Last month — before the current fire disaster, note — the Senate Budget Committee put out a report titled Next to Fall: The Climate-Driven Insurance Crisis Is Here — and Getting Worse. Here’s just a bit —

In communities across the United States, homeowners are already facing a climate-driven insurance affordability crisis. As climate-related risks have increased, so, too, have climate losses. Some estimates suggest that “[i]nsured losses from natural disasters in the U.S. now routinely approach $100 billion a year, compared to $4.6 billion in 2000.” This has, in turn, translated to an accompanying increase in insurance premiums. Between 2020 and 2023, insurance premiums in the top 20 percent of counties for climate risk increased by 22 percent, and studies have found that insurance premiums have increased 40 percent faster than inflation. Homeowners have, on average, “seen their premiums spike 21 percent since 2015. . . . That
means ever more people are forgoing coverage, leaving them vulnerable and driving prices even higher as the number of people paying premiums and sharing risk shrinks.” Staggeringly, around 67 percent of homes in the United States are now underinsured.

In other words, this isn’t just a Florida or California problem. It’s a national problem, and it needs a national solution, which isn’t going to happen in the next four years.

I believe this is the Bloomberg article that was linked in Senator Whitehouse’s “x.” I can’t read it behind the subscriber paywall. Here’s one I could read, Climate change tests the insurance industry and could lead to the ‘next big economic shock’ for the U.S. at Yahoo News. The MAGAts are still pretending climate change is a joke, but you can’t fool bean-counters.

Meanwhile, House GOP puts Medicaid, ACA, climate measures on chopping block, says Politico. House Republicans are the new flying monkeys, I tell you.

See also As a Climate Scientist, I Knew It Was Time to Leave Los Angeles at the New York Times.