Mutually-assured destruction: insuring the Cali wildfires
Wildfires Hasten Another Climate Crisis: Homeowners Who Can’t Get Insurance
This NYT article talks about the growing insurance crisis in the wake of the California wildfire rampage. You might like to give it a read. It’s hard to comment on any one existential disaster these days, but as a frequently misunderstood/undercovered reality, I felt compelled to write (in language they might understand) about insurance companies in America and Cali’s indication of a much more urgent issue. Discussion is the objective, more thoughts to come.
In an ever-liable world of societal and economic development, coverage of one’s facilities (and faculties for that matter) is a necessary standard to ensure legitimized growth. Without insurance companies, banks can be placed into hazardous and at times compromising disadvantages when it comes to evaluating large influxes of mortgage and investment opportunity. To this end, if the desires of a state’s citizenry to enjoy fundamental asset protection are to be preserved to the best effect, and yet are also able to rebuild entire communities in the event of disaster, lawmakers must compromise with the interests of the insurers.
Despite this relationship, regulators in the state of California receive (according to this article) a sentiment of consumer-protection orientation about their track record, an attribution that, given the recovery outlook of the wildfire crisis, is pretty baffling. Although efforts such as the 12-month ban on premium spikes, the establishment of better coverage for consumers who take wildfire precautions, and similar initiatives may illustrate proactive reparation on behalf of afflicted residents, these measures suggest more about California’s legislative gridlock and obstructive prowess of its insurance industry than a commitment to its inhabitants. This is particularly clear in the words of Consumer Watchdog’s Cameron Barber, who states that “If insurers want to sell in the best parts of California, they need to sell in the riskier parts.” Insurance firms must first lookout for their own interests as a profit-focused entity, but by no means can they discount the gravity of their presence in communities and the ramifications of rolling back services. By contrast, crude parallels between insurance companies and firms in other free-market enterprises (e.g. banking, technology, energy) serve to show the detached understanding by American constituents and politicians alike in the cultural and developmental role they play beyond their bottom line.
If any break in the economic chain is to be surmised, I believe it involves the larger misappropriation of scarce land for zoning and urban expansion throughout the state of California; development responsible for an unprecedented exodus from its squeezed cities. So far, the result has spelled disaster, as the relocated droves of penny-pinched families and young professionals find themselves ever-surrounded by the state’s throng of natural disasters. In Sonoma, Santa Cruz, and other counties of high aridity and risk, all it takes is one new occupant to set the spark.
Oscar
