Ike and Insurance

I'll Be Back

I was reading an article here about Hurricane Ike and the looming billions of dollars worth of damage that may be coming for Florida. This wasn’t what caught my eye though, as the article goes on, it talks about the ridiculous insurance rates in the state, with premiums for house insurance out of control and rising. There’s talk of the government having it’s own insurance fund for these kinds of disasters, which of course as you know means taxpayer dollars.

But why are insurance premiums rising? It’s not as though Hurricanes in Florida are anything new. The fact of the matter is that insurance companies are worried, because they’ve been following the science around anthropogenic climate change and realize that they’re going to have a very difficult time covering the damages that are to coming in the next few decades. This isn’t just me screaming from the hilltops, see for yourself, here’s Allstate’s explanation for why they’re raising rates here. I’ve known that this was coming for a couple of years now, ever since Allstate left the state of Maryland because they saw the writing on the wall and knew they couldn’t afford to provide us coverage in the years to come, see that here. I guess they should change their name from Allstate to “almost every state”.

Ok, so allow me to give my forecast for the years to come. Insurance companies aren’t Republicans ro Democrats, they’re businesses. The most telltale sign that we’re going to be in trouble is when entities whose only bottom line is making a profit start heeding the warnings of our scientists. These guys don’t eat granola and they don’t have a political or socialist agenda. So in the upcoming years, if you live in a coastal state, your premiums are going to get ridiculous. Soon enough, even if it takes a storm or two, insurance companies will stop offering homeowner insurance to coastal states, and then either you’re out of luck, or the government is going to create it’s own insurance fund, and EVERYONE is going to pay for it in their tax dollars. Yet another reason why doing nothing when it comes to climate change is the most expensive act we can undergo. The time to act is yesterday.