Climate-driven premium inflation is not likely to get better anytime soon. Of course, it’s self-inflicted, not only through our emission of carbon into the atmosphere but also, in the United States, through a ridiculous governance scheme that assigns insurance regulation to individual states. Especially in a hurricane corridor like Florida’s or a wildfire-friendly landscape like much of California, leaving insurance to the states forces some of them to absorb an unreasonably large share of climate risk and its attendant costs. Unfortunately, a June report on the problem by Biden’s Treasury Department fell well short of urging that automobile and property insurance be regulated entirely by the federal government.
Even here, though, Biden outperforms Trump by a mile, merely by acknowledging that climate change is an urgent problem. “I listen to people talk about global warming, that the ocean will rise, in the next 300 years, by one-eighth of an inch–and they talk about, ‘This is our problem,’” Trump told Fox News in April. “The environmentalists talk about all this nonsense.” Even by Trump’s debauched standards, though, double-digit increases in property insurance premiums can’t be shrugged off as nonsense. Perhaps he’ll find something besides climate change (Critical Race Theory?) on which to blame them, and perhaps his Republican supporters will, yet again, dream up some fanciful reason to believe him. Or perhaps they don’t need a reason. If the Journal poll tells us anything, it’s that human reason isn’t playing much of a role yet in voters’ opinions about 2024.