Climate change's future is already here

“The future,” Canadian sci-fi novelist William Gibson once wrote, “is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” In Los Angeles, where raging wildfires have already killed at least 24 people, burned thousands of homes, and caused upward of $100 billion in damage, we’re getting an unwelcome preview of what our climate-changed future will look like. It’s one where all the money in the world can’t always save or protect you, but those without means will still suffer the most. 

We are not even close to ready for it. Witness the attempts by bad-faith actors on the right — including the president-elect — to target everything from DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and environmental regulations to local government officials and even sign language interpreters (I wish I was kidding) during a fire that fire officials have said repeatedly couldn’t be stopped. Scapegoating like this might be politically convenient, but it does nothing to address the real issue that will keep rearing its head in ever more catastrophic ways. 

That’s because, of course — of COURSE — this is a story about climate change. As Bloomberg’s Lauren Rosenthal and Brian Sullivan noted in a recent piece, the ever-rising levels of heat in our oceans may have caused the jet stream to wander off its normal track, leaving a high-pressure ridge stuck over southern California for even longer stretches than normal. That means more heat, less moisture and ideal fire conditions. “One stubborn high-pressure ridge has blocked moisture from reaching Southern California for months,” Rosenthal and Sullivan wrote, “creating a virtual force field that has led to dry conditions.”

The sheer ferocity of the Los Angeles fires reminded West Kelowna fire chief Jason Brolund of those his crews battled in August 2023. “We have first-hand experience with the force of wildfire, but what’s happening there is on a scale that really is almost too difficult to fathom,” he told Castanet. “They’re fighting a fire in essentially what amounts to a hurricane.” And make no mistake: California is the future. “We watch California very closely,” Brolund says. “They are in many ways probably five to 10 years ahead of us, not only in their strategies and tactics and the way that they approach wildfire, but also in the risk and what they’re facing.” 

There’s no point in trying to convince climate skeptics of the urgency here. They won’t listen to us. Their insurance companies, on the other hand, might just drive the point home. California’s insurance market has been shielded from the reality change, with ratepayers in lower-risk areas effectively subsidizing costs for higher-risk homes. Right now, California is the only state in the country that doesn’t allow insurance companies to use so-called “catastrophe models” to set prices. It also prevents companies from factoring in the cost of reinsurance, which is essentially the insurance they have on their own policies and the possibility of major disaster-related payouts. 

As a result, insurers have been pulling out of the state in droves, a trend that’s almost certain to increase going forward. It’s not just happening in California, either. In hurricane-ravaged Florida, for example, insurers have been taking it in the teeth for years, with 16 becoming insolvent since 2017 and a further 16 deciding not to write policies there any more. "If we're going to have a solvent insurance market in the country,” California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara told NPR, “insurance can no longer be an afterthought in the national and global conversations around climate change. Insurance has to be at the forefront."

As the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) noted in a 2024 report, climate events are happening all across America — and driving up insurance prices everywhere. “As insurers seek to limit their exposure to climate-induced weather events like hurricanes and wildfires,” they wrote, “insurance premium increases and policy non-renewals have become a summer norm in the United States (US), making housing more unaffordable in the process.”

This isn’t just about individual policies or homeowners, either. Climate-driven disasters and their impact on the insurance industry could trigger a broader financial crisis, one that begins — as the last one did — in the housing market. “As more American homeowners become unable to afford insurance,” the CIEL report notes, “they are more likely to default on their mortgages. Increased rates of home mortgage defaults were a key factor in the 2008 financial crisis, and large numbers of defaults could have ripple effects throughout the economy.”

At some point, whether conservative politicians and ideologues like it or not, the government and taxpayers will have to pay the price on carbon emissions. The real question is whether they do it up front to help mitigate the problem or through cleanup costs  — and how high those costs ends up being.