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Extreme Weather Is Sending Home Insurance Rates Through the Roof; Big Oil Should Pay
We and a growing number of lawmakers are proposing legislation to ensure that the companies that helped drive the climate crisis help pay their fair share of the ensuing damage.
Apr 18, 2026
It's not just your rising bills for groceries and healthcare. For many Americans, the affordability crisis is now showing up in skyrocketing costs to keep their homes insured, as communities are battered by worsening weather disasters fueled by climate change.
Our states and our constituents are feeling this directly. Hawai’i is picking up the pieces after several weeks of historic flooding, which caused more than $1 billion in damage and led to widespread evacuations. These costs are sure to increase home insurance rates that have already spiked by as much as 50% since August 2023, when out of control wildfires—worsened by climate change-driven drought conditions—devastated Maui.
In California, communities are still trying to recover from wildfires that tore through Los Angeles in January 2025. These fires stand as the most expensive wildfires in world history—causing more than $65 billion in damage, much of which is being passed onto the public through rising insurance premiums.
Although New York’s insurance market is not yet seeing the levels of climate-driven distress seen in other parts of the country, the average homeowner is paying $1,000 more for coverage in the years since Hurricane Ida—supercharged by warming oceans—caused over $9 billion in flooding damage. And the frequency of highly destructive storms is growing fast.
If a power company is responsible for the spark that ignites a fire, why not the fossil fuel giants that are turning much of the country into a tinderbox?
The average American homeowner isn’t responsible for this climate chaos; why are they the ones picking up the tab for the billions of dollars of damage it leaves in its wake? We and a growing number of lawmakers are proposing a better model: ensuring that the companies that helped drive this crisis help pay their fair share of the ensuing damage.
Large multinational oil and gas giants knew as far back as the 1970s that their dirty fossil fuel products would make weather disasters more destructive, but spent the ensuing decades lying to the public about their contribution to the problem. The real world harms of their deception is becoming increasingly clear, but they’re paying nearly none of the financial consequences.
That’s why we’re working to build a fairer system in our states—one that could be a model for the rest of the country. One that protects people from perpetually rising home insurance premiums by holding Big Oil accountable for their contribution to weather disasters that are a core driver of the affordability crisis in this country.
Our legislation would empower state attorneys general to bring civil actions against the largest oil and gas companies after major climate-driven disasters. Revenue recovered through legal action would be used to reimburse people dealing with higher rates, stabilize “insurer of last resort” programs, and reimburse homeowners facing rising premiums. At a time when housing affordability is already under strain, the growing instability in home insurance markets is making it even harder for families to buy, keep, and protect their homes.
The stakes couldn’t be higher—for individuals, not to mention the broader American housing market. Uninsurable properties are often unsellable properties, as mortgage lenders generally require that home buyers secure insurance.
Last year, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told the US Senate Banking Committee that in “10 or 15 years there are going to be regions of the country where you can’t get a mortgage” due to climate change. That ominous prediction seems overly conservative given that realtors in California and Colorado are already reporting pending home sales falling through due to climate risk.
Even as extreme weather becomes more common, more and more Americans are risking financial ruin and going without a safety net altogether. A recent poll in California found that a shocking 1 in 5 California homeowners don’t have insurance, with rising costs the most often cited reason.
Holding polluters accountable for their contribution to a weather disaster isn’t a radical idea. Insurance companies already routinely take utilities to court—and win large settlements—when unmaintained power lines ignite wildfires. If a power company is responsible for the spark that ignites a fire, why not the fossil fuel giants that are turning much of the country into a tinderbox?
The status quo of worsening disasters, perpetual insurance premium increases, and more uninsured families is clearly untenable. But it’s likely to persist until Big Oil companies pay their fair share for the weather chaos they knowingly brought about. It’s time for the fossil fuel giants driving the home insurance crisis to shoulder the growing financial burden, not everyday Americans.
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'We Lost Everything': Hawaii Swamped by Worst Flooding in 20 Years
Experts agree that the climate emergency caused by the burning of fossil fuels is making extreme rainfall events on the islands wetter and more common, reigniting the debate about who should foot the bill.
Mar 25, 2026
Hawaii was inundated by its worst flooding in 20 years over the weekend, in another reminder of how the climate crisis disrupts the lives of ordinary people by increasing the likelihood and frequency of extreme weather events.
Hawaii Gov. Josh Green on Tuesday formally requested federal aid for a series of storms this month that he said could cost the state more than $1 billion in debris clearing and repairs to homes, roads, and infrastructure.
“These storms have impacted every county in our state and stretched our emergency response capabilities,” Green said in a statement.
Hawaii's waterlogged woes began on March 10 with the first in a series of winter Pacific rainstorms known as Kona lows. The initial storm caused upwards of $400 million in damages, including to Maui's Kula Hospital, and left the ground saturated when another storm rolled in beginning March 19, leading to what Green told Hawaii News Now was “the largest flood that we’ve had in Hawaii in 20 years."
“Should the residents just consider it an act of God and open up their checkbooks whenever this happens when the record is clear about who knew what and when they knew it?”
This second storm inundated Oahu's North Shore on Friday night, necessitating more than 230 rescues and placing 5,500 people under an evacuation order at one point, according to The Associated Press. The storm damaged hundreds of homes as well as schools, airports, and highways. All told, the two storms dumped a total of four feet of rain on parts of Oahu and Maui, Green said, as CBS reported.
"We lost everything," Oahu resident Melanie Lee told CBS News after visiting her flood-damaged home on Monday. "My children's pictures. Just real sentimental stuff. Now it's like, now where we go from here?"
The agricultural sector was also hard hit, with farmers on Oahu, Maui, Molokai, and the Big Island reporting over $10.5 million in damages, according to Honolulu Civil Beat.
Yet Friday's storm was not the end. On Monday, another downpour brought flash flooding to southern Oahu, as rain fell at a rate for 2-4 inches per hour, shocking even meteorologists.
“When you think it’s over, it’s not quite over,” National Weather Service forecaster Cole Evans told AP on Tuesday.
Oahu Emergency Management Agency spokesperson Molly Pierce told AP: “Most of us have not seen something that just keeps going like this... We feel like we keep getting punched down. But we’ll keep getting back up.”
Experts agree that the climate emergency is making extreme rainfall events on the islands wetter and more common.
As Honolulu Today reported:
The intense flooding in Hawaii highlights the growing threat of extreme weather events driven by climate change. The frequency and intensity of heavy rainfall have increased in the islands, leading to devastating impacts on infrastructure, homes, and communities.
Retired University of Hawaii professor Tom Giambelluca, who now supervises weather monitoring towers, told Honolulu Civil Beat that scientists have observed Hawaii's weather getting dryer generally, while storms tend to drop more rain that causes more flooding.
“It’s not like we never had extremes before. You know, something like this could have happened with no warming, probably,” Giambelluca said. “But these kinds of events seem to be getting more frequent.”
US Rep. Jill Takuda (D-Hawaii) told Maui Now: “We are accustomed to saying, ‘Well, this was a 100-year flood,’ right?... Well, 100-plus-year floods are happening every few years. We literally have to throw away the book in terms of the way we used to look at weather patterns in Hawaii.”
The flooding is also an example of how the impacts of climate disasters can build on each other. Some of the rains fell on Lahaina in Maui, where soil is less absorbent due to scarring from 2023's deadly climate-fueled wildfires.
“We think about evacuation routes when it comes to a fire,” Maui resident Kaliko Storer told Maui Now. “And now we say, when are we going to really sit down and talk about these (flood) controls?”
The connection between the burning of fossil fuels and the uptick in extreme weather events is reigniting the debate about who should pay for the damages from storms like those that swamped Hawaii this month.
State lawmakers are working to pass legislation that would allow insurers to recoup some storm costs from oil and gas companies directly, as Honolulu Civil Beat reported Tuesday.
"This is the third generational rain event we’ve had in the last four weeks,” state Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole (D-24) said. Referring to reporting that large fossil fuels companies have known for decades about the climate-heating impacts of their products and chose to lie to the public instead of act, he added, “Should the residents just consider it an act of God and open up their checkbooks whenever this happens when the record is clear about who knew what and when they knew it?”
Hawaii is also one of several states that has sued Big Oil for climate damages.
Even as oil prices climb due to the US and Israeli war on Iran, Emily Atkin of Heated argued that disasters like Hawaii's prove that the cost is still deflated.
"This is what the true price of oil looks like: Hawaiians wading through their flooded homes while the state scrambles to find a billion dollars for cleanup," she wrote.
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Trump Is Trying to Spook States out of Suing Big Oil—Why They Shouldn’t Back Down
Given the shakiness of the administration’s lawsuits, what really matters is whether state and local officials have the courage to stand strong against Trump’s mafia-style threats.
May 14, 2025
As U.S. President Donald Trump continues to threaten any institutions that could check his administration’s ongoing drive toward authoritarianism, there’s been a stark contrast in responses to his mob boss-style attacks. Some targets—like Harvard, which vowed to fight Trump’s assault on universities, or the law firm Perkins Coie, which recently scored a judicial win holding Trump’s actions against the firm unconstitutional—have seen their stature in their respective fields skyrocket,. Others—like Columbia University or the law firm Paul Weiss, which both immediately folded at the first sign of aggression from Trump—have been publicly, and perhaps permanently, tarred as feckless cowards.
This contrast between courage and gutlessness appeared once again earlier this month in response to Trump’s latest dictatorial salvo: an all-out assault on behalf of the fossil fuel industry against state and local efforts to hold Big Oil companies accountable for deceiving the public about climate change.
Right now, 1 in 4 Americans live in a jurisdiction that is fighting to put Big Oil companies on trial for their climate lies and make them pay for the catastrophic damage they knew decades ago that their products would cause. The fossil fuel industry concedes that it faces “massive monetary liability” in these cases, and has been growing more and more desperate to stop plaintiff communities from having their day in court. In the last few years Big Oil has asked the Supreme Court to block these cases on five separate occasions. Recently, industry front groups tied to Leonard Leo ran a pressure campaign pushing the court to take up the issue.
Making polluters pay for climate damages is widely supported—and far more popular than Trump ever has been.
But the court has denied Big Oil every time, and so fossil fuel companies have had to shift to Plan B: asking the man they spent hundreds of millions of dollars electing to fulfill his end of the quid pro quo. The Wall Street Journal reported that oil executives asked Trump during a White House meeting for legal help against the cases, and their lobbyists are pushing congressional Republicans to include legal protections for the fossil fuel industry “in a coming Trump-endorsed bill.”
In his typical oligarchical style, Trump has gone all in to protect his corporate backers. On April 8 Trump issued an executive order directing the attorney general to “take all appropriate action” to stop states that have “sued energy companies for supposed ‘climate change’ harm.” And this month the Department of Justice filed a series of lawsuits attempting to prevent Hawaii and Michigan from pursuing climate litigation.
We’ve become so inured to the extreme misconduct of this administration that it’s often hard for any new scandal to stand out. But it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the staggering corruption of this new broadside on the rule of law.
Trump is taking unprecedented action on behalf of an industry that understood decades ago that their fossil fuel products would cause, in their own words, “great irreversible harm,” “more violent weather—more storms, more droughts, more deluges,” and “suffering and death due to thermal extremes.” Instead of warning consumers about this existential threat, they waged a massive disinformation campaign to prevent the public from understanding the dangers of climate change. They made trillions of dollars from this deception, leaving regular Americans to pay the price.
And regular Americans certainly have been paying that price. They’ve been paying in higher insurance costs driven by the “violent weather” that Big Oil companies knew their products would cause. They’ve been paying in homes, businesses, and livelihoods lost in climate-driven “deluges.” And in far too many cases they’ve been paying with their own “suffering and death.” That is why many of the communities hit hardest by these disasters have sued—under the same long-established state laws used to hold Big Tobacco and opioid profiteers accountable—to force the companies responsible for global warming to contribute at least something to the often devastating climate costs that right now are falling entirely on the shoulders of regular Americans.
Trump, of course, doesn’t care about regular Americans experiencing, in his words, “supposed ‘climate change’ harm.” His concern is limited entirely to his Big Oil donors, who are terrified of having to defend their climate lies to a jury composed of the people they screwed over.
Unfortunately for Big Oil, we live in a federalist system of government that does not allow a president to unilaterally block a state from pursuing valid state-law claims in state courts. Indeed, legal experts seem to agree the suits filed by the administration against Hawaii and Michigan are “shockingly flimsy.”
That doesn’t mean Trump’s legal maneuvering isn’t a potent weapon, however. As we’ve seen with Trump’s assault on universities and law firms, the goal of these attacks is not winning in the courtroom. It’s all about intimidation—which means that what really matters is whether state and local officials have the courage to stand strong against Trump’s mafia-style threats.
Some leaders are demonstrating that they have that backbone. On May 1, Hawaii ignored the DOJ’s specious lawsuit and became the 10th state to sue Big Oil. As Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez said, “The state of Hawaiʻi will not be deterred from moving forward with our climate deception lawsuit. My department will vigorously oppose this gross federal overreach.”
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel had a similar response: “Donald Trump has made clear he will answer any and every beck and call from his Big Oil campaign donors… I remain undeterred in my intention to file this lawsuit the president and his Big Oil donors so fear.”
Sadly, not all local leaders have demonstrated such courage. Shortly after the DOJ announced its suits against Hawaii and Michigan, Puerto Rico voluntarily dropped its 2024 case that sought to make fossil fuel companies pay to help protect the commonwealth’s infrastructure against stronger storms, sea-level rise, and other damages fueled by climate change. The Leonard Leo-linked Alliance for Consumers, which days earlier called on Puerto Rico’s governor to help kill the case, crowed that the dismissal would allow consumers to “take comfort in knowing the things you buy for your family will still be there, at the store, when you need them”—an Orwellian message for the millions of Puerto Ricans who were unable to access basic goods for months following the climate-driven catastrophe of Hurricane Maria.
A spokesperson said the commonwealth dropped its case, which was brought under a previous administration, because Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón wanted to “be aligned with the policies of President Trump,” which is “to support the burning of fossil fuels [and] the protection of oil companies.” As a result, her constituents will be condemned to a future of escalating climate disasters that they—and not the polluters most responsible—will have to pay for.
But maybe the contrast between Puerto Rico’s humiliating supplication and Hawaii and Michigan’s courageous stands can help inspire other local and state jurisdictions to refuse to bend to Trump’s future threats. After all, making polluters pay for climate damages is widely supported—and far more popular than Trump ever has been.
When the history books are written about this lawless moment, the collaborators—the Columbias, the Paul Weisses, the González-Colóns—will not like how posterity remembers their cowardice. But leaders who rise to the occasion, who refuse to surrender to Trump’s protection racket, and who continue fighting to make polluters pay will be able to take pride in their place on the right side of history.
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