Month: August 2023

Floridians Could See Major Insurance Hikes After Idalia

Irma, Ian, Idalia. The “I” storms seem to have it in for Florida.

Check your policy.
Above, South Florida TV station reports price hikes could be on the way for anyone that holds any kind of insurance policy in the state of Florida.

New York Times:

Insurance companies are still reeling from Ian. Some firms doubt they can continue to cope with such superstorms, while others have limited their business in the state. One of their big complaints: State regulations prevent them from raising prices for customers, they say, forcing them to say no to new policies.

Florida’s woes reflect a nationwide problem, one that is expected to intensify as climate change unleashes more extreme weather events. The Insurance Information Institute, an industry trade group, estimates that property and casualty insurers in the state have had cumulative underwriting losses of more than $1 billion for the last three years.

The picture is bleak elsewhere, too:

Not everyone views these markets as hopeless. Florida’s insurance regulator just approved Orion180 as a new insurer for the state. “We view Florida as an attractive insurance market for profitable growth over the long term,” said Kenneth Gregg, the company’s founder and C.E.O. And Berkshire Hathaway has bet big on Florida’s reinsurance market this year.

One possible enticement: Premiums in the state have spiked, with the average Florida homeowner now paying $6,000 a year. (However, those rising premiums have also brought down property values, pushing more property owners to forego coverage.)

A so-called “protection gap” seems likely to grow. Last year, insurance covered just 60 percent of the $165 billion in total economic losses from climate-related disasters in the U.S. That widening gap is becoming a major concern for federal regulators, who worry it leaves big swaths of American homeowners and businesses vulnerable to the next superstorm.

Pump and Dump: How Climate Denier Ramasmarmy Made His Money

There’s your “successful businessman” – but I’m sure many had already guessed.

‘

Meanwhile, In Other News..

https://youtube.com/shorts/Wfn11XtWwIA?si=iQZXyKODGgAh2y7b

Above, shocking footage of flash flooding in Turkey.

Below, Austria hit by heavy rains.
“Brown water gushed from a waterfall in the Austrian spa town of Bad Gastein after the region was hit with heavy rain. The rainstorms led to rivers rising to critical levels and caused floods across the Austrian Alps on Monday, including from the Gasteiner waterfall”

New York Times:

The salmon were once so plentiful in the river that old-timers talk about having been able to cross on the backs of fish so thick they were like steppingstones. Such was the renown of the Cowichan River, flowing east on Canada’s Vancouver Island, that its fly-fishing conditions were posted in fishing clubs in London. John Wayne and Bing Crosby were regulars in Cowichan Bay.

So when hundreds of young salmon and trout were found dead in the river last month, even as record wildfires burned across Canada, the news made the front page of the local newspaper. The die-off, the biggest in living memory, quickly led to an investigation.

It remains a mystery. Government officials found partially treated wastewater in the river a couple of weeks after the fish were found, but they have yet to draw conclusions about its impact. Local scientists suspect the bigger culprit is climate change, which has contributed to the decline of salmon populations in British Columbia by increasing droughts and heat waves.

Continue reading “Meanwhile, In Other News..”

Will Idalia Break Florida’s Insurance Market?

Above, Kerry Emanuel of MIT has a warning for insurers, and taxpayers.

Mathew Zeitlin in Heatmap:

The entire state of Florida may end up on the hook for damage caused by Hurricane Idalia.

That’s because the state-run insurance company, Citizens, has hundreds of thousands of policies in the area that could be hit by the storm. The most recent National Hurricane Center forecast projects the largest storm surge just north of the heavily populated Tampa Bay area in counties where Citizens has over half the market. The center is also expecting high windsfrom Tampa north all the way to the state’s Big Bend region, and unlike many private insurers in the state, Citizens is willing to cover wind damage.

Citizens is designed to be backup for Floridians if they can’t get private insurance for their homes and commercial property. As more and more insurance companies leave the state or go out of business, the company has massively expanded its reach over the state’s insurance market. In 2023, Citizens expects to have 1.7 million clients with $5.1 billion in premiums, compared to under 500,000 policyholders and $877 million in premiums in 2019, according to the company’s budget report.

“The difference for this storm of a few degrees is billions of dollars to Citizens,” Jeff Brandes, a former Florida state senator and president of the Florida Policy Project, told me. If it hits Pasco or Hernando counties head-on, Brandes said, the resulting insurance claims could exhaust Citizens’ current surplus and force it to issue “special assessments” — essentially one-time bills — on the state’s policyholders, including drivers. Citizens has over 50% of the property insurance market in the two counties north of Tampa Bay, according to Brandes, meaning that substantial storm damage could incur large losses for Citizens.
-|

Earlier this year, Citizens reported that “due to Hurricane Ian, Citizens’ financial resources have been significantly depleted,” and that its surplus had declined to just under $5 billion. This could mean that Florida policyholders could be on the hook for the state-run company: “If Florida is impacted by a storm or series of storms in 2023, Citizens will need to rely on its assessment capability and/or post‐event financing to meet its policyholder obligations,” Citizens said in the report.

“You see massive amount of socializing risk [in a state] that doesn’t want to talk about socialism,” Brandes said. “We’re the free state of Florida except for our largest liability — Citizens — which we are happy to subsidize.”

Below, Andrew Hoffman of University of Michigan School of Business:

As Idalia Rages, Let’s Review What We Know About Climate and Hurricanes

First, Jim Kossin of NOAA, the signal of climate now making hurricanes stronger is significant at the 95 percent level, or greater. So yeah, more hurricanes are getting stronger, and the strongest ones are getting even stronger.

“Whether or not you have more storms or less storms, when you do have a storm, it’s more likely to become a major hurricane than it was 40 years ago.”

Below, Kevin Trenberth and LiJing Cheng discuss how warmer water amplifies hurricane impacts.

Below, Kerry Emanuel of MIT, on how we subsidize increasing climate risks.

Continue reading “As Idalia Rages, Let’s Review What We Know About Climate and Hurricanes”

Idalia Ashore

WFLA Tampa report, above.

Rapid intensification, something we have seen a lot of in recent years.

Idalia Update: Beginning to Bubble



Ramasmarmy Amplifies Right Wing Climate, Racial Frames. Also, Hates to be Called Ramasmarmy.

Clip above should begin at the 3:02 mark, where Dana Bash replays Vivek Ramaswamy’s comments as recent as Friday, comparing White Supremacy to mythical Unicorns. This just days before an avowed White supremacist gunned down three black people in a Jacksonville Dollar General.

Phillip Bump in the Washington Post:

It’s useful to consider why Ramaswamy is downplaying the idea of white supremacy as a force in the United States. People like Trump and Tucker Carlson have extrapolated from “criticism of embedded racism that benefits Whites” to “criticism of Whites” to “portraying Whites as inherently racist.” By now, nearly a decade after the start of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, any allegation of racism triggers mockery on the right as necessarily opportunistic or insincere. So Ramaswamy, in his ceaseless effort to generate approval from his audiences, joins in the scoffing.

Then that guy in Florida had to shoot those people in that store. So, to Bash, Ramaswamy admits there’s anti-Black racism — but blames it on the way White people have purportedly been treated. If there is a throughline from efforts to address systemic racism to gunning down Black shoppers, it seems fair to suggest that perhaps the path includes opportunistic arguments that frame those efforts as attacks on White people and their status.

Ramaswamy is a student of right-wing rhetoric, obviously. For example, he pushed back on Bash’s questions about the shooting by suggesting that having respect for the victims necessitated “not bring[ing] them into partisan politics.” He also argued that it was the left who were the real racists, citing, as an example, tech journalist Kara Swisher calling him “Ramasmarmy,” something he said was “effectively reducing me to the color of my skin and my attributes.”

—
FYI
Googling “smarmy, meaning” returns:

“ingratiating and wheedling in a way that is perceived as insincere or excessive.” as in
“a smarmy, unctuous reply”
Synonyms include

  • smug.
  • buttery.
  • fulsome.
  • insincere.
  • oily.
  • oleaginous.
  • sleek.
  • smooth. suave.
Continue reading “Ramasmarmy Amplifies Right Wing Climate, Racial Frames. Also, Hates to be Called Ramasmarmy.”