We Are All Going to Die From Coastal Flooding*
* Those having net worths of $10MM or more need not read.
via Soren K Group and Marketslant
The opinion piece at bottom is by Dr. Joe Romm, a Founding Editor of Climate Progress, “the indispensable blog,” as NY Times columnist Tom Friedman describes it. We thoroughly enjoyed reading it. And as writers with trading DNA we wanted to know where the trade was.
Long OJ? Long potable water? Short insurance companies, and other ideas were bounced around. All had risks we were uncomfortable with. Finally one of our group, "Bon Scott" summed it up perfectly in only the way he can. Implicitly, Buy infrastructure companies.
From Soren K. Group contributor "Bon":
Complete, total, globalist propaganda.
In the USA coastal property values are going nowhere but up. Period. Humans by nature want to be around water. Rich people like to be around other (white) rich people. Who do you think supports political campaigns?.... Beachfront property owners that's who!
Flooding... Hire mexicans that no longer have landscaping jobs due to suburban collapse to truck in more dirt and pave it. Raise homes, raise roads (it's happening now in NJ). Water? Pipe it in from the mountains all the way to Key fucking West. MOAR jobs! Print the fucking fiat to pay for it. Tax the world.
The result is like everything else we say here. The middle class, what remains of them, will have more financial burden to shoulder. The rich build walls, and the poor are cared for.
OH NO GLOBAL WARMING
Examples of Bon's point. Bill Gates bought a stake in the Four Seasons and its Caribean property in 2015. Think he is worried about his island sinking? Trump owns a mansion on St. Maarten bought in 2013 last we checked. Think he's worried? Gates also owns property in Palm Beach bought in 2013. Tech billionaire Larry Ellison has bought 98 per cent of Hawaiian island Lanai. Indian Creek Village in Miami's Biscayne Bay may be on a tiny island, but the neighborhood of just 86 residents is home to some of the biggest A-listers and some of America's richest business moguls.
Some of these purchases are basically "safe rooms" for the rich in case of civilization breakdown. Climate change isn't a deterrent. If it were they'd be buying mountain homes only.
Capitalism Finds a way, Workers Will Pay
The author must be kidding us if he thinks a climate catastrophe awaits Trump. This is just another justification for Trump to ramp up infrastructure and thus GDP. Does he think we will just watch things sink? By his own admission it is in "slow- motion". China builds synthetic islands in the South Pacific. Romm, the academic globalist doesn't think the rich voting owners in coastal Fla will get their way through walls, levies, and tax breaks to protect their property? And Romm doesn't think that it will be a tax increase on the rest of us as a Patriotic Duty?
- The rich will be on stilts. You will pay for it. in NJ each home wrecked post Sandy got a 40k tax credit to raise the house. Who paid for that? The wealthy that are leaving NJ in droves now.
- The insurance companies will be bailed out- You will pay for it. You already did 5x in the last 30 years.
- The poor will be taken care of (as they should be)- You will pay for it, as the impoverished group of baby boomers swell the ranks.
You will pay with higher taxes, lower purchasing power, an inability to access global competitors for pricing. your children will pay for it by becoming indentured servants to the Government when they cannot pay their student loans back. we know. We've seen it in Argentina first hand. The best educated, lowest paid MBAs in the Americas.
Mnuchin's tax statement yesterday basically implied the intention to remove tax cuts at the middle class level by removing home owner tax deductions. The working class is taken for granted. Even Ghandi had a point where he'd take up arms. Wake up people. Why aren't you mad?
That said, enjoy the piece below. -Soren K. Group
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Climate change poses ‘nightmare scenario’ for Florida coast, Bloomberg warns
via Joe Romm and Thinkprogess
Donald Trump’s presidency may make this future for South Florida and “Miami Island” unstoppable. CREDIT: Climate Central
“Pessimists selling to optimists.” That’s how one former Florida coastal property owner describes the current state of the market in a must-read Bloomberg story.
Right now, science and politics don’t favor the optimists. The disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is speeding up, providing increasing evidence we are headed for the worst-case scenario of sea level rise?—?three to six feet (or more) by 2100.
The impacts are already visible in South Florida. “Tidal flooding now predictably drenches inland streets, even when the sun is out, thanks to the region’s porous limestone bedrock,” explains Bloomberg. “Saltwater is creeping into the drinking water supply.”
At the same time, President Trump is working to thwart both domestic and international climate action while slashing funding for coastal adaptation and monitoring. E&E News reported earlier this month that the EPA has already “disbanded its climate change adaptation program” and reassigned all the workers.
Faster sea level rise and less adaptation means the day of reckoning is nigh. Dan Kipnis, chair of Miami Beach’s Marine and Waterfront Protection Authority?—?who has failed to find a buyer for his Miami Beach home for nearly a year?—?told Bloomberg, “Nobody thinks it’s coming as fast as it is.”
But this is not just South Florida’s problem. The entire country is facing a trillion-dollar bubble in coastal property values. This Hindenburg has been held aloft by U.S. taxpayers in the form of the National Flood Insurance Program.
A 2014 Reuters analysis of this “slow-motion disaster” calculated there’s almost $1.25 trillion in coastal property being covered at below-market rates.
?
CREDIT: Reuters
When will the bubble burst? As I’ve written for years, property values will crash when a large fraction of the financial community?—?mortgage bankers and opinion-makers, along with a smaller but substantial fraction of the public?—?realize that it is too late for us to stop catastrophic sea level rise.
When sellers outnumber buyers, and banks become reluctant to write 30-year mortgages for doomed property, and insurance rates soar, then the coastal property bubble will slow, peak, and crash.
The devaluation process had begun even before Trump’s election reduced the chances we would act in time to prevent catastrophic climate change. The New York Times reported last fall that “nationally, median home prices in areas at high risk for flooding are still 4.4 percent below what they were 10 years ago, while home prices in low-risk areas are up 29.7 percent over the same period.”
Sean Becketti, the chief economist for mortgage giant Freddie Mac, warned a year ago that values could plunge if sellers start a stampede. “Some residents will cash out early and suffer minimal losses,” he said. “Others will not be so lucky.”
As this week’s Bloomberg piece puts it, “Demand and financing could collapse before the sea consumes a single house.”
So here’s a question for owners of coastal property?—?and the financial institutions that back them?—?as they watch team Trump keep his coastal-destroying promises: Who will be the smart money that gets out early?—?and who will be the other kind of money?