What the collapse of home insurance companies in the United States tells us about climate change
A few months ago I wrote about how California’s home insurance companies were no longer offering coverage in the sunshine state due to increasingly frequent and lethal wildfires; now it is the turn of Florida, where insurers are going bankrupt because of the growing number of homeowners’ claims from the impact of ever-worsening hurricanes and storms.
When a sector as important as insurance can no longer assume the responsibility of protecting us from all kinds of eventualities because the numbers don’t add up, we know we have a problem. The recent insolvency of Florida’s United Property and Casualty, with 159,170 active policies and a 2.5% market share in the state, has left many homeowners with wrecked homes and no coverage, despite having paid their premiums.
A state whose hard-right governor has banned the use of the terms “climate change” and “global warming” in official documents has now found that the rising costs of increasingly frequent and intense natural disasters due to climate change…
