THE SET-UP: It’s not hard to find a chart that conclusively demonstrates the rise in global temperature over the last five decades. It’s also not hard to find a mechanical explanation of the predictable climactic distortion that comes from unleashing megatons of climate polluting gasses into the atmosphere. It’s physics. Then there’s the last two years of record-setting heat and a planet-wide barrage of floods & fires & droughts & hurricanes & cyclones & tornadoes & heatwaves that we now describe as “extreme weather.” It’s not unusual to hear a flood victim, a firefighter or a forecaster say “I’ve never seen anything like this” because they haven’t … until now, that is.
And yet the United States just elected a recalcitrant denier who is populating his forthcoming administration with industry apologists, climate polluters and proud deniers. His right-hand man in Congress is a young earth Creationist who believes the Earth is less than 10k years old. He hails from the petrostate of Louisiana and is enthusiastic about the possibility of pumping even more climate pollution into the atmosphere … his home state’s home insurance crisis be damned.
And therein lies the problem.
Politicians can deny anthropogenic climate change all they want. It will not change reality or the minds of the insurance industry. Denial is not an option for insurers. And denial offers no exemption for a growing cadre of uninsured homeowners in Florida and Texas and California. Florida and Texas are governed by deniers. For them, climate change is a plot or a scam or a Trojan Horse for a nefarious ideology. For California, it is a problem that needs solutions.
To wit, just days before the Santa Ana Winds swept up burning embers and distributed the flames around L.A., the “California Department of Insurance unveiled a new regulation … that aims to increase homeowners insurance coverage in areas prone to wildfire.” Housingwire described that auspiciously-timed move as “a response to the recent pullback in policies by several major insurers.” Housingwire explained it thusly:
The rule will require all insurers that do business in the state to begin increasing their policies in high-risk wildfire areas by 5% every two years until at least 85% of their policies cover these homes. Currently, the state has no requirements for insurers to offer coverage in these areas.
To incentivize insurance companies, the state will now allow them to pass on the costs of reinsurance to consumers. Every other state already has this provision, according to Lara. But these costs will be capped through an industrywide standard, which will seek to determine the typical cost of reinsurance and push insurers to compete for the lowest price.
In explaining the rationale behind the new regulation, the Department of Insurance noted that climate change “has made California hotter and drier over the last several decades.“ The eight largest wildfires in state history have occurred since 2017, and the worst when measuring the loss of life was the Camp Fire in 2018, which killed 85 people.
In August, CoreLogic reported that 2.6 million homes across 14 western states were at risk from wildfires. About half of these were in California alone.
This isn’t necessarily the greatest news for homeowners. It sounds like insurance isn’t going to get any cheaper, promises of competition notwithstanding. But it’s reality. And it’s a reality that will require resilience. And resilience will require money. As you’ll see, there is some “resilience” money set aside for the incoming Administration. But it’s going to be in the hands of a trigger-happy Governor who’s been loathe to treat nature as anything more than a target. - jp
TITLE: Florida town’s climate reckoning: Storms so costly, homeowners may be forced out
https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2025/0107/florida-hurricane-climate-insurance
EXCERPTS: As a warming climate fuels more intense storms, repair and prevention bring overwhelming costs. If people are forced to move, the character of communities could change forever.
This is not because repeated storms make people want to leave [towns like] Englewood, Florida (population 20k). Even with the water damage and the mold and the recognition that the wealthiest part of town is on a barrier island that should never be expected to stay put, many in Englewood still see their city as a gem; an Old Florida holdout in one of the fastest-growing regions in the country.
But the finances of insurance and disaster recovery after [Hurricane] Milton are making it hard for many to imagine how they will keep their homes – and how they will continue to stave off the developers that have bought, built, and sold much of the Gulf of Mexico coastline.
It is an inflection point that researchers worry will be repeated across the country, as flooding and other natural disasters increase with a warming climate. A slew of studies show that these events tend to amplify housing disparity and income inequality. A Brookings Institution 2023 report documented the rent increases that accompany natural disasters – as much as 12%, researchers found, for communities with multiple disaster events between 2000 and 2020.
Also last year, researchers from the University of San Diego, in California, and the nonprofit group Resources for the Future published an article in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management that detailed how wealthier homeowners tended to buy up property in Florida communities recovering from hurricanes, creating lasting demographic changes.
Many housing advocates point out that federal disaster relief is slow to arrive, when it trickles down to homeowners at all. And policies created in the name of long-term resilience – flood zone building requirements, for instance – are creating a bifurcated system. On the one hand are people – or private equity firms – with the cash to pay for hugely expensive home upgrades, such as rebuilding on stilts, or who can afford to self-insure and repair their properties.
Much of the national discourse about climate resilience on the U.S. coastlines revolves around how and whether insurance companies or governments should support wealthy homeowners who chose – despite the warnings of climate scientists, who predict stronger storms and higher sea levels – to buy on the water. But cities like Englewood highlight a different reality. It is home to retirees and service-industry workers, living in generational houses and small rental units, on fixed incomes and often paycheck to paycheck. They are tightly bound to their neighbors and the waterways that form the veins of this community.
Indeed, something called the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s “50% rule” is the talk of the town here. It’s the subject of frustration at municipal meetings. It’s what diners talk about at The Waverly restaurant, whose beachside water view is now blocked by a multiple-story pile of sand, which had washed over this key during the storm and has been collected here.
The rule prohibits repairs or improvements to a structure of more than 50% of its market value – just the structure, not the property – unless it is brought into compliance with flood regulations. In other words, if the damage to a small ranch house worth about $100,000 is more than $50,000, homeowners are not covered unless they pay to bring the home into flood plain building compliance, which in this part of coastal Florida often requires raising the house onto stilts, costing as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The idea behind the policy was to keep federal money from being wasted. But in reality, the rule “places people in an impossible position,” says Zoe Middleton, associate director for Just Climate Resilience at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “They’re forcing change without funding adaptation.”
TITLE: Climate-Risk Scores Are the New Big Number for Homebuyers
https://www.barrons.com/articles/buying-a-home-climate-risk-score-c201d400
bypass: https://archive.ph/GPie9
EXCERPTS: Many people move to areas endangered by extreme weather events because the lifestyle and cost of living outweigh the risks. But that is changing, with soaring insurance costs and two recent devastating hurricanes underscoring the issue.
Home listings giant Zillow Group is rolling out climate-risk estimates that size up a home’s likelihood of damage from flood, fire, and wind over the next 30 years. These scores, along with soaring insurance costs, could change the economics of where people choose to live, as buyers avoid homes with high risk or face fewer bidding wars to buy them.
A house’s risk of flood or wildfire usually isn’t as apparent at first glance as an ugly bathroom or cramped kitchen. But now, Zillow is joining home listing websites like Redfin , Realtor.com, and CoStar Group ’s Homes.com by adding scores provided by climate-risk modeling company First Street.
Zillow may not be the first to add First Street’s scores but it’s the largest, with 233 million average monthly unique users. That means its rating system will be seen by many more people. Zillow users can find a listing’s score about halfway down the page on its website, underneath its payment calculator section. Not every home has a score.
First Street builds models based on historical data, climate projections, and statistical analysis to determine the probability that a property could see flooding, wildfire, dangerous winds, or other detrimental weather-related events, even if it hasn’t in the past. On listings websites that use the data, this appears as a score from one to 10 across five risk categories.
“For people who exclusively use Zillow, this will be the first time they really have seen this information, whether it’s on their property or in the search process,” says Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications at First Street.
The tool gives buyers another data point to consider, similar to how they size up a neighborhood’s downtown or school district online, says Porter.
Homes with better climate scores could become more sought after while those with worse readings could see lower prices, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper co-written by Redfin’s chief economist, Daryl Fairweather, and researchers from the University of Southern California, Columbia University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
To test the impact of risk scores, Redfin displayed First Street’s flood ratings to some users but not to others. The information changed some users’ behavior on searching and buying, Fairweather says. Compared with a control group, users who viewed homes with high-risk scores instead made offers on properties that were about half as risky. The scores also drove up competition for less-risky homes, increasing prices slightly, and reduced demand for some high-risk homes.
“The flood risk information had a tangible effect on property prices, with homes in high flood risk areas experiencing a decrease in value,” the authors wrote.
“Getting any sort of credible information about a property’s climate risk is a big step in the right direction,” says says Ben Keys, a real estate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He co-wrote a separate National Bureau of Economic Research working paper on climate risk and property insurance last year.
Keys’ research found that premiums rose 33% from 2020 to 2023, with those climbing sharply in areas that FEMA deems to be at higher risk.
In the long run, climate risk could alter migration patterns—whether it’s because of cost of disasters or insurance. But consumers don’t need to dismiss an area solely based on an area’s risk rating. It’s cheaper to pay to make a home more resilient than to replace it after disaster strikes, notes John Rogers, chief data and analytics officer at CoreLogic, which sells an analytics tool that helps insurers size up the resilience of individual homes to storms. “Every one dollar that you invest in resiliency [in a] home is equivalent to six dollars to recover the home if that weather event was to occur,” he says.
TITLE: FEMA offers $1.35B in climate resilience grants
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/fema-climate-resilience-grants-bric-fma/736650/
EXCERPTS:
The Federal Emergency Management Agency on Monday announced that communities can apply for a total of $1.35 billion in grants to build climate resilience.
The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities annual grant program is offering a total of $750 million, and the Flood Mitigation Assistance program is offering $600 million for projects that reduce flood risk.
Heat waves, storms, floods, droughts and wildfires are becoming more frequent and intense as the effects of climate change progress. The annual number of billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. has risen in recent years, with 24 such events occurring last year as of Nov. 1, 2024.
The [Flood Mitigation Assistance] (FMA) grant program was created in 1994 by Congress through funding from the National Flood Insurance Program. The BRIC program is much newer, having launched in fiscal year 2020. Both programs are supported by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, which invested more than $4.5 billion total into them through fiscal year 2026.
FEMA has received large numbers of applications for these programs in the past. In March 2024, the agency said communities that applied in that fiscal cycle requested a total of almost $8 billion — more than quadruple the $1.8 billion FEMA had available between the two programs.
FEMA has received criticism from some stakeholders that disadvantaged communities may not have the capacity to apply for and administer large grants under BRIC or meet cost-share requirements. One 2023 analysis by nonprofit research group Headwaters Economics found that the BRIC program distributes funds unevenly across the nation, with larger cities that have more resources tending to be the most successful at securing funding.
To distribute grants across more geographic areas in this funding cycle, FEMA is applying a $150 million cap per applicant on total available BRIC funding. “This will help to ensure a more diverse distribution of BRIC funds across the nation,” the agency said in a press release.
The funding announcement comes in the weeks leading up to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20. Trump’s pick to run the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, is South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem. Politico reports that Noem has been skeptical of climate change and did not claim or pursue certain FEMA resilience funding for her state.
SEE ALSO:
Climate Science Deniers and Fossil Fuel Greenwashing: Danger in Trump’s Second Term
https://blog.ucsusa.org/kathy-mulvey/climate-science-deniers-and-fossil-fuel-greenwashing-danger-in-trumps-second-term/
"I want a better catastrophe", a book by Andrew Boyd. It might help people to make better decisions. Or not. who knows.