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| 4/13/2010 10:58:00 AM | Email this article • Print this article | Dilweg's odyssey to climate change chief started with GOP
New errors cast more doubt on UN’s major global warming forecasts
News Analaysis
Part 2
It's hard to know just if or when Sean Dilweg, the state's insurance commissioner, converted to environmentalism, or whether he has always adhered to the more extreme spectrum of global warming politics.
At first blush he would seem to be an unlikely candidate for a slot as one of the nation's top climate crusaders, as Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal has called him.
After all, he comes from Republican lineage, has worked as a lobbyist, and, before that, as a Republican legislative staffer before finally landing in Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle's administration as an executive assistant at the Department of Administration and in his current role as the state's insurance commissioner.
Even the photograph that accompanies his official biography imparts a mild-mannered, personable appeal, as if Dilweg were a bureaucratic version of Clark Kent.
As it turns out, beneath the calm exterior, there's a caped reformer, an outspoken and admittedly aggressive advocate of using the insurance industry's regulatory machinery both to pressure insurance firms and the companies they insure to embrace global warming "best management" practices, such as carbon fuel emissions caps.
Indeed, he is one of two state insurance commissioners - the other is Pennsylvania's Joel Ario - to have fashioned and pushed a disclosure survey that insurance companies must file annually attesting to their climate change practices and habits.
The theory is, if investors don't like what they see, they can pressure companies with their dollars, and, if environmental groups don't like what they see, they can pressure companies with liability class-action lawsuits.
After Gov. Jim Doyle named him commissioner in late 2006, Dilweg participated in climate change efforts within the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) and quickly became a leading force for regulatory reform.
By 2008, he chaired the NAIC's global warming task force, was credited with reviving the disclosure process within that forum, and was deeply involved in writing and rewriting a white paper that assumed climate change was an unassailable fact. He also envisioned turning state insurance commissions into climate change watchdogs by calling for the mandatory public disclosure survey.
Ultimately, Dilweg was not entirely successful. He lost his chairmanship of the task force, was forced to tone down the original disclosure survey and last month lost a vote in which the NAIC modified its most controversial aspects even further, including the elimination of mandatory public disclosure.
But this does not mean Dilweg is through as an effective national climate change regulator.
He was, for example, instrumental in a January decision by the Securities and Exchange Commission to require all public companies to disclose their climate risks to investors and consumers if new or pending laws or regulations or international accords could impact climate change risks, or if legal, technological, political and scientific developments regarding climate change might create new opportunities or risks.
Dilweg's politics
What makes Dilweg's politics so extreme is not merely his belief in the reality of global warming and its manmade underpinnings but his certainty that environmentalists can accurately predict specific climate changes and their impacts over the next century.
Knowing that super hurricanes will batter the coasts, for instance, or that Wisconsin will be afflicted by drought and extreme heat if certain environmental policies are not followed allows regulators and policy makers to hold delinquent companies responsible.
Just how extreme Dilweg's politics are become evident in the testimony he delivered June 6, 2007, to Gov. Jim Doyle's Global Warming Task Force.
For one thing, he told the task force, global warming's ramifications would reverberate through the nation's economy.
"My office has the responsibility of overseeing one of Wisconsin's major industries and as such is strategically placed to observe the pervasive impact climate change will have on business," he testified. "I am pleased to have the opportunity to provide you with an economic perspective on global warming."
He cited a number of recent billion-dollar weather disasters, from hurricanes and tornadic events, and attributed them to climate change. He also provided what he called a snapshot of that change, using summaries based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Survey released in early 2007.
For example, he said, Wisconsin should prepare for significantly warmer winters and overall temperatures.
"One prediction is that we will see a 5-10 °F rise in winter temperatures and an 8-17 °F rise in summer temperatures by the end of the century," he said. "Warmer winter probably sounds good to most of us but let's consider some consequences. If the temperature is higher we will have less snow but perhaps more freezing rain. As a result, automobile travel will be riskier and ski slopes and snowmobile trails may be a thing of the past."
Dilweg said Wisconsinites should prepare for a significantly drier climate and more frequent severe weather events, such as extreme heat and sustained heavy rainstorms.
The bottom line is, Dilweg said, business needs to take certain necessary steps to implement policies based on those predictions, and the insurance industry was helping to facilitate that process.
"Using computer based catastrophe models, many major private insurers are incorporating some near-term elements of climate change into their risk management practices," he said. "In addition, some are approaching climate change at a strategic level by publishing reports outlining the potential industry-wide impacts and strategies to proactively address the issue. Some of the world's largest insurers have also taken a long-term strategic approach to changes in catastrophic risk."
Of course, forcing major and costly changes in the national and global economy - such as a 25 percent reduction in fossil fuel emissions by 2025 - based on a certain future is rational only if the future is certain.
But just how certain are the assessments in the IPCC's 2007 report, which has faced withering criticism last year and again last month?
For example, the IPCC claimed that Himalayan glaciers would "very likely" disappear by 2035 if current warming trends continued. But, as the New York Times reported in January, that estimate turned out to be based on a decade-old interview with one climate scientist in a science magazine, who now claims he was misquoted.
Controversy arose again last year when hacked e-mails from researchers at the University of East Anglia in England suggested they were manipulating data to point to the human cause of climate change.
Now, just weeks ago, the IPCC is again being criticized after a new study concluded the IPCC was wrong when it claimed that up to 40 per cent of the Amazonian rainforest could be lost by even a "slight reduction" in rainfall.
In fact, a study undertaken by Boston University researchers during a 2005 drought, when rainfall was at its lowest "in living memory," and rivers and lakes had dried up, found no major changes in the levels of forest vegetation.
That directly contradicted the statements made in the IPCC's 2007 assessment report: "Up to 40 percent of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state."
In the wake of these and other errors, the United Nations has asked the InterAcademy Council (IAC), a multinational organization of the world's science academies, to conduct an independent review of the IPCC processes and procedures.
Dilweg's journey
None of this has cooled Dilweg's ardor for climate change politics, and, if he succeeds in his quest to turn insurance commissions into climate change watchdogs, his work could mark the first major step toward a dramatic rearrangement of the American economy, whether or not it is based on sound science, and without any public debate or congressional stamp of approval.
So who is Sean Dilweg?
Well, for one thing, he is the son of Gary Dilweg, who served as a Republican state representative first elected in 1978.
The elder Dilweg spent the 1970s working in the trenches for the Republican Party. He lost a state senate race in 1972, and then briefly contemplated running for the seat held by Democratic Sen. William Proxmire.
He also ran President Gerald R. Ford's 8th congressional district campaign, during which a young Sean Dilweg would get to meet, or at least see, the Republican president. Ford's diary for April 3, 1976, shows Gary Dilweg, his wife Vivi, and their two children, including the 8-year-old Sean, among the participants welcoming the president at the Green Bay airfield.
Meanwhile, Sean Dilweg's mother, Vivi, wasn't exactly a stranger to politics herself. She served as a Brown County circuit judge for almost 20 years.
If Dilweg got his taste of politics from his parents - he is said to have handed out leaflets during his father's political campaigns - it was cemented when he went to work as a legislative staffer for Republican Sen. Robert Cowles in the late 1990s.
Later, according to his biography, he was a lead policy advisor for members of the Joint Committee on Finance during three biennial state budgets and as Committee Clerk for the Senate Committee on Environment and Energy from 1995 to 2000.
Democratic all along?
The question is, how did a young Republican staffer, who hailed from a Republican family, end up less than a decade after his legislative stint in a Democratic administration and on the front lines of the national environmental movement?
One potential answer is that the Dilwegs might have been Democratic and environmentalists all along, with Gary Dilweg choosing the Republican brand because he lived in a primarily Republican district.
Certainly the Dilweg family has strong and deep Democratic roots. Sean Dilweg's grandfather and Gary's father - LaVern - was not only an end for the Green Bay Packers from 1927 to 1934 but a Democratic congressman who served one term in 1943 and 1944 before being defeated. He was again defeated in a Democratic primary for U.S.Senator in 1950.
Whatever the reason for LaVern's son's decision to enter Republican politics, Gary Dilweg was certainly not a participating Republican by the year 2003.
That year, Gov. Jim Doyle appointed him to the Wisconsin Coastal Management Council. According to campaignmoney.com, Gary Dilweg and his wife Vivi each gave Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry $2,000 in 2004; Vivi Dilweg contributed $500 to Democrat Nancy Nussbaum's bid for Congress in 2006.
For his part, as many do, Dilweg moved from the Legislature to become a lobbyist. Between 2000 and 2003, he served as director of policy analysis at Essie Consulting Group, a Madison consulting and lobbying firm.
There he represented such environmental groups as the League of Wisconsin Conservation Voters and the Wisconsin Wetlands Association.
It was not just a professional association he had with environmentalists. He also sat on the board of directors of the River Alliance of Wisconsin at the same time that Todd Ambs served as the group's executive director. Ambs is now the administrator of water for the DNR.
Back in 2001, environmentalists were already appreciative of the work Dilweg was doing for them on the local level. After then Wisconsin Gov. Scott McCallum signed wetlands protection legislation giving the DNR authority to regulate isolated wetlands, Caryl Terrell of the Sierra Club and Charlie Luthin of the Wisconsin Wetlands Association praised the then lobbyist's efforts.
"While legislators from the Senate and Assembly tried to reach common ground on language for an acceptable bill, another group met in negotiating sessions several times a week," they wrote. "This core group included Mike Theo and Tom Larson of WI Realtors Association, Charlie Luthin, Sean Dilweg, Kirk McVoy and Tom Dawson of WI Wetlands Association, Scott Kelly of the Governor's Office and Patrick Henderson of Senator James Baumgart's office. . . . Pat Henderson and Sean Dilweg regularly met with legislators and staff from the Senate and Assembly and with the staff of Gov. Scott McCallum."
These days, Dilweg continues to lobby for environmental policies and to earn praise from environmentalists.
The difference is, the praise - and criticism - is now coming on the national stage, and the regulatory agenda he is touting is directed not only at the state but at the national economy.
These days, Sean Dilweg is as likely to meet with national regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission as he is with state lawmakers and the governor's staff.
These days, Sean Dilweg is aiming to have a global impact.
Richard Moore can be reached at rmmoore1@verizon.net.
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Reader Comments
Posted: Saturday, April 17, 2010
Article comment by:
M
Wow, the Times On-Line certainly has become the mouthpiece of the angry right-wing fringe element, hasn't it? How much longer before the Chamber of Commerce disavows itself of this trash as it certainly isn't doing the business community any good these days.
Posted: Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Article comment by:
Meme Mine
Al Gore said yesterday: "If Tiger Woods can make a come back, so can global warming.
How many climate scientists does it take to change a light bulb?
None, but they DO have consensus that it WILL change.
There is nothing more organic than environMENTAL bull$hit.
News Flash: Voters have real consensus, not scientists and the new deniers are the enviro fanatics trying to scare my kids with SAVE THE PLANET.
History is cursing each and very one of you fear mongering CO2 doomers.
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