So a lot of people like to use the Florida insurance crisis (which is real) to push their particular issue but the truth here is more complex than "climate change".
First, you cannot talk about this issue without talking about the 2017 Florida State Supreme Court case Joyce v. National Federated [1]. Basically, this made it much easier for policyholder plaintiffs to recover costs in insurance litigation, sometimes punitively so. If a court deems a case to have been likely to succeed from the outset, it can award up to 2.5 lodestar costs for attorney fees.
This is well-intentioned. It should encourage insurers to settle rather than go to court but it had the opposite effect because of how rife Flroida is for roofing scams and insurance fraud [2]. Basically, dodgy companies would offer to inspect your roof, find a fault and then file a claim to replace the roof. Nothing was really done to curb this fraud and, because of Joyce, it was unprofitable to fight these cases.
This compounds to Florida accounting for 76% of homeowner's insurance lawsuits but only boasts 9% of claims [3].
Third, the current Florida government has shown no interest in actually tackling this problem. One bill in recent years simply gave insurers $1 billion [4] for really nothing in return.
Fourth, a lot of issues are mistakenly attributed to climate change. Take the coastal erosion in Cape Cod [5]. People like to say "climate change" (to be clear, I 100% believe in man-made climate change) but really it's just a longstanding trend of coastal erosion that probably has almost nothing to do with climate change.
Your post is completely off-topic. The paper includes a great discussion about how the property insurance crisis in Florida dates back to Hurricane Andrew in the 90s, not a court decision in 2017. The issue raised in the paper isn't climate change, its weakly capitalized insurers and the conflict of interest created by one particular rating agency (Demotech), that is giving sketchy insurers clean bills of health that allow them to operate.
Tort reform in Florida is a bandaid. The state-run insurer is creating serious market distortions by undercharging for the risk, accumulating very large proportions of the state homeowners insurance policies (since no one else will), and then offloading the policies to undercapitalized insurers while looking the other way about their poor financial condition. When Citizen's claims are in excess of its reserves, the legislature steps in and taxes the rest of the state to cover the shortfall. I'm guessing when the other insurers become insolvent, the shortfall is offload to the state guarantee fund (possibly on the taxpayers dime). This is all covered in the paper.
Does Florida share California’s problem in that areas have been developed that should have never been developed, and we keep paying people to rebuild there?
> the true cause of energy inflation, which was Trump's 2020 OPEC deal for them to cut the global oil supply by 10%
And the state of California (earthquakes, wildfires, riots). And the state of Oklahoma (tornadoes). And the entire coastline of the United States (hurricanes, tsunamis, termites) which covers most houses in the US. Most areas along the Mississipi river (flooding). Almost all mountain areas (landslides, wildfires). All riparian areas (flooding, cavitation).
First, you cannot talk about this issue without talking about the 2017 Florida State Supreme Court case Joyce v. National Federated [1]. Basically, this made it much easier for policyholder plaintiffs to recover costs in insurance litigation, sometimes punitively so. If a court deems a case to have been likely to succeed from the outset, it can award up to 2.5 lodestar costs for attorney fees.
This is well-intentioned. It should encourage insurers to settle rather than go to court but it had the opposite effect because of how rife Flroida is for roofing scams and insurance fraud [2]. Basically, dodgy companies would offer to inspect your roof, find a fault and then file a claim to replace the roof. Nothing was really done to curb this fraud and, because of Joyce, it was unprofitable to fight these cases.
This compounds to Florida accounting for 76% of homeowner's insurance lawsuits but only boasts 9% of claims [3].
Third, the current Florida government has shown no interest in actually tackling this problem. One bill in recent years simply gave insurers $1 billion [4] for really nothing in return.
Fourth, a lot of issues are mistakenly attributed to climate change. Take the coastal erosion in Cape Cod [5]. People like to say "climate change" (to be clear, I 100% believe in man-made climate change) but really it's just a longstanding trend of coastal erosion that probably has almost nothing to do with climate change.
[1]: https://www.propertyinsurancecoveragelaw.com/blog/court-reaf...
[2]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/roofing-scams-florida-p...
[3]: https://www.roofingcontractor.com/articles/97786-what-you-sh...
[4]: https://floridaphoenix.com/2022/12/16/desantis-signs-billion...
[5]: https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/cape-cod-h...