Climate change. Just saying the words sends shivers down the spines of science -deniers. The boogeyman that haunts them at night. Afterall, it challenges their attachment to the future, and the truth only reinforces the loss of control they feel. It creates an uncomfortable sense of responsibility and fear and guilt. Because it’s something happening to us… that human beings are also causing. The weight of that notion feels enormous and too heavy to hold for them.
But, I don’t write to comfort the ignorant. So, they’re going to have to put their feelings on hold for a minute. Or fuck off altogether. Makes no difference to me, because at the end of the day, the truth is the truth is the truth.
Climate change itself, doesn’t kill societies, per say. It just removes the things that were holding it together, one by one, until the shock after disaster that used to be survivable, isn’t anymore.
The insurance market is the canary in the coalmine. Insurance companies build their entire business on predicting the future and when they start refusing to write policies to protect catastrophic loss created by nature, that’s the canary singing. Loudly. The market’s telling us something these jerkoff politicians won’t.
Farmer’s insurance pulled out of Florida. AIG, Allstate and State Farm stopped writing policies in California. State Farm cited catastrophic exposure explicitly. Since 2022, at least 11 Louisiana home insurers have gone insolvent and a similar number stopped writing policies in the state after Hurricanes Laura and Ida hammered down on them in 2020 and 2021. Louisiana’s market has since stabilized, some, with new insurers licensed under state reform, but Florida and California haven’t seen the same turnaround. Insured losses hit $112.7 billion dollars in 2024.
Florida’s response wasn’t to fix the underlying risk. Instead, they worked on making it harder for homeowners to sue when their claims got denied. And like clockwork, the other wealthy insurance pigs in other states are currently copying that move. It’s never about serving and helping the people who line their pockets — it’s always about how they can extract more money out of us. The wealthy hate us. They never cared.
“Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.” What a crock of shit.
“With Allstate, you’re in good hands.” Fuckin liars.
And my favorite lie, “Nationwide is on your side.” Ain’t that a kick in the dick?
So, the models moving forward isn’t “insurers price the risk and people adapt.” It’s “insurers leave, the state backed insurer of last resort becomes the biggest player in the market and homeowners lose legal recourse when their payout doesn’t cover the damage.”
Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance is not the largest insurer in the state because private companies won’t touch it.
This is what collapse looks like at the household level. It’s not going to be a single dramatic event — nothing ever is. It’s the slow removal of the financial infrastructure that lets you rebuild after one. FEMA isn’t slow, it’s being made to be slow.
When the Texas floods ripped through Kerrville in 2025, killing over a hundred people, a new rule requiring Kristi Noem’s personal sign off on any DHS contract or grant over $100,000 delayed the deployment of federal search and rescue teams until more than 72 hours after the flooding began. And this is only one of many disaster incidents.
FEMA withheld $10.9 billion in reimbursements to 45 states in 2025. As of 2026, states and tribes are still waiting on more than $1.3 billion in hazard mitigation money. FEMS’s backlog is the largest it’s ever been in its agency’s history right now.
But, it’s not just that the money to rebuild is late. It’s way more than that. Every time this happens, it teaches people, in real time, that the institution built to catch them when disaster strikes wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire. Yet, we pay ALL these taxes for this invisible safety net. I think we’ve finally, collectively, come to the conclusion that there was never a fucking net. All of this bled into how people currently feel about government generally.
We cannot fix a wildfire without public trust. We can’t fix anything without it. Tornado alley has now moved. For the first time since moving to Texas ten years ago, we went all spring and summer without the tornado sirens blaring in our area. That’s because, due to climate change, tornado alley has now moved slightly north and to the east a bit. Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri and Wisconsin got hammered this year. Even the U.P. of Michigan had some tornadoes! Insanity.
Illinois had the record of most tornados on the books for 2026. In Kankakee, IL a strong PDS tornado ripped through the middle of town and wiped out over 500 structures in a matter of minutes.
Many people lost their lives, homes, security and sense of normal in 2026. It’s truly devastating what the Midwest has experienced this year. I watched storm chasers on YouTube, from the comfort of my living room here in Texas, in horror. I know what they’re going though and it breaks my heart to pieces — even more-so, knowing they are going to have to beg and plead for help from their insurance companies and will live in constant panic and anxiety waiting to see if their insurance companies drop them or deny their claims.
We lucked out the last time a tornado hit our city. We only received minor damage compared to others. This is a video of our backyard after a tornado touched down near our home March 2nd, 2023:
The Power Struggles
Texas also set it’s all-time power demand record in 2023, at 85.5 gigawatts. ERCOT is now forecasting demand could nearly double by 2030 and reach almost 368 gigawatts by 2032, driven by population growth, hell on earth heat, and a wave of resource-sucking data centers expected to pop up. Research published in 2025 projected power supply could fall short of peak demand in a worst case scenario starting this last summer. We’ve already experienced multiple brown outs since April 2026 here in the DFW area trying to save on power. For the last two weeks the temperatures here have been over 100 and only drop to 90 at night.
Temps usually peak around 3pm here. It’s only 9:30 am and already 90 degrees.
Texas runs it’s own grid on purpose, disconnected from the rest of the country, so when it runs short, it can’t pull power form anywhere else. It’s a policy choice — an intellectually bafoonish and a breathtaking display of bad judgement policy choice — but this state has been run by dipshit Republicans for the last 30 years, so it makes sense.
Climate change is the thing stress-testing that choice every single summer now, and every near-miss quietly recalibrates what people expect from basic infrastructure. When you stop being surprised that the power might go out in 105 degree heat, something has already broken in how you related to the systems around you.
The Actual Climate Argument
Climate stress is a threat multiplier that interacts with existing governance failures, water mismanagement, and inequality. Climate change doesn’t need to be the sole cause of collapse to be a cause. It just needs to the thing that turns a survivable crisis into an unsurvivable one.
None of these things alone breaks a country. An insurance market retreating form Florida doesn’t collapse the United States. A FEMA backlog doesn’t either. Neither does a grid running hot in August, or a drought overseas. What breaks a country is all of it landing on the same weakened institutions, over and over, for decades, while the wealthy people pay the politicians in charge of the response, treat each disaster like an isolated event instead of a pattern.
Climate change isn’t a wrecking ball. It’s the guy taking bricks out of the foundation one at a time while everyone stands around talking about the paint job on the house.
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~Eevie
Decades ago my Dad said something as our family was walking Boston that has stuck with me all this time, "Ever notice that insurance companies cry about being poor and not having the money to pay out or refusing claims but they're the ones with the biggest fucking buildings in the city?"
They may have cute commercials with emu's and geckos but they are all of them snakes.
The other dirty little secret about insurance (homeowner's, renter's)... more than one claim (talking 15+ years between claims) results in a caution that the NEXT claim may not be paid and/or one's policy may be cancelled. State Farm. Claim #1, the existing water heater failed and leaked... claim submitted for clean up of water damage to cabinets, drywall - NOT a huge claim, not a big flood (see: water heater); 2nd claim: tree damage after a storm w damage to fencing and an exterior storage shed (not the main structure, residence) and the finger wagging began w the delays, several layers of bullshit to wade through (we trim our trees here but tornado wind damage isn't something one can forecast or fully prepare for). ... Climate change, you say? They haven't heard of this, it seems - and we didn't have the damage that some areas of our town experienced.