YouSaid · the spoken record

Eugene Linden

lines on the record: 63
first: 2022-05-16
most recent: 2022-05-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Basically, went into a coma for 70 years, began to come out of the coma after the Arab oil embargo. And then, of course, this is in the States, during the Carter years. And for a while, the U.S. actually led on research on renewables. We passed that baton to Europe, Great Britain, Japan during the Reagan years, where the administration couldn't care less about climate change and indeed setback research on solar by about 10 years. And then, of course, in the 90s, we're back in looking at renewables again, but we're also, throughout this period, just pushing coal as well. And that's the sort of irony of this is because we gave this mixed message. I say in the book that I think the battle to control climate change was lost.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're right. I mean, back the turn of the last century, there was a veritable renaissance in exploring all types of renewables. Solar, Thomas Edison wanted to capture the tidal power, the power of the Gulf Stream 8 billion gallons a minute going five miles an hour, 15 miles off the Florida coast. He had that idea. All sorts of evidence. People are exploring steam power, wind power. Geothermal, of course, goes back a long time. And then it all stopped. Why did it stop? Something better came along. 1908, there was a huge discovery of oil in Iran then a couple of decades later you had these other great discoveries and you had this compact fuel that was easily transportable and just almost like a miracle you could do so many things with it and with gas and research on renewables”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very rapidly became the largest or sure in the state, meaning that they were by definition underpricing it if everybody was going to them. And of course that again incentivized millions more people to move into vulnerable areas. So anyway, I wrote it and I said somewhat tum in cheek. It's not for you if you don't believe in climate change. Because at this point, if you don't believe in climate change is a threat, you're not going to believe in climate change is a threat, at least until it hits your pocketbook.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For fires in the fire zones of the West. And what that meant was the states and the federal government in the U.S. picks up the flood risk. The states stepped in to pick up the wind risk or the fire risk. And they still underpriced the risk. And you know they underpriced it because in Florida the citizens' property insurance entity that picked up all that flood risk, sorry, wind risk.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, because if they're right and we aren't experiencing a deepening change in climate, they can underprice and go in. Nobody else is writing policies in some of these areas and make a fortune. I suspect, however, they'll be bankrupt if they do that. In fact, that's what the insurers did. What has happened in the States at least is that many of the insurers said we're out of town once they saw that the risks they couldn't price in the risk of sea level rise and storm insurance in the vulnerable areas.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was out on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and I talked to a bunch of glaciologists, climate scientists who were saying, well, the ice streams in the West Antarctic ice sheet look like they were speeding up. Everybody back then thought the ice sheets would be stable for hundreds of years or more. But there were signs that something was happening. And again, in the Arctic, the same thing. And so what you saw was a transition in the climate science community from understanding that climate change was way off in the future and was going to be slow to understanding that, gee, this is happening now and it could be quite rapid. The old model for climate change was that it was like a dial that you slowly turned up. The new model was like it was like a switch. The problem, of course, was that if it's like a switch and changes are already becoming manifest, it meant we didn't really have time, much time.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The conventional wisdom when I went to Antarctica. Was still that climate change at a stately long-term pace. There was, they had already been published for a few years, studies that showed that climate doesn't change at a stately pace. Rather, it can change quite rapidly because what had happened was that studying the ice cores from both Antarctica and Greenland The proxies for understanding past climates became sufficiently refined that they could actually It wasn't that it wasn't there, it's just that in the 80s and the 70s you didn't have proxies with the precision to see those rapid changes. Now they did. So in 93, all this work was published, and it's sort of at the edges of the climate community people began to say, yeah, well, maybe that climate changes rapidly. When I was in Antarctica, I did a cover for time on that.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or not renew a policy if it looks like disaster is going to become more frequent. And so the incentive, I mean, and this is a kind of paradigm for the entire business community, what it showed me was that the incentives for business as usual are absolutely enormous because your incentive is not to worry about climate change. Your incentive is to write as many policies as you can. Same with almost all businesses. But the net effect of that is it basically leaves us blind to long-term threats. If the insurance industry, which is right on the front lines of risk for climate change, can't really adjust, even as the risk has become manifest, what other industries can't, most of them. And so that seemed to me to point to a kind of frailty of the way we do business that leaves us vulnerable to long-term threats such as climate change.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After I read that article about the scrambling to understand the risk, I called my brother and I said, wait a second, how is it that you get paid? Because he owned a little insurance agency. And he said, well, you know, that they would continue to write policies until they weren't backstopped, until the pricing, if the pricing rose, they'd pass on the pricing. But you always assume that the risk was in the pricing. And your incentive is to continue to write policies until you can because your profit sharing is based on past performance. And so you have this incentive, even if you know disaster is coming, to keep writing policies. And the other thing about it is that most insurance policies, at least in the United States, are renewable on a yearly basis. And so they have a get out of jail-free card. They can either up the prices if they can.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The New York Times quoted the senior lobbyist for the insurance industry in California saying, we're scrambling to understand this risk. And I read that and I thought, what you understood this risk 25 years ago. So why is it that you didn't act then? Because in the interim, millions and millions of people moved to the vulnerable coast, moved into the fire zones, and moved into the flood zones, all under the assumption that climate was not going to be a risk, or at least it wasn't going to be priced in. So that's really the reason that I thought I've got to exploring why that happened would be a very interesting exercise to undertake.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After the changes of climate change have become manifest. And what triggered me to write this was in 2018 there was a massive fire in Northern California. It's called the Campfire. It caused $12.5 billion in damage”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On this pricing for the climate risks of increased storm sea level rise, fires, floods to homeowners and businesses and people to adjust. And it turned out that they would turn out to be a very timid white knight. Whereas with seatbelts and electrical standards, the insurance industry would be lobbying Congress in the United States to take action. They didn't do that with climate change. Indeed, the reinsurance end of the end of the insurance industry that ensures catastrophic risk has been brilliant on climate change. They've done wonderful studies. They've tried to assess the economic impacts and the derivative impacts and produced a lot of conferences and studies that have helped everybody a lot. But the retail end continued to write policies for people who you'd say are in harm's way.”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, why I wrote it in the trigger for it are two different things. I wrote it because I've been writing about climate change since the late 80s. And so I realized I was a witness to the unfolding, what I hope will not be a tragedy in the future from the get-go. And I thought that somewhere down the road, my grandchildren fearing out of their caves might want to know how it was that we blew it and why and why we failed to take action on an issue, even though we had decades of warning about it as of now. The trigger, however, was a little different. In 1994, I wrote an article for Time magazine in which I discussed the insurance industry and climate change, and back then I thought the insurance industry was going to turn out to be the white knight of climate change because there live and die by pricing risk accurately and that they would pass”
2022-05-16 · Intelligence Squared · How to Avert the Climate Catastrophe and a Financial Meltdown, with Eugene Linden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT