In Florida, the effects of climate change are hard to ignore, no matter your politics. It’s the hottest state — Miami spent a record 46 days above a heat index of 100 degrees last summer — and many homes and businesses are clustered along beachfront areasthreatened by rising seas and hurricanes. The Republican-led legislature has responded with more than $640 million for resilience projects to adapt to coastal threats.
But the same politicians don’t seem ready to acknowledge the root cause of these problems. A bill awaiting signature from Governor Ron DeSantis, who dropped out of the Republican presidential race in January, would ban offshore wind energy, relax regulations on natural gas pipelines, and delete the majority of mentions of climate change from existing state laws.
“Florida is on the front lines of the warming climate crisis, and the fact that we’re going to erase that sends the wrong message,” said Yoca Arditi-Rocha, the executive director of the CLEO Institute, a climate education and advocacy nonprofit in Florida. “It sends the message, at least to me and to a good majority of Floridians, that this is not a priority for the state.”
As climate change has been swept into the country’s culture wars, it’s created a particularly sticky situation in Florida. Republicans associate “climate change” with Democrats — and see it as a pretext for pushing a progressive agenda — so they generally try to distance themselves from the issue. When a reporter asked DeSantis what he was doing to address the climate crisis in 2021, DeSantis dodged the question, replying, “We’re not doing any left-wing stuff.” In practice, this approach has consisted of trying to manage the effects of climate change while ignoring what’s behind them.
Hamilton Nolan in How Things Work:
At its core, insurance is a simple business. Companies figure out how much they will likely have to pay out, and then set their rates to ensure they make a profit. Success is dependent upon the ability to accurately assess risk. There is a huge financial incentive to have the most clear-eyed possible understanding of reality. Wishful thinking or misguided ideology will do nothing except lose an insurance company money.
Because of this, insurance can tell you things about reality. It resembles global investment firms in this: The people running them may be greedy, and the clients may be evil, but the business is all about understanding the true and unvarnished state of the world in order to manage risk in order to protect wealth, and therefore these firms do their very best to operate according to what is true, whereas politicians, for example, often do their very best to lie. This is why every leftist and revolutionary should read the Wall Street Journal. There are far fewer lies when money is involved.
The insurance industry is going to serve a very useful role in the climate apocalypse. It is going to be the tip of the spear that punches through all of the bullshit of climate denialism once and for all. Indeed, the process is very much underway already. Politicians and oil lobbyists can lie all they want, but their homeowners insurance rates are going up.
Watching this process unfold is going to expose the hidden bedrock of many people’s belief systems in a rather violent way. That bedrock, in most cases, will not be “socialism” or “capitalism” but rather “whatever is good for me, personally, I don’t care what it costs, please god save me.” We are well on the road to the inevitable political crisis that will be sparked by insurance. State Farm just stopped selling home insurance in California, due to wildfire and other climate-driven risks. Coastal states in the path of hurricanes have seen tons of insurers pull out altogether in recent years, and the ones left are handing down eye-watering premium increases to homeowners. Florida property insurance rates are rising 40% in a single year(!). In Louisiana, it was even worse—the state insurance of last resort bumped its rates 63% this year. Increases like this prompt predictable outrage. “Louisiana needs a healthy, competitive insurance market,” a typical editorial went, “but not at the cost of making it difficult-to-impossible for Louisianans to remain in their homes.”
And sure, you don’t have to be great at math to see that an annual insurance bill that compounds at something like 50% a year is, in short order, going to make it economically stupid/ impossible to keep living in your hurricane/ fire-prone home. But banks won’t write mortgages on uninsurable property. This sure is a pickle! What to do? The states themselves, desperate to look like they are solving the problem, have their own (expensive) insurance, which they sell to homeowners who can’t get anything better. But these state insurance firms are, if we’re being honest, a comforting fiction. State governments do not possess enough money to make homeowners whole in the event of a really bad disaster, like a major hurricane plowing through South Florida. Just as a point of perspective, last September Hurricane Ian—which could have been worse!—caused $100 billion in total losses, $60 billion of which was insured. One hundred billion dollars is equal to the total budget of the State of Florida. Unless you think Ron DeSantis is going to be holding some very creative yard sales after the next hurricane, it is clear that the system is marching further towards absurdity with every passing year, as private insurers decide the risk is just not worth it.