![]() | The Top Energy Stories of 2006 (and Happy New Year!) from The Oil Drum | The Oil Drum | Will the New Year bring Happiness and Prosperity? | ![]() |
69 comments on DrumBeat: January 1, 2007
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Show without comments | PDF version
69 comments on DrumBeat: January 1, 2007
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Show without comments | PDF version
Search The Oil Drum with Google
Support The Oil Drum
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Campfire
TOD:Europe
- Peak Gold, Easier to Model than Peak Oil? - Part I
- Carbon Capture and Storage
- Oilwatch Monthly November 2009
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
TOD:Australia/NZ
- International Energy Agency calls 'Peak' on OECD Oil Demand
- Australian Senate: Peak Oil motion defeated 31:6
- The Bullroarer - Friday 20th November 2009
TOD:Net Energy
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- Early Warning
- The Energy Blog
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- Health After Oil
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Calculated Risk
- The Crash Course
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
Peak Oil Primers
Beware email scams!
Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.
“It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Nate Hagens, Gail the Actuary, Prof. Goose
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Heading Out, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Sam Foucher, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Campfire: Glenn, Jason Bradford
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Emeritus: Stuart Staniford
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.










GAIA Host Collective
If you can't get insurance, you can't get a mortgage.
If you can't get a mortgage, you won't buy the house.
This is what you call large scale capital destruction. The owners have insurance, but can't sell anymore. Plus, their premiums go up bigtime. Not a nice position to be in.
Think it's bad now? Wait till after the next big storm.
A "managed retreat from the coasts" is what we should be doing. If the free market prevailed, the retreat would happen, though "managed" is probably not how it would go down.
The free market isn't prevailing, of course. Unfortunately, the government is really screwing it up. In Florida, the state - IOW, the taxpayers - is insuring homes that insurance companies won't.
In North Carolina, Hurricane Fran decimated some towns in areas that weren't supposed to be rebuilt with federal money. They were supposed to pay people to relocate, but not to rebuild. But emotions ran so high after the disaster that they got a waiver. The result was a huge jump in prices. Houses that used to cost 1 million started going for 2 million. And more people moved into harm's way.
A predictable development. Governments have votes as their no.1 priority. They must see the sign on the wall, but if that is more further out into the future than the next election, guess what?
Politicians can afford to wait for insurers to act first, and they in turn proceed with caution, since they need clients. Moderately higher premiums, more money down, the kind of thing that rolls out of computer models.
Still, it just that next big storm, and everything will change.
By the way, isn't it hilarious somehow that a bunch of Germans, as in Munich RE, and Swiss, in Zurich RE, cast the decisive vote on the value of large parts of US real estate?