The Insurance Apocalypse Conversation America Won't Have

Last spring, I wrote an essay here called “Insurance Politics at the End of the World,” discussing the climate change-fueled home insurance crisis in America and the fucked up political path that it was likely to take. Today—wallowing in the depths of winter, taking a brief pause between ever-lengthening hurricane seasons, in an election year in which candidates would, in a more rational country, be putting forward plans to deal with this issue—is a good time to take a brief look at how this crisis has been unfolding since I last wrote it about it. It has been unfolding just as dysfunctionally as anyone could have imagined it would. To recap: due to rising seas and increasing hurricane and wildfire risk and other long-predicted consequences of global warming, the cost of insurance for homeowners in many disaster-prone areas has been skyrocketing at a staggering rate. Many of these areas, particularly the coastal South, are the same places experiencing the fastest population growth in A

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• John Sanchez