Friday, May 31, 2013

Property insurance and climate change

Have a look at this article about climate change and insurance.

It does make sense to be prepared for harsh weather events such as storms, freezing and heat waves, floods and droughts, since is makes sense to protect our property from damage.  However, to prepare for "climate change" is a whole other thing since it means gradula change over decades.  The variability of weather is much higher than that of climate, so being prepared for weather is most logical. 

Here in Ottawa, Canada's capital, the daily temperature sometimes fluctuates by more than 25 degrees celsius and this is ten times greater than the climate doomsayers claim will happen in the next century, even though there is no evidence it is occurring at anywhere near that pace, if at all.  We handle such changes as a routine part of life and have both heating and cooling systems.  Of the two, the heating system is far more important since fewer people die of heat than of cold. On a very hot day we simply open the windows, turn on a fan, use air conditioning or maybe even go for a swim.  On a very cold day, without heat, people would suffer enormously and their household water would of course freeze and burst the pipes.

The greater damage due to weather in recent decades is because humans have accumulated so much more wealth and placed much of it in harms's way for the sake of waterfront property.  Unless they study history a little more, people may not realize the frequency of great storms and other weather events in the past, and so may believe the present storm is an anomaly.  Modern technology has made most lives so much better that we forget how harsh nature is without the protections our energy and technology systems provide.

I hope Klinenberg will focus on the benefits of technology, the fantastic improvement in human life that a free market enables, and the desperate need to allow freedom of choice in energy, insurance and construction, among other areas.

Read more here: http://www.heraldonline.com/2013/05/30/4903757/media-advisory-ibc-sponsor-of.html#storylink=cpy

The right of a business to exist and follow its own path

Take a look at http://www.universitybusiness.com/article/divestment-debate

The scariest part of this article is not the validation of organizations bent on controlling larger parts of society through eco-scare tactics, but the philosophical base on which their ideas rest, as exemplified by the statement "their social license to continue business as usual" by President Stephen Mulkey of Unity College, Vermont.

Businesses are nothing more than individuals who have organized their productive activities into a particular structure.  In the case of the ones referred to by Mulkey, they are businesses successful enough, that provide enough added value to their fellow human beings that they are able to list their shares on a stock exchange. Most businesses never achieve that level of distinguished value creation and remain privately held throughout their existence.

Businesses, whether small or large, private or public, are always owned by individual human beings and so the rights of a business are nothing more or less than individual human rights being expressed in more complex ways. Morally, businesses right to exist is derived directly from the human rights to life, liberty and property. Just as individuals are morally right to pursue their own happiness and goals in life, so are businesses right, and have the right, to pursue their goals - so long as they do not initiate physical force against others.  Morally, there is no such thing as "a social license to continue business as usual" and to make such a statement is to imply that individuals right to exist depends on a social license.  This idea is the foundation of all the most monstrous regimes seen in human history, recently in Russia, China, Germany and North Korea. It is the idea that man must live for the sake of others (the morality of altruism) that must be purged if society is to survive, and it is the individual rights of the individual as identified by America's founding fathers, life, liberty and property, that must be upheld if society is to thrive.