A Red in every Glovebox
Lawmakers need to end Wisconsin insurance commissioner’s climate mitigation program
My latest from the MacIver Institute …
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. …
Read the rest at the MacIver Institute …