The U.S. Senate budget committee just released report entitled Next to Fall: The Climate Driven Insurance Crisis is here – and Getting Worse. Included is a map of non-renewals for 2023, showing that the crisis in the American home insurance market has spread beyond well-known problems in Florida and California. The jump in non-renewals now extends along the Gulf Coast, through Alabama and Mississippi; up the Atlantic seaboard, through the Carolinas, Virginia and into southern New England; inland, to parts of the plains and Intermountain West; and even as far as Hawaii.
Homeowners insurance is now a leading indicator of how climate reality will disrupt every aspect of our lives. And the impact will be enormous. Without homeowner’s insurance, you can’t get (or keep) a mortgage. An ever increasing number of communities will be too dangerous to insure and face falling property values, less tax revenue for basic services and limited ability to respond to disasters.
Committee chair Sheldon Whitehouse identified non-renewal data a key indicator “for predicting the likelihood and timing of a significant, systemic economic crash,” as disruption in the insurance market spreads to property values.
“The climate crisis that is coming our way is not just about polar bears, and it’s not just about green jobs,” Mr. Whitehouse said Wednesday during a hearing on the investigation’s findings. “It actually is coming through your mail slot, in the form of insurance cancellations, insurance non-renewals and dramatic increases in insurance costs.”
The New York Times created a helpful visualization of non-renewals by state along with the map shown above. The bottom line, the climate crisis is coming for America and it is not going to stop with “Coastal Elites”.