What happens in Europe today, American Democrats will try here in the United States tomorrow. That's one thing you can count on as sure as you can count on the sun coming up in the morning.
Case in point: The European Commission has a post they call the Director-General for Climate Action, and the person currently holding that impressive title is one Kurt Vandenberghe, and he is now proposing dealing with damage caused by weather by implementing a whole new bureaucracy - because that always straightens these things right up.
His claim is that there is a "climate insurance gap" in private insurance coverage. To deal with it, his new bureaucracy will set not only climate policy, but insurance policy.
Kurt Vandenberghe, the European Commission’s Director-General for Climate Action, put the new orthodoxy in a single sentence this month. Posting after a round table with Europe’s insurers on closing the “climate protection gap”, he declared that “insurance as usual will not be sustainable”. Climate policy, he argued, is now effectively insurance policy too: whatever risk insurers decline to cover becomes uninvestable. According to Vandenberghe, a widening protection gap threatens a looming financial-stability problem for the whole European Union.
So, presumably he proposes to invest in the uninvestable? To sustain the unsustainable? To apply the flawless logic of climate scoldery to homeowners' and property owners' insurance?
As it turns out, it's not a new notion, but the amounts of money involved are, shall we say, substantial.
In April, the Financial Times pushed the same idea, reporting that EU insurance, pensions and financial regulators want a Brussels-backed fund of €10 billion–€65 billion for natural and climate disasters “to close the bloc’s insurance gap for floods, wildfires, heatwaves and storms”. The figures behind the pitch are stark: only €4.5 billion of the €11 billion in losses from the 2024 Valencia floods were insured; only €13 billion of the €51 billion in losses from the 2021 Ahr valley floods were covered. Natural catastrophes, the regulators said, caused more than €900 billion in damage across the EU between 1981 and 2024 – “only a fraction” of it insured.
Brussels has decided that Europe’s storms and bad weather need a new bureaucracy. The Financial Times report drew on a joint discussion paper published that same day by the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority. It proposed a continent-wide natural catastrophe insurance pool, backed by a loan facility of up to €65 billion, that would supposedly shrink Europe’s “insurance protection gap” from roughly 75% to about 10%.
I'll hazard a guess here and say that this insurance gap won't be reduced to anywhere near the claimed 10 percent. These things never seem to work the way the proponents think they will. Bureaucracies are, above all else, money pits. Bear in mind also that the ordinary rank-and-file citizens of the nations of the European Commission elected Kurt Vandenberghe to this position. He is a bureaucrat put in place by other bureaucrats. His answer to every crisis, therefore, is more bureaucracy. Feature? Or bug?
The Financial Times piece mentioned says in part:
Setting up an EU-wide risk-sharing mechanism would allow the bloc to use its strong credit rating to raise cheaper funding in debt markets and provide cover to insurers for major natural and climate disasters such as earthquakes, floods, heatwaves, wildfires and storms, the regulators said.
How long would that strong credit rating stay strong when the new bureaucracy starts having to pay out more and more and more and more in damage claims? Here's the thing that these people never seem to understand: Incentives matter. This may well have the opposite effect intended; it may persuade more people living in high-risk areas, such as eroding coastlines and riparian lowlands, to forgo or at least reduce their insurance coverage, in the notion that the European Commission will bail them out.
And finally, here's the primary argument for this:
Europe is the fastest-warming continent, heating at about twice the global average, in part because of its proximity to the Arctic where the sun’s rays are absorbed by darker ground from melting ice and snow.
Bear in mind that much of northern Europe, 20,000 years ago was covered in mile-thick ice sheets. That last major glaciation ended around 13,000 years ago, and yes, it was followed by a warming climate and what some scientists call the Great Melting. This is still ongoing, and it will continue regardless of what humans have to do or say about it.
As I'm continually pointing out, we solve today's problems with tomorrow's technology. Our technology has grown ever cleaner, ever more reliable, since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Our environment is remarkably cleaner and healthier than it was even in my youth in the late 1960s. Our emissions are dropping, more in the developed world than anywhere else, not because of any political agendas but because our modern technologies are growing cleaner and more efficient.
This proposed new program, should it be implemented, will be costly, and most of the money will be wasted. The European Commission would do better spending that money to buy every European household an example of 19th-century technology in wide use in the United States: Air conditioning.
Remember, what the European left tries to do today, the American left will try to do tomorrow. Remember that, especially on election day.
