The primary goal of the international climate negotiations is to transfer huge amounts of money from the US and other developed countries to the developing countries. Some of the various schemes for doing this are well established, but a breathtaking new one is emerging — climate insurance.

The basic idea is very simple, which good scams always are. The Federal Government (in other words, taxpayers) buys climate insurance for specific developing countries. This insurance then pays for damages supposedly due to climate change.

I am not making this up. In fact this nutty idea was endorsed by the 2015 G7 group of developed country leaders, naturally including then President Obama. They even know roughly how many people will be covered at first, namely 400 million.

Note too that paying the premiums is not limited to national governments. In the US the States, Counties and Cities could all chip in. So could private firms, organizations and people. The beauty of this scam is that it makes wealth transfer very informal, with everything run through the insurance giants.

If the annual insurance premiums are, say, $100 per person then that is $40 billion a year, which is serious money. They get the 400 million by covering just the poorest and supposedly most vulnerable countries, but of course that is just the entering wedge. Paying for all of the damage from all of the bad weather in the developing world would be a (literally) staggering sum.

The scheme is absurd because bad weather is not climate change and the developed countries do not cause it. Driving cars and using electricity does not create droughts and floods around the world, but that is precisely the so-called science behind this mad scheme.

After all, the folks with the computer climate models are getting enormous research funding to attribute bad weather to human causes. Ironically, this attribution game funding is also paid for by developed country taxpayers. Americans are paying the people who are trying to rob them!

So I am sure that the insurance companies would find a way to decide which bad weather events were how much due to human caused climate change. Of course the insurance companies love this idea. They have been using the supposed threat of climate change to sell policies and jack up premiums for a long time. This new scheme opens up a new global market for their products, by extending coverage to people who cannot afford them.

The giant re-insurance company Munich Re has long been a leader in this climate insurance game. In keeping with the new global wealth transfer scam it has created the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative (MCII). Their domain name is Climate-Insurance.org. They even have a new word for the scam — InsuResiliance.

Here is how they describe themselves: “MCII pioneers concepts through its extensive expert network advocating for new ways of applying insurance to complement risk management and adaptation. Secondly, MCII tests risk transfer tools in ā€œlighthouseā€ projects and provides proof of concept and implementation models for further replication. MCII feeds its results back to governments and decision makers, affecting regulations and enhancing international aspiration and standards. To provide this cutting-edge professional expertise, MCII works closely with private sector insurers and insurance associations, governments and regulators, delegates to UN policy processes, UN agencies and regional bodies, and scholars & practitioners of risk management and adaptation.”

Note the reference to “risk transfer tools” and “international aspirations.” Developed countries aspire to assume, that is pay for, the risk of bad weather, supposedly because they cause it. In fact in the UN climate proceedings these insurance schemes fall under the rubric of “loss and damage,” which means that the developed countries compensate the developing world for the proclaimed evils of climate change.

Note too the references to influencing governments and regulators. Munich Re is just one of the insurance giants that are lobbying hard for wealth transferring climate insurance schemes, because they get the action. The World Bank is also heavily involved, as is the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The basic point is that climate insurance sounds a lot nicer than direct financial aid to questionable governments, for questionable purposes. After all, a good scam has to sound good, right? That the whole compensation-for-climate premise is nuts, is irrelevant.