Members of Nevada Senate candidate’s family endorse opponent
Gabe Stern – October 12, 2022
RENO, Nev. (AP) — Less than a month before Election Day, 14 members of Nevada Republican Senate candidate Adam Laxalt’s family sent a letter endorsing his opponent, Democratic U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.
“We staunchly believe that Catherine is well equipped with her own ‘Nevada grit’ — a quality that she will take forward in representation of our home state for six more years across the halls of Congress,” the letter states.
Instead, it talks of Cortez Masto’s understanding of “the daily realities of dogged hard work” and mentions her experience in public education as well as her commitment to law enforcement.
The family members also wrote that Cortez Masto’s career demonstrates she is “an authentic advocate of Nevada.”
It marks the second time that some of Laxalt’s family has endorsed his opponent. During his unsuccessful gubernatorial run in 2018, a dozen family members endorsed Democrat Steve Sisolak in an op-ed to the Reno Gazette-Journal. That letter more explicitly criticized Laxalt, saying he “leveraged and exploited” the family name throughout his campaign.
That letter prompted 22 of his family members to send another op-ed, defending Laxalt and calling the other letter “vicious and entirely baseless.”
The grandson of former U.S. Sen. and Nevada Gov. Paul Laxalt and the son of former Sen. Pete Domenici, R-New Mexico, Laxalt is seen by many as the best opportunity for Republicans to pick up a seat that could give them the majority in the Senate.
In a tweet on Wednesday afternoon, Laxalt said it is “not surprising” that family members, most of whom he said are Democrats, are supporting Cortez Masto.
“They think that Nevada & our country are heading in the right direction. I believe Nevadans don’t agree,” he said.
The Laxalt family joins a growing list of endorsers from across the aisle, Cortez Masto spokesperson Sigalle Reshef said in a statement, citing law enforcement organizations and rural lawmakers who have endorsed the Democratic candidate.
Stern is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
The newspaper’s editorial board broke down exactly why it believes Johnson is “the worst Wisconsin political representative since the infamous Sen. Joseph McCarthy.”
It ripped the Donald Trump loyalist, who is facing a reported tight race against Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, as “an election falsifier who recklessly promoted” Trump’s 2020 lies and a “science fabulist” who baselessly questioned COVID-19 vaccines and spread pandemic misinformation. Johnson was also slammed for trying to rewrite “the sordid history” of the deadly U.S. Capitol riot.
“You’ll notice Johnson is not touting a long record of accomplishments in his ads for re-election,” the board wrote. “Instead, he and his supporters have attacked his opponent — a Black man — as ‘different’ and ‘dangerous.’”
Johnson was first elected to the Senate in 2010.
“Johnson in the past promised to serve no more than two terms,” the board concluded. “Voters should hold him to that pledge in November.”
Spanish Vineyards Use Solar Panels to Protect Wine Grapes
By Paige Bennett, Edited by Irma Omerhodzic – October 12, 2022
As global wineries are hit with impacts of climate change, a new project called Winesolar in Spain is innovating ways for vineyards to protect their grapes while also generating clean energy.
Iberdrola, an energy company based in Bilbao, Spain, has created a shelter for growing wine grapes at vineyards in Guadamur. The shelter is made with a few solar panels that generate about 40 kW of energy, which will be used by the González Byass and Grupo Emperador wineries. The solar panel shelter creates a microclimate by shading or exposing plants from the sun and offering some relief from high temperatures while also minimizing evaporation after watering crops.
While combining solar energy and agricultural land is not new, one component that makes the Winesolar project stand out is that it will have a tracking system, with trackers from PVH, that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to determine the most efficient solar panel positioning over the vines at any time, according to Iberdrola. Techedge, an IT firm, will help the solar panel project further the wineries’ agricultural goals.
Sensors in the vineyards will record data including soil humidity, wind conditions, solar radiation, and even vine thickness to find the optimal position for the solar panels, giving the vines a fighting chance against the effects of climate change.
“The installation will help to improve the quality of the grapes, allow a more efficient use of the land, reduce the consumption of irrigation water and improve the crop’s resistance to climatic conditions in the face of rising temperatures and increasingly frequent heat waves,” Iberdrola explained in a statement.
While the project is a small pilot, Iberdrola has plans to expand the idea into other Spanish vineyards, in addition to adding another 1,500 megawatts of solar panels across Spain. The company has installed 2,200 MW so far in 2022 and installed 800 MW last year, as CleanTechnica reported.
The project is an example of growing interest in agrovoltaics, or a balance between photovoltaic energy and agriculture through the installation of solar panels on farms. Agrovoltaic projects are meant to improve sustainability and make farming more efficient. While it isn’t a new concept — it was first conceived in the early 1980s — it has become increasingly popular in recent years for its potential environmental and economical benefits.
“When it comes to the environment, the main benefit of agrovoltaics is that it reduces greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector,” Iberdrola said on its website. “What’s more, the dual use of land for both agriculture and for energy relieves pressure on ecosystems and biodiversity, which are affected when cultivation areas are expanded.”
Former Trump employee tells FBI Trump ordered Mar-a-Lago boxes to be moved -report
Sarah N. Lynch and Kanishka Singh – October 12, 2022
Trump holds rally in Nevada
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A former employee of Donald Trump has told federal agents the former president asked for boxes of records to be moved within his Florida residence after receiving a government subpoena demanding their return, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
The testimony of the key witness, coupled with surveillance footage the Justice Department also obtained, represent some of the strongest known evidence to date of possible obstruction of justice by the former Republican president.
The FBI conducted a court-approved search on Aug. 8 at Trump’s home at the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, seizing more than 11,000 documents including about 100 marked as classified.
The employee who was working at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida was cooperating with the Justice Department and has been interviewed multiple times by federal agents, the newspaper reported, citing people familiar with the situation. The witness initially denied handling sensitive documents and in subsequent conversations with agents admitted to moving boxes at Trump’s request, the newspaper reported.
The Justice Department declined to comment.
A Trump spokesperson said the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden had “weaponized law enforcement.”
“Every other President has been given time and deference regarding the administration of documents, as the President has the ultimate authority to categorize records, and what materials should be classified,” Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich told the newspaper.
Budowich accused the Justice Department of leaking “misleading and false information” to the media.
The document investigation is one of several legal woes Trump is facing as he considers whether to run again for president in 2024.
New York state’s attorney general recently filed a civil lawsuit accusing Trump and three of his adult children of fraud and misrepresentation in preparing financial statements from the family real estate company.
The Trump Organization also is set to go on trial on Oct. 24 on New York state criminal tax fraud charges.
Separately in Georgia, a grand jury in the Fulton County is probing efforts by Trump to overturn the former president’s 2020 election defeat.
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch and Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Lincoln Feast)
‘Everything has collapsed’: Russia’s draft tanks small businesses
October 12, 2022
In his brand new co-working space in Chelyabinsk, a city in central Russia, entrepreneur Maxim Novikov is counting the empty seats.
The space is usually overflowing with designers, programmers and young Russians working on their start-ups.
But since President Vladimir Putin announced a mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of young Russian men last month, the 33-year-old has lost much of his clientele.
“Many have stopped coming,” he told AFP by phone.
Instead, they are filling the depleted ranks of Russia’s army or they are among the tens of thousands of others who have fled south for neighboring Kazakhstan.
The Kremlin’s mobilisation has brought uncertainty and chaos to businesses already hard-hit by sanctions and still recovering from the fallout of the pandemic.
In the last three weeks, a little more than half of the 77 spots in Novikov’s co-working place were occupied.
He has “no idea” if the people who fled or were drafted will keep paying subscription fees, which cost between 70 and 130 dollars.
And now Novikov is worried about his loans.
“Turnover has already dropped by more than 40 percent this year,” Novikov, an architecture graduate, said.
“I wanted to buy a third space but for the moment it is not possible to take the risk.”
– ‘Projects on hold’ –
But he is far from the only business owner in Russia who is growing more nervous over the workforce vacuum.
“It means projects are being put on hold and private companies will be afraid to invest,” said Natalia Zubarevich, an economist at Moscow State University.
Russia’s economy has already been battered this year by unprecedented Western sanctions in response to Putin’s decision to send troops to Ukraine on February 24.
But Zubarevich said mobilisation was an “additional aggravating factor.”
She added she was not surprised young men from the provinces were joining the army, attracted by monthly payouts that are sometimes almost as much as their annual salaries.
Meanwhile, in glitzy central Moscow, 45-year-old Yelena Irisova is distraught at seeing her company, which produces luxury leather bags, stop production.
She employs around ten people in the small business.
But two of her craftsmen left the company in recent weeks — one fearing mobilisation, another to help her daughter whose husband had been sent to the front.
“After September 21, everything collapsed,” Irisova said. “Our sales fell threefold — from 10 to three orders a day.”
She says her savings will keep her going “a month or two, but not more.”
– Almost no orders –
No Russian business seems unscathed.
Katerina Iberika, 39, who owns a pastry shop specialising in birthday cakes in Moscow, is also facing ruin.
Her five employees are women with exemptions from mobilisation. But it’s the low morale among the public that’s endangering her business.
“Cancellations of orders for big events started two days before mobilisation,” Iberika told AFP.
Now she gets nearly no orders at all, except for “very small” ones.
She is considering leaving Russia.
In increased isolation — and hit by sanctions and mobilisation — an anxious Russian society is watching its spending closely.
“People are looking to put their money aside,” Sofya Donets, chief economist for Russia at Renaissance Capital, said.
“They’re not going to overspend.”
Some industries have been harder hit than others by a sudden lack of men.
Employers have sounded the alarm in recent days, asking the government for exemptions from mobilisation, in particular for small and medium-sized companies.
Russia’s economic development ministry told AFP that it had drawn up a list of measures for these “problematic issues”.
It said it had facilitated grants and micro credits.
“A mobilised entrepreneur will be able to suspend the fulfilment of obligations” to pay the loans back, the ministry said.
Analyst Sofya Donets expects “more intervention and state aid” to calm the effects of mobilisation.
Especially since Russian coffers continue to fill up thanks to its energy exports.
Climate change is causing more billion-dollar weather disasters
David Knowles, Senior Editor – October 12, 2022
When Hurricane Ian barreled into Florida’s Gulf Coast last month, it became the 15th extreme weather event in the U.S. this year to rack up damages totaling more than $1 billion. Climate change, data shows, is helping to make expensive disasters much more frequent in recent years.
“In the last five years [2017-2021], there were just 18 days on average between billion-dollar disasters—compared to 82 days in the 1980s,” Climate Central, a consortium of scientists and journalists, found in a new analysis posted to its website.
This year’s extreme weather disasters in the U.S. have resulted in over 340 deaths, the NOAA said, and the financial toll is still being tallied. The insurance losses alone from Hurricane Ian are projected to cost between $53 billion and $74 billion, according to an estimate by RMS, a risk modeling company. In addition to that staggering sum, the National Flood Insurance Program could face an extra $10 billion in losses, Insurance Business America reported.
“The number and cost of weather and climate disasters are increasing in the United States due to a combination of increased exposure (i.e., more assets at risk), vulnerability (i.e., how much damage a hazard of given intensity — wind speed or flood depth, for example — causes at a location), and climate change is also supercharging the increasing frequency and intensity of certain types of extreme weather that lead to billion-dollar disasters — most notably the rise in vulnerability to drought, lengthening wildfire seasons in the western states, and the potential for extremely heavy rainfall becoming more common in the eastern states,” Adam Smith, a climatologist at the National Centers for Environmental Information and a lead analyst on the NOAA’s findings on $1 billion disasters, told Yahoo news in an email. “Sea level rise is worsening hurricane storm surge flooding.”
While climate change is not the sole cause of events like hurricanes, drought, rainfall or wildfires, ample scientific research has shown that rising global temperatures are amplifying all of them, making each potentially more destructive.
Workers clearing debris in Fort Myers, Fla., in the wake of Hurricane Ian, Oct. 1. (Giorgio Viera/AFP)
“The year-to-date average temperature for the contiguous U.S. was 56.8 degrees F — 1.7 degrees above average — ranking in the warmest third of the YTD record. California and Florida saw their third- and fourth-warmest January-through-September periods on record, respectively,” the NOAA stated on its website.
Across the West, nearly 1,000 heat records were broken in early September, the NOAA said, a month that will go down as the fifth-warmest on record. In all, the last seven years have been the warmest on record, according to data from NASA, the NOAA and Berkeley Earth.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has for years been sounding the alarm about the risks related to global temperature rise and tried to convince world governments to agree to limit greenhouse gas emissions so as to keep average temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.
In its most recent report, which was issued in February, the IPCC reiterated that the planet could expect an increase in the kinds of severe weather consequences seen in recent years that have been liked to climate change.
“This report is a dire warning about the consequences of inaction,” Hoesung Lee, chair of the IPCC, said in a statement that accompanied the release of the report. “It shows that climate change is a grave and mounting threat to our well-being and a healthy planet. Our actions today will shape how people adapt and nature responds to increasing climate risks.”
Hurricane Ian exposed a flood insurance nightmare for homeowners in Florida
Phil McCausland – October 11, 2022
Hurricane Ian’s storm surge brought numerous feet of water into homes on Florida’s west coast, and left behind mold, muck, mud and a flood insurance nightmare for residents who want to rebuild.
Many Floridians who suffered extensive flooding did not carry a separate flood insurance policy to cover the damage caused by the deadly storm. It’s left homeowners — and even renters — with a hefty and, possibly, life-changing expense that could decide whether they are rendered homeless.
Susan Cavanaugh and her two kids are living through that ordeal after the first floor of their home on Sanibel Island, where all three live and work, was engulfed by the storm surge. While going through a costly divorce earlier this year, Cavanaugh’s flood insurance coverage lapsed.
Now she doesn’t know how to get her family back into their home without an insurance check to pay for contractors and building materials.
“I can only do so much as a single mom,” said Cavanaugh, who is staying in a motel and is unsure where to live next. “We just want to go back to the house. It’s been deemed structurally sound, but we have to get it back online and it’s not just a cosmetic issue. It’s going to take blood, sweat and tears and it’s going to take a lot of muscle and a lot of work to get there.”
Image: Resident Pamela Brislin who has lived on Sanibel Island since 2020 cleans up the damage from Hurricane Ian, on Oct. 6, 2022, in Sanibel Island, Fla. (Scott Smith / AP)
Sanibel Island last month suffered a direct hit from the Category 4 storm and the surge of water, up to 15 feet in some places, it brought from the gulf into people’s homes. The community remains inaccessible by car, forcing many to pay boat captains to ferry them to begin the cleanup.
Cavanaugh is not alone in facing flood damage without the backing of insurance coverage. Many people in the small coastal community, which faces the Gulf of Mexico southwest of Fort Myers, did not have flood insurance coverage.
What’s more, Sanibel Island is a microcosm of a greater insurance challenge facing Florida and the country.
Only about 18.5% of homes in Florida counties that faced a mandatory or voluntary evacuation order the evening before Hurricane Ian landed had a flood insurance policy with the National Flood Insurance Program, the federal government program administered by FEMA, according to an analysis conducted by the risk management consulting firm Milliman. Even in designated flood hazard zones within those counties, fewer than half of the homes had a policy on file.
It appears that, despite an increased occurrence of devastating flood events, a declining percentage of people nationwide have flood insurance policies. The number of policies maintained by the National Flood Insurance Program has declined by nearly 700,000 since 2008, according to data acquired from the federal agency.
“There are many factors that influence this drop in policyholders, including the economic impact of the pandemic, the housing market, affordability, or purchasing flood insurance from the private market,” David Maurstad, the senior executive of the National Flood Insurance Program, said in a statement.
Image: A U.S. Coast Guard helicopter takes off, seen from inside a home damaged by Hurricane Ian on Sanibel Island, Fla., on Sept. 30, 2022. (Steve Helber / AP filw)
He said that FEMA “continues to market the flood insurance product throughout the country” in an effort “to increase the number of properties covered by flood insurance.” Currently about 5 million policies are under the National Flood Insurance Program, which was created in the 1960s because the private insurance market increasingly declined to cover flood events.
It’s an expensive undertaking for the federal government. Since 2008, the program has paid out $40.1 billion to slightly more than 910,000 claims, according to FEMA’s data, and the agency still owes about $20 billion to the U.S. Treasury after borrowing funds to pay out many of those claims.
With climate change leading to more dangerous storms and expanding the risk of flooding, the U.S. and its coastal communities are beginning to suffer the pitfalls of building in flood-prone areas.
“The risk is there as weather losses are on the rise,” said Lynne McChristian, the director of the Office of Risk Management & Insurance Research at the University of Illinois, “and those exposures are growing because we’re building more expensive things in the most vulnerable areas.”
That has become a growing challenge for FEMA, as it often provides aid to communities prone to flooding. It has hoped that more people in these areas would sign up for insurance — especially those in flood-prone areas. FEMA guidelines have gone so far as to refuse aid to those who have received funds from the federal agency for flooding in the past if they have not picked up flood insurance coverage in the meantime.
“I think anybody who lives near water should certainly purchase flood insurance because it’s your No. 1 tool to help protect your family and your home after the storm,” FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell told CNN last week.
Image: Damaged vehicles and debris are seen on Sanibel Island, Fla., during Hurricane Ian. (Chuck Larsen / SantivaChronicle.com via AP)
One significant issue is that many homeowners assume a typical homeowner’s insurance policy covers floods. Florida law requires insurers to inform their clients about the coverage gap, but many Floridians expressed surprise to find their policy did not cover flooding.
One Florida requirement is that each policy at issuance and renewal must include in at least 18-point bold font four sentences warning that a separate flood policy is necessary. “Your homeowner’s insurance policy does not include coverage for damage resulting from a flood even if hurricane winds and rain caused the flood to occur,” the warning text states.
“I think people might read them less now because it’s all electronic,” McChristian said of the policies and the warnings. “Regulators in several states have tried to do it, but it’s not moving the needle.”
Affordability also remains an essential reason many gave for forgoing flood insurance. The average cost of flood insurance from the National Flood Insurance Program is $995 a year, according to Forbes Advisor analysis. That number can fluctuate depending on the location and floodwater risk the home faces, and it is an additional cost on top of other homeowner policies. That can make it unaffordable or, at the very least, a burden.
Although mortgage companies often require coverage upon purchase of a home in areas prone to flooding, some allow their coverage to lapse as costs have gone up. Others, who own their homes outright, no longer have to maintain that coverage.
Leslie Weyhrich said that she and her husband decided to cut back on insurance coverage for their second home on Sanibel Island in May after 15 years of holding a policy. Each year the price grew astronomically and they knew they would be facing another massive cost for a needed roof repair. Now they will be stuck footing the bill for much of the damage themselves.
“It went up significantly, maybe about five or six years ago,” said Weyhrich. “But every year that bill came due, we discussed whether it was worth it or not because the deductibles were so high, it didn’t cover as much as it used to and it just made less fiscal sense.”
But decisions like these could prove existential for many on the island and for communities across Florida, and it is an issue that is unlikely to be sorted in the near term and could lead to litigation.
“Half the people I’ve talked to on this island are uninsured for flooding and that is absolutely terrifying,” said Chuck Bergstrom, a realtor on Sanibel Island who stayed in his home through the storm. “And whether you have it or not, these insurance companies aren’t here to help these folks right now. They’ll negotiate as hard as they can.”
Those who have flood coverage are also gearing up for their own insurance nightmare as they debate with their carriers whether a home’s damage was caused by floodwaters or the hurricane’s wind.
The separate policies means companies on both sides are likely to have a drawn-out battle that could become litigious.
“The lawyers are going to have a field day with this,” Bergstrom added. “I mean, who pays for what exactly?”
Ian Urbina, Outlaw Ocean Project, Contributor – October 10, 2022
Cambodian migrant workers on a Thai fishing ship wait during an inspection. (Fábio Nascimento/The Outlaw Ocean Project, Thailand)
While forced labor still exists throughout the world, one place where it’s especially pervasive is the South China Sea — especially in the Thai fishing fleet, according to a 2016 investigation by the New York Times. Partly this is because in a typical year, Thailand’s fishing industry is short about fifty thousand mariners, according to the U.N. in 2014. As a result, tens of thousands of migrants from Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar are whisked into Thailand each year to make up this chronic shortfall. Then, unscrupulous captains buy and sell the men and boys like chattel.
With fewer fish close to shore, maritime labor researchers predict that more boats will resort to venturing farther out to sea, making the mistreatment of migrants more likely. The work aboard the fishing boats is brutal. And in this bloated, inefficient and barely profitable national fleet at a time of rising fuel prices, captains require crew members to simply do what they are told, and have little patience for complaints, no matter how long the hours, how little the food, or how paltry the pay. In short, these captains rely on sea slaves.
The Outlaw Ocean Project, a nonprofit journalism organization based in Washington, D.C., got onboard a Thai distant-water vessel that uses enslaved labor. There, three dozen Cambodian boys and men worked barefoot all day and into the night on the deck of a purse seiner fishing ship.
The third episode of the podcast series “The Outlaw Ocean,” from CBC Podcasts and the L.A. Times, tells the harrowing stories of sea slavery.
Rain or shine, shifts were between 18 and 20 hours long. At night, the crew members cast their nets when the small silver fish they target — mostly jack mackerel and herring — are more reflective and easier to spot in darker waters. During the day, when the sun is high, temperatures topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit, but the crew members worked nonstop. Drinking water was tightly rationed. If they were not fishing, the workers sorted their catch and mended their nets, which are prone to ripping.
One boy, his shirt smudged with fish guts, proudly showed off his missing two fingers, severed by a net that had coiled around a spinning crank. Cre members’ hands, which virtually never fully dried, had open wounds, slit from fish scales and torn from the nets’ friction. Infections areconstant. Captains never lack amphetamines to help the crews work longer, but they rarely stock antibiotics for infected wounds.
A Cambodian worker on a Thai fishing ship. (Fábio Nascimento/The Outlaw Ocean Project, Thailand)
On boats like these, deckhands areoften beaten for small transgressions, like fixing a torn net too slowly or mistakenly placing a mackerel into a bucket of sablefish. Dispatched into the unknown, they are beyond where society could help them, usually on so-called ghost ships — unregistered vessels that the Thai government has no ability to track. Deckhandstypically do not speak the language of their Thai captains, do not know how to swim, and, being from inland villages, sometimes have never seen the sea before.
Virtually all of the crew has a debt to clear, part of their indentured servitude, a “travel now, pay later” labor system that requires working to pay off the money they often had to borrow to sneak illegally into a new country. The debt just becomes more elusive once they leave land.
There is a modern assumption, especially in the West, that we got rid of slavery. But debt bondage is still very much present. The Cambodian boys and men who are held captive are killed if they try to escape. This is what modern-day slavery looks like. Until we modernize our understanding of that, we won’t know how to identify it, much less do anything about it.
(Ian Urbina is the director of the Outlaw Ocean Project, a nonprofit journalism organization based in Washington, D.C., that focuses on environmental and human rights concerns at sea globally)
Hurricane Ian traumatized Floridians. It also erased their nest eggs.
Zack Colman and Katy O’Donnell – October 10, 2022
Rebecca Blackwell/AP Photo
Hurricane Ian has displaced thousands of Floridians’ whose homes are now uninhabitable. The storm took their safety nets with it, too.
As Florida tallies the immediate tab from its deadliest hurricane in decades, the destruction it wreaked on homes will erase retirees’ nest eggs and families’ primary way of passing along wealth to new generations. That exposed the dangers of American dependence on housing as most people’s financial backstop and lifeline.
“The impacts of Hurricane Ian have stretched far and wide, especially to Southwest Florida seniors who’ve invested most of their livelihoods in properties across my district,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), who represents Lee County, said in an emailed statement. “In addition to the tremendous economic pressures induced by soaring inflation, this storm contributes additional pain to many on fixed incomes.”
As climate change makes natural disasters more frequent and severe — and threatens the viability of living in much of the country — Ian offered new evidence that Americans’ retirement funds and assets are in jeopardy in vulnerable areas.
“This is an enormous wealth shock,” said Benjamin Keys, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, who has researched the effects of climate-driven sea-level rise on Florida’s housing market.
It’s a problem with no easy policy solutions.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency, which regulates the government-controlled companies behind about half of the $12 trillion residential mortgage market, has begun assessing the risks that climate change poses to the mortgage and housing market. But it has historically allowed the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s flood insurance program to take the lead in protecting borrowers against flood damage — though independent analyses show that FEMA’s flood maps underestimate how many homes face flood danger.
Home ownership is the primary way most Americans build wealth. For decades, federal policy has placed a priority on making more Americans homeowners, seeing it as the clearest way to achieve long-lasting financial security and generational prosperity. But climate change is jeopardizing all that.
The risks Ian revealed are most pressing for retirees. People over 65 years old make up 29 percent of the population in Lee County, Fla. — ground zero for Ian damage — according to Census data. Among midsize cities, business research firm AdvisorSmith foundthat the Lee County communities of Cape Coral and Fort Myers experienced the sixth- and seventh-greatest increases nationally in the numbers of people older than 65 years in 2019. Those populations have grown even more since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
Many of the Fort Myers and Cape Coral neighborhoods that Ian battered are middle-income, blue-collar areas, not at all like the multimillion-dollar mansions just down the coast in Naples, said Dave Stevens, a former CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association and Federal Housing Administration commissioner. They’re also hotbeds for retirees who had “their life savings wrapped up in real estate” and now live on a fixed income, he added.
“It’s an important asset — obviously not one that’s replaceable, unless you’re part of the wealthy class,” said Stevens, who is now CEO of consulting firm Mountain Lake Consulting.
Retirees whose homes were destroyed also lost an important part of their wealth planning, said Jesse Keenan, professor of sustainable real estate at Tulane University’s School of Architecture. The market for reverse mortgages, which allow a person with a fully paid-off home to borrow against the house in exchange for cash, is “very strong” in Cape Coral, he said. But without that real estate asset, there’s no way to tap into that equity for everyday living.
If these people already had a reverse mortgage, they’re likely using those funds to make repairs now — especially if they were uninsured, Keenan added.
Climate science studies have shown that warmer temperatures are causing hurricanes to accelerate and grow stronger whenever they do form. Early analyses of Ian showed that human-driven climate change probably made the hurricane drop 10 percent more rainfall compared with a world without warming. That tracks with other recent hurricanes such as Harvey in 2017, which devastated the Houston area with more than 51 inches of rain when it stalled over the city for three days.
Climate and natural disaster risk-modeling firm RMS estimated that Ian inflicted between $53 billion and $74 billion in private market insured losses, with a best estimate of $67 billion. That would make Ian the second-costliest hurricane in U.S. history, slotting behind Hurricane Katrina’s nearly $90 billion in insured losses in 2021 dollars, according to the Insurance Information Institute.
Ian will result in anywhere from $30 billion to $42 billion of insured damage from wind alone, without accounting for flooding damage, according to an estimate from CoreLogic, a property data and analytics company.
Homes with federally backed mortgages in the 100-year floodplain are required to carry flood insurance, but that covers only up to $250,000. In contrast, the average mortgage borrower in the area covering Cape Coral and Fort Myers has $316,499 of equity in their homes, according to CoreLogic.
Boosting flood insurance would buttress homeowners against severe losses. But many homeowners fail to keep current with legal requirements to purchase that protection — a subject that’s been part of congressional inquiries and Government Accountability Office reports. And FEMA, despite administering the federal flood insurance program, maintains it does not have the ability to enforce those requirements.
Homes that are fully paid off don’t require flood insurance, with many choosing to forgo it. And even homes outside the 100-year floodplain, where this insurance is not required, incur flood damage. In Lee County, federal flood insurance uptake was far higher than the national average, but still reached only 30 percent of households, according to FEMA data.
“Issues related to flood insurance are convoluted and frustrating, and Hurricane Ian has brought these matters to the forefront, which the State will likely address soon,” Donalds said in his emailed statement.
Even people who have insurance must spend up to their deductibles before their claims are covered, which can be difficult for retirees on fixed incomes.
“For retirees it’s a double whammy, because many fixed-income retirees buy their homes with cash, and even if they’re in the flood zone they don’t have coverage because the [National Flood Insurance Program] enforces through mortgages,” said Tom Larsen, associate vice president for hazard and risk management at CoreLogic.
“Flood damage can go from zero to a very high number very rapidly,” he said.
Fort Myers is far from the only place where personal safety nets and inheritances are under siege.
Rising temperatures in cities such as Orlando and Phoenix could start to lower the value of real estate and the ability of Americans to depend on their homes as a safety net.
Investment research firm RisQ, real estate company Climate Core Capital and the Harvard Graduate School of Design explored how quickly some of the nation’s most desirable real estate markets would heat up beyond the point of tolerable human living in what they called a “Death Valley Index.” They measured how soon certain areas’ climates would mimic the historical climate of Death Valley, the site of the hottest-ever temperature on record, where between 1981 and 2010 daily temperatures hit 95 degrees Fahrenheit across 161 days on average every year.
The exercise concluded that Miami and Houston will achieve that mark by 2026 when high temperatures and humidity are taken into account. Austin would reach it by 2027, Tampa by 2029 and Phoenix by 2038. Orlando already has.
That climate would bring health risks from being outdoors even for a few hours, raising questions of how desirable those locations will be in the future, said Owen Woolcock, a partner at Climate Core Capital. People who purchased homes in those areas — many of which are retiree havens — could be left with properties worth less than what they were purchased for, Woolcock said.
“People need to think about climate change as a wealth destruction event,” he said. “It is going to make these enormous incisions in net worth at the household level and in the regional or local economy level.”
Another Challenge to New York’s Gun Law: Sheriffs Who Won’t Enforce It
Jesse McKinley and Cole Louison – October 9, 2022
Sheriff Robert Milby in his office in Lyons, N.Y., Sept. 15, 2022. (Lauren Petracca/The New York Times)
LYONS, N.Y. — Robert Milby, Wayne County’s new sheriff, has been in law enforcement most of his adult life, earning praise and promotions for conscientious service. But recently, Milby has attracted attention for a different approach to the law: ignoring it.
Milby is among at least a half-dozen sheriffs in upstate New York who have said they have no intention of aggressively enforcing gun regulations that state lawmakers passed last summer, forbidding concealed weapons in so-called sensitive areas — a long list of public spaces including, but not limited to, government buildings and religious centers, health facilities and homeless shelters, schools and subways, stadiums and state parks, and, of course, Times Square.
“It’s basically everywhere,” said Milby, in a recent interview in his office in Wayne County, east of Rochester. “If anyone thinks we’re going to go out and take a proactive stance against this, that’s not going to happen.”
On Thursday, a U.S. District Court judge blocked large portions of the law, dealing a major blow to lawmakers in Albany who had sought to blaze a trail for other states after the Supreme Court in June struck down a century-old New York law that had strictly limited the carrying of weapons in public. Between the court challenge and the hostility of many law enforcement officers, New York’s ambitious effort could be teetering.
The judge, Glenn T. Suddaby, agreed to a three-day delay of his order to allow an emergency appeal to a higher federal court. But even before Suddaby ruled, a collection of sheriffs from upstate New York were already saying they would make no special effort to enforce the law, citing lack of personnel, an overbroad scope and possible infringements on the Second Amendment.
Nationwide, conservative sheriffs have been at the front line of an aggressive pushback on liberal policies — often framing themselves as “constitutional sheriffs,” or as self-declared arbiters of any law’s constitutionality. Sheriffs in other states have also been part of efforts to prove a fallacious conspiracy theory that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
In New York, dissent has walked a fine line between loud complaints and winking resistance, including pledges of selective — and infrequent — enforcement.
“I have to enforce it because I swore to uphold the laws, but I can use as much discretion as I want,” said Richard C. Giardino, the Republican sheriff in Fulton County, northwest of Albany. “If someone intentionally flouts the law, then they’re going to be handled one way. But if someone was unaware that the rules have changed, then we’re not going to charge someone with a felony because they went into their barbershop with their carry concealed.”
Such criticism has been heard from Greene County, in the Hudson Valley, to Erie County, home to Buffalo, the state’s second-largest city, as well as from groups like the New York State Sheriffs’ Association, which called the new law a “thoughtless, reactionary action” that aims to “restrain and punish law-abiding citizens.”
“We will take the complaint, but it will go to the bottom of my stack,” said Mike Filicetti, the Niagara County sheriff, who appends a Ronald Reagan quote to his emails. “There will be no arrests made without my authorization and it’s a very, very low priority for me.”
The law took effect Sept. 1, and, at least anecdotally, has been used only sparingly since. Jeff Smith, the sheriff in mostly rural Montgomery County, west of Albany, said his office has had no calls for enforcement of the new law, noting that “almost every household” in his jurisdiction had some sort of gun.
Smith, a Republican, said he understands the motives of lawmakers to quell violence and mass shootings, but that the gun law inadvertently targeted lawful gun owners.
“The pendulum swung way too far,” he said.
An element of the New York law makes it a crime to carry a firearm onto any private property, including homes, unless there is “clear and conspicuous signage” indicating that the owner allows such weapons. Some sheriffs have printed their own signs and distributed them to gun-friendly businesses and residents.
“I don’t think you could find one case in this country, in United States history, where a sign said ‘SCHOOL ZONE NO GUNS PERMITTED,’ and it stopped an active shooter,” said Giardino.
For supporters of the law, the opposition is insincere, considering that sheriffs’ demands for law and order are often coupled with complaints that the state is in disarray, that crime is rampant and that the Legislature has empowered lawbreakers.
“To turn around and say, ‘For the laws that we don’t like, or we may disagree with politically, we will refuse to enforce,’ to me is the height of hypocrisy,” said state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, a Brooklyn Democrat who voted for the bill.
John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, said sheriffs weren’t just endangering the public, they were also “endangering their colleagues in law enforcement.”
Myrie added that if sheriffs are angry, they should direct their ire at the Supreme Court, noting that the majority decision in the case, New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, was written by Justice Clarence Thomas, an avowed conservative — and specifically noted a historical basis for restrictions in “sensitive places.”
Kelly Roskam, the director of law and policy at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, said that the Supreme Court left many unsettled questions that lower courts must address. One particular challenge is a lack of clarity in the court’s test for constitutionality: whether a sensitive place is identical to or sufficiently similar to one that existed at the time of the Second Amendment’s adoption in the late 18th century.
“We face different problems with firearms than those who ratified the Constitution did,” she said. “You’re likely to see challenges to these laws, and different judges will come to different conclusions.”
The nation has a long history of banning guns in certain places, said David Pucino, the deputy chief counsel at Giffords Law Center, which seeks to stem gun violence, with dozens of states restricting concealed weapons in places like airports, courthouses and locations that serve alcohol.
“The statements that we’ve been seeing here are ideological statements,” Pucino said of the sheriffs. “And that’s not an appropriate basis for a sheriff to enforce or not enforce laws.”
The dispute evinces a larger rift between Democratic lawmakers in Albany — heavily represented by downstate liberals — and more conservative law enforcement and elected officials upstate. The schism was intensified by the pandemic, with some sheriffs defying COVID-19 occupancy rules for Thanksgiving dinners in 2020, while other Republican county officials refused to abide by mask mandates in schools.
“The people who are doing this, a lot of them are New York City legislators and they don’t have a clue,” said Todd Hood, the sheriff of Madison County, east of Syracuse, who says that “firearms are what made our country great.”
“There are different people up here,” said Hood, a Republican. “It’s run totally different.”
Jeffrey A. Fagan, a law professor at Columbia University, said that Albany lawmakers and Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, performed a critical test of the Bruen decision’s limits, even if the law is overturned.
“What New York did in response to Bruen was just about as strong or any other state in the country,” he said. “The governor and the Legislature were sticking their chins out in service of making a very important point.”
For her part, Hochul says she and her staff consulted with a raft of state and county law enforcement officials before the gun bill’s passage. “It was an intense process, but it was necessary,” Hochul said in late August, on the eve of the law taking effect.
The rollout was not without hiccups, including concerns from some military re-enactors who have canceled events out of fear of running afoul of the new law. Officials in Adirondack Park, the 6-million-acre swath of greenery and small towns in the state’s North Country, also pressed Hochul on whether guns would be allowed there.
For his part, Milby, a Republican elected in November, reiterated that his officers, fewer than 100 in a county of nearly 100,000 people, would not be actively pursuing offenders of the new law, although they would respond to calls about concealed weapons if they came in.
More than anything, he said his office is getting “an awful lot of calls” from residents confused by the law, many of whom are “very pro-Second Amendment.”
“It’s basically been clear as mud since Sept. 1,” he said.
And as for who was to blame, Milby said the opinions in Wayne County were crystal clear long before Thursday’s decision.
“There’s a very strong sentiment in this county that the governor has just thumbed her nose at the Supreme Court, in what’s being touted as an unconstitutional conniption fit,” he said. “She’s absolutely overstepped.”
