Mitigation, or Retreat?

Climate crisis is driven by the drive for constantly expanding profits and markets and the assumption that the earth’s resources are limitless. This letter is being sent to California homeowners in areas at risk of fire:

This is ugly, and represents the market- and profit-driven expectations of capitalism taken to their extremes. The insurance industry is refusing to insure those who need it most. The fires are caused in the immediate sense by greedy power-company executives who chose profits over equipment maintenance, but the droughts promoted by human activities over recent decades created the conditions that enable them.

But we are not going to be able to stop drought and flooding and other effects of climate change, and in some cases we are going to need to retreat from areas that we have destroyed or placed at high risk of fire and flood. If the insurance companies drive this because they are accurately assessing risk when no one else is, it’s tragic in the short term but may help us find a way forward in the medium and long terms. Which is, literally, cruel irony.