United States | News & Politics

Sure, the Gulf (most warm coastal areas, really) has always had hurricanes - but they are increasingly severe, destructive, and expensive to recover from with each year.

It seems like a false equivalency to compare it to health insurance, healthy people suffer plenty of surprise illnesses and costly medical expenses as a normal part of life, whereas the odds of my home in MN, 1,200 miles from the Gulf, being destroyed by regularly occurring hurricanes are incalculably small. Other risks, like tornado and flooding, can be more easily managed with regular tree maintenance and a battery backup sump pump. A blizzard might keep me snowed in for a day or two, but won't ever result in the insurance company footing the bill to rebuild my house.

The housing insurance market is one of the only powerful forces actively disincentivizing living in disaster prone areas. By contrast, the housing market has largely been ignoring climate science, instead trying to squeeze every last penny out before leaving regular folks with a inflated debt and land they can't sell.

It'd be politically toxic for the government to say that we shouldn't build a FIMA subsidized suburban McMansion on every last vulnerable acre of land - but something needs to shift to permanently migrate people out of harms way before SHTF if we are to survive this climate emergency.