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I honestly thought the insurance agencies, which spend all day modeling risk including climate risk, would use their lobbying clout to sound some sort of alarm by now given that it puts their industry at risk. I guess they’re happy to raise prices and let the customer base naturally shrink.
Risk is their business model. As long as assets aren’t a total loss, the more risk, the higher premiums, the more profit.
While climate change does turn many assets into a total loss, it also puts assets that were previously very safe at risk, which means more profit again. And it makes people scared, the perfect mindset to buy overpriced insurance policies.
The “insurance crisis” is an intentional reframing of the expected destruction of an entire way of life as something with insurance markets. It keeps the ball in their court, thinking of economic levers to support the health of the insurance market rather than recognizing that we’re looking at a region becoming uninhabitable and the whole spectrum of human and economic consequences of that.
So by talking about an “insurance crisis”, insurance companies increase the chance of subsidies or other government support, at the small cost of distracting them from the world being on fire.
I hope not. Insurance schemes, scammy though they are, are the best form of socialism that exists in america right now.