MASTER OF DISASTER

Trump won’t confront the climate crisis. He’ll feast off it.

- Alex Steffen

WITH THE ELECTION of Donald Trump, we’re in for a climate catastrophe.

We know because we’re in that crisis now, already. We just don’t talk about it all that much, mostly because we don’t like to admit what it means.

Many of us recognize on some level that we’ve moved into a world of superstorms and rising seas; droughts and failed crops; deluges and floods; mega fires and orange skies full of gag-ging smoke; life-threatening heat waves and blackouts; invasive insects spread-ing infectious diseases, and the loss of native ecosystems. We may try to tune it out, but we know it’s bad.

But what hasn’t sunk in is that we built this country for physical conditions that no longer exist. We’ve experienced a discontinuity with the past, a threshold where what used to work no longer does, and what we used to know no longer makes much sense. Once-sturdy systems will break more frequently. Once-safe places will find themselves disaster zones. No aspect of our lives will go untouched. And while it’s true some places are safer than others, nowhere is immune, and even communities like Asheville, North Carolina, can find themselves walloped by extreme weather.

Hundreds of millions of Americans are about to have a collision with planetary reality. We're already seeing the impact on insurance and finance. Insurance depends on the ability to accurately price risk, to accurately measure future value. And the truth is, a big chunk of America is way riskier than we thought it was, and seriously overvalued.