted more, more would be served. I was having a grand and fabulously caffeinated time, completely engrossed in asking as many questions as came to mind while everyone translated for me. What was the difference between black tea, green tea and oolong? (They’re all from the Camellia Senesis plant, but black tea is fully fermented/oxidized, oolong to a lesser extent, and green tea not at all). Why was the first short steeping of the tea always discarded? (To “wake” the tea and to wash away any residue on the leaves before drinking). Why were there so many steeps of each tea, and why such tiny cups? (We were performing a ceremonial method called gongfucha, and the exacting chemistry and temperature of the ceremony dictates smaller cups with hotter water). Would a person get fat from eating so many of these delicious biscuits, peanuts, and cookies between each serving of tea? (“Not as long as they’re consumed with tea!,” chirped my comfortably stout host.)

"You cannot get fat, no matter how much you eat, as long as it's while you're drinking tea!"

I also learned just how intensive the human labor of tea (especially oolong) is. The vast majority of it is picked by hand, a pound of tea requires tens to hundreds of thousands of leaves, and pay is generally very low. Taking this into consideration, the slower and more deliberate consumption of tea makes perfect sense.

It was not until many hours and maybe 50 cups of tea (small ones, but really: 50) that I realized just how very much tea had been consumed.  When we finally tore ourselves away, my obviously great love of tea led our host to offer me a very fine traveling tea set and some lovely spring tea from the high mountains of Nantou to take with me on my travels. Score!

The first ten cups make you smile, the second twenty make you talk. The twenty after that may give you tachycardia.

That night, I worked merrily through the night while F. and her parents complained bitterly the next morning about insomnia and bad sleep. 

It is not simply national chauvinism when the Taiwanese tell you, as they often do, that the very best tea is from Taiwan. The choicest tea they produce is bought up by men doing business in mainland China, who use it to bribe Chinese officials and thereby grease the wheels of commerce. This is so common, I was told by a merchant for one of Taiwan’s largest tea producers, that it’s very hard for the average Taiwanese to get any of their prized winter tea. I noticed that the Wikipedia entry on oolong tea does not mention this fact. Then again, as great as Wikipedia is, you can’t be too trusting of anything you read online…

NEXT: Ten days working on a WWOOF-affiliated “organic” farm in Chunan, on the northwest coast of Taiwan. ABC’s of Japanese-style organic fertilizer! The genius of birds relative to that of insects! How to cut and harvest bamboo without getting eaten alive by vicious little bugs! (That is, vicious little bugs other than the Taiwanese vampire mosquito.)

~~~~

Brian Awehali, a former editor at Britannica.com, founded and edited the North American magazine, LiP: Informed Revolt (anthology: Tipping the Sacred Cow, AK Press). In 2010, he will be traveling through Taiwan, China, and Mongolia, writing diffusely about culture, sustainable development, and emerging “green” technologies. He curates LOUDCANARY: One interconnected journey through everything and nothing. He is a half-Irish member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

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By Simmons Buntin, March 8, 2010 6:20 pm

By Tom Rooney

Tom Rooney, CEO of SPG Solar, rings the solar gong at the SunTech solar factory in China.

Greetings from Beijing where, from my cafe seat near Tiananmen Square,  plans to expand solar power in the United States look a lot different than from my office in Northern California — where I am the CEO of one of America’s larger solar power companies.

Many of the measures — and half measures — that we read about every day in American papers are things the Germans and Chinese and Spanish and French decided to do 10 years ago.

They are racing. We are walking.

Germany, for example: Hardly a sunny hot spot — but it has more solar installations than any country in the world. 200 times more than England. That is because German citizens have been getting 50 to 75 cents per kilowatt hour for the solar power they sell back to the grid. Spain is similar.

Great Britain and France and Ontario and other places throughout the world recently raised their so-called ‘feed in tariffs’ to  comparable levels.

In Gainesville, Florida, the feed-in tariff is now the highest in the country at 32 cents. All of a sudden there is an explosion of interest in solar in Gainesville.

In California, we get less than 10  cents. And that is more than most places.

In the United States, we limit not just the price but also the amount of solar energy an owner can sell back to the grid. So we wait for the day when all the transmission lines are perfect. When the grid is perfect. When all the energy infrastructure is in place.

Meanwhile, we wait for an energy future that may never come.

If we allowed the price to rise, and removed the limits on how much solar energy a farmer or business owner or school or police station could generate, we would see an explosion in demand for solar and other renewables.  That would reduce our dependence on foreign energy and stimulate domestic manufacturing, as well.

It’s a two-fer.

That is our best chance of creating solar panel manufacturing jobs in the United States. But it is already very late in the game.  Michael Northrop of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund points out the most of the world’s largest renewable energy manufacturing happens outside the United States. He says,  “Not only are we shipping oil dollars to the Middle East, we are watching our solar, wind, and other renewable energy dollars begin flowing to Asia. … The U.S. needs to decide rapidly whether it wants to own this future or pay for it.”

From my seat in Beijing, where I am traveling the country visiting suppliers for my solar power installation company, it looks as if this decision has already been made.

~~~

Tom Rooney is the President and CEO of SPG Solar. He can be reached at spgsolar.com.

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By Simmons Buntin, February 16, 2010 4:07 pm

The Chain Letter of the Soul: New and Selected Poems
by Bill Holm
Milkweed Editions, 2009

By Claudia Broman

Death eventually comes knocking, but before it does, a person might as well pass the time writing poetry. Bill Holm implies as much in “Ars Poetica,” one of his many until-now-unpublished poems included in The Chain Letter of the Soul, printed and posthumously distributed by Milkweed Editions in October 2009 after Holm passed away unexpectedly earlier that year from pneumonia.

Along with new work by Holm, The Chain Letter of the Soul recounts treasures from some of his previous works, The Dead Get By With Everything, Boxelder Bug Variations, and Playing the Black Piano. The book itself is named after a phrase in an application Holm made to the McKnight Foundation to support the time he spent crafting his final batch of new poems: “I have written and intend to continue until someone among you takes up the happy work of keeping the chain letter of the soul moving along into whatever future will come.”

Serendipitous and poignant, many of the poems track Holm’s own emotional negotiation of life, death, and infinity. Through images steeped in landscape, people, wildlife, technology, and music, he questions why death is difficult to accept, what mundane day-to-day moments can teach, and what it means to be human. Take the outset of one of the last poems he wrote, “I Began the Day in My Sixty-Fifth Year,” in which Holm says he asks “himself questions that nobody else has bothered to ask.” By sharing these intimate exchanges with readers, Holm seems to have understood – even if intuitively – how his creativity would continue to resonate much farther than his own abruptly ended life.

The Chain Letter of the Soul is an appropriate entry point for those unfamiliar with Holm, and it offers touching closure for readers already acquainted with his work. The book holds nearly 100 previously unreleased poems, well worth the investment, even though the end of the “Storm Coming to Seattle” section seemed a bit rushed. Please consider The Chain Letter of the Soul as highly recommended and especially so while enjoyed aloud with Mozart or Beethoven, preferably performed on piano, playing in the background.

~~~~

Claudia Broman lives in Ashland, Wisconsin. Her poetry has appeared in Writing Nature: An Annual of Fine Nature Writing and Drawing.

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By Simmons Buntin, December 9, 2009 7:00 pm

By Shelly Yarbrough

Mike Parham, the IUSD board member responsible for prompting the school district to retrofit with solar.

Anyone who ever watched Housewives of Orange County knows that people in that upscale community have a lot of money to spend on just about anything they want.

So plunking down a few millions bucks for solar panels should be no problem for the school district in the heart of Orange County, the Irvine Unified School District, right?

Wrong.

Despite the high living you might see on television dramas and reality shows, the IUSD is pretty much like every other school district in California. The money is dried up.

So when IUSD board member Mike Parham decided his district needed to go solar, he also knew it would have to be at little or no cost to the district.

“We knew the price of buying and installing solar was coming down, and the incentives were at an all-time high, so there was no reason to wait,” Parham said.

Low cost was good. No cost was better, so that is what Parham and his district did.

Earlier this week, the IUSD voted unanimously to go solar on each of its 21 schools, selecting SPG Solar and Sun Edison to build and finance the project. All at no cost to the district.

This is not a charity thing. Or a giveaway. It is a sound business deal made possible by tax incentives on the one hand, and a sharply decreasing cost of buying and installing solar panels on the other.

Here’s how it works: Schools, of course, do not pay taxes so tax breaks are of little interest to them. Enter SPG Solar and SunEdison.

What they do is rent the roofs from the IUSD, build the system, create the power, then sell it to the schools — just like a utility might. With one difference: it is cheaper. Way cheaper. From seven to 20 percent cheaper.

And over the 20-year life of the deal that comes to more than $17 million, says Tom Rooney, president of SPG Solar.

For all you gear heads out there, “this project will generate over 6.6 million kilowatt hours of solar energy per year,” said Dylan Dupre of SPG Solar. “Over the life of the project, this will remove 127 million pounds of CO2, the equivalent of removing 12,000 cars from the road for one year.”

But as good as the finances are, what really has school board members such as Parham excited is what is happening in the classrooms. IUSD is developing a curriculum that takes full advantage of all the information its solar system is creating.

That includes lessons in science and math of course, but also business, finance and even art.

“Our responsibility is to squeeze the most out of every dollar, and to provide the best education possible with those limited resources,” said Parham, who in addition to being nationally recognized in the field of renewable energy for schools is also an investment banker. “Students, who will one day run this country, should learn about the viability of solar (and wind) energy, in order to be well-prepared for the job market of the future.”

Thanks to Parham, the people of Orange County are still getting whatever they want. Only this time they are making money from it. Go figure.

~~~

Shelly Yarbrough is a member of the Val Verde School Board in Riverside County, California. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the California School Board Association.

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By Simmons Buntin, September 29, 2009 5:26 am

By Jennifer McStotts

When the draft for Vietnam was in full swing, my father volunteered not because he believed in the war or lusted for battle, but because he couldn’t avoid the draft. He knew if he volunteered, he would get a better assignment, and if he survived, his life afterward would be more stable. A risky reason to enlist, but it is also common thinking among women who serve: the desire for training, for education, for opportunity and stability. Much like many women who serve today, his enlistment launched three decades of silence in his family. The first time I remember him mentioning Vietnam was in my late teens. We were in twining lines waiting for flu shots, staying together until we were divided, men to the left, women to the right. He stood just off my shoulder, and as we neared the split, he asked, “Are you squeamish about needles?”

I chuckled. “No, are you?”

To my surprise he gave the smallest shudder and said, as our lines split apart, “I’ve put parts into body bags that you couldn’t even tell were once a person, but for some reason needles still give me the creeps.”

He didn’t speak of his service even as I considered joining myself, except to say that a commission was better than enlistment and that serving as a woman was not easy. Choosing to remain a civilian isn’t something I regret; in fact, it is a luxury for which I am thankful, but it was pressing on my mind as I sat down, Saturday evening in Tucson, Ariz., for the performance of Coming in Hot.

The stageplay is an adaptation of selections from the Kore Press anthology, Powder: Writing by Women in the Military, from Vietnam to Iraq, which collects the work of nineteen women who served in the U.S. military in a variety of roles. Lisa Bowden and Shannon Cain, the co-editors, admit that they “went into the project with the idea that this work would contribute to the chorus of opposition to the war in Iraq . . . We saw immediately the necessity of setting aside any bias and agenda.” It was, nonetheless, this agenda, bias, and perspective that made me wonder if the adapted work would be solely anti-war, primarily a piece of activism, especially given that the work was produced by Kore Press and directed by Bowden.

What the audience witnessed was a well-balanced collection of monologues composed into a one-woman show featuring Jeanmarie Simpson (original score by accompanist Vicki Brown on strings and pedals, with recorded voice talents of Donald Paul Stockton and Kaylene Torregrossa). Before I go any further, I would like to applaud Simpson. While her performance wasn’t flawless, she was also presented with a nearly impossible task in portraying 14 distinct characters in 80 minutes, without costume change; she did so successfully — laudably — using her voice, her mannerisms, and her versatility as an actress, but at times the variety of accents necessary to distinguish so many women became less convincing.

It is troubling that the adaption and direction called for Simpson to do so in the first place. The message or point of the play could have been narrowed, refined, or, in the alternative, the number of monologues could have been reduced (19 contributions became 14 characters, and an even greater number of segments given the recurring appearance of Charlotte Brock’s character in Mortuary Affairs). Characters could have been conflated without much loss of narrative effect and without forcing Simpson to stretch to distinguish them; as one audience member said immediately after the performance, “There were too many stories. It was too much, and it didn’t say enough.”

That said, despite missed light cues, despite a few stuttered lines and awkward moments involving her blocking, Simpson brought life to characters within the simplicity of an otherwise stark production. The set consisted only of one chair and one table — more of an operating table, clinical and spare — which was primarily used for the Mortuary Affairs scenes in which Brock’s character stood over it as if looking down on a body. The lighting consisted of only a few overhead fixtures at various angles with the exception of one water effect and one flashlight held by a crew member. What felt strange, to me, was the balance the director struck between the one-woman show format — meant to emphasize character and message — and the use of recorded voice segments to supplement Simpson’s work. In addition, it was confusing that at first the recorded voices were only used for the male voice of a boot camp instructor, then a female voice for the character Simpson was portraying silently on stage, and finally that same female voice switched to a male role. While I don’t agree with one audience member’s assessment that it would have been better to focus on a very small number of stories — four being the number she mentioned — it did feel inconsistent to rely on the one-actor model while supplementing and distracting from her performance in a variety of ways.

The original score by Vicki Brown was a perfect accompaniment to the monologues. Brown used the same themes and structure each time Simpson returned to the recurring character of Charlotte Brock in the mortuary. At other times, her music set the heartbeat of the scene, calling its pace; at every moment, she took the pain and the challenge of Brock’s writing (and Simpson’s portrayal) to a higher level.

These recurring scenes pulled me in the most and made me think — again, as I often have before — of my father’s offhand comment. “I’ve put parts into body bags that you couldn’t even tell were once a person.” Brock says something very similar about “the contents of the bags” that Mortuary Affairs handled, especially in one harrowing scene in which the deceased is little more than “a head, a hand, and an arm.”

What Simpson, Bowden, and Cain attempted to do in the adaptation and performance was no easy task — to tell these stories and to grant these women their individual voices when their silence has been so pervasive. What perhaps made the sections by Brock so powerful was that she, too, was trying to give someone a voice, both herself in the world in which she found herself surrounded, but also the dead who lay upon that table.

About the Blogger

Jennifer McStotts is the daughter, niece, and ex-wife of United States Marines, as well as a second-year MFA student in creative nonfiction. Her work has been published in Future Anterior, in International Journal of Heritage Studies, and by Preservation Books.