Climate Change

Ezra Croft has never filed an insurance claim, and his house in Raleigh, North Carolina isn’t close to a stormy coastline or a fire-prone forest.

So Croft was surprised when his annual homeowner’s insurance premium shot up to $1,600, or $700 dollars more than he was paying just a couple of years ago.

“I’m a middle income guy,” Croft says. “Don’t make a ton of extra money. At this point I’m teetering on the point of inaffordability.”

Similar complaints can be heard all over the country. On average, insurance companies sought to raise homeowners’ premiums by more than 11% last year, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Auto insurance premiums are climbing even faster, far outpacing overall inflation.

Take Paul Morro. His auto insurance bill just jumped by $600 a year.

“Here’s the kicker,” Morro says. “My wife and I both work from home. So we have no commute to speak of.”

He’s bracing himself for the bill to insure his house, in Herndon, Va.

“It just feels like everything is rising at a scary rate,” Morro says.

Why insurance costs are surging

Insurance companies insist they’re just playing catch-up, after two years of big losses. For every dollar in home and auto premiums they collected last year, insurance companies paid an average of $1.10 in claims and expenses, according to the Insurance Information Institute.

“Nobody wants to have that higher-price bill,” says Sean Kevelighan, the institute’s CEO. But he added companies “need to price insurance according to the risk level that’s out there.”

Inflation is partly to blame for those big payouts. The cost of fixing or replacing damaged homes and cars has jumped sharply in recent years as a result of rising labor and material prices.

Even as those prices start to level off, though, insurers are having to contend with a mounting toll of natural disasters, and not just in the usual places like Florida and California.

Last year, there were around two dozen severe storms in the U.S. with billion-dollar price tags, spreading lightning, hail and damaging winds through many parts of the country.

“While a lot of these storms don’t make national headlines, they do tend to be very costly at the local level,” says Tim Zawacki, principal research analyst for insurance at S&P Global Market Intelligence. “And the breadth of where these storms are occurring is something that I think the industry is quite concerned about.”

As a result, insurance premiums are likely to keep climbing this year even as overall inflation cools.

Insurers have a lot of pricing power

While state regulators have some power to limit those price hikes, insurance companies tend to get their way. Regulators know that if they move too aggressively to limit premiums, insurance companies might stop offering coverage altogether.

“The insurance companies have become really aggressive in their bullying,” says Doug Heller, director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America. “You’ve heard a lot about companies that are threatening to pull out of the market if they don’t get what they want. Generally speaking that bullying has worked.”

Last week, the Treasury Department hosted a roundtable with consumer and environmental groups to discuss the ways climate change is rattling insurance markets. The department also plans to host a meeting on the topic with insurance industry stakeholders.

Customers can sometimes save money by shopping around. Alicia Pitorri switched insurance carriers after the cost of her family’s auto policy jumped more than a thousand dollars.

“It was Liberty Mutual,” she says with a rueful laugh. “We’ve since switched to State Farm since the renewal went up so much.”

Pitorri, who lives in Nashville, says while she managed to shave a few hundred dollars off the bill, she’s still paying a lot more than she did two years ago.

“What can you do?” she asks. “You need insurance. You can’t have a vehicle or a house without them. So you have to pay for it. And you figure out where you can cut other things to make sure you can drive around.”

Going without insurance

Auto insurance is required in nearly all states. And lenders typically require homeowners who have a mortgage to carry insurance as well. Still, as premiums keep climbing, more people are scaling back their coverage or even going without.

Ezra Croft considered dropping his homeowners’ coverage, but ultimately decided to pay the higher premium.

“I’m fairly good at home repairs, but if something like a tree fell on my house or a tornado or a fire, I don’t know what I would do,” Croft says.

A survey by the Insurance Information Institute last year found 12% of homeowners had no insurance, up from 5% four years earlier. Going without coverage is risky, though, for both individuals and communities.

“Insurance is an important product, not only for economic stability but for community resilience,” says Heller. “We are very concerned that these escalating premiums are going to lead to escalating rates of uninsured drivers and homeowners, which makes us all quite vulnerable.”

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

A federal appeals court has lifted a moratorium on new coal leasing on federal land that dates back to the Obama administration.

A three judge panel in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Wednesday tossed the moratorium saying it was now moot. It’s the latest decision in a series of legal back-and-forths that date back to 2016 when then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell moved to halt all new coal leasing on federal land as part of a strategy to address climate change.

President Trump’s Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke ended the Obama moratorium, a move that was challenged by environmental groups and tribes. A court then reinstated the ban on new leases in 2022.

Wednesday’s latest ruling tossing that out appears to be largely on a technicality. The judges noted that the original challenge was to a Trump-era policy that is no longer in place as President Biden’s Interior Secretary Deb Haaland had revoked it already.

Rich Nolan, president and CEO of the National Mining Association called the ruling a victory. “Important projects can once again advance and support the production of affordable, reliable power to the grid, while creating jobs and economic development,” Nolan said in a written statement.

Even as demand for coal has slumped nationwide, mining companies have pushed federal land managers to open up more land for exploration particularly in the western United States, citing its location as a possible continued export market to countries such as China.

It’s not yet clear how President Biden will respond to Wednesday’s ruling or how soon new leasing could resume on federal public land.

Environmentalists and tribes are pressing the Biden administration to intervene again and launch a new federal review of the coal leasing program.

In a statement, William Walksalong of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe in the coal-rich Powder River Basin in Montana said the administration needs to “step up” and live up to its promises to protect the climate.

“We will fight tirelessly to protect our reservation and its air and waters and the Cheyenne way of life,” Walksalong said.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Right about now, millions of walleye pollock are gathering in the Shelikof Strait, near Kodiak Island. They mass there every year towards the end of winter to prepare for spawning. 

And soon, scientists will follow them to do their annual winter trawl survey. 

“It’s timed to be there and survey the pollock just prior to the peak of spawning,” said fisheries biologist Lauren Rogers, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “So that timing of when pollock are going to be migrating to the spawning grounds or away from the spawning grounds is then going to be particularly important for that survey.”

But the timing of pollock spawning is becoming more unreliable, as human-caused climate change warms the ocean. That means the scientific surveys that are used for fisheries management could become unreliable too.

Between 2017 and 2019, surveys done by the Alaska Fisheries Science Center across the Gulf of Alaska produced wildly different estimates of pollock biomass. Summer surveys across the feeding grounds showed near-record lows, while the winter survey in Shelikof Strait showed record highs.

To understand the mismatch, Rogers and her collaborators worked backwards using surveys of larval pollock. 

“We have the offspring’s information and then we can go back to what the parents must have been doing in order to put them in the world when they were put in the world,” Rogers said. 

Rogers’ previous research on pollock showed that spawning can occur earlier when ocean temperatures are warmer. And according to a new paper, published this month, earlier spawning times account for much of the discrepancy in the Shelikof Strait survey. 

In 2017 and in 2019, peak pollock spawning happened more than 2 weeks earlier than the long-term average. That was likely shaped, in part, by marine heat waves that hit the Gulf around that time. The new paper offers a tool that can be used to account for changes in spawning timing when building stock assessments. 

But Rogers says spawning time isn’t the only thing fisheries surveys need to pay attention to — warming oceans may be changing fish in all kinds of ways. Recent studies in the Bering Sea, for instance, showed that as sea ice melts, populations of pollack are moving further north, out of the typical survey areas.

But Rogers says fisheries managers can try to adjust for these changes. 

“If we have an understanding of the links between changes in the climate and changes in spawn timing, or migration timing, or distribution shifts or growth rates, then we can start to use that information when we’re interpreting our biomass estimates or when we’re doing our stock assessments,” Rogers said. 

It’s not just a simple matter of doing the Shelikof survey earlier or moving the Bering Sea surveys north. Rogers said there are logistical challenges that come with doing that, and climate-driven changes will be unpredictable from year to year. 

“We need to be monitoring to track changes as they’re happening,” Rogers said. “Planning for a continual shift is not going to allow us to respond as proactively as we need to.”

So to keep up, she says fisheries managers need to consider the latest climate science. It’s the only way to follow the fish in a rapidly changing ocean.

Members of the Alaska Senate Resources Committee revisited one of Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s priority bills last month, to get the state into a fledgling industry: carbon storage. The bill is part of a carbon management plan the governor unveiled last year that he said could earn the state hundreds of millions of dollars.

Department of Natural Resources Commissioner John Boyle called in to the committee meeting to echo the governor’s support for a potential new revenue source.

“I really see this as providing the greatest opportunity for the state of monetization,” he said.

Burning fossil fuels produces a lot of carbon dioxide. It’s one of the major drivers of climate change. In recent years industries have sprung up around trying to keep CO2 out of the atmosphere.

And that’s where carbon storage comes in. It’s a method of pumping CO2 into rock formations deep underground, and locking it in the ground so it doesn’t end up in the atmosphere.

Haley Paine, deputy director of the Alaska Division of Oil and Gas, said pumping gas underground isn’t a new idea. It’s a routine step in oil drilling that’s been practiced in Alaska for decades.

“I think the market around it is new, but I think the engineering, the geology and the technology is really kind of firmly established.”

Who would foot the bill for this technology? Oil companies themselves might pay to pump carbon back into the ground, facing pressure to reduce their carbon emissions. Some companies have made promises to operate at net zero, which usually means paying to store as much carbon as they emit. Expanded federal carbon storage tax credits are also driving industry interest.

Paine said Alaska isn’t the first to consider this new venture. States like North Dakota, Wyoming and Louisiana are also exploring options to lease underground space on state land for carbon storage.

“We’ve started to study a lot more what our own pore space would take to license and lease and then look at a lot of other states and work closely with them to understand the regulatory programs that they set up,” she said.

Pore space is the underground space between solid rock and soil that can potentially hold gas.

The Northern Journal reported in December a group of lawmakers and administration officials had recently visited North Dakota to learn about what’s involved in the industry, also known as carbon capture, utilization and storage, or CCUS.

According to DNR, there is significant underground carbon storage potential in Cook Inlet and on the North Slope. The department estimates leases could bring in more than a billion dollars over 40 years.

But there are some big questions with carbon storage, like where does the carbon come from? And how do you get it to the storage site?

Right now, the state’s ideas are far from materializing.

Paine said one idea is to capture CO2 from the exhaust from industrial power generators around the state, like the natural gas-fired generators that power drilling operations on the North Slope.

But this kind of carbon capture technology is still a ways away, said Mark Foster, an energy consultant and former state utilities regulator.

“It is not being done regularly, anywhere,” Foster said.

He said there are pilot projects underway, but it’s generally considered too expensive to be worth it.

Foster said most of the state’s ideas — carbon capture, even a suggestion to ship CO2 up to Alaska to be stored — are prohibitively expensive right now.

He said carbon storage could make sense if Alaska successfully pulled off its decades-long dream of selling North Slope natural gas. That’s because there’s a lot of CO2 mixed in with the natural gas underground and suppliers would likely need a place to store it.

“I think the big opportunity to the extent there is a large opportunity is really associated with the North Slope natural gas commercialization,” Foster said. “That’s the elephant.”

Plans to export North Slope natural gas also come with hefty price tags, and it’s unclear whether that will ever happen.

“It sounds wholly uneconomic and extremely unlikely,” said Larry Persily, longtime journalist and former head of a federal office focused on advancing Alaska natural gas transportation projects. He said a carbon storage industry naturally hinges on having carbon to store, and right now, it’s not clear where that would come from.

“If you don’t have the CO2 to put underground, well, who wants to lease your land to put something underground that doesn’t exist?” Persily said.

Paine said despite the hurdles, the state is hopeful Alaska will become a carbon storage hub, even if it takes some time for that to happen.

“We’re taking into account where these future markets are going, and we want to participate in them,” she said. “There’s not really a harm in setting the stage. And we have the expertise to manage it, if or when it does begin to really take off.”

She said the state hopes setting up the framework for a carbon storage industry may also encourage new industries that are focused on low-carbon production, such as blue ammonia, a low-emissions version of ammonia that is used in fertilizer. In recent years, talks about reopening the major Nikiski fertilizer plant that shuttered in 2007 have mostly gone nowhere, due to the high cost of natural gas.

“We’re not just thinking about the projects that we have right now, we’re also looking into the future. And, what sort of industrial markets can we develop here?”  Paine said.

Carbon storage bills in the House and Senate are awaiting hearings in committees before the chambers can vote.

Hurricanes are rated on a scale from one to five, depending on their wind speeds. The higher the speed, the higher the category. But as climate change makes powerful storms more common, it may be necessary to add a sixth category, according to a new paper published by leading hurricane researchers.

The current five point scale, called the Saffir-Simpson scale, was introduced in the 1970s and is used by forecasters around the world including at the National Hurricane Center in Florida. Under the scale, storms with maximum wind speeds of 157 miles per hour or higher are designated as Category 5 hurricanes.

Category 5 storms used to be relatively rare. But climate change is making them more common, research shows. And some recent Category 5 storms have had such high wind speeds that it would make more sense to assign them to a Category 6, if such a category existed, the authors argue.

The authors of the new paper, James Kossin of the First Street Foundation and Michael Wehner of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, have been studying the effects of climate change on hurricanes for decades. They propose that Category 5 should include hurricanes with maximum sustained winds of 157 to 192 miles per hour, and that a new Category 6 should include any storm with wind speeds above 192 miles per hour.

Under the new scale, Category 6 hurricanes would be exceedingly rare right now. For example, it might apply to 2013’s Typhoon Haiyan devastated the Philippines with wind speeds around 195 miles per hour. In fact, scientists in Taiwan argued at the time that Haiyan necessitated a new category designation.

Four other storms since 2013 would qualify for Category 6 status, including 2015’s Hurricane Patricia, which hit Mexico, and three typhoons that formed near the Philippines in 2016, 2020 and 2021.

But other powerful storms wouldn’t make the cut. For example, Hurricane Irma had sustained winds around 185 miles per hour when it hit the U.S. Virgin Islands in 2018 as a Category 5 storm. The wind damage from Irma led some residents to suggest that the storm should have been given a Category 6 designation by forecasters, because they felt that they hadn’t been adequately warned about the extraordinarily dangerous wind. But under the new proposed scale Irma would remain a Category 5 storm.

Similarly, Hurricane Dorian had wind speeds of about 185 miles per hour when it made landfall in the Bahamas in 2019. It was, and would remain, a Category 5 storm.

And the new scale would do little to convey the particular danger from storms such as Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Florence or Hurricane Ida, which fit cleanly into the current wind speed scale, but caused deadly flooding from extreme rain. Climate change is to blame – studies have found that hurricanes and other storms are dropping more rain because a warmer atmosphere can hold more water.

The National Hurricane Center, which handles official category designations for hurricanes that threaten the United States and its territories, has not weighed in on the question of adding a Category 6. The center has done other things to update hurricane forecasts in response to climate change, however, including new storm surge forecasting tools, and upgrades that allow forecasters to predict the intensity and location of storms earlier, so people have more time to prepare and evacuate.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

The second atmospheric river to hit the West Coast in as many weeks has stalled over Southern California, dumping more than 9 inches of rain over 24 hours in some areas near Los Angeles. Streets are flooded in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles; creeks are raging like rivers; and rainfall records in Los Angeles County are nearing all-time records.

At least three people were reported to have died due to storm-related injuries, including two people killed by fallen trees. As of Tuesday morning, the severe weather had knocked out power for more than 150,000 Californians.

The National Weather Service said Los Angeles received nearly half of its average seasonal rainfall in just two days, but the storm isn’t over yet.

Areas east and south of Los Angeles could see several more inches of rainfall through Wednesday. That includes San Diego, which was inundated a few weeks ago by a different storm.

Atmospheric rivers are well-known weather phenomena along the West Coast. Several make landfall each winter, routinely delivering a hefty chunk of the area’s annual precipitation. But the intensity of recent atmospheric rivers is almost certainly affected by human-caused climate change, says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Climate change has made the ocean’s surface warmer, and during an El Niño year like this one, sea water is even hotter. The extra heat helps water evaporate into the air, where winds concentrate it into long, narrow bands flowing from west to east across the Pacific, like a river in the sky, Swain says. An atmospheric river can hold as much as 15 times as much water as the Mississippi River.

Human-driven climate change has primed the atmosphere to hold more of that water. Atmospheric temperatures have risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (just over 1 degree Celsius) since the late 1800s, when people started burning massive volumes of fossil fuels. The atmosphere can hold about 4% more water for every degree Fahrenheit warmer it gets. When that moist air hits mountains on the California coast and gets pushed upwards, the air cools and its water gets squeezed out, like from a sponge.

Swain estimates those sky-rivers can carry and deliver about 5 to 15% more precipitation now than they would have in a world untouched by climate change.

That might not sound like a lot, but it can—and does—increase the chances of triggering catastrophic flooding, Swain says.

In 2017, a series of atmospheric rivers slammed into Northern California, dropping nearly 20 inches of rain across the upstream watershed in less than a week. The rainfall fell in two pulses, one after another, filling a reservoir and overtopping the Oroville dam, causing catastrophic flooding to communities downstream.

The back-to-back atmospheric rivers that drove the Oroville floods highlighted a growing risk, says Allison Michaelis, an atmospheric river expert at Northern Illinois University and the lead of a study on the Oroville event. “With these atmospheric rivers occurring in succession, it doesn’t leave a lot of recovery time in between these precipitation events. So it can turn what would have been a beneficial storm into a more hazardous situation,” she says.

It’s not yet clear if or how climate change is affecting those groups of storms—”families,” as one study calls them.

It’s also too early to say exactly how much more likely or intense climate change made the current storms on the West Coast. But “in general, we can expect them to all be intensified to some degree” by human-driven climate change, Michaelis says.

Scientists also don’t yet know if climate change is affecting how often atmospheric rivers form, or where they go. And climate change doesn’t mean that “every single atmospheric river storm that we are going to experience in the next couple of years will be bigger than every other storm” in history, says Samantha Stevenson, an atmospheric and climate scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

But West Coast communities do need to “be prepared in general for dealing with these extremes now,” says Stevenson. “Because we know that they’re a feature of the climate and their impacts are only going to get worse.”

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.