Exactly as predicted in SR, insurance companies are bailing out of areas and states where climate change has created crises that make it impossible for them to make their usual profits. We are going to see more and more of this and it is going to create an internal migration of people who can’t get insurance. But even worse they won’t be able to sell their property because anyone who has to have a mortgage will also have to be able to get insurance. As this article also describes this is going to have an enormous impact on banks since the majority of mortgages are held by banks. If you own property in a coastal area I would begin to think about selling it before your area faces an insurance crisis.
A road is completely filled with a tall pile of debris from destroyed beachfront homes and businesses, two days after the passage of Hurricane Ian, in Fort Myers Beach, Fla., Sept. 30, 2022. Florida’s home insurance market was already on shaky ground. It now faces an even mightier struggle after the damage caused by the hurricane. Credit: Rebecca Blackwell / AP Photo
The rising weather-related risks from climate change, from coastal hurricanes to western wildfires, are increasingly pinching insurance companies, which are raising rates and pulling back from parts of the country in an effort to stay in business.
Just this summer, two major insurance companies left Florida, adding to the long list of companies that have left the state.
A billion deaths, do you think that will wake up people, particularly Republicans, about what is coming? I doubt it. Nor do I think many authoritarian governments are going to prepare properly, which is going to radically change international relations and geopolitics. What I think will happen in the United States is that the Blue states are going to begin to seek ways to stop having to pay for the failure of the Red states. Federal funds paid out to Red states after a climate crisis are essentially Blue state tax money being used to pay for the failures of Red states. Few Americans seem to realize that for every dollar a Red state pays into the Federal treasury, it already takes out more than a dollar in some form of aid. In contrast for every dollar a Blue state pays in it takes out less than a dollar in federal support.
Credit: CCO Public Domain
If global warming reaches or exceeds two degrees Celsius by 2100, University of Western Ontario’s Joshua Pearce says it is likely that mainly richer humans will be responsible for the death of roughly one billion mainly poorer humans over the next century.
The oil and gas industry, which includes many of the most profitable and powerful businesses in the world, is directly and indirectly responsible for more than 40% of carbon emissions—impacting the lives of billions of people, many living in the world’s most remote and low-resourced communities.
A new study proposes aggressive energy policies that would enable immediate and substantive decreases to carbon emissions and recommends a heightened level of government, corporate and citizen action to accelerate the decarbonization of the global economy, aiming to minimize the number of projected human deaths.
“Such mass death is clearly unacceptable. It’s pretty scary really, especially for our children,” said Pearce, Western’s John M. Thompson Chair in Information Technology and Innovation and lead author of the study. “When climate scientists run their models and then report […]
Here is a very interesting trend that has just turned up about medical surgical care in Canada and Sweden. It presents two large well conducted studies, one in Canada the other in Sweden. They tell us something very significant about the difference between male and female surgeons. You might consider this if you or a family member or friend has to undergo surgery.
The Canadian study found patients treated by male surgeons were 25% more likely to die one year after surgery than those treated by female surgeons. Credit: Chee Gin Tan/Getty
People who are operated on by female surgeons are less likely to experience complications and need follow-up care than when males wield the scalpel, according to two major studies that suggest male surgeons have important lessons to learn.
Doctors in Canada and Sweden reviewed more than 1m patient records from two separate medical registers and found that patients seen by female surgeons had significantly better outcomes with fewer problems in the months after the operation.
The researchers are investigating potential reasons for the differences, but the records suggest that female surgeons tend to operate more slowly and may achieve better results by taking their time in the operating theatre.
Dr Christopher Wallis, who led one of the studies at Mount Sinai hospital in Toronto, said the findings should prompt male surgeons to reflect on their approach to surgery and learn from female colleagues for the benefit of their patients. […]
Anyone who knows anything about American history knows that unions were critical to creating the American middle class. They have, of course, always been opposed by rich fascists, and it is not a coincidence that the rise of the oligarch class exactly correlates (see the above chart) with the decline of union membership, and the rise of America’s obscene wealth inequality. And unions are critical to reverse this inequality. As this article describes the U.S. Treasury now officially recognizes what I have said.
A report released Monday by the U.S. Treasury Department argues that labor unions are critical to combating income inequality, which has risen dramatically in recent decades as union membership has declined and real wages have largely stagnated.
The report estimates that unions boost the wages of their members by between 10% and 15%, an impact that spreads to the broader economy as nonunion workplaces compete for employees.
“Unions also improve fringe benefits and workplace procedures such as retirement plans, workplace grievance policies, and predictable scheduling,” the report notes. “These workplace improvements contribute substantially to middle-class financial stability and worker well-being. For example, one study has estimated that the average worker values their ability to avoid short-notice schedule changes at up to 20% of their wages.”
In a summary of the report’s findings, Treasury Department economist Laura Feiveson wrote that “increased unionization has the potential to contribute to the reversal of the stark increase in inequality seen over the last half-century.”
“All in all, the evidence presented in Treasury’s report challenges the view that […]
The American healthcare system is so bad that we have an early death rate unlike any other developed nation. Why is this obvious failure to perform allowed to continue? Money, of course, that and the glaring corruption in the U.S. Congress and state legislature, particularly Republican controlled state legislatures. This report is based on a very carefully done research study and, like everything else about the illness profit system that masquerades as healthcare in the United States, it is a study of failure. Why doesn’t it change? Again, because of corruption and the failure of American voters to hold the legislators, federal and state, who whore themselves out responsible.
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS — A recent study is revealing the dire state of public health in the United States. In comparison to other wealthy nations, the U.S. death rate far outpaces America’s peers — leading researchers to say that the country is actually “experiencing a crisis of early death.”
Researchers from the Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) found that more than one million U.S. deaths a year — including many young and working-age adults — could be avoided if the country had mortality rates similar to other high-income nations.
In 2021, 1.1 million deaths would have been averted if the U.S. had mortality rates similar to other wealthy nations. The study refers to these excess deaths as “Missing Americans,” because these deaths reflect people who would still be alive if the U.S. death rate was equal to its peer countries.
Nearly 50 percent of all Missing Americans died before age 65 in 2020 and 2021. The study found that the level of excess mortality among working-age adults is particularly […]
