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They are certainly not a ‘de facto carbon price’ because they are not related to the amount of carbon that any specific homeowner emits. Carbon price is meant to be an incentive to change behaviour or technology, to reduce emissions.
I suppose they might be considered a ‘de-facto climate-change-denial price’ for those who recently invested in such places by the sea (in the US case, there seems to be some correlation…), but that’s still not fair for people who lived in vulnerable places for a long time, before some of these impacts became inevitable.Eh kick out the profit driven insurance companies, and bring in state insurance.
That doesn’t solve the underlying problem, which is that some places have a very high yearly probability of disaster.
How do we help the people struggling leave these areas? I’m sure many are buried already and can’t incur more costs.
Let’s say, for example, Florida from alligator Alley down everyone has to leave. Where exactly should all these people go and what do you with all the houses and business buildings left behind? And if there are just empty cities sitting around someone is gonna move into them, legally or otherwise, and then what?
I think a better solution would be government funding of retrofitting homes to better handle the disasters they can potentially face. Florida for example could make steel reinforced concrete block standard required construction, roofs anchored to the foundation, impact resistant windows and doors and roll down storm shutters. All that in lieu of sticks, nails and a prayer that nearly every new building in Florida is currently built on. Far more practical than “everyone leave Florida forever”.
It’s not realistic to beep fighting the ocean. The earth is mostly void of people. The effort to make a new city, especially one planned to be resource efficient will be much cheaper to move people.
I believe the same issues played out in New Jersey with their Blue Acres program. Iirc they would offer loans for upgrades or buy-outs to move, often the upgrades would fail a few years later so in the later versions of the programs it is buy-out only. NJ Blue Acres
I think I heard this on Les Stroud’s Surviving Disasters, but North America is unique in that many places haven’t been largely inhabited for enough time to find out they are prone to disasters (some definitely are but people are stubborn enough to go back). Whereas, ancient Asians and Europeans may have had the chance in the past to relocate out of floodplains or other disaster-prone areas, for example.
There are some examples of what you describe, such as the the lack of written records meaning that residents of the Pacific Northwest US not being aware of the earthquake and tsunami risk until recently, but knowledge doesn’t result in people actually taking action to keep people out of harms way. There are great examples in Europe and Asia of people simply staying in risky spots for a variety of reasons, such as the large population living around Vesuvius or in parts of Bangladesh which flood during typhoons.
