If it is an insurance company’s goal to keep more money than it pays out, Swiss Re’s announcement last week was less political than self-interested. The world’s second-largest reinsurer announced that it expects environmental disasters – from storms, drought, flooding, hurricanes, etc. – to leap to $150 billion a year in the next 10 years, with insurance companies paying out $30 billion to $40 billion annually.

The payouts are much higher than in previous years, with the costs double the current level, to say nothing of the cost of lives lost as a result of these calamities. The cause of the increasing number of these events is clear enough to Swiss Re, which concluded in its report: “There is a danger that human intervention will accelerate and intensify the natural climate changes to such a point that it will become impossible to adapt our socio-economic systems in time. The human race can lead itself into this climatic catastrophe – or it can avert it.”

Whenever controls are proposed on sources of pollution – from power plants, automobiles, etc. – opponents cite the cost of reducing emissions as an impossible hurdle. What the Swiss Re numbers suggest is that the cost is still being paid, just not by the people making the pollution. They make the profit and everyone takes a share of the cost by enduring environmental disasters and subsequent higher insurance rates. Meanwhile, as Congress engages in circular debates over whether climate change even exists, states are establishing their own policies to reduce greenhouse gases, an inefficient and unavoidably spotty effort, but what choice do they have?

If ever a problem demanded national and international responses, climate change does. The Bush administration occasionally seems to understand this, then ignores its own reports on the problem and changes the subject. A bipartisan group of 20 House members recently introduced companion legislation to a bill in the Senate sponsored by Sens. John McCain and Joseph Lieberman, which would cap the production of greenhouse gases and trade emission credits. It is unlikely to go anywhere unless the White House shows enthusiasm for it.

The cynicism embedded in subsidies for smokestack and automobile industries is difficult to overestimate, and of course climate-change doubters will simply assign rising temperatures to the normal fluctuations of the planet, assuming people have no responsibility for the change. They might disregard the rising temperatures, but the rising costs affecting all businesses and all states, red or blue, will not be as easy to ignore.