Australia: Climate change: words don't matter as much as action
[...]
Climatologists say Australia will be one of the earliest countries to suffer from the long-term impacts of man-made climate change, but action to deal with the issue has been stymied since 2013 by internecine warfare between climate sceptics and realists in the ruling federal Coalition.
[…]
[A tangle] started two weeks ago when ICA President Richard Enthoven delivered a strong “state of the industry” address to the National Insurance Brokers Association (NIBA) convention, in the course of which he noted that climate change is “sensitive politically”, despite robust industry data that aligns with climate science.
[…]
ICA wants to move past the whole debate about the existence of climate change to focus on the benefits of mitigation, and prefers to always point to the Productivity Commission’s recommendation that the Commonwealth invest at least $200 million a year (matched by state and territory governments) on infrastructure.
[…]
Days later ICA’s happy glow turned to irritation when the ABC published research from the Climate Risk consultancy which states that extreme weather events caused by climate change will make hundreds of thousands of Australian properties uninsurable.
[...]