The issue with private insurance when it comes to natural disasters is they don't like losing money (understandable) and the climate is changing.
Those two things together mean that this year you could have good insurance that covers freak accidents, but what about next year, or next decade? An area that may have only seen flooding once a century might be predicted to see it once a decade or even once a year.
People still live there. Some people lived there with the insurance coverage for those natural disasters only to see it slowly go away or to be outright cancelled. We can't expect that they all migrate.
They can’t expect us to cover their losses, especially predictable and repeated losses.
However, that doesn't neccesarily imply that there should be flows of money available to rebuild in vulnerable locations. Insurance becoming unavailable or unaffordable is probably the best signal available that someplace is a bad place to live. If you can't afford the price or the risk ... There are lots of other places in the world.
It's one thing to say "don't buy beach front property in the Florida everglades" but what do you do with the millions who already own such property?
This came up with hurricane Katrina and Louisiana. Multigenerational communities were completely obliterated. I really don't find "the market said you should move" to be a compelling response.
These places are no longer safely inhabitable due to rising ocean levels. People are going to have to be relocated one way or another.
For better or worse, markets are the clearest signals we have in a hugely messy world. That shouldn't prevent us from doing the best thing available, but the world is not inherently fair and safe, and it's not possible for it to be perfectly fair and safe with our current technology and psychology.
The millions that own beach front property should accept the value of their land will decrease as it becomes harder to insure. If they don't want to lose equity, sell it sooner than later.
Those mines still have owners, and they can be found by the state if they really, really want to find them.
Almost certainly not.
> Owning mineral rights doesn't create liability for existing mines.
I was under the impression that it generally does. However, the documents are generally old paper records (often missing) and fragmented between multiple polities in Pennsylvania. The owners of the mineral rights obviously know who they are but reconstructing the trail from public records is quite time consuming and provides a lot of "plausible deniability".
But, boy, once fracking made those mineral rights worth something, the owners sure showed up and found those "missing" records in a real hurry.
Earth movement in general - from landslides to sinkholes to shifting foundations - is excluded from most home insurance policies.
I don't know specifically about mines or sinkholes, but I don't think they are generally excluded. However one difficulty would be that buildings are generally insured up to the value of the rebuilding cost, IE what it would take to put the building back after it was completely destroyed. But in the case of a mine or sinkhole, the land itself may also be unusable. In an expensive city the rebuild cost may be only a fraction of the cost of buying an equivalent home, including the land it sits on.
Sort of an IRL Hell.
The entire Ruhrpott settled and sank so much that if the water pumps in the largest mines would cease operating for too long, the entire area would flood. It's literally called "Ewigkeitslasten" (forever burdens) for that reason.
LeoPanthera•6h ago
gruez•5h ago
tart-lemonade•4h ago
schiffern•4h ago
I do appreciate creators who give us a real website alternative, not just drop videos on <centralized platform>. Everyday Astronaut is another great one.