Top insurers did make an early feint in that direction over a half-century ago. Way back in 1973, notes Peter Bosshard, the global coordinator of the U.S.-based Insure Our Future campaign, “the insurance industry first warned about climate risks.” But that warning, in the years to come, wouldn’t stop insurers from “underwriting and investing in the expansion of fossil fuels.”

Giant insurance companies that actually took climate science seriously, Bosshard observes, would have been “suing fossil fuel companies, to make polluters pay for the growing costs of climate disasters and keep insurance affordable for climate-affected communities.”

Insurers haven’t been doing any of that.

”Insurers talk a lot about their climate commitments and supporting their clients through the energy transition, but this is plain greenwashing,” charges Ariel Le Bourdonnec, a Reclaim Finance insurance activist. “They are still profiting from providing cover that allows companies to develop new fossil fuel projects. Insurers could be a force for change, but instead they are undermining climate action.”

Other critics are emphasizing that insurance industry execs have gone beyond “greenwashing” to “bluelining,” as Lilith Fellowes-Granda, a Center for American Progress associate director, points out. These execs are increasing prices and withdrawing services “from regions they perceive to be at high environmental risk.” These moves typically hit hardest on the “communities most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.”

Climate activists are advocating for a variety of policy changes to reverse these dynamics, everything from making sure property insurers must share the risks they cover to ensuring underserved communities access to affordable insurance.

Another reform approach might more quickly catch the attention of top insurance industry boards of directors: tying an insurance company’s tax rate to the ratio between that company’s CEO pay and the paychecks of the firm’s workers.

Inside the insurance industry, as in every other major U.S. economic sector, that ratio between CEO and worker has soared over recent decades.

In 2023, the chief executive at Chubb Ltd., Evan Greenberg, took home $27.7 million, enough to make him that year’s top-paid American property and casualty insurer. Those millions added up to 452 times more than the annual pay of the typical Chubb employee. In 2022, Greenberg pocketed a mere 346 times his company’s typical employee pay.

Back in 1965, the Economic Policy Institute noted last month in its latest annual CEO pay report, the top execs at major U.S. corporations only averaged 21 times what typical American workers earned. Nearly a quarter-century later, in 1989, CEOs were still only averaging 61 times worker pay.

How could we restore greater equity to corporate compensation and, at the same time, give top corporate executives an incentive to care about more than simply maximizing their own personal compensation? Lawmakers at the state and federal levels have over recent years advanced dozens of proposals that tie corporate tax rates to the size of the gap between top executive and worker pay.

In all these proposals, the higher a corporation’s CEO-worker pay ratio, the higher that corporation’s tax rate.

The Institute for Policy Studies has compiled an exhaustive guide to these CEO-worker pay gap proposals. Maybe the winds of Hurricane Milton will help give these moves the momentum they need to turn into law — and give top execs a reason to care about something more than the size of their own personal pay.