00:00certainly be highly problematic for everyone in the United States.
00:04Senator Whitehouse.
00:05Just for the record, at least as to me, my personal objective is to reduce fossil fuel emissions to the point of safety,
00:15which can be done in a lot of ways, including by reducing fossil fuel emissions or scrubbing them out of the fossil fuel power plants
00:24or replacing burning water to make steam with fossil fuel to run the turbines with boiling water with nuclear, solar, other ways to run the turbines.
00:37So this is not about destroying the fossil fuel industry.
00:43This is about getting the fossil fuel industry to behave like a responsible citizen while it is causing so much harm.
00:51On the subject of harm, the International Monetary Fund has pegged the subsidy to fossil fuels in the United States every year
01:04from getting away with polluting for free, which is not moral, not economic, not environmentally correct,
01:11at over $700 billion.
01:17$700 billion.
01:18No wonder it's such a monster in the political landscape when it's defending a $700 billion annual subsidy.
01:31But more than that, the damage that it does rolls forward.
01:39And one of the areas we're seeing it most clearly now is through the insurance industry.
01:43And Mr. Arkush, I'd like to ask you a little bit about that.
01:48There have been reports, not from green groups, from major insurance companies, from major mortgage companies,
01:56from very respected financial experts,
02:01that once climate change makes weather and weather conditions too unpredictable,
02:11there become areas of the country that can't insure themselves any longer.
02:16And once they can't insure themselves any longer in that area, you can't get mortgages any longer,
02:22which means that property values crash in that area,
02:25and that local bankers suffer because their loan-to-value ratios crash,
02:29and their mortgage revenue crashes.
02:31And that the combination of that local economic effect with the property value loss to those homeowners
02:37cascades into a full-on 2008-style recession.
02:42Could you walk us through that and where we're seeing some current examples of that already beginning to appear?
02:50Sure.
02:50That's exactly right.
02:53Again, no less than the Republican chair of the Federal Reserve has said that there are whole regions of the country
02:59that soon you won't be able to get a mortgage, and there may not be bank branches or ATMs,
03:05and that is because of insurers withdrawing from those areas.
03:09And the way this works is that climate harms raise insurance rates or cause insurance to withdraw entirely.
03:15They're withdrawing from entire states.
03:17There are headlines about this, you know, every other month.
03:21When insurance becomes too expensive to afford or is just unavailable,
03:25that dramatically drops home values because you can't get a mortgage without insurance.
03:29And if you can't get a mortgage on a property, that dramatically shrinks the buying pool.
03:33And also if the insurance is just really expensive,
03:36the expenses of paying for any asset or any kind of ownership reduce the value of the asset, right?
03:42My point in my opening remarks,
03:47if the average homeowner's insurance price in Florida is now $14,000 a year,
03:52and if that's predicted to double or triple, let's say it doubles.
03:57Now you go to $28,000 a year.
04:00Yes.
04:01If when you buy a home, you know you're signing up for $28,000 a year in expense out of your pocket?
04:06Just for insurance.
04:09Not for maintenance of the home, not for taxes, not for anything else.
04:12That's right.
04:12Then it gets a lot harder to sell your home, that's for sure.
04:16And the value of your property falls down a lot.
04:19Yes, that's absolutely right.
04:20And that's what we're seeing in Florida.
04:22People are losing their insurance.
04:24It has some of the highest premiums in the country.
04:26It has some of the fastest premium increases in the country.
04:28There's been, according to data from the Federal Insurance Office,
04:33there was a 168% increase from 2018 to 2022
04:37in Floridians who have to go to the state last resort insurer,
04:42Florida citizens, because they can't get insurance from anyone else.
04:4610% of Florida homeowners already don't have insurance.
04:50And more and more people are unable to afford these premiums.
04:52It could easily cause a real estate crash that has nationwide effects.
04:57As you said, just like the financial crisis of 2008,
05:01which had its roots in a sharp decrease in home values.
05:05And Mr. Arkush, just a last question.
05:07If an industry is lying to the public
05:12about the dangers of the product that it sells,
05:18is that established to be a legally actionable situation?
05:24And is the tobacco lawsuit an example of that?
05:28That's exactly right.
05:29These are not novel legal theories.
05:31In fact, they're some of the oldest in our country.
05:33Some of them go way before our country in English common law.
05:36If you're responsible for harms, you pay for them.
05:41If you can't commit fraud to consumers, you can't engage in a fraud racket.
05:46And a fraud racket is exactly what Big Tobacco engaged in
05:49and was successfully sued by the U.S. Department of Justice for.
05:52Thank you very much.
05:56And State Attorney General points out our State Attorney General.
