Who Will Pay For The Coming Climate Disasters?

Few things are as easily predictable as the path that America is walking down towards its awful, inevitable national political war over the costs of climate change. Each catastrophe will propel us to take another step towards our looming irrational meltdown. Hurricane Helene has now done her part, and our short-sighted politicians are doing theirs.

Helene devastated portions of the Florida coast, mangled inland towns in Georgia, and caused Biblical flooding in the Carolinas that has been compared to an Appalachian version of Hurricane Katrina. In the desperate atmosphere that rushes in as every major storm dissipates, Florida Congressman Jared Moskowitz took to Fox News to promote the bill that he filed last year to require the federal government to backstop disaster insurance costs for high risk states. Florida Politics reports:

“It would add no money to the deficit. It would allow states to buy bonds that when we have these 1 in 1,000 year storms would take that off of the plates of the insurance companies, which is driving up 25% of the cost on reinsurance,” Moskowitz said. “Even if my bill doesn’t move or go anywhere, I think the United States government and Congress has to start realizing that we have to amortize the risk.”

“We have to spread this risk around,” he added. “It can’t just be on one state or two states to deal with this. Just like FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) spreads risk around when there’s a big disaster, FEMA comes in and helps local cities, counties and the states recover, I think we’re going to have to do the same thing in the insurance market.”

What you are seeing here is the unfolding of a process that is as certain as the rising sun. Humans emit greenhouse gases that cause climate change. This generates a lot of short term wealth as well as problems that reveal themselves in the long term, incentivizing companies to keep snatching profits as long as possible despite exacerbating the eventual costs of the problem. Natural disasters, particularly storms and wildfires, grow more intense over time. Insurance rates for homeowners in areas prone to these disasters rise, quickly becoming unaffordable. Said homeowners panic and demand relief from their politicians. This is where we are now.