America’s Last-Ditch Climate Strategy of Retreat Isn’t Going So Well

I can see lots of parallels here between big businesses and big government. It seems obvious what should be done -- Relax the restriction that disaster reconstruction funds go to rebuilding in the same location. In fact, go even further and don't ever repay to rebuild in the same location if the same threat (like flooding) is still present -- require that the funds go to acquiring or constructing a building in a safer place.

And yet it's been many years since this fact became obvious, and still no progress has been made on actually implementing it. The government is a big ship in motion that does not turn easily, just like businesses that keep doing the same thing even when it's obvious to outsiders what should change. There's no shortage of examples that can be drawn from big tech companies.

I'd bet that countries that are prone to large scale weather devastation are more poor that nations with stable climates. Snow is clearly disruptive to infrastructure, but not as much as a hurricane or earthquake. With that in mind, we should be investing where we can engineer infrastructure that is resilient to the area it is built in so we don't spend our entire time rebuilding back to where we once were.

This problem will at least get ameliorated as federally-subsidized flood insurance gets phased out. This subsidy has been artificially propping up the value of these properties, so in the future it should be easier to tear them down after a flood. Especially since many people will no longer to be able to afford flood insurance to begin with, which isn't great, but is much more equitable than the current status quo where many people are only able to 'afford' waterfront property by basically stealing from those with less money.