More than a decade ago, The Ecologist cited the insurance industry as the single most significant force addressing the challenges of global climate change. Large European insurance firms were pressuring the boards of global companies to develop strategies to mitigate their CO2 emissions.

This summer, Mary Williams Walsh reported in The New York Times that: “The A. M. Best Company called the level of natural disasters this year ‘unprecedented.’ The company, based in New Jersey, said disaster-related losses this year had already exceeded the total for all of 2010. It estimated the losses at $27 billion through June 30, compared with $11.9 billion in the first six months of last year and $19.6 billion for all of 2010.”

In a fragile global economy, let alone in an economy in the US that’s close to devastated, it’s hard to imagine that the economic costs of climate change wouldn’t begin to shift the political debate.

What will future generations, let alone our own children say when we have to explain why we chose to continue to burn coal and oil today, saving a dollar now for the tens or hundreds of dollars it will cost us tomorrow to repair the damage?

We are so deeply lost inside our own short-term thinking that we allow the entire supply chain that benefits from the use of non-renewable energy to purchase our politicians to ensure they continue to make disastrously poor decisions.