During a town hall on Monday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) spoke about the effect that climate change could have on the insurance and housing markets.
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00:00I'll just add insurance markets. Watch out for insurance markets. If you know anybody in Florida, ask them about their property insurance. If it hasn't doubled, it's probably because it's tripled, and it's likely to triple or quadruple again.
00:17And the whole market is very rickety with most of the major insurers having left, and it's a highly focused thing in Florida right now, but all coastal communities are beginning to see it, and so I'm watching Florida like a hawk for what I see and portends for us here in Rhode Island.
00:40The chief economist of Freddie Mac, which is the huge mortgage giant and is not green at all. It's a mortgage company, has said that this cascades from being a climate crisis into an insurance crisis, into a you-can't-get-a-mortgage crisis, right, because you need insurance to get a mortgage, into a property values crash, his words, not mine, that cascades out through the whole economy like 2008.
01:08And that was just coastal properties. That doesn't count the wildfire risk that has emerged so rapidly. So on top of all the almost willful destruction that Trump has been doing to our economy is this extra layer of a very, very big future risk that is looming if we don't deal with it.