Mother Nature’s Budget-Busting Vendetta

 March 2023 flooding in Pajaro, CA

October 2023 Highland Fire in Aguanga, CA

Mother Nature’s Budget-Busting Vendetta

You Ain’t Seen Nuffin’ Yet

For most consumers, it’s usually somewhere between quality of life and insurance costs, but for an increasing number of Americans, it is beginning to boil down to survival, keeping your home and job/business/farm. For larger entities, including corporations with multistate operations, it’s about budgeting and planning. Insurance companies are constantly reevaluating their risk profiles, and increasingly, their business in many states either makes no sense or requires premium increases that make their customers blanche, hovering on the brink of unaffordability.

Which brings it down to the insurer of last resort, the fixer of infrastructure, the employer of those uniformed services that are referred to generally as “first responders,” the provider of emergency housing and medical care, and the maintainer of the vehicles and instrumentalities of massive disaster reaction and repair: government. Charities, like the Red Cross, can temper some of these needs, but it is government that shoulders the biggest load. Which does mean taxpayers.

All this is well and good, but it gets so much worse when a major political party generally denies the impact of climate change and is heavily focused on cutting government services to keep taxes low for the richest in the land. Add to this congressional gridlock and the quagmire generated by the lobbying and campaign contribution efforts against necessary regulation to contain the beast. The “beast,” if you haven’t figured it out yet, is accelerating climate change… and the litany of disasters that have already occurred and are going to in frequency and intensity in our immediate future is beyond clear.

Because of its size and the array of different climatic zones, California is one of most severely impacted states when it comes to climate related disasters and the massive resulting costs. Yet while California fully accepts the continued consequences of not containing greenhouse gas emissions, the undisputed (at least by virtually all qualified scientists) cause of climate change, it remains, like most states, woefully unprepared for the expected disasters and related costs. Oh, and California also enjoys the trials and tribulations of sitting on the earthquake home of homes: the ring of fire. We’ve had climate related: atmospheric torrential rain, floods, mudslides, desertification of some this nation’s once-most productive farmland, severe water shortages (and we still have floods?!) and wildfires after wildfires taking out buildings by the hundreds.

So, California is a great place to start when it comes to state budgets and their planning for the inevitable climate change-related disasters. We’re facing a projected $38 B+ budget shortfall generated by changes related to reduced income tax revenues (expected investment returns to the mega-wealthy fell short), a major homeless crisis (California’s warmer cities attract unsheltered people, supplemented with busloads of undocumented immigrants from Texas), a slowdown in real estate sales and revaluations, and the exodus of several big corporate taxpayers to states with lower taxes. It with perspective that Anita Chabria, writing for the January 12th Los Angeles Times, addresses the proposed state budget presented by Governor Gavin Newsom:

“[U]nlike most years when state officials have a grasp by April, when taxes are usually filed, of how much money California can responsibly spend, last year was different… Mother Nature slammed the state in winter and spring with record snow and storms that flooded entire towns such as Planada and Pajaro. Capitola was hit with a bomb cyclone that all but destroyed the pier. Tulare Lake reappeared in the Central Valley, submerging homes and crops and revealing the fragility of an expensive levee. The damage of that extreme weather cost $4.6 billion and took 22 lives, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information.

“Our weather was so volatile and devastating that even the IRS had mercy, delaying the deadline for the majority of the state’s residents to file taxes first to October and then to November… Which meant that no one really knew (though certainly there were indicators) how much we were spending that we didn’t really have until a couple of months ago, when those taxes were finally tallied and came up short… ‘This has been a hard year,’ Newsom told the reporters gathered to hear his plan, and no one is arguing that.

“But it also may not be an unusual year, as we move forward into the economic realities of climate change. Sure, the stock market is projected to rise, inflation is down and employment figures are up. By all measurable standards, the economies of California and the United States are primed for a good year, regardless of public sentiment that, faced with higher bills and a nagging sense of uncertainty, isn’t quite ready to embrace a positive outlook.

“But the severity of our weather is not likely to abate, and dealing with the unrelenting price tag of storms, floods, fires, rising sea levels, extreme heat, mudslides and more is going to change what we can and can’t afford in California. Consumers see this already with home and car insurance — rates are rising based on projections of more climate disasters to come.

“At the same time, costs of rebuilding or maintaining homes in high-risk zones are increasing as well, be it in places where the sea is encroaching on mansions or where flames threaten double-wides in fire-prone forests. Even keeping those homes hot or cool is getting tougher to pay for… That means it’s harder to stay housed at any income level. More than 3 million Americans, mostly in storm-heavy states such as Texas and Florida, have already moved because of weather, a trend of climate migration expected to increase as the cost of living in dangerous and devastated places becomes untenable.

“The federal government recently released its National Climate Assessment, which detailed the many ways that climate and economy are linked, and the many ways the situation will likely get worse… In the 1980s, the report said, ‘the country experienced, on average, one (inflation-adjusted) billion-dollar disaster every four months. Now, there is one every three weeks, on average.’.. Every three weeks, a billion-dollar disaster. In the last few years, that added up to 89 billion-dollar events. And that billion-dollar amount doesn’t include the emotional and economic tolls of deaths and injuries, the families traumatized, generational wealth literally up in smoke, poor communities — often people of color — left without drinking water or roads.

“The costs of climate change aren’t just the obvious ones, though. Newsom’s budget has cuts — though the next few months will be all about the governor and the Legislature hashing out exactly what those will be. Newsom is suggesting reducing spending by $8.5 billion, the largest chunk of which would come out of climate programs. But also losing money would be housing programs, the Middle Class Scholarship fund and other reductions likely to be unpopular…

“While our reserve fund is robust, states including Wyoming, which also has a volatile revenue model, have funds that are much stronger than ours. Wyoming could run for nearly a year off the money it has saved. Obviously, California is bigger, but we have saved only enough to last less than three months…. Projecting future revenue, for people and for states, is always a bit of a crystal-ball endeavor. But climate change is going to cost us dearly, one way or another.” Yet as much as Texans and Floridians like to make fun of California, at least we don’t pretend climate change is just a passing cycle.

I’m Peter Dekom, and take a good long, hard look at where kicking the climate change containment can down the road has brought us… and as I said above, you ain’t seen nuffin’ yet.