Surprised and delighted as I am that the marmot seems to have a worldwide audience, I shall nevertheless continue to write about Florida, the state of absurdity.
View it as a cautionary tale.
Yesterday, this popped up in my feeds, about how disaster recovery gets expensive. Then, this morning, I heard this story on NPR's Morning Edition.
From the Business Journal:
As the Atlantic Ocean shows signs of heating up, potentially fueling damaging hurricanes, a former state and national disaster chief warned Tuesday of working-class Floridians being priced out of communities in post-storm rebuilding.
From the Morning Edition piece:
Nearly two years later, James and her husband are still trying to recover from the financial gut-punch of the storm. Today, they live outside Tampa in an RV with their two dogs, two cats and an elderly bearded dragon lizard named Gary. It’s only in the last few months that they’ve stopped living paycheck to paycheck. James describes her current credit score as “too low to finance a pizza.”
It's the chronological proximity that made me consider posting about it. It's hurricane season, and there is "a disturbance" that's likely to affect the Gulf of Mexico early next week (I haven't checked the latest forecast), so it's unsurprising.
What made the Business Journal piece noteworthy to me is Fugate's comments about Florida:
“They're actually one of the more progressive states in dealing with the impacts of climate change,” Fugate said. “If you look at the insurance ratings for building codes, Florida's No. 1 or No. 2 every time. So, there's this tendency, I think, to get caught up between what are called rhetoric and actions. And the rhetoric sometimes doesn't always match what you're doing.”
Bullshit.
If that's true, then I pity the rest of the states, although few of them are as exposed as Florida is.
The building code work was largely the result of Andrew back in 1992, before Florida became a one-party Republican state. Since then, there have been occasional improvements, but Florida's insurance crisis is largely the result of unchecked, unregulated growth in vulnerable areas.
Because we don't love anything as much as we love growth.
Florida actually did have a fairly enlightened growth management regime, until successive Republican legislatures began systematically dismantling it to facilitate more rapid growth.
I like Craig Fugate, I think he's a pretty savvy guy with regard to emergency management and disaster recovery, but he's a "go along to get along" guy who tries to steer clear of politics. Florida is on the precipice of a catastrophic insurance industry collapse because of, sorry about this, politics.
We are white-knuckling it through each and every hurricane season. If we have another one like 2004, with a couple of the current climate's "rapid intensification" storms, we're in for a world of hurt.
This state has done nothing to address the cause of climate change. It has ignored sea level rise for decades, and it refuses to plan for a future that is growing more clear and more dire year by year. It is by no measure whatsoever "one of the more progressive states" in dealing with anything, let alone climate change.
Anyway, be grateful if you don't live in Florida, no state income tax notwithstanding.
And I'm going to repeat this line, because I think it's a good one...
If you're dreaming of moving to Florida, wake up!
It's a nightmare.
Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:26 Thursday, 1 August 2024