This diary is about money. More specifically, it is about how much the droughts, flash floods, tornados, wildfires, and hurricanes that climate change is exacerbating (bigger – faster – louder – harder) are costing us, how much they will cost us in the future, and how we might use the threat of this potentially endless money pit to convince at least some Republicans to join us in climate action.
With the debt ceiling debacle behind us – resolved with panache by President Biden without too much damage to too many Democratic priorities – it’s not too soon to talk about how we might communicate with Republican lawmakers about the rising cost of climate change.
The GOP is not, of course, unaware of the financial aspect of the crisis. In just one example of markets shifting because of the changing climate, the LA Times announced recently that neither State Farm nor Allstate will sell new homeowners policies to Californians.
Californians looking to buy a house face some of the country’s most expensive real estate prices and wildfires that threaten scores of housing tracts. Now there’s another obstacle: finding an insurer willing to cover their dream home.
State Farm General Insurance Co. said last week that it’s no longer accepting new applications for property and casualty coverage in California because of soaring wildfire and construction costs and “a challenging reinsurance market.”
Now, Allstate Corp. has told the state Department of Insurance that it stopped selling new home insurance policies last year. The notice was part of a recent request for a nearly 40% rate increase for home and business property and casualty insurance.
The insurance industry has the ear of GOP politicians, to be sure.
Per Open Secrets:
Health, life, property and car insurance companies, agents and brokers are all included in the insurance industry, which is a major contributor to federal campaigns.
Individuals and PACs associated with the insurance industry made $120 million in federal contributions during the 2020 election cycle. That's a new record for the industry, which has favored Republicans over Democrats in every election cycle since 1992.
It is my fervent hope that insurance industry executives are huddling with the GOP politicians they lobby to try and talk sense into them – to try and frame the climate crisis as a very real fiscal crisis, and not just some soft squish “woke” Leftie thing.
Goodness knows that appealing to the GOP based on human suffering, human health, environmental health, and the future of all species of life on this planet has not been working. They’re clinging desperately to their nonsensical “climate change, what climate change?!” act, and mostly refusing to admit that we must take collective societal action NOW.
Of course it is the human toll – and the potential for environmental and civilization collapse – that is top of mind for most Democrats, progressives, and those generally “on the left.”
On July 27, 2022, a flood swept through 14 counties in East Kentucky, killing 45 people and displacing thousands more. More than six months later, the affected communities remain on a long road to recovery. People’s lives and livelihoods were devastated. Children died.
This April, scores of people died, and multiple thousands suffered, in a devastating heatwave that was so brutal that the pavement was observed to melt.
In May in Italy,
Older and disabled people were trapped in their homes as rescuers worked under pounding rain throughout the night to save people in what has been described as the most severe flooding to affect Italy in 100 years.
The floods in the northern Emilia-Romagna region have claimed 13 lives as of Thursday evening. An estimated 20,000 have been left homeless in a disaster that caused 23 rivers to burst their banks and 280 landslides, engulfing 41 cities and towns.
An 80-year-old man drowned in his cellar after going to retrieve belongings, and a couple, identified as Sauro Manuzzi and Marinella Maraldi, who owned a company that produces herbs, were hit by the floods in the field opposite their home. The body of Maraldi, 70, was swept 12 miles down a river before being found on a beach along the Adriatic coast. A 76-year-old man was killed after being hit by a landslide in his garden, while another man, aged 43, died after falling into a well while trying to pump water away from his property.
Firefighters have carried out 2,000 rescue operations across the region and in parts of central Marche that were also affected by the floods.
My first thought – and probably the first thought of many readers here – is about the human suffering and pain resulting from each such disaster.
I widen out, then, from thoughts of individual lives lost and individual families torn asunder to thoughts of ecosystems and food webs, thoughts of crop disruption and failure, food shortages, and hunger.
My first thought is never the bottom line. But perhaps we should focus on that more – because the bottom line is absolutely devastating.
In January of this year, FEMA was estimating the cost of those 2022 East Kentucky floods at over $150 million.
Hurricane Ian in 2022 was briefly a Category 5 monster storm, as well as the costliest in Florida history, at $109 billion.
In April 2023 the Tampa Bay Times reported:
The extent of the storm’s damage was detailed in a report released by the National Hurricane Center… Ian has racked up more than $112 billion in damage worldwide. Of that, more than $109 billion was in Florida.
For reference, please note that Florida’s annual budget in 2022 was $105.3 billion.
How about wildfires? Accuweather has reported that the 2021 wildfire season in California cost between $70 and $90 billion dollars.
Are droughts pretty inexpensive, though? Nah. No such luck. Here’s NOAA:
Since 1980, the U.S. has sustained 258 weather and climate disasters where the overall damage costs reached or exceeded $1 billion (including adjustments based on the Consumer Price Index, as of January 2020). Among these, 26 droughts cost the nation at least $249 billion, with an average cost of more than $9.6 billion incurred during each event. Only hurricanes were more costly. The cumulative cost for all 258 events exceeds $1.75 trillion.
The number and cost of disasters are increasing over time due to a combination of increased exposure (i.e., values at risk of possible loss), vulnerability (i.e., how much damage does the intensity [wind speed, flood depth] at a location cause) and that climate change is increasing the frequency of some types of extremes that lead to billion-dollar disasters (NCA 2018, Chapter 2).
Number of events
The U.S. has experienced 69 separate billion-dollar disaster events over the last 5 years (2015-2019), an inflation-adjusted average of 13.8 events per year. Over the last 40 years (1980-2019), the years with 10 or more separate billion-dollar disaster events include 1998, 2008, 2011-2012, and 2015-2019. (my bolding)
So yes. Climate change is killing people. It’s destroying homes and families and entire communities. Entire ecosystems are in danger of collapse. Ocean creatures are dying in the billions. The crisis deepens every year, and will not stop getting worse for some time, even if we were to stop all GHG emissions starting tomorrow.
And it’s costing us money. When we talk billions and TRILLIONS, we’re talking “real money,” as the saying goes.
The majority of Republican politicians know this. They have been briefed, and many of them are not as stupid as they playact on TV. There are a few unregenerate climate deniers and low-information dimwits out there (Tuberville, Greene, Bobert, etc.) – as well as Democrats who should know better but would prefer to line their own filthy wallets (Manchin, [D, Bituminous Coal] – but there are also many more GOP politicians who know the truth but dare not speak it because of the “culture wars” veneer this issue has (enragingly) acquired.
Republicans are addicted to saying that we must balance the budget and “pay our bills, just like the average American family,” so where do they think the additional billions and trillions are coming from to cover the massive amounts of “building back” that will need to be done as the climate worsens? And where do they think the dollars are coming from for hardening our infrastructure before disaster hits?
For now, of course, red states will get that money from the blue states, who perennially fund their abject nonsense. But there is only so much we can collectively pay before we will have to decide to make sacrifices. All the local charities and GoFundMe accounts in the world won’t be able to make up the shortfall as hurricanes bloom like toxic blossoms over the Gulf of Mexico, and wildfires rampage through Sacramento and downtown LA.
The rubber is going to meet the road very soon. The butcher’s bill is starting to come due. Is it even marginally plausible to consider that there might be a way to talk to Republicans about the changing climate if we invite them to join us in talking to Americans about what this is costing them AS TAXPAYERS every year?
It seems impossible that no argument – no appeal to fiscal policy or budgetary reason – will break through to our colleagues on the other side of the aisle.
It seems impossible that there’s no way to leverage the financial behavior of some of the GOP’s biggest donors – like the insurance industry – to impress upon craven GOP politicians that the time to act is NOW, before things can get much worse.
I can hear people now, furiously typing, “Republicans are scum!” and “they’re hopeless” and “we have bigger fish to fry what with creeping fascism and the death of democracy!” and I hear you, I do. But if we don’t start to put more pressure on not just our Democratic elected leaders, but Republicans too, we really don’t have a hope in hell of moving the needle on any of this.
Maybe (just maybe) appealing to the GOP love of money and purported “fiscal responsibility” by presenting them with the unappetizing prospect of shoveling endless amounts of cash into an ever-widening money pit of climate disasters is a place to start?
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Kira Thomsen-Cheek (@KiraOnClimate)
Asking did not work.
Voting did not work.
Marching did not work.
Emissions keep going up.
#ClimateRevolution