Amid LA Inferno, Home Insurers Under Fire for Policy Cancellations | One observer said it “really feels like the climate crisis is putting the home insurance industry on a fast track to being almost as reviled as the health insurance industry.”

https://www.commondreams.org/news/california-wildfire-insurance

by crustose_lichen

7 comments

  1. People seriously don’t understand how insurance companies work. They’re not a charity to help you build and live in a fire zone.

  2. The only thing that’s changing is their image is burning away, the insurance industry has always been a leech.

  4. Just wait. The entire insurance industry as a whole only has five *maybe* ten years before they cease being profitable whatsoever.

    Things will get really fun then

  5. I’ve looked at insurance stocks as investments. They’re not unusually profitable, indeed they underperform their finance sector brethren.

    If an insurer no longer knows how to assess risk in an area, due to climate crisis changes in risk, they’ll either leave the area or highball every premium assessment. They do this because its their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, and the only way to obtain reinsurance for local disasters.

    I think the climate aware should understand this isn’t unreasonable greed when the industry chooses to leave uninsurable areas, like suburban chaparral brush California or coastal Florida. The premiums that would compensate for this level of risk, often 8-10% of building values, aren’t acceptable to owners or prospective buyers.

    In the long term, this is a good thing. I don’t think the rest of us in society should subsidize building in places that are routinely wracked with brush fire or hurricane. If you are wealthy and want to live among flammable chapparal, or close to coasts subject to storm surge, *you’re on your own*. These places are uninhabitable in the long term, so the sooner they return to nature, the better.

  6. The insurance industry was always going to be the first place that truly undeniable evidence of climate change would come from.

    When the disasters in your region became so unpredictable and widespread that the insurance companies cannot afford to underwrite policies.

    You have irrefutable proof that change has happened.

  7. Insurance companies should be billing oil companies for all of this.

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