Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Allstate Insurance: No More Policies for Coastal Areas

Chris in Paris, AmericaBlog: With the seas warming, it's no wonder they want nothing to do with insuring properties in the danger zone. The storms are getting worse and moving up the coast, but the GOP doesn't believe global warming is an issue. When a Fortune 500 company makes a move like this, you would think some might take notice.

I also think back to the brilliant ideas that the Reagan administration started when they thought selling off wetlands made sense. Building on critical wetlands, whether in the Gulf in Mississippi or Louisiana or up along the Chesapeake Bay was a bad idea twenty five years ago and looks only worse today.

Allstate also decided recently to let thousands of homeowner policies lapse in the Carolinas, New York and Texas, and to no longer write new policies in parts of Virginia and all of Connecticut, Delaware and New Jersey. (Full story is here.)

And in a related story, Inhabited Tropical Island Disappears:

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities. (Read the rest of the story - the one you won't read in the American mainstream press.)

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