Daunting Damage Estimates for Harvey
August 30, 2017
Make Mexico pay.
RMS said Tuesday that hundreds of thousands of individual National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) policies will almost certainly be affected by the devastation in Houston. It could be the largest event ever directed at the federal flood insurance program managed by FEMA, the agency in charge of the program, RMS said. The majority of the economic loss is likely to be in the metropolitan Houston area, where there are more than 7 million properties worth $1.5 trillion.
Harvey has broken all U.S. records for a single extreme-rainfall event, with cumulative amounts in some regions as high as 51 inches. As a result, RMS estimates the economic losses caused by a combination of wind, storm surge and inland flooding could be as high as $70-90 billion. But the losses could be even higher. RMS won’t issue its official insurance loss estimate for several weeks.
August 31, 2017 at 7:42 am
$90 billion could decommission every coal power plant and create fields of solar arrays, wind turbines and batteries instead.
Add another couple of hundred billion for Sandy and Katrina, and the transition to a decarbonized economy could have been decades ahead of now.
If you think decarbonization is expensive, try denial.
At least millions of jobs will be created, just to recover what was lost – if only lives were replaceable too.
No chance now that Trump will get his stupid wall.
August 31, 2017 at 10:35 am
Complete decarbonization *today* won’t stop the changes that are already built in:
– warmer arctic that broke the jet stream and leads to stalled weather
– rain bombs
– “instant droughts”
– artesian sea-water flooding in Florida
etc.
We’re trying to stop FF use on the promise that it won’t get *too much worse* decades from now. That’s an abstraction that humans are pretty bad at grasping.
August 31, 2017 at 9:26 am
How much bail out money are those oil companies gonna get?
August 31, 2017 at 3:11 pm
As much as they need, of course.
September 1, 2017 at 12:42 am
Saw Ted Cruz BSing about not voting for Sandy relief secondary to ‘pork barrel’ money in the bill, which was itself BS, but just figured it was classic Republican projection, where they accuse the other side of what they are doing or about to do.
September 1, 2017 at 12:44 am
* are about to do…as in make it rain on Exxon.