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QuestionerWarren, you have said that global warming has not increased Berkshire's payouts for weather-related events. Yet other insurers, including travelers, have cited climate change as a risk factor that they use. Are Berkshire's models different? And if so, how?
WarrenYeah. You know, I've seen the, of course, the SEC requires to put in all these risk factors, and the lawyers will tell you to put in, you know, everything possibly you can think. of, you know, that you'll develop Alzheimer's or whatever it may be. I mean, they just want, you know, have a laundry list so that it's all been covered in case of later litigation or something to sort. So people do put in whether it's, and maybe they put it in because they've got some model that shows it, but, you know, we price our business, basically we price it every year. It's not like a life insurance company. A life insurance company, you make a contract at so much a thousand, and if you buy whole life insurance, that you've set a price for, if you're 20, you may have set a price for 60 or 70 years in the future. But that's not the, that is not the property casualty insurance business, which we're in. We set it one year at a time. And I see nothing that tells me that on a yearly basis, that global warming is something that should cause me to change my prices a lot, or even even a small amount. That doesn't mean that it isn't a threat to you. humanity or, you know, and terribly important. It just means that if I'm going to sell a one-year insurance policy and I'm going to sell it on a one-billion-dollar plant, I made care enormously about the fire protection and various other kinds of protection within that plant. I may care about what's going on adjacent to that plant and all kinds of things. But I am not thinking about global warming. It does not change the situation in a material way in any one-year period of time in my judgment. I don't think it's totally clear what the effects of global warming will be on extremes of weather. I think there's a lot of guesswork in that field and a lot of people like howling about calamities that are by no means sure. It's like a crazy ideology. It's not that global warming isn't happening, it's just that you can get so excited about it, you make all kinds of crazy extrapolations that aren't necessarily correct.