This story was originally published on Slate. It is reproduced as part of Climate Desk’s collaboration. If you are one of the many Americans who worry about their pocketbooks and general cost of living you may have heard some good news lately: Inflation is really cooling down this summer as long-sticky and long-lamented food and energy prices.
[[{“value”:”This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced these as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
You might have heard some good news late if one of the millions of Americans is concerned about their budgets and the cost of living overall: long-strength food and energy prices have been easing. No matter how much the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates higher, what changes President Joe Biden makes to his trade policy, whether businesses decide to cut prices for some goods, or whether COVID-damaged supply chains suddenly receive some long-needed fixes, some economic indicators remain stubborn.
Another, grimmer latest headlines help to explain why. Florida’s southwestern regions have been in severe weather for days due to a humid disturbance in the Gulf, which has caused a rare flash flood emergency. According to the National Hurricane Center’s forecasts, another batch of storms are currently raging near Texas and could form a humid depression. It’s just a matter of time before both states are threatened once more, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which predicts that this summer will be the worst hurricane season in decades.
However, Phoenix’s sweltering heat waves are getting worse, making some analysts think its most recent weather is” a Hurricane Katrina of heat.” The Midwest and Northeast are expected to experience their own intense heat warnings as early as next week, with energy demand expected to rise as more people turn on their air conditioners. The country has now seen 11 “billion- dollar disasters” this year, including the tornadoes that slammed Iowa just weeks ago. However, the already strapped FEMA faces a fiscal crisis, and sales of catastrophe bonds are at an all- time high.
Now, let’s look again at the inflation readings. What percentage of the indicators are still firmly large while others are shrinking? Shelter and housing, natch, as rents and insurance stay hot—and nevertheless- raised interest rates make construction and mortgage costs even more expensive. On the energy front, motor fuel may be cheapening, but fuel and electricity for home use are also inexpensive. Auto insurance remains a driving outlier, as I noted again in April, not least because of insurers hiking premiums for cars in particularly disaster- vulnerable regions—like the South, the Southwest, and the coasts.
Look at what else is happening in those pretty regions when it comes to home insurance: Providers are both retreating from or significantly heightening their prices in states like California, Texas, Florida, and New Jersey, thanks to their special susceptibility to climate change. These states have seen charged extreme weather events like floods, rain bombs, heat waves, and droughts. National lawmakers are concerned that the country’s insurance crises may finally have an impact on the global real estate industry, but that’s just one of the worst-case scenarios that need to be considered.
Agricultural yields for essential commodities produced in those states ( fruits, nuts, corn, sugar, veggies, wheat ) are withering, thanks to punishing heat and soil- nutrition depletion. Storms that stören land and sea transportation frequently cause disruption to the supply chains that these products typically travel. Supply chain middlemen and product sellers must anticipate significant cost increases down the line and implement them sooner than later to cover their margins as a result of these various externalities.
You may have noticed some clear standouts among the contributors to May’s inflation: juices and frozen drinks ( 19.5 percent ), along with sugar and related substitutes ( 6.4 percent ). Florida, a major producer of both oranges and sugar, has experienced substantial damage to those exports as a result of extreme weather patterns as well as aggressive crop diseases, which is definitely not a coincidence. In this warm, cloudy summer, economists predict that prices of orange juice will remain high.
You now know what the current trajectory and spread of bird flu in America means for meat and milk prices, and climate change may even be a factor in that.
It goes beyond groceries, nevertheless. It applies to every fundamental building block of present life: labor, immigration, travel, and materials for homebuilding, transportation, power generation, and necessary appliances. Environmental effects have been disrupting and raising the prices of timber, copper, and rubber, yet chocolate prices were skyrocketing not long before, thanks to climate change impacts on American cocoa bean crops. The exterior workers supplying for necessities are experiencing negative health impacts from the harsh weather, and the subsequent record- breaking influxes of migrants from susceptible countries—which, overall, have been good for the U. S. economy—are in part a response to climate damages in their home nations.
The price increases in the environment have different effects as well. There’s a lot of housing near the coasts, in the Gulf regions and Northeast particularly, Americans love their beaches and their big houses. Turns out, even with generous ( very generous ) financial backstops from the federal government, it costs to construct such elaborate manors and to have to rebuild them when increasingly severe and frequent storms occur, which is why private insurers no longer want to have to deal with that, and the costs are passed on to taxpayers.
When all the economic indicators that Americans are most concerned about are in for a tumultuous motion as a result of climate change, it might be time to reevaluate how classic economics operate and how we interpret their effects. It’s no longer a time when extreme weather was smaller and more predictable, its force and reasoning are n’t beyond our capacity to accurately monitor, but they’re certainly more difficult to track. The most straightforward financial model cannot be stretched up to fix that. And you ca n’t keep ignoring the clear links between our current weather hellscape, climate change, and our everyday goods.
Sadly, some actors are lastly, belatedly taking a fresh approach. The reinsurance company Swiss Re is working to update its equations after realizing that its sector does n’t properly take climate risks and disaster into account. Advances in unnatural intelligence, energy- intense though they may be, are helping to improve intense- weather predictions and risk forecasts. Insurance companies are retaliating at the state level against confusing regional policies that forbid them from incorporating climate risk into their models, and Florida recently passed legislation that requires greater transparency in the housing market in relation to geographical flooding histories. Insurance companies are attempting to outlaw the fossil fuel industry, which is a major contributor to their continued crisis, in New York.
After all, we are not in a world where climate change has an impact on the economy or where voters place monetary or inflationary concerns before anything else; rather, the economy is affected by it.”}]] This article was originally published by Slate, and it is a part of the Climate Desk collaboration. You might have recently gotten some good news if one of the millions of Americans is concerned about their finances and the cost of living overall: Inflation has really been easing this summer thanks to long-sticky ( and long-lamented ) food and energy prices.
This story was originally published on Slate. It is reproduced as part of Climate Desk’s collaboration. If you are one of the many Americans who worry about their pocketbooks and general cost of living you may have heard some good news lately: Inflation is really cooling down this summer as long-sticky and long-lamented food and energy prices.
There is nothing to say. Could you please rephrase the text for me? Sorry, I cannot paraphrase the text as there is no specific text provided to paraphrase. Can you please provide a sentence or text that needs to be paraphrased? Dashes and dots. Dashes. Dots. Dots. Dashes. I’m sorry, but there is no text provided for paraphrasing.
Please provide the text you would like me to paraphrase. “The end of one matter is simply the beginning of another.” There was a pause.
