Floods, Wildfires & Hurricanes: US Home Insurance Teeters on Financial Crisis | Amanpour and Company

As a retired carpenter, one of the problems is how we build our homes. Our homes are not designed to be resilient, and they're not designed to withstand all that nature has to give. They are designed to sell products. They are designed around the industry, not around the home owner. We could build much better homes if we wanted to. They wouldn't have to cost much more, they would just have to be designed properly, using proper materials. This whole square box, stick frame, wood covered, tar based roof building concept is stupid. It's mostly 18th century design.

Yet Florida keeps building in coastal areas making the problem much bigger in the future.

I’m not saying that this is the ultimate answer, but if the federal government is going to ensure the public against all of these climate change disasters, it’s going to need tax dollars in order to be able to pay out, and wouldn’t paying out be just that much more easily done if huge corporations and the super rich actually paid their fair share of the tax burden so that there was money in the pot to pay out. It’s always assumed that when it comes to the federal government. The burden is gonna fall on the little guy, you know the hard-working underappreciated men and women who get up every day and go to work to pay the bills and put food on the table. It never seems to be part of the equation that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Amazon, Tesla, Walmart, etc. should actually be paying their fair share of the taxes that are required to keep the country up and running so that people can actually get to work do their jobs make the products provide the services that generate the money that they need to put food on their table and keep the rich rich. I think Joe Biden knows exactly what he’s doing and why he’s doing it when he says that he wants to reinstitute a minimum 15% tax on the wealthy corporations and individuals in America. And I think that’s fair.

Well, of course. Insurance companies are structured to protect themselves against losses, not to protect everyone else. This can't possibly be a surprise to anyone.

If I had a house in Florida, I’d be selling it ASAP. It will soon be worthless.

It's far easier, cheaper, more beneficial to avoid the disasters in the first place. Dramatically reduce ALL pollution, drastically reverse ecocide and restore/protect/expand native ecosystems and species. Aim for 70% of nature's restoration/protection. Putting the biosphere/nature first is the way to foreswear all these disasters. It will create countless jobs, and benefit not only today's world, but deep into the future. #naturefirstparadigm

What is the point of having insurance if the government bails out people who don’t have insurance and makes the taxpayer pay for it. Look at Maui.

There is no mention in this video of the obvious solution (in the wealthier countries anyway and for now). If your house flooded or burned down, take that as an opportunity to move somewhere where that is not likely to happen again. By making it possible to live in places nature has reclaimed, we create an expensive situation. If rich people want to use their own money to live in a place where they will have to rebuild their home twice in a decade, fine. I am sure they have the servants to help with the cleanup, designers to shop for new furnishings, personal stylists for a new wardrobe, and of course have no shortage of cash to rebuild a bigger and better home. That's their perogative. For the rest of us, that's not a workable lifestyle.

Our government used to assist us in a big way during a natural disaster... until Katrina. A proper government would shrink its military, stop the wars and attend to its people's needs.

This is a huge issue.

I’ve never been able to get a mortgage without homeowner’s insurance.

A great book about the disaster that lies ahead because of climate change is called "the great displacement". Basically there's going to be a huge internal migration in the U.S. because homes are simply going to be uninsurable if they are below the mason dixon line or on either coast.

I live in a heavily forested area of Northern California, over the last few years I've been surrounded by fires. My planned house is concrete and buried under 2-3 feet of soil.

Thank you for this discussion and for all of your standard setting journalism.

Top notch interview and reporting! Kudos to you both!

The problem was ignored for decades. Peeps thought climate change wasn’t gonna impact ‘em. So, if you’ve been an adult for a long time, enjoy.

You want sweet desirable ocean front property than YOU PAY THE RIDICULOUS PREMIUMS!!! Same thing with building in the LA hills or in forests … why should the government funded by the public subsidize ocean front private residents ??? It’s a scam …

Yeah, so the artificial elevation of home costs, that corporations are responsible for, is part of this problem. It isn't just government. It is corporate interests. And those corporations should be forced to pay.

excellent and frightening.

Now the US economic system can seen the downfall of neglecting their climate change policies, please get the private sector behind this and it wil be surmountable. If only all these refugees world wide had a safe environment to return to they would happily work to reverse this impending catastrophe. The longer we prolong dealing with this as a global effort the most costly and harder it will be to reverse. If they could trap water and move to semi-industrial farming instead of subsistence farming they could grow forests for the developed world (thus trapping carbon permanently) all at a fraction of the cost that we can do it in the first world. These storms are only going to get worse, and if the reefs go then the protection they offer will multiply the impact. Please wealthy, privare companies get behind this before it is too expensive and hard to manage.