Letters to the Editor
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Reasons?
The private insurers are changing their practices, particularly in the area of underwriting, because they know what's coming. Not the weather, the financial consequences of the climate. We don't know where or when the next "big one' will hit, or what form it will take, we just know that something big is over the horizon.
And private insurers are in business to make money - particularly, to generate pools of investment capital. Payouts for the aftermath of disasters have a rather pronounced effect on that. Insurers are predatory, they are greedy, they are the sort of bookies who encourage you to bet that something terrible will in fact happen and then hope against hope that you lose that bet. Stupid, not so much.
The federal programs, driven "from the top" as they are, as everything to do with the federal government is in this "special case" federal government, are being pushed into an uncomfortable corner. The boss says climate change isn't a problem. Their actuaries tell them it is, and will only get worse. (And it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better, if ever it does!) They are not being allowed to adapt. And we're going to end up with the tab. And what a tab that will be...
Rock, meet hard place, hard place, this is rock. You guys never met before?
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further reading
If you're interested in further reading about the dust bowl and how it was almost completely man-made check out Donald Worster's "Dust Bowl" it was written in 1980 and he saw even then that the dust bowl would return...it's an awesome, eye-opening read.