Thread by @graceblakeley

This article is incredible - one thing that stuck out to me:

State-funded vehicles offering home insurance policies in areas where private insurers aren't providing coverage due to climate risks seem to me like today's Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac nytimes.com/interactive/20…

"Hurricane Andrew reduced parts of cities to landfill and cost insurers nearly $16 billion in payouts. Many insurance companies, recognizing the likelihood that it would happen again, declined to renew policies and left the state...

... So the Florida Legislature created a state-run company to insure properties itself, preventing both an exodus and an economic collapse by essentially pretending that the climate vulnerabilities didn’t exist."

"Under the radar, a new class of dangerous debt — climate-distressed mortgage loans — might already be threatening the financial system. Lending data analyzed by Keenan and his co-author, Jacob Bradt, for a study published in the journal Climatic Change in June...

... shows that small banks are liberally making loans on environmentally threatened homes, but then quickly passing them along to federal mortgage backers."

"Americans had dealt with climate disaster before. The places [Dust Bowl] migrants left behind never fully recovered. Eighty years later, Dust Bowl towns still have slower economic growth and lower per capita income than the rest of the country...

Dust Bowl survivors and their children are less likely to go to college and more likely to live in poverty. Climatic change made them poor, and it has kept them poor ever since."

"Once you accept that climate change is fast making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this: With time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and hot. Something like a tenth of the people who live in the South...

... and the Southwest — from South Carolina to Alabama to Texas to Southern California — decide to move north in search of a better economy and a more temperate environment. Those who stay behind are disproportionately poor and elderly."

@anne_deveze @JeremyLabrado