It’s wonderful when “journalists” who have no clue write a story about things they have no clue about
Climate change is coming for Florida’s real estate. Why don’t prices reflect it?
As a University of Miami doctoral student studying climate change, Mayra Cruz knew more than most about the risks of sea rise and wetter storms and hurricanes.
So when she and her husband bought their first home in 2021, they picked inland Miami Springs and bought federal flood insurance. They felt good, learning the only previous claim had come long ago, after Hurricane Andrew.
Then three storms in three years sloshed 18 inches of water into their backyard. And when the city posted a warning about flooding on Instagram, it used pictures of her impassable street.
Last summer, the couple decided to sell because of the repeated flooding. They wrote a “crystal clear” disclosure: the home escaped damage, but water got unnervingly close. Cruz worried if anyone would buy it. “My Realtor said it would still sell. I asked ‘Are you sure?’ I wouldn’t buy this house knowing what I know.”
Because non-cultists understand that storms happen, and that some years it could be bad and others see nothing. But, especially in the Miami area, it has always had a loaded gun pointed at it.
They got an offer almost immediately, selling for nearly $250,000 more than they paid for it.
This has made them very sad. Because cult.
It’s a paradox of South Florida’s super-heated real estate market: When homeowners like Cruz move out because of growing flood risks, somebody else always seems willing to move in — and often at a much higher price.
“Our housing value almost doubled in that time,” Cruz said. “That’s absolutely insane. Our house should not have been worth that much.”
Says you. But, buyers have a different opinion.
The value of her home and thousands of others in Florida have been buoyed at least in part by what some experts call a climate denial bubble. A wave of reports in the last five years has pegged the size of the bubble in the billions and suggested a correction is looming, potentially a major one. It has yet to come.
Anyhow, this is a long doomsday screed about how buyers are wrong because doom is coming, so, I’m going to stop now. Except to note that sea rise in the Miami area is above the Holocene average of 6-8 inches per century, but, still not as high as what is expected for a Holocene warm period.
Maine may be joining Vermont, New York, and two other states in establishing a “Climate Superfund Cost Recovery Program” within the Maine Department of Environmental Protection. The goal is to force the world’s largest oil producers to pay for the impact of climate change. This measure seeks to force the 90 or so biggest oil and gas producers in the world to pay for the climate change they allegedly helped cause.
The United States has never really cared much about tackling climate change, at least at the federal level. Up until the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA — which handed out billions of dollars for people to electrify their homes and pumped billions more into the clean energy economy — neither Congress nor the executive branch advanced truly meaningful climate policy, given the scale of the crisis.
Conservative Republicans have spent more than a decade working toward a wholesale rollback of federal regulations — and now they think they have the legislative battle plan to make it happen.
Thirty-five House Democrats are rebuking the Biden administration’s 11th-hour waiver that cleared a path for California to enact a full ban on gas cars by 2035.
