Deniers and Insurance Premiums Both Surge

Robert Hunziker

 January 24, 2025
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Climate change deniers are experiencing a renaissance, especially on social media.

In concert with this upswing in denialism, home insurance premiums are skyrocketing, or coverage is dropped altogether, a problem in coastal states.

Indeed, it’s noteworthy that American real estate is the largest asset class in the world valued at $43.5 trillion that’s challenged for the first time by a bonkers climate system that’s unwelcome and delivering its worst of worst, e.g., firestorms for the ages. The question of the year: Do home insurance companies suddenly have rubber legs. Yes, they likely do because of radically destructive climate change, too much CO2 belching from burnt fossil fuel ultimately causes these kinds of horrible events, LA Fires.

And the climate change issue is much more than simply an argument over whether CO2 is really caused by how society operates and blankets the Earth, heating things up, manmade, but it’s not, because as the deniers claim: “climate always changes.” That’s roughly the simplistic angle the deniers take, it’s not us humans! But climate change, the bad kind, is so obvious that failure to address it is only possible in a society so shallow with such a meaningless value system that it cannot see beyond its nose. And worshipping materialism doesn’t heal the shallowness of anti-cultural anti-humanistic behavior.

On a deeper level yet, the shadow of neoliberalism’s utter destruction of class structure, the whole enchilada of free market dictates of socio/economic materialism at its ugliest, leads to a shallow value system that can’t see beyond its next purchase. In sharp contrast Classical Greek civilization treasured advancements in philosophy, art, architecture, literature, debate, and theater, not the newest millionaire of the day. They’d laugh.

Cultural voids in society are filled by materialistic self-interests that typically have no vision, no long-term outlook beyond what can be consumed today. A threatening climate is too slow to come into vision for such makeup.

Climate change denial and homeownership insurance are interrelated as forces of the same threat that gets worse by the year, every year. It’s a monster in its own right. A new study has uncovered the sources that poison social media with falsehoods. (The study: Networks of Climate Obstruction: Discourses of Denial and Delay in US Fossil Energy, Plastic, and Agrichemical Industries, PLOS, January 15, 2025.)

This is happening within the context of a disruptive climate system that regularly appears on nightly news programs via images of flash floods overturning cars or all-powerful “atmospheric river” instantaneous flooding, as globally 2024 had the most floods in human history and the onset of ginormous wildfires destroying entire communities while wiping out forests, e.g., Canada’s 29 mega fires of 2023. None of these climate events are normal.

Society can handle “normal” but it risks going over cliff’s edge along with busting apart America’s all-important home insurance industry with today’s brand of climate change; it’s brutal! At the same time, denialism is more pronounced than ever before. In the face of a turbulent climate system that needs clearheaded mitigation policies, social media has become a climate denial echo chamber.

How/why this happens in the face of a global climate system that’s gone off the rails is now exposed. But, in truth, shouldn’t rational humans be finding ways to mitigate threats to life-supporting ecosystems? And shouldn’t the people behind low-life groveling in the dirt be publicly humiliated and whipped?

Meanwhile, according to an outstanding research effort by DeSmog, the international journalism organization that focuses on climate change, a major new study has identified the poisoning of social media. (New Study Shows How Fossil Fuel Sectors Created a Climate Denial Echo Chamber on Social Media, DeSmog, Jan. 15, 2025)

“Research finds signs of ‘coordinated climate obstruction efforts’ among oil, plastics, and agrichemical industries in social media messaging,” Ibid.

What could be worse, lowlier, than major corporate lobbyists/representatives, interconnected to fossil fuel use and loaded with stacks of money to spend controlling the narrative of whether climate change is the real thing or not! Wow! And they denigrate it! This gangster-type corporate ganging up altogether to deep-six the climate change narrative is about as low as it gets. What are they running away from? What is scaring them so much? Not that denialism is a new thing, certainly, it’s not, but now they’ve put it on a scorched-earth trajectory.

The dangers of climate change have never been more severe or more obvious, and in the face of this extraordinary danger, the mainstays of production and foodstuff have conspired to work against the best interests of society. What has the world come to?

With science under attack like never before, in fact, since the Middle Ages, according to NASA: “The vast majority of actively publishing climate scientists – 97 percent – agree that humans are causing global warming and climate change. Most of the leading science organizations around the world have issued public statements expressing this, including international and U.S. science academies, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and a whole host of reputable scientific bodies around the world. A list of these organizations is provided here.” (Do Scientists Agree on Climate Change? NASA Science)

The new study “found that all of the organizations, including the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), were mentioned by at least four of the other groups – helping to essentially create an echo chamber for similar messages. The groups also frequently tagged regulators and the media in their posts, with researchers finding the Environmental Protection Agency was tagged 795 times and the Wall Street Journal, the most mentioned media organization, tagged 517 times out of more than 125,000 X posts.”

“Our study suggests that climate obstruction in different industries is more coordinated than is generally recognized,’ said co-author Jennie Stephens, professor of Sustainability Science and Policy at Northeastern University and of Climate Justice at the National University of Ireland Maynooth,” Ibid.

“This paper is interesting because it shows that the fossil fuel industry, plastics industry, and agricultural chemicals industry all promote forms of climate denial on social media, and their messages are largely aligned with each other,’ said Ben Franta, associate professor of climate litigation at the University of Oxford. ‘Is that alignment intentional? Are these industries engaging in a joint enterprise to deceive consumers and the public about petrochemical products and climate change?” Ibid.

The study included 15 years of tweets starting in 2008 before the past year’s election and the return to the presidency of Donald Trump, a longtime climate denier. According to Jennie Stephens of the Study group: “Obviously, we know that climate denial is not over. It’s come back as a strong force.”

According to Bloomberg news, as of January 17^th, the Federal Reserve withdrew from the global climate coalition: “The Federal Reserve has withdrawn from the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System, a global coalition of central banks engaged in the study of climate risk that was launched in 2017.”

Meanwhile, corporations have been dropping like flies from climate mitigation agreements (truth be known, it was greenwashing from the start) over the past two years as Middle Eastern oil producers hijack UN COPs (Conference of the Parties) initially designed to reign-in greenhouse gases like CO2. Moreover, fossil fuel interests have boldly expressed their intention to crank up oil and gas production over the same timeframe that the Paris ’15 climate agreement of 195 nations agreed to cut CO2 by 43% by 2030, which target, according to the UN, is off the mark by a country mile. According to UN Climate Action: Based upon national action plans in effect, the decrease in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared to 2019 will be 2.6%.  The word “outrageous” seems appropriate.

Now that the Federal Reserve Board has officially jumped off the green crusade, global warming has been officially turned lose to “go for it, full blast ahead.”

Although, by the time ugly repercussions of policy makers going deeper rogue than ever before hits home with the public, it’ll be too late to point fingers or the failures to act. By then, home insurance premiums will be one of the largest yearly expenses for homeowners. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis: “Average homeowners insurance premiums have increased by 39 percent over the past seven years, and 15 percent in 2023 alone.”

It’s impossible to ignore the irony of the Fed dropping participation in the global climate coalition as a major branch of its 12-bank network reports on the drama of home ownership insurance premiums cranking up, exceeding the ongoing rate of inflation by a country mile because of the ravages of climate change.

It’s only too obvious that the prevailing issue going forward will be the point in time when climate change becomes too expensive for individual homeowners and not nearly rich enough for homeownership insurers. It’s almost there now and already there for many.

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

Welcome to the Pyrocene: an Era of Uncontrolled Burning

Stephen Pyne

 January 24, 2025
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Los Angeles is burning, but it isn’t alone. In recent years, fires have blasted through cities in Colorado, the southern Appalachians and the island of Maui, along with Canada, Australia, Portugal and Greece. What wasn’t burned was smoked in.

Is this another case of a future not only dire but strange, without a narrative to join past to present or an analog for what is to come?

I’m a historian of fire, and my reply is that we have both a narrative and an analog. The narrative is the unbroken saga of humanity and fire, a companionship that extends through all our existence as a species. The analog is that humanity’s fire practices have become so vast, especially in recent centuries, that we are creating the fire equivalent of an ice age.

Fire as organizing principle

Humanity and fire have been reforging the Earth since the end of the last glaciation, about 11,500 years ago. Generally, these changes have made landscapes more fire-receptive.

The scale is significant. Recent studies speculate that massive depopulation, especially in the Americas, which removed the torch and allowed forests to reclaim land and so sequester atmospheric carbon, may have even helped nudge the planet into the Little Ice Age from the mid-16th to mid-19th centuries.

Still, there were limits. Fire and life had coevolved across 420 million years, and ecological checks and balances limited how far humans could push and pull fire within the constraints of terrestrial landscapes.

The process unquestionably quickened and changed character with the wholesale burning of fossil fuels, or what we might term lithic landscapes. This combustion lies outside the old boundaries: It can burn anytime, anywhere, and its effluent isn’t easily absorbed into the old ecology. By warming the atmosphere, it is a leading cause of climate change, which in turn is generally enhancing conditions for wildfires.

Equally important, the transition to a fossil-fuel civilization has affected how people live on the land, how they design cities and peri-urban communities, how they shape living landscapes with agriculture and nature preserves, how they generate and transmit energy, and what kind of fire practices they adopt.

Firefighters monitor a prescribed fire in Florida’s Everglades National Park in 2018. Prescribed burns are carefully planned to reduce overgrowth and brush and promote growth of plants that depend on fire to thrive. Federal agencies revised policies to encourage controlled burns during the late 1960s and 1970s, but studies show that the practice is still underutilized relative to need.
National Park Service

Petrochemicals from fossil biomass replace, or try to substitute for, fire’s ecological effects. Energy from fossil fuels displaces the heat, light and power of flame. Instead of challenging wildfire with tamed fire, modern societies fight landscape fire with the counterforce of industrial fire in the form of pumps, engines, bulldozers and aircraft.

This “pyric transition” in types of combustion forces the two different kinds of burning – fires in living landscapes and fires that burn lithic landscapes – to interact in ways that sometimes compete and sometimes collude. Like the power lines that have sparked so many disastrous wildfires, the two realms of fire are crossing, often with lethal consequences.

The prospect for worsening fires because of changing land use and fire practices was apparent before climate change became a serious consideration in the 1990s. U.S. land agencies recognized the ill consequences of removing fire and reformed policies to reinstate good fire over 50 years ago. Unfortunately, bad fire continues to outpace good fire.

As the world burns

No single factor drives fire: It synthesizes its surroundings. It’s like a driverless car that barrels down the road, integrating whatever is around it.

Sometimes it confronts a sharp curve called climate change. Sometimes it’s a tricky intersection where townscape and countryside meet. Sometimes it’s road hazards left from past accidents, such as logging slash, invasive grasses or postburn environments.

Climate change acts as a performance enhancer, and understandably, it claims most of the attention because it’s global and its reach extends beyond flames. But the argument over whether climate or land use is more critical is misguided: They both derive, independently, from the conversion to a fossil-fuel society. Megafires, it seems, feed on modernity as hurricanes feed on warm oceans.

A plume of black carbon particles, commonly called soot, spans eastward from wildfires in Canada and across more than 2,000 miles of the Atlantic Ocean on June 26, 2023. Red and yellow areas denote the densest concentrations of particles.
NASA Earth Observatory

In the U.S., the pyric transition sparked a wave of monster fires that rode the rails of settlement – fires an order of magnitude larger and more lethal than those of recent decades. Land clearing and logging slash fed serial conflagrations, which blew up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – the waning decades of the Little Ice Age.

This havoc inspired the federal government to intervene to end the environmental wreckage, spare watersheds and shield communities, all under the aegis of conservation, which became a global project. Fire control was regarded as foundational; suppressing fires became an index of success. Led by foresters, the belief spread that fire on landscapes could be replaced, as was happening in cities, or caged, as it was in furnaces and dynamos.

With natural fire and traditional burning removed from the landscape, the population of fires fell to the point where flames could no longer do the ecological work required. Instead of reducing risk, landscapes became prone to more explosive burning as fuels accumulated on them over decades.

Now, too much fossil biomass is burned to be absorbed within ancient ecological bounds. Fuels in the living landscape pile up and rearrange themselves. The climate is unhinged. When flame returns, as it must, it too often comes as wildfire.

Welcome to the Pyrocene

Widen the aperture a bit, and we can envision Earth entering a fire age comparable to the ice ages of the Pleistocene, complete with the pyric equivalent of ice sheets, pluvial lakes, periglacial outwash plains, mass extinctions and sea-level changes. It’s an epoch in which fire is both prime mover and principal expression.

Humanity’s firepower underpins the Anthropocene, which is the outcome not just of anthropogenic meddling but of a particular kind of meddling, made possible by humans’ species monopoly over fire. Even climate history has become a subset of fire history.

Fires in living landscapes, fires burning lithic landscapes – the interaction of these two realms of fire has not been much studied. It’s been enough of a stretch to fully include human fire practices within traditional ecology. Yet humans – the keystone species for fire on Earth – are merging the two arenas of earthly burning with a give and take that is reshaping the planet in what resembles a slow-motion Ragnarok.

Add up all the effects, direct and indirect: the ice driven off by fire, the areas burning, the biogeographical migrations as biotas move to accommodate changed conditions, the collateral impacts with damaged watersheds and airsheds, the unraveling of ecosystems, the pervasive power of climate change, rising sea levels, a mass extinction, the disruption of human life and habitats. The result is a pyrogeography that looks eerily like an ice age for fire. You have a maturing Pyrocene.

If you doubt it, just ask California.

This article uses material from an article originally published on Nov. 1, 2019.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.