Capitalism causes climate change

[jfish26]

i haven't really spent much time concerning with the climate. But since i have been watching the last of us on hbo. it's making me wonder.

This is really just so perfect. A+, 100/100, no notes.

[jfish26]

Insurance Politics at the End of the World

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/insuran ... the-end-of

At its core, insurance is a simple business. Companies figure out how much they will likely have to pay out, and then set their rates to ensure they make a profit. Success is dependent upon the ability to accurately assess risk. There is a huge financial incentive to have the most clear-eyed possible understanding of reality. Wishful thinking or misguided ideology will do nothing except lose an insurance company money.

Because of this, insurance can tell you things about reality. It resembles global investment firms in this: The people running them may be greedy, and the clients may be evil, but the business is all about understanding the true and unvarnished state of the world in order to manage risk in order to protect wealth, and therefore these firms do their very best to operate according to what is true, whereas politicians, for example, often do their very best to lie. This is why every leftist and revolutionary should read the Wall Street Journal. There are far fewer lies when money is involved.

The insurance industry is going to serve a very useful role in the climate apocalypse. It is going to be the tip of the spear that punches through all of the bullshit of climate denialism once and for all. Indeed, the process is very much underway already. Politicians and oil lobbyists can lie all they want, but their homeowners insurance rates are going up.

Watching this process unfold is going to expose the hidden bedrock of many people’s belief systems in a rather violent way. That bedrock, in most cases, will not be “socialism” or “capitalism” but rather “whatever is good for me, personally, I don’t care what it costs, please god save me.” We are well on the road to the inevitable political crisis that will be sparked by insurance.

[...]

[This] sets up a very interesting political crisis that we will all get to “enjoy,” meaning “wage cutthroat battles on the road to the next civil war.” Because when you brush away the soothing fictions and political slogans, there are only a few ways to handle this:

1. You let private insurers set rates appropriate to the actual risk of insuring billions of dollars worth of property that is increasingly likely to flood, blow away, or burn up. Those rates are very high and getting higher. Every year, more homeowners will not be able to afford to stay in their homes. They will have to sell and move inland. Sooner or later there will be a tipping point where the pool of sellers far outstrips the pool of buyers. Real estate prices in all of these areas plummet to almost nothing, because only very rich or very insane people can afford to live there. This real estate value crash will cause state tax receipts to crash, meaning the states will be broke as hell at a time when millions of residents are squawking for help. Even more consequentially, a real estate crash will cause an enormous, widespread financial hit to basically everything, as the banks holding all of those mortgages get hammered. I am not qualified to “pencil out” the exact scope of such a financial crisis, but in Florida there is $2.9 trillion worth of insured coastal real estate. That is a lot. A 2020 McKinsey report guesstimated that some parts of Florida could lose as much as a third of their real estate value by 2050, but it is fair to say that that could turn out to be low. Regardless of the exact timeline, this is where it’s headed.

One important thing to say about this scary scenario is: This is the free market functioning perfectly!!! This is actually how capitalism is supposed to solve problems. In this scenario, adaptation to climate change is induced by price signals. People are forced to move away from the coasts because it becomes too expensive. This is economically rational. The human pain of this enormous dislocation does not change that fact. Everyone who loves to celebrate the free market: This is what you’re asking for. Every time you hear a Republican frantically decrying this rational economic progression, you are hearing a hypocrite.

2. The second possibility—the one that will actually happen—is that the private insurance market collapses and then the emergency quasi-fictional state insurance market fills the gap but then it runs out of money at the first big disaster and then all of these states and their homeowners go to Washington for bailouts. Republican warriors for free enterprise quickly become socialists when their donors’ beach houses are at stake. Climate change deniers quickly turn into climatologists when they start asking for the government to build sea walls to keep their garages from flooding. One small consolation as this panic-inducing process plays out will be seeing all the bullshit pretenses of the people who were happy to deny climate change for their own gain blow away with their roof tiles. Unfortunately, good and bad people alike will be fucked, but at least you will get to watch your neighbor’s Ford F-150 with the “LIBERAL TEARS” flag float away too.

[...]

The path we are on today, though—the path that our current political system makes likely—is the path of Wholly Irrational and Completely Ad-Hoc Pirate Capitalism: Increasing climate change-induced disasters cause panic among homeowners as a class; politicians rush to grab dollars to enable everyone to live the same as they are now for as long as possible; and eventually the whole thing crashes into the wall of reality in a way that causes uncontainable, national pain rather than just the specific, regional, temporary pain of the smarter solutions. This pain will probably come in the form of 1) enormous economic and human losses and 2) a political crisis that will occur when all of the people living in other states finally say, “Why the fuck is so much of our federal budget going to protect these idiots’ beach houses?” Then things will get ugly.

We could at least have a productive debate about all this if our leaders would pick a lane and stay there. Instead, I expect Florida to reach a point where Republican governors are demanding that every Republican donor’s house be hoisted onto an impermeable private island built at government expense while everyone else drowns. Just remember that the insurance bill you got that made you vomit is telling you something real about the world—the sort of no-nonsense, suck-it-up, facts-don’t-care-about-your-feelings delivery of free market information that Republicans are so fond of celebrating. As long as they are not the ones getting it.

[japhy]

Expect Florida in the near future.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/state- ... 023-05-30/

[KUTradition]

this is a bit illustrative of the disconnect from reality that was so painfully on display in New Orleans post-Katrina

rebuilding in that locale, it seems a foregone conclusion that another disaster is imminent

[ousdahl]

makes me wonder how anyone is getting insured in CO too, seeing all the ridiculous new construction here now, particularly in increasingly-parched wildland areas vulnerable to fires.

[Shirley]

Today In: Woke!

[zsn]

City of San Jose and other Bay Area communities have been doing this in schools, libraries and other public parking lots for about a decade. Good to see a large parking lot like Six Flags adopt this approach