Back in May, State Farm Insurance announced the company would no longer accept homeowner insurance policy applications in California. Consequently, California regulators recently decided on a new way to prevent insurance companies from fleeing the state.

California will let insurance companies consider climate change when setting their prices, the state’s chief regulator announced Thursday, a move aimed at preventing insurers from fleeing the state over fears of massive losses from wildfires and other natural disasters.

Unlike other states, California does not let insurance companies consider current or future risks when deciding how much to charge for an insurance policy. Instead, they can only consider what’s happened on a property in the past to set the price.

At a time when climate change is making wildfires, floods and windstorms more common, insurers say that restriction makes it difficult to truly price the risk on properties. It’s one reason why, in the past year, seven of the top 12 insurance companies doing business in California have either paused or restricted new business in the state.

Now, California regulators are going to allow insurers to use climate change essentially as an excuse to ratchet up insurance rates. Specifically, the L.A. Times just reported that would allow insurance companies to do so based on catastrophe modeling that takes into account the projected impacts of climate change and other shifting factors when asking to raise rates.

This obviously came after years of environmentalists preventing the Golden State from upgrading its water infrastructure and managing state lands better to prevent fire outbreaks. However, the so-called climate crisis will now be baked in to insurance rates and California residents will have to bear the brunt of what could have been prevented had environmentalists not gotten in the way, blocking or obstructing what could have halted a lot of catastrophes that came about in the first place.

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