Unanimous Consent Request--S. Res. 555

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, climate change is real. Earlier this year, I came to the floor and asked my colleagues if they could all agree to that simple scientific fact. Unsurprisingly, given the clout of fossil fuel in this arena, they could not.

So I return to the floor in hopes that my Republican colleagues could at least agree to some of the simple truths that make up the bigger picture of climate change.

I asked if we could agree that sea levels are rising due to fossil fuel emissions. Republicans objected.

I asked that we could agree that oceans are warming due to fossil fuel emissions. Republicans objected. They are actually warming by the zettajoule, if you want to look up a really big number.

So I changed tactics. I wanted to see if my Republican colleagues could at least acknowledge some of the realities. I asked if we could agree that climate change is driving up the cost of homeowners insurance, which is something that even homeowners insurers will tell you. But, again, Republicans objected.

Well, I am not giving up. Here is today's simple truth: Climate change poses a threat to home values and the mortgage market. Can we all agree on that?

Let me break this down. Republicans may object, but facts remain. And the fact is that sea levels are rising.

Sea level rise and the flooding that comes along with it causes catastrophic damage to coastal infrastructure, businesses, and homes. This drives enormous financial loss.

Between 2005 and 2017, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia together lost $7.4 billion in home value due to sea level rise-related flooding. Absent climate action, flooding like this will get worse in the years to come.

Researchers find that 300,000 U.S. homes and commercial properties collectively valued at $136 billion, in today's dollars, are at risk of chronic disruptive flooding in the next 30 years, the duration of a mortgage; and by the end of the 21st century, nearly 2.5 million U.S. homes and commercial properties, collectively valued at over $1 trillion, will be at risk of chronic flooding. Indeed, the chief economist of Freddie Mac has predicted what he called a ``coastal property values crash.''

Sea level rise is not the only climate impact threatening homes across the country. We see it in all kinds of natural calamities. I have shown this chart on the floor before. It tracks billion-dollar climate disasters in the United States between 1980 and now. These include floods, wildfires, cyclones, and drought. As you can see, the events and the costs are increasing.

And it is not just homes directly impacted by climate disaster that face declines in property values. Following a weather disaster, housing values decline substantially across entire impacted ZIP Codes, in part because of the market's expectation of future disasters in that area.

Last week, I explained that the same forces driving home insurance costs up are driving down home values. That is because climate losses hit insurers first, and insurers then raise their costs; and those costs ultimately affect the home's value.

This chart shows that insurance costs are increasing the most in areas facing the highest climate risk, which is only logical.

Unfortunately, for the parts of the country most exposed to climate change, insurance premiums are going to continue to climb. This chart shows the county-level forecast for homeowners insurance premiums over the next 30 years. As you can see, all along the gulf coast, through Florida and out through the Intermountain West, where fires are such an issue, premiums are expected to double or triple or even quadruple. The darkest areas here are the highest increase, but everywhere is heading up.

And it gets worse. Rising premiums depress home values, as the carrying cost of owning that home increases. If you have to pay, as in Florida, on average, $14,000 every year for home insurance and that doubles or triples, and now you have a $30,000 or $40,000 annual burden--a check you have to pay to keep that home--that is going to drive down the cost of the home because the next buyer is going to be looking at that cost burden.

So rising premiums are one key risk to home property values, but insurance unavailability is just as big. More and more often, in the areas of highest climate risk, insurance companies are refusing to insure homes at all.

This chart tracks home insurance nonrenewal rates. That is when your insurance company--that you have been a good customer of for years and years and years--suddenly sends a notice into your mail slot saying: Sorry, you are all done. Your property is too dangerous. We are not going to insure it any longer. You will have to look elsewhere.

This was based on work we did last Congress in the Budget Committee, and the nonrenewal rates are the highest in areas with high climate risk. Again, it seems obvious, but the data tracks that the greater the climate risk, the more the insurance industry is backing away from uninsurable risks. Obviously, coastal Florida and wildfire-prone western areas are in greatest danger.

This problem is a disaster for homeowners because lenders won't approve a mortgage unless the borrower also purchases insurance. An uninsurable home is an unmortgageable home, and an unmortgageable home is, in most places, an unsellable home. At the individual level, homeowner by homeowner, this can wipe out a family's primary source of wealth. One day your home had one value. The notice of nonrenewal comes, you can't get insurance, and your own home's value drops precipitously, wiping out your primary source of wealth, endangering retirements, endangering your children's future.

And as climate disasters keep getting worse, so will this. Researchers predict that U.S. residential property will lose nearly $1.5 trillion in value over the next 30 years due to increasingly expensive and unavailable insurance. Just recently, Moody's Analytics came to a similar conclusion. And, sure enough, the places that will see the biggest declines in value are the places most exposed to climate risk: the Southeast and gulf coast, and the West and Plains, which are exposed to wildfire and hail risks.

Indeed, in Florida, property values have already started to decline. It has been reported that Florida is the No. 1 State in the country for lost property value, which is the natural endpoint of the cascade from climate risk to insurance collapse, to mortgage market collapse, to property values collapse. And there in Florida, you see it beginning to happen.

Here is the bad news. At the end of the day, the pressure from the insurance market on home values--this is the place where home values are likely to decline because of climate change.

There has always been a basic truth in America that, with time, over the course of the mortgage, your property is going to go up in value. But in a world burdened by this level of climate risk, that is no longer the case. Now, we are looking at areas where it is predicted that home values may decline. In some cases, the decline is targeted at 100 percent.

What is 100 percent decline in home value? That means it ain't worth nothing anymore; you have lost all the value in your home. And, obviously, it is concentrated in the highest risk areas, but the risk is continuing to grow.

We know what happened the last time, when there was a widespread decline in property values: The economy spiraled into the great recession. It cost millions of people in the United States their jobs, their homes, their savings. It would be folly to repeat 2008 all over again. The warnings are many, and they are real, and they come from leading voices in the financial sector--not environmentalists--people who track financial markets.

So let's agree on the simple truth that climate change portends significant declines in American home values in climate-exposed regions of the United States.

Res. 555; further, that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, may I just say that some of the projections that my colleague objects to go back to the Chafee hearings of 40 years ago. These are predictions that are the product of NASA scientists.

NASA is pretty good at stuff. We have vehicles rolling around on Mars thanks to NASA science. Their predictions are pretty good about where things are going to go.

When the 2008 mortgage meltdown happened, there were two guys--one named Burry and one named Burt--who predicted. They got it right. Had we listened to those predictions, we could have saved ourselves a lot of pain.

By the way, both of them are predicting a climate-related insurance collapse affecting property values, as we have said. And, indeed, if you look at some of the companies most responsible for this mess, their own scientists predicted exactly what we have seen.

We can test those predictions from 30, 40 years ago by measuring what has happened since, and what happened since confirms the predictions that Exxon scientists knew about, American Petroleum Institute scientists knew about, Chevron scientists knew about.

Their problem was that when they told their senior management, the senior management said: No. No. No. Let's not talk about that. Let's cover that up, and let's start actually misleading the public about it.

The folks who came into the Budget Committee to testify about this are people like the former risk management chief for Goldman Sachs, the chief economist--former chief economist for Freddie Mac, the mortgage giant.

We had reports from the international Financial Stability Board about the danger to global banking markets. The Mortgage Bankers Association expressed their concern about this problem. An Allianz board member has written a very compelling article about what the collapse of the insurance market looks like as it continues. The American president of Aon, a huge insurance giant testified about this risk. Mark Carney, who was the president of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada before that and is now Prime Minister of Canada, testified about this.

So some predictions are worth paying attention to, either because they have a track record over decades of proving themselves out or because the people really seem to know what they are talking about. And I would urge that we pay more attention to these predictions.

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