Marketplace: Climate change is taking money from Americans now

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Every financial advisor who ever lived knows all too well that humans are wired to say “Don’t bug me about preparing for tomorrow when getting through today is hard enough.”

You see that in the policy debate in this election year, which is not focused on the climate change of tomorrow but the affordability issues of today. A recent trip to DC was a reminder for me: Climate change is not just the Maldives Islands flooded by the Indian Ocean in 2100; climate change is clobbering household budgets right now in the 2020s.

I was in town to moderate a panel discussion outside a museum on the Washington Mall. The Museum of Unnatural Disasters is a pop-up exhibit, an aluminum and glass enclosure that transforms a bit of disaster tourism to prompt serious consideration of the policies that make these disasters more common and more intense.

The museum is a production of the Climate Action Campaign, a coalition of environmental and public health groups including the non-partisan Center of American Progress, the Sierra Club and the Union of Concern Scientists.

Unhappily, what should be my town in California is referenced in one display. On a sprawling map of expensive disasters in the U.S. in recent years is poor old Altadena. We lost our house to the 2025 firestorm there. What does that Southern California tragedy have to do with climate change? Dried-out plant mass made those fires burn hotter and longer, and UCLA researchers attribute 25% of that dryness to climate change, driven by human activity.

Among my panelists for the event at the museum was Sam Strgacich, who used to live a few miles from me before his smoke-contaminated house was left uninhabitable. He told us how he and his wife had done everything in their power before the fire to be financially secure, owning a home and insisting that property was well-insured. But more than a year and a half later Sam’s still fighting with his insurance company about money to clean up his old house so he can sell it. In the meantime, he’s struggling to pay for two properties, the smoked-out house and the place he has to live in now. Adding to the financial risks, Sam said he was turned down for fire insurance on the new place only because his claim with another insurance company on the smoked out house is still open. Sam’s gone from financial security to precarity despite his preparations.

Panelist Rosanne Kiely owns a grocery store in Asheville, North Carolina, which suffered in the long power outage that followed Hurricane Helene and the ensuing flood in 2024. West Village Market is what should have been a safe distance from potential flooding, two miles from the nearest river and 6 hours from the nearest ocean. It wasn’t the waters that got her, it was the spoilage to all her refrigerated inventory. Rosanne said she was pleased she could help with free food donations, but that storm ate into her bottom line almost as if she was paying some sort of massive “disaster tax.”

We also had a new college graduate, Carolina Gutfreund in from Tampa, whose monthly household budget is burdened by its own variety of climate surcharge. Carolina explained that she has Type-1 diabetes, an incurable, autoimmune condition. Her insulin supply goes bad above 72 degrees, meaning storm-driven power outages can be life-threatening. Her expensive safety strategy works this way: When forecasts show even the possibility of a big storm, she drives five hours home to Miami to keep out of potential destruction. If the storm turns that way, her family has paid to install a battery back-up system to keep power on for insulin refrigeration.

This is not speculation about a future climate dystopia. It is the way Carolina lives now: frequent 560 mile round trips to safety at the hint of dangerous weather.

All this reminded me of a warning to Congress last year from then-Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. He said there are already areas where banks and insurance companies are pulling out of areas prone to flooding and fire. Powell predicted a time when there are “regions of the country where you can’t get a mortgage.” Turning off access to mortgages would be one a dramatic and dire affordability issue, if there ever was one.