Misrepresenting the Federal Insurance Office
Intentional or lazy, it's bad politics
There is a fancy map made its way around the internet and, as I gather from some LinkedIn posts, staff in Senate Banking during their preparation last week for a hearing on homeowners insurance.
The map was created by two advocacy groups, Revolving Door Project and Public Citizen, and shows zip code level data, obtained through the Treasury’s Federal Insurance Office (FIO), of metrics of insurance availability and affordability.
I have no comment on the map itself or its methodology. My comment is on its misleading framing.
The two advocacy groups present the map under the introduction that:
Households across the United States face a new and unexpected cost from fossil fuel-driven climate change: Skyrocketing home insurance premiums, along with policy nonrenewals and cancellations.
To guide users to where the data is sourced from, the site links to a January 16, 2025 Treasury press release announcing a report by the Federal Insurance Office.
In big bold letters the Treasury press release attributes the nation’s homeowners insurance problems to “climate-related events” then refers to a “climate-related crisis.”
“Climate- related” is not consistently defined across venues and lacks some logic, but whatever. It is almost always used to signify something about climate change with that something open to interpretation.
For its part, FIO provided the following definition of “climate-related disasters” which
refer to weather-related events that may increase in frequency or intensity due to climate change, such as hurricanes and wildfires, as distinguished from non-weather-related natural phenomena such as earthquakes and earthquake-related tsunamis
The FIO report itself is a review of factors attributing to the availability and affordability problems facing the United States. It contains sections on different regions’ exposure to weather extremes.
Part of the impetuous of the FIO report was the early Biden EO directing all the agencies to examine their climate- related risk. This encouraged an effort within FIO to wrangle the insurance industry, via NAIC, into making data available so they could see what was going on.
Good on FIO; better access to data is important. Though, leaving out the symbolic wording about climate would have given the report more significance to inform an important issue in the country.
In FIO’s final report, out of 4 pages on the factors affecting homeowners’ experiences with insurance affordability and availability, FIO gives 3 sentences to attributing the problems with insurance to some type of change with the weather or climate.
The first sentence is a generic statement which could be argued with. The second sentence recites trends drawn from NOAA’s billion dollar disaster set and disaster declarations; the former misrepresents socioeconomic influence on losses (among other things) and the latter is a product of the subjective decisions of presidents. The third sentence directs readers to a later section of the report to muse on what ‘may’ happen in the future.
In short, FIO gives no connection between the nation’s struggles with homeowners insurance and changes in weather or climate. FIO does, however, provide ample connection between these cost struggles and background socioeconomic and market dynamics.
FIO appeared to handle the wording of the report carefully.
On one hand FIO is directed by the president to address “climate-related” risk, however defined, and on the other hand, it is responsible for saying something meaningful about the homeowners insurance market.
The difficulty is captured in a footnote:
Many of the comments FIO received in response to its Federal Register Notice (see 88 Fed. Reg. 75,380 (November 2, 2023)) noted a range of factors affecting the cost of insurance and the difficulty of attribution
The press release and advocacy group map is a misrepresentation of the report’s findings. It is common to see people refer to the Treasury press release, with it’s bold statements, rather than the actual report which is cautious about its wording.
Did anyone read the report or did they just stop with the press release title?
It is bad politics and bad information to make homeowners insurance about climate change, or climate change about homeowners insurance.
It smells of a covert game being played whatever that may be. Or worse, it’s just plain lazy.