Por Eve Ottenberg
 |
Photo by Roger Starnes Sr |
The climate catastrophe not only kills people with fires and floods, it also bankrupts them by annihilating their homes – many uninsured. Why no insurance? Because of climate change – a perfectly horrible repeating loop. Our inside the Beltway gang may not know about the climate catastrophe, but insurance companies sure do – they know which way the wind blows, and it blows toward a hotter, more inhospitable and downright dangerous planet.
By May 22, per the National Interagency Fire Center, “18 uncontained large fires are currently burning nationwide,” requiring over 5000 firefighters to contain them. “So far this year, 29,023 fires have burned more than 2.3 million acres nationwide…the [California]Santa Rosa Island Fire…has grown to 18,379 acres. Evacuations are in effect on fires in Southern California and the Southwest, where the Seven Cabins Fire in New Mexico has burned 17,116 acres.” This agency does not speculate about how many of these numerous blazes are due to climate change, but an informed guess would put that at a big percentage. And who’s making that informed guess? Homeowner’s insurance companies, where, according to the New York Times November 19, 2025, climate change has sent premiums skyrocketing, home values falling and moderate-income owners screwed.
As has been well publicized, many homes in Pacific Palisades that burnt to the ground in the 2025 Los Angeles-area inferno lacked homeowner’s insurance. They had none because companies like Allstate were busily cancelling policies over the past few years, precisely because they understood very well the climate that capitalism damaged would cause costly disasters, and they didn’t want to be on the hook for them. This happens not just in California but also especially in Florida, Louisiana and Texas; and homeowner’s insurance cancellation is very likely soon coming to a district near you.
Four ways climate change impacts home insurance were noted by the Environmental Defense Fund on March 10. They are: skyrocketing premiums; insurance scarcity; people relying on ‘insurers of last resort;’ and homeowners taking on more risk. It should also be noted that the public sector shoulders more risk due to climate change. In other words, as the climate collapses thanks to Big Oil and Big Gas, the expenses incurred are shifted onto ordinary people, away from Big Finance.
Extreme weather boosts premiums, EDF wrote on October 4, 2025, “alongside the growing expense of rebuilding, high cost of reinsurance and continued development in areas prone to disaster.” Regarding difficulty finding insurance, some companies “are abandoning certain locations, even entire states.” Most infamously, “State Farm stopped offering new homeowners’ policies in California” due to wildfires. Another cause of insurance scarcity is “some insurers are going broke.” This happened in Florida and Louisiana following hurricanes. Also, “the quality of coverage is starting to decline,” as companies shrink what they will cover.
Public sector insurance so far is not the answer, because such programs “struggle with the same challenges…as the private sector.” So it’s the little guy, the homeowner, and sometimes not even so little, who shoulders the risk. Priced out, some homeowners are “living without this vital protection. Lenders typically require homeowners’ coverage for those with a mortgage. But households that don’t have a loan might forego insurance, as good coverage becomes increasingly unaffordable.” Then when the climate strikes, it leaves the uninsured in the ditch. Especially low-income homeowners.
According to that November 2025 New York Times article, anecdotal evidence revealed doubling annual home insurance premiums in Louisiana. “Since 2018, a financial shock in the home insurance market has meant that homes in the ZIP codes most exposed to hurricanes and wildfires would sell for an average of $43,900 less than they would otherwise…Changes in an under-the-radar part of the insurance market, known as reinsurance, have helped to drive this trend…global reinsurance companies have had…a ‘climate epiphany’ and have roughly doubled the rates they charge home insurance providers.” In some zip codes, these price hikes force Americans out of their homes: they simply can’t afford to stay, because “a rapid repricing of disaster risk had been responsible for about a fifth of overall home insurance increases since 2017.”
Prospects for improving this situation are bleak. Allstate announced a year ago “that it anticipates significant financial losses due to the recent wildfires in Southern California,” reported the Press Rundown shortly after the worst of the 2025 L.A. conflagration. The company, it said, estimates “pre-tax losses of approximately $1.1 billion, net of reinsurance…Allstate’s share of the California homeowners’ insurance market has declined from 12.6 percent 15 years ago to 5.8 percent at the end of 2023.” Interestingly, despite this supposed financial bloodbath, Allstate’s shares rose 20 percent in 2024 and are not merely still stable, but have posted double-digit gains since then. So these ultra-rich corporations still rake in the big bucks. They don’t suffer from the climate catastrophe – you do.
Not only homeowners sans insurance go broke covering costs of extreme weather, would-be buyers can’t get mortgages in locales insurers won’t cover. That was the gist of a New York Times article December 18, 2024, while insurance hikes were the focus of the November 19, 2025 piece. So unless you can pay the entire asking price up front, you can’t own a home in many places in the U.S. “Since 2018, more than 1.9 million home insurance contracts nationwide have been dropped…In more than 200 counties, the nonrenewal rate has tripled or more,” per the NYT 2024 article.
Look on the bright side – those 15 million swanky homes that sit empty across the land, because they’re an “investment” where American aristocrats park excess cash? If they lose insurance and burn down, bye-bye investment. So what was once a safe bet for the uber-wealthy might not look so great anymore. If these money-bags start searching for other places to sock away their dollars, the ordinary people they squeezed out of the housing market might be able to buy an abode. But that’s only if our plutocrats flee housing investments en masse, i.e. in districts where insurance is still available as well as in those where it’s not.
The irony is bitter. For those with mega-bucks, that posh empty domicile becomes a risky investment. So the rich may take their loot elsewhere, ultimately freeing up housing, as the real estate market beckons ordinary people again; but what was once a path into the middle class, homeownership, now becomes a path into bankruptcy court, a path beaten by fleeing insurers and incoming extreme weather.
After the climate-aggravated L.A. inferno burnt 6800 homes to a cinder in Pacific Palisades and 9400 in the suburb of Altadena in December 2024, “California’s home insurance plan of last resort” ran out of money, reported the Washington Post the following February 11, 2025. Luckily that FAIR plan was slated for a $1 billion bailout. “To date, the plan has paid out $914 million to policyholders, a figure that is expected to grow.” But this means rates will rise. How? FAIR assessed that $1 billion from its members – insurers, who then shift some of that expense to homeowners. So any way you look at it, climate change makes owning a home riskier and more costly.
This is bad news, because home-ownership is one of the last, reliable routes into the middle class in this country. In 2024, 65.6 percent of households owned the roof over their heads but most owed a mortgage. Without that debt, far fewer Americans could ever dream of buying a house, and with mortgages going the way of the dodo, thanks to the climate collapse, we may very well become a nation of renters. And you may have heard that stratospheric rents not only impoverish tens of millions of Americans, they leave another large cohort – homeless. So picture this dystopia: a charred and in other places flooded landscape in which the destitute mill about, searching for a decent place to sleep. That’s the future to which Big Money, embodied in oil, gas and finance corporations, will banish lots of ordinary people. Not very nice.
Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest novel is Old Man Alone. She can be reached at her website.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário