By Craig Rucker
California homeowners are struggling to find insurance against wildfires and other natural disasters, as the state chases insurance companies away, and as the California Insurance Commissioner fails to hold insurance companies accountable.
So what does the California Department of Insurance want to do? Insure “urban forests” against climate change!
The department is working on a pilot project to study how it can work with insurance companies still doing business in the state to insure forests against “storms, extreme heat, drought and pests.”
The idea is to provide “parametric insurance,” which is a lump sum of money, rather than compensation for losses. (That’s how most earthquake insurance works: It won’t be enough to rebuild your house, but some smaller amount.)
The California Department of Insurance is partnering with UC Santa Cruz Center for Coastal Climate Resilience to explore how insurance policies could protect “green infrastructure.”
The United Nations Environment Programme is running a related project, encouraging something called “Total Balance Sheet Transition” (TBS).
The idea is to encourage insurers to write policies to insure the natural environment against the anticipated effects of climate change.
The UN’s idea is designed to let government and corporate players interpret the new world of insurance any way they want — and ultimately con, scam, and fleece hard-working families and businesses.
Bureaucrats will get new powers and cultivate new corporate allies as they force consumers and property owners to pay more for insurance.
Insurance companies will have new justifications to raise rates, supposedly to cover risks like rising sea levels. The companies might never have to pay claims, since sea levels will only rise several feet under the worst-case scenario.
Legislators, regulators, activists, and journalists can continue blaming petroleum companies and their customers for rising seas, wildfires, energy prices, and social and climate injustices.
Meanwhile, the thousands of aggrieved families who lost homes and loved ones in the Palisades Fire, Eaton Fire, Camp Fire, and other recent conflagrations in California will be left out in the cold.
These families won’t even be counted among the “stakeholders” in this grand TBS insurance transition, which barely offers an afterthought about wildfires.An aerial view shows homes in various stages of construction following the 2025 Eaton wildfire on Monday, August 3, 2026, in Altadena. VCG via Getty Images
That’s likely because urban, state, and national forest wildfires have been horrifically destructive and lethal in recent years — for reasons that have nothing to do with climate change.
The state’s forest management, endangered species, and fire response policies have prevented tree thinning and brush removal; emphasized diversity over competence in hiring, and failed to ensure adequate water supplies.
TBS mumbo-jumbo says nothing about better forest management, adequate fire insurance, ensuring faster permits to rebuild homes, or holding insurance companies to the terms of their policies.
It’s little wonder State Farm, Allstate, Farmers, and other insurers have paused or stopped selling or renewing property insurance policies in California.
Homeowners left with inadequate or no coverage must now rely on California’s FAIR Plan, the insurance pool of last resort — which hardly covers victims for their damages.
It’s business as usual for a state that’s become infamous for planning to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a high-speed train system that has yet to lay one inch of track.
These are the typical climate change and “renewable” energy obsessions that bring blackouts, rolling outages, and the highest gasoline and electricity prices in America.
Somehow, the state continues to embrace policies that delay housing permits and raise construction costs — while keeping and even expanding homeless encampments, which are themselves the cause of wildfires.
None of this is surprising when voters have blessed one-party control of state government for most of the past fifty years.
With two Democrats — Bernie Sanders-backed Jane Kim, and State Senator Ben Allen — running for California Insurance Commissioner, voters have limited choice.
But Californians can demand that the two candidates explain if they intend to continue UN-backed pipe dreams like TBS — or if they will finally put homeowners first.
This article originally appeared at The New York Post
Apologies…But who benefits from such behaviour..?
The plan is to make living there so miserable and impossible for the average person that they cry out for government intervention to save them. Little do they realize the cure is worse than the disease until it’s implemented.
One party governments always enrich themselves first. There is no one to stop them, so of course that’s what they will do.
these people need to be put an institution and studied, there’s a wealth of insanity there
What with being business people and realists, insurance companies see climate change for what it is.
Real. Funny how that works.
“insurance companies see climate change for what it is….”
Yes, a scam that allows them to raise premiums.
Funny how that works.
You haven’t realized that insurance companies will use “climate change” as a convenient get-out to reject claims?
It’s the modern version of the “Act of God” get-out.
It’s a slick pivot by them, realizing that “climate change” was an easier sell to the great naive than “Act of God”.
(One religious belief replacing another).
Insurance companies do what state regulators tell them to do.
Funny how that works.
To many on the left, everything that isn’t pure communism, is some form of capitalism.
Last working, tax paying, responsible citizen that leaves California needs to turn out the lights. The cost of living in CA requires a six figure job just to rent an apartment, pay for food, and have personal transportation (a requirement in CA) and not save anything for emergencies or retirement.
The lights will most likely go out well before the last working citizen leaves.!!
California “Fair” plan is a sick joke. It covers at very high cost only fire. One needs to buy another insurance plan to cover all other damage at high cost as well. For a $100,000 500 sq. ft cabin one pays about $1,000 a year for insurance that barely covers the home. Since California home prices are the highest in the nation on average the average home owner is paying at least $3,000 a year on a small home. If the home burns down, the California regulation require one upgrade to solar and water heater and furnace regulation which add at least 20% to the cost. If one lives in say LA county the building department will take 2 years to issue a building permit and send you a bill for thousands of dollars for the permit.
JP Morgan’s 15th Annual Energy Paper (March 2025) noted that
“From 1990 – 2020 California built 1.5m homes in the wild fire-urban interface and from 2020 to 2022 insurance companies declined to renew 2.8m home owner policies”
Yet they still build homes in that interface!
There is no problem so bad, that more government involvement won’t make it worse.