Hurricane Ian, which hit Florida in September, was the costliest hurricane in the state’s history. It was the third severe hurricane Florida has had in the last five years, and the total damages done by these storms is estimated to be more than $150 billion. While there have always been hurricanes in the Caribbean region, climate change has made these events more frequent and much more severe. (In a nutshell, the storms are bigger because the ocean water is significantly warmer, and this will only get worse over time.) It’s not just hurricanes that are becoming more of a problem because of warming. The rate of natural disasters in the US has almost tripled since 1980. In 2021-2022 , there were 38 natural disasters in the US that caused at least $1 billion in damages, and the total cost of these events was a staggering $310 billion.
Hurricanes aren’t the only problem in Florida – there’s rising sea levels, water contamination, tidal flooding, coastal erosion, toxic algae blooms, habitat destruction and the mass extinction of native species. But you wouldn’t think anything was amiss at all, as Florida’s population is growing at the fastest rate in the entire country, mostly from people emigrating from northern states. Florida’s population has almost doubled since 1990, and its housing prices have gone up about 80 percent over the last five years. These numbers only reinforce how effective right-wing disinformation on climate has been and the ease with which some people can be deluded into living in a fantasy world. According to polls, only 57 percent of Floridians believe in man-made climate change. The state has been run by Republicans since 1999, and so it has followed the conservative playbook to the letter: deny and ignore environmental issues, cut regulations and push for ever-more growth.
But now the bills are coming due. Florida’s government has been propping up the home insurance business for decades. Ian wiped out what remained of a $17 billion fund that was used to cover uninsured claims. Current governor Ron DeSantis, another climate liar, recently earmarked an additional $3 billion for homeowner claims. It won’t be anywhere near enough. Insurers in the state have been suffering losses for years. Six insurers based in the state are already bankrupt, and another 27 insurers are currently on death watch. Many companies are planning to leave Florida entirely. The average home is already paying roughly $4,200 a year for home insurance and 2023 is likely to bring increases of at least 40 percent. This doesn’t even include flood insurance, which in Florida is only provided by the federal government through FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and costs another 700-800 dollars per year – a low rate that is subsidized by all US taxpayers.
Albert Einstein famously said the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. After every hurricane, flood, wildfire, etc., people just rebuild in the exact same place as before. This is true even if it’s government money that’s being used to rebuild - for example, FEMA provides funds and low interest loans for rebuilding with no conditions whatsoever. Much as we all hate paying the insurance companies, they provide vital services, one of which is measuring and pricing risk. Market prices provide needed information. About 15 million people in Florida live in coastal regions and the fact that insurance companies can’t make it is telling us that this situation is untenable. If DeSantis and FEMA didn’t backstop private insurance, homeowners would have to pay rates that reflected the new reality of climate chaos, and these costs would likely be so high that many people would have no choice but to move to safer ground.
This may seem too harsh and grossly unfair, but this is how capitalism works, and the climate deniers, who are almost always conservatives, should know this better than anyone. Conservatives are always claiming that government subsidies distort markets and lead to negative outcomes. Programs like welfare are criticized because they supposedly are a disincentive to work or to family formation. Conservatives preach that people need to take responsibility for their choices. Why aren’t they sticking to this logic when it comes to insurance? Should it be my problem that your house flooded because you chose to live on a floodplain? Why should people living in landlocked Wyoming subsidize a guy who insists on living on the beach? Suddenly, the rules of market capitalism no longer apply.
We need to get real and start doing climate triage, as some places are either already unlivable or will be in the not-too-distant future. It’s much better to plan an organized retreat now than wait until it’s too late. But what we have is a bunch of slimy politicians pandering to people who either can’t understand science or simply won’t accept reality. One-hundred-year floods are now happening every few years. (Most homeowners in Canada and the US don’t have flood insurance. When southern Alberta had its historic flood in 2013, about 65 percent of the $5 billion-plus in damages had to be paid by the government.) Wildfires are 500 percent more frequent than they were in the 1970s. The risks of living in disaster-prone areas are far higher now than in the past.
What needs to happen is that full property insurance should be mandatory and 100 percent underwritten by private insurers. When homeowners have to pay the true costs of living in climate change danger areas most will have no choice but to accept reality. This isn’t just the case for Florida, this is the way it should be in every high-risk area - for people living on floodplains or in wildfire-prone areas or in desert megacities running out of water. A true accounting of the cost of climate change will make it a lot more politically palatable to transition away from carbon and avoid the even worse outcomes which will be coming at us in the next 50 years. Climate denialism and yapping about how renewable energy is “too expensive” is easy when someone else is footing the bill for your delusions. Make people pay the full cost of their ignorant intransigence and see how fast they change their minds.
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