Activists gathered outside the White House on Sunday to protest the Keystone XL pipeline after 350.org's "Do The Math" event.

In the weeks after the election, Washington insiders are trying to interpret the complicated national politics of climate and environmental issues.

Would Congressional Republicans support a carbon tax as part of a deficit reduction deal? Is the Obama Administration distancing itself from pricing carbon, hoping to let conservatives lead on the issue? What kind of trade-offs would environmental groups accept in exchange for a climate deal?

The White House plan to “lead from behind” became clear last week when press secretary Jay Carney said: “We would never propose a carbon tax and have no intention of proposing one.”

So while the President once again fails to lead on the central issue of our time, what is the climate movement to do?

Enter environmental movement-builder Bill McKibben of 350.org, who rolled into town yesterday afternoon with a very simple message: Don’t listen to Washington.

Joined by other leaders of the climate activism movement, McKibben was at the Warner Theater yesterday — just blocks from the White House — discussing his new “Do The Math” campaign, which lays out the case for divesting from fossil fuel companies. It’s a no-nonsense, make-no-apologies approach to limiting carbon emissions by attempting to weaken the finances of companies responsible for climate change.

When the lights dimmed and McKibben walked on stage to a theater full of roughly 1,800 cheering supporters, the large screen above his head prominently displayed a new mantra within the climate activism movement.

“We’re going after the fossil fuel companies.”

Simple. Aggressive. And a campaign waged almost completely outside the paralysis of national politics.

Do The Math is based on a very simple premise. In order to have a serious chance (better than 3 in 4) of limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius — a threshold needed to prevent catastrophic climate change — the world can only emit about 565 gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2050. We will burn through that carbon in 16 years at our current rate. Fossil fuel companies have reported their intent to burn reserves of carbon five times that amount. So preventing uncontrollable global warming means keeping roughly 80 percent of proven carbon reserves in the ground.

The International Energy Agency backed up those calculations in a report last week that concluded two thirds of carbon reserves need to stay in the ground by 2050 in order to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Rather than wait on a weak signal from Washington that would likely result in very modest carbon reductions, activists are attempting to create a carbon price of their own by exposing the financial unhealthiness of fossil fuel companies.

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by Mindy Lubber, via Ceres

The fallout from Hurricane Sandy will be with us for years, and it will extend far beyond the devastation in New York City, New Jersey and other parts of the East Coast.

The immediate cleanup costs and economic losses are alarming. Current estimates are $33 billion in New York alone. But a far bigger challenge lies ahead: preparing for a future in which storms like Sandy and Irene are likely to occur more frequently. It is gargantuan task with no parallels, and there are millions of people and trillions of dollars worth of property sitting in harm’s way.

As a result of rising sea levels from warming global temperatures, coastal communities will require vastly expensive upgrades to key infrastructure such as subways, power grids and hospitals to boost their resiliency to stronger storms. It will require tough decisions on whether building and rebuilding should be encouraged in flood-prone areas. Above all, there’s the daunting task of curbing the pollution that creates these risks in the first place.

To adapt, we need bold action from governments, policymakers and the business community alike. Their efforts to date have proven to be grossly insufficient.

Let’s start with the business community – specifically, the insurance industry, the sector most vulnerable to skyrocketing storm losses.

Extreme weather losses are hitting insurers with a vengeance, yet U.S. insurers barely acknowledge it. They need to recognize that climate change is fueling larger drought, wildfire and flooding losses and build this into their business models and underwriting policies. This will certainly result in some higher premiums.

They need to offer stronger financial incentives for storm-proofing buildings and be a louder voice in influencing land-use planning and building codes so that coastal properties are better protected or not built at all.

And, lastly, insurers should be pushing for policies that reduce carbon pollution. Some re-insurers already are. “The insurance industry should have an interest in mitigating global warming because if we don’t do that, then we may run into hardly manageable conditions in the second half of the century,” the head of Munich Re‘s Geo Risks Research Unit, Peter Hoppe, told the Huffington Post last week.

But there are limits to what insurance companies can do – and that’s where governments, regulators and politicians must be more accountable. Government-subsidized insurance programs have been far too lenient in allowing homes to be built and rebuilt in risky areas, resulting in enormous exposure for taxpayers.

We’ve seen this in Florida, where private insurers bolted from the state after regulators capped their premiums following a string of hurricanes. A state-run insurance program is now providing homeowners insurance, and it is on financially shaky ground. With a wide gap between premiums it collects and over $500 billion in overall exposure, it is one bad hurricane away from going bankrupt.

We’ve seen this in the National Flood Insurance Program, where artificially low premiums are grossly out of whack with the odds of losses. The New York Times cited one example in Biloxi, Miss., where a property valued at $183,000 flooded 15 times in a decade, costing the program $1.47 million. Overall, the program is $18 billion in debt and that’s before factoring in Hurricane Sandy flood losses.  One encouraging sign is NFIP recently won approval to raise premiums 25 percent a year over the next five years, but rising costs for consumers are certainly cold comfort, and critics say far more still needs to be done.

Governments have also moved too slowly to make key infrastructure more resilient to stronger coastal storms. While Europeans coastal cities have invested billions to build storm locks and barriers, Eastern U.S. cities have done relatively little, making them more vulnerable to higher sea levels and storm surges. Storm-proofing subways, hospitals, electrical grids and other key infrastructure will cost tens of billions of dollars. Congress will be under enormous pressure to help with such costs, but given the deficit reduction talks also in play, the conversations won’t be easy.

More than ever, we need strong leadership from the business community and policymakers to boost our preparedness in a post-Sandy world. With increasing threats from ever-more-extreme weather, both groups must play a key role in keeping the U.S. economy out of harm’s way.

Mindy S. Lubber is the president of Ceres and a founding board member of the organization. She also directs Ceres’ Investor Network on Climate Risk (INCR), a group of 100 institutional investors managing nearly $10 trillion in assets focused on the business risks and opportunities of climate change.