Is the world becoming uninsurable?

Here is a list of all new solutions we need: 1) not insure places at higher risk 2) mass desalinification 3) fix US hot climate grids sparkles and/or place them underground 4) Street corridors to isolate fires in neighborhood 5) Build with more fire-resistant materials 6) Install automated hydrant towers with cameras able to spray water on fire remotely (it's done in Spain on the edge of forests and urban areas) 7) Pass on the costs of maintaining of living in expensive risky areas to the people living there and/or give them benefits to move to unpopulated areas with no risk

1) Not all the world will suffer equally from climate change. The parts that are at higher risk should not be insurable so that new housing will not be built there but somewhere else.

2) The idea there won't be water because it doesn't rain it's ridiculous. We live on a planet literally made of water. We'll develop mass production de-salinification plants and have enough water. We need to keep investing and improving that technology. I think having water artifically priced at a low price won't help the development of the desalinification industry. So water should cost more NOW that we can afford it to reflect the R&D cost of it that we must make to have water later.

5) Hot countries don't tend to have plenty of wood to build with. Forests grow with more rain. Building with wood in Spain and Italy is very rare. LA got his wood shipped from somewhere further out. Let's build with other materials in arid fire-prone zones. Yes it's perfectly possible to have houses that are both more-fire-resistant and more-earthquake resistant.

And then you'll have the brine problem.

It’s desalinated water falling from a massive sprinkler in the sky.

Buildings can be built out of less fire prone materials, and surrounding non native vegetation avoided which feeds fires. This does mean someone can’t live in LA as if they are in a New England country town.

So what about the people who already live there...? Like I'm fine telling millionaires their coastal cottages are fucked, but there's a lot more folks out there who've lived in these areas for generations both because they're attached to them emotionally, and also because they can't afford to go anywhere else.

Like I'm glad your personal wealth is going to let you skate out of the worst effects of climate change (so you think/for now). That is far from a universal experience and "tough choices need to be made" in this context sounds a hell of a lot like euphemistic language for "a lot of poor people are going to die, at least if they're too poor to afford to rent my spare homes."

Fire risk isn't that new. London famously largely burnt down in the great fire of 1666 and the solution was to build stuff that doesn't burn as easily. It's not really a new science.

- Originally Lord Farquaad, emulated by every modern billionaire

If we make it a slurry, perhaps we could use it to pump to unpopulated areas with endorheic lakes like the Salt Lake or Salton Sea, then mine and refine the resulting slurry.[0]

The concern is the brine getting into the atmosphere -- that can likely be mitigated.

[0] https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/gold.html

Great, now in a storm surge (which is the most destructive part of most hurricanes), you have built an effective system for transferring rising seawater into your urban area!

> and river beds.

Great, now you've completely eradicated the delicate ecosystem that was living there and everything that depends on it.

> Build houses higher.

That is how a lot of coastal houses are built. But now you're more susceptible to wind damage, so you're playing a risk balancing game.

Every time a natural disaster shows up, nerds starting inventing solutions. I love the optimistic spirit behind that impulse. But at the same time, people living in those areas, including generations of civil engineers, having been thinking about this a lot longer than us.

The solutions are known but most either have even worse externalities, or simply take a long long time to roll out.

Any solution relating to housing is particularly slow to ship because, surprise, people don't like being forcibly kicked out of their homes. So houses basically only get upgraded at the rate that people die.