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CLIMATE WATCH -
“Climate change is the monster we made. We are Victor Frankenstein.” (Climate Change: The Monster of our own Making, WashU, October 16, 2017, Michael Wysession, Professor Earth & Planetary Sciences, Washington University)
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was inspired by the extreme weather of 1816, also known as the "Year Without a Summer."
Today’s climate change is a product of capitalism. It’s the unprecedented version and society’s stuck with it. It is here; it’s now; it’s not going away. It’s the birth child of capitalism. Born 200 years ago, it’s now in late adolescence, about to enter early adulthood, unlike anything seen throughout 2.5 million years of human history.
This spooky version of climate change overpowers its own creator, hitting capitalism’s pocketbook hard and harder, year by year. Climate change in years past never moved the needle on costly homeowner insurance or abandonment of insurance coverage. But that’s changed; now it’s a money grubber.
The evidence of climate destructiveness never witnessed before is found everywhere. Headlines spell out the truth: (a) The Mounting Cost of Climate for Insurers, S&P Global, Jan. 13, 2025 (b) How the Climate Crisis Became an Insurance Crisis, The New York Times, Oct. 19, 2024 (c) According to NOAA, in 2024, the US had 27 climate disasters each exceeding $1 billion for total costs of $183 billion, the costliest year on record for climate change-related damages. This is the Frankenstein climate in full living color.
The genesis of climate change is easily identified. A study of the period 1750 to 2017 by Colorado-based Climate Accountability Institute (est. 2011) discovered that 70% of greenhouse gases derived from just 103 fossil fuel companies. And since 1965, 20 of those 103 companies now contribute 1/3 of all emissions, e.g., Chevron and ExxonMobil. (Source: Why a Carbon-free World Isn’t Possible with Capitalism, Broadview, April/2024).
It’s scientific fact that too much atmospheric CO2 emitted from burning gasoline in your car’s engine creates too much planetary heat for survival, eventually. An example of what can happen with excessive levels of CO2 is found in the atmosphere of Earth’s sister planet Venus at 96% CO2. This greenhouse effect makes Venus roughly 700°F (390°C) hotter than it would be without the greenhouse effect. Your spaceship will melt before landing on its hot surface.
The causal relationship between CO2 and climate change is indisputable: “Based on the published evidence IPCC attributes temperature increase to the total increase in radiative forcing and asserts that this is primarily caused by the increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO2 during the last 200 years” (Adolf Stips, et al, On the Causal Structure Between CO2 and Global Temperature, Scientific Reports, Nature, 2016)
The concentration of high-end capitalism’s influence on climate change has been exposed in a study by Stockholm Environment Institute (est. 1989) finding that of 8 billion people, the wealthiest 1% contribute the same share of yearly emissions as the lower 2/3rds. Yet, “we’re so used to capitalism that we don’t necessarily even know it when we see it,’ says Emily Huddart Kennedy, a sociologist at the University of British Columbia,” Ibid. People need to start opening their eyes to who’s responsible, who should pay.
Consequences
If you create it, you own it and must care for it. Capitalism’s Frankenstein, which becomes more and more costly year by year, is not going away. If anything, with oil companies publicly stating intentions to crank up fossil fuels big time, consumers should brace themselves to pay an arm and a leg for property insurance. It’ll assuredly be hitting new all-time highs. This could crush the backbone of capitalism.
Homeowner Insurance Imbroglio
Property insurance is a big question mark: When will American homeowners wake up to reality and rebel against the abject, dishonorable failure of politicians to address the massively destructive climate system that’s starting to crush home values? It’s happening everywhere, to wit:
Move Over, Florida, Retirees are Making New Plans as Climate Change Raises Costs, Barron’s, Feb. 13, 2025: “Beth McCormack recently called off her search to buy a home in Florida. The Chicago attorney decided that prices were too high, especially given the expensive homeowner’s insurance she would need to buy.”
Climate Change to Obliterate $1.5 Trillion in U.S. Home Values, Study Finds, CBS News, Feb. 4, 2025
Real Estate Confronts Climate Change, American Meteorological Society, Jan. 13, 2025
How Climate Change Could Upend the American Dream, ProPublica, Feb. 3, 2025
Zillow Will Begin Showing Climate Risks for US Properties in Early 2025, Reddit, Jan. 2025
More Americans, Risking Ruin, Drop Their Home Insurance, The New York Times, Jan. 16, 2025
California Isn’t the Only Place Where Insurers are Dropping Homeowners, The Washington Post, January 15, 2025.
Map Shows Where House Prices Risk Falling Due to Climate Change, Newsweek, Feb. 10, 2025
Why Renters Suffer After Hurricanes, Floods, and Wildfires, NPR, July 31, 2024
That Giant Sucking Sound? It’s Climate Change Devouring Your Home’s Value, The New York Times, Feb. 3, 2025
Climate Change Should Make You Rethink Homeownership, The New York Times, Feb. 9, 2025
How to stop bleeding headlines about home values clobbered by climate change: Stop fossil fuels. Start renewables. And throw billions of dollars at worldwide coordination to remove billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, much bigger than the WWII Marshall Plan, e.g., New Report States 7-9 Billion Tonnes of CO2 Must be Sustainably Removed Per Year to Hit Climate Targets, University of Oxford, June 5, 2024. It can be done, but removing human-generated CO2 from the atmosphere is a very costly challenging uphill battle. Carbon Capture Has a Long History of Failure, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 1, 2022.
According to the International Energy Agency: Direct air capture (DAC) technologies extract CO2 directly from the atmosphere for CO2 storage or utilization. Twenty-seven DAC plants have been commissioned to date worldwide, capturing almost 0.01 Mt CO2/year. That’s a ridiculously meager amount: “We’ve maybe at most removed a few seconds of the world’s emissions after spending billions and billions of dollars which would have been better spent elsewhere.” (Direct Air Capture Solution Faces Criticism, Steep Challenges, Mongabay, Dec. 13, 2024).
‘Citzens United’ for the Environment
Since capitalism fathered today’s version of radical climate change, it should treat it as its own. This justifies a universal movement for Environmental Personhood. After all, corporations have been declared ‘people’ in Citizens United the US Supreme Court ruled that corporations are “persons,” aka: the Doctrine of Corporate Personhood entitled to constitutional protections.
Similarly, non-human entities can be “persons” under both Canadian and international law with certain rights and obligations. This is something that indigenous people have followed for centuries.
“In February 2021, the world was introduced to Mutehekau Shipu — also known as the Magpie River — when the people of Ekuanitshit, Quebec and the regional municipality made a joint declaration granting the river legal personhood and rights. The declaration carries broad implications for the fight to protect nature across Canada and around the world.” (I am Mutehekau Shipu: A River’s Journey to Personhood in Eastern Quebec, Canadiangeographic, April 8, 2022)
The river now has its own rights, modelled after the inalienable rights a human person has, including the right to flow and exist. Crucially, it also has the right to legal representation, allowing human lawyers to advocate on its behalf in the courts. Environmental Personhood, like Corporate Personhood, is one way to bring nature into the value system of capitalism, by respecting nature and concern for the health of the planet with legal stranding the same as corporations enjoy. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Who knows where it might lead.
Meanwhile, faster than ever, climate change festers in the background, roughing-up the American Dream of homeownership. It’s gonna get worse, first Trump and now, from Europe’s biggest economy: Germany Set to Scale Down Climate Ambitions, Bloomberg Green Daily, Feb. 17, 2025.
(Robert Hunziker, MA, economic history DePaul University, awarded membership in Pi Gamma Mu International Academic Honor Society in Social Sciences is a freelance writer and environmental journalist who has over 200 published articles appearing in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites worldwide.)
