Benefits & ERISA Law

A Break from LaRue: Anticipating Insurance Coverage Disputes Over Climate Change Exposures

Can’t do LaRue all the time, every post, although, frankly, the more one thinks about the Supreme Court’s three opinions, the more one can come up with to talk about. I will return to various issues raised by the opinion here and there, as time and interest allows. For now, though, I think I owe some posts that can be attributed to the insurance litigation side of this blog’s title to readers who are interested in that topic, and I have been thinking - when not obsessing over whether individuals can sue for mistakes in their 401(k) plans, that is - about all the legal seminars and publications that have been showing up in my in-box lately anticipating insurance coverage litigation over climate change issues. One of the interesting things about these is that they are showing up in droves now, long before suits seeking to recover for climate change losses have even been pursued. As I have said before on these electronic pages, insurance is the real leading edge indicator for a lot of issues, and one of them is climate change; the insurance industry will be one of the first to be heavily impacted by increased climate related losses, through its coverage of property and liability risks, and will, concomitantly, be one of the first to take concrete business steps in response to global warming. This early media drumbeat over insurance coverage issues related to climate change litigation reflects an eternal truth: that any possible new area of business liability, such as over climate change, will simultaneously spawn a cottage industry in representing businesses against insurers over those new liabilities. On a more substantive note, the particularly interesting thing to me about the seminars I am seeing is that these educational materials present the issue as essentially an extension into the climate change area of the legal developments generated during the last broadly contested, high stakes area of coverage disputes, namely environmental losses related to Superfund and other environmental liabilities. It’s a logical step, if one thinks about it: the environmental coverage disputes revolved primarily around the environmental impacts of the dumping of pollutants, and the new climate change issues will also concern environmental impacts, only in this instance ones that stem from the global warming impacts of certain business practices. The earlier environmental coverage rulings issued primarily in the late eighties and early nineties are thus a natural base on which to analyze the insurance coverage issues raised by climate change liabilities. In a way, it even fits the historical development of insurance coverage law. The environmental coverage litigation really expanded from, and built upon, the mass tort coverage disputes of asbestos, most concretely in the extension of trigger of coverage issues decided in that earlier context into the environmental pollution context; it only makes sense that the same historical evolution would continue into the next “hot” (pun intended) realm of insurance coverage litigation, in this instance by taking coverage decisions related to environmental polluting and rejiggering them to apply to climate change exposures.

Full post as published by Boston ERISA Law Blog on February 26, 2008 (boomark / email).