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The Trump administration’s EPA has put the home insurance industry, home mortgage industry, real estate industry, and individual homeownership on notice that the rules are changing against their best interests. Already, before these negative changes to EPA policy, radical climate change has forced insurance companies to eliminate home coverage in regions of America.
Trump’s EPA Plans to Stop Collecting Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data From Most Polluters, ProPublica, April 10, 2025)
The Environmental Protection Agency has thrust a danger into the heart of American homeownership, and the home insurance industry and the mortgage industry by throwing out accountability of greenhouse gases. The relationship between greenhouse gases and global heat/climate change is accepted by nearly 100% of climate scientists, including Exxon’s own in-house scientists, to wit: “The researchers report that Exxon scientists correctly dismissed the possibility of a coming ice age, accurately predicted that human-caused global warming would first be detectable in the year 2000, plus or minus five years, and reasonably estimated how much CO2 would lead to dangerous warming.” (Research Shows That Company Modeled and Predicted Global Warming with ‘Shocking Skills and Accuracy’ Starting in the 1970s, The Harvard Gazette, Jan. 12, 2023.
The single most important thing governments can do in today’s changing climate environment is to identify and monitor sources of greenhouse gases that cause radical climate change. The whole world is doing this to know how to mitigate the problem. But the EPA of the USA is tossing this out the window.
Nobody’s Insurance Rates are Safe from Climate Change, Yale Climate Connections, Jan. 14, 2025.
Home Insurance Problem is Set to Intensify, Business Insider, Oct. 22, 2024.
More Americans, Risking Ruin, Drop Their Home Insurance, The New York Times, Jan. 16, 2025
The world insurance industry understands the problem: “Climate change is a source of financial risk, impacting the resilience of individual insurers as well as global financial stability. While insurers are exposed to both transition and physical risks through their underwriting and investment activities, they can also be key agents in identifying, mitigating and managing climate risk, thereby contributing to a sustainable transition to net-zero.” (International Association of Insurance Supervisors)
Significantly, the EPA has effectively deleted the second sentence to that statement by the International Association of Insurance Supervisors. Namely: You cannot “identify, mitigate and manage climate risk” without knowing where it’s coming from. The EPA is removing that critical component, leaving insurance companies swinging from the branches, directionless.
The Trump EPA is eye-gouging the home insurance industry and real estate market by changing national standards for collecting and reporting greenhouse gas emissions. This data is crucial to determination of national climate mitigation policies on a worldwide basis. Meanwhile, climate change has been identified by the home insurance industry as its most serious issue, as climate change transforms the American home insurance industry into a basket case that risks undermining the American real estate market down the tubes. Home mortgage companies stand to lose billions. As it stands, real estate is America’s biggest asset class, and it has now been hit hard by EPA rulings.
No other country in the world has chosen to completely ignore climate change. To do so is a risk to every homeowner in America because climate change has turned into a monster that randomly destroys real property, forcing home insurance rates to the moon.
And the outlook for climate change, according to state-of-the-art climate research, has turned grim, as follows.
Is Earth Losing Resilience?
Knowing/identifying the data behind climate change, which EPA is eliminating, has never more important to safeguard the planetary system. A major study by Johan Rockstrom of Potsdam Institute questions Earth’s resilience, as follows:
“We have received enough concerning signals from the Earth system, forcing us to seriously ask the question, are we seeing the first signs of Earth losing resilience?”
“The most recent estimates already point to implications of a weaker planet showing first signs of accelerated warming. The 1.5°C limit will be breached earlier, probably already before 2030. And the BIG question out there is what does all this mean for the risk of crossing tipping points in the Earth system? We already have evidence that multiple tipping elements are likely to cross their thresholds when 1.5°C is breached permanently. This places us in a very delicate situation, given that these tipping elements (Tropical Coral Reef systems, the Greenland Ice Sheet, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, abrupt thawing of permafrost, and collapse of the Barent sea ice) would not only affect billions of people, but comprise feedback systems, i.e., they can trigger permanent changes in the functioning of Earth, which would accelerate warming even further.”(Rockstrom)
And the EPA wants to ignore greenhouse gases. This is the closest we’ll ever get to mimicking Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
© Counter Punch
