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Municipality workers remove debris from the streets after flooding in Sheikh Jalal district, Baghlan province, Afghanistan May 12, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Devastating floods, COVID reporter released, Catalonia votes, Swiss contestant wins Eurovision
315: At least 315 people in northern Afghanistan have died in severe floods that also injured over 1,600 others, wiped out thousands of homes, and devastated livestock herds that feed the region. Aid agencies expect chaos. It’s been a bad month for floods worldwide — similar inundations in southern Brazil and Kenya have killed hundreds in recent weeks.
4: Lawyer and journalist Zhang Zhan has been released from prison in China four years after being detained for her reporting on the government’s draconian response to the COVID-19 outbreak. In jail, Zhang’s health suffered severely, with her weight dropping to below 90 lbs at one point. Her former lawyer says Zhang will either be returned home or sent somewhere to do a few months of “soft prison” time while cloistered from the rest of the world.
9: Candidates from nine parties competed for seats in local elections in the wealthy, independence-leaning Spanish region of Catalonia on Sunday, and the Socialist candidate supported by Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is expected to squeak out a win. If no party wins a majority outright, the Socialists will likely need to hammer together a coalition to maintain control.
2: Students walked out on two major commencement speakers this weekend. Dozens of Duke graduates turned their backs on comedian Jerry Seinfeld, and Virginia Commonwealth University grads gave the same treatment to Gov. Glenn Youngkin. In addition to the walkouts, several more campuses saw major demonstrations surrounding their commencement activities.
59.5 billion: US oil major Exxon Mobil on Wednesday paid $59.5 billion to acquire Pioneer Natural Resources, a major producer of shale oil in West Texas.
Hard Numbers: Exxon bets on shale, Netflix makes an unchill choice, Google floods the zone, digital tax plans advance
25: Netflix is planning to raise subscription prices again, starting with the US and Canada, as soon as the ongoing US actors strike ends. The precise cost increase isn’t known yet, but it comes after Netflix and other ad-free streamers have already raised their fees by 25% over the past year.
800: Is a flood on the way? As the weather gets more and more extreme, the answer is, increasingly, yes — but where and when? Google Maps has an answer for that: a new prediction service called Flood Hub. In the US and Canada, it will cover 800 river areas inhabited by some 12 million people.
32 billion: The OECD this week released a new draft treaty on global digital taxation that could raise as much as $32 billion annually by enabling governments to tax tech companies in the countries where they operate, rather than just where they are headquartered. It’s unclear whether it will be ratified by enough countries’ legislatures to take effect — but Canada is charging ahead unilaterally with its own digital tax, despite threats from US lawmakers.The Graphic Truth: The rising (insurance) costs of climate change
State Farm, the largest homeowner insurance company in California, recently announced that it’s halting new insurance sales across the Golden State. This is part of a nationwide trend of insurers raising rates, restricting coverage, or pulling out of areas altogether. Why? Because they’re tired of losing money to natural disasters.
In the 1980s, for example, the US averaged three or four annual disasters with costs in the billions. But those numbers started to tick up significantly after 2010, and in 2021, 18 disasters cost $175.2 billion in damages.
Increasingly frequent natural disasters, in turn, are wreaking havoc on the insurance market and turning it into a system where, in some places, only the most affluent will be able to afford coverage. In 2021, FEMA, which had provided taxpayer-backed flood insurance nationwide, had to start setting rates equal to the flood risk. This change caused the average cost of flood insurance to jump from $888 a year to $1,808, with prices being exponentially higher for those in flood zones.
Florida is on the verge of an insurance crisis thanks to consecutive years of bad storms. Twelve private insurers in Florida have gone out of business since 2020, six in the last year alone, and 30 more are being monitored by state regulators over their risk of insolvency. Meanwhile, severe storms in the Midwest, droughts and wildfires in the Southwest, and flooding in Kentucky and Missouri have priced hundreds of thousands out of the system in the last year alone.
In Louisiana, the insurance market has been buckling since 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. After the last few years of bad storms, the state government has had to borrow $600 million to prop up insurers and rescue homeowners who have been abandoned by the broken system.
The lack of insurance makes extreme weather events even more costly. It slows economic recovery, increases the likelihood of cascading financial consequences, and can leave people in financial ruin, especially in low-income communities, which are increasingly being left at the mercy of Mother Nature as natural disasters become more intense.
Many of these vulnerable communities are being blue-lined, whereby banks or mortgage lenders designate neighborhoods that are more susceptible to climate risk and have less access to affordable insurance premiums.
Earlier in 2023, the Biden administration released a report detailing the economic challenges a warming planet posed to the US. It argued that bailing out homeowners after natural disasters incentivizes them to reside in riskier areas, increasing costs on taxpayers and slowing down climate change adaptation.
While the report is not legislation, it identifies how climate change has upended the nature of risk across the American economy and how the federal government will bear significantly higher costs in the future if it does not correct where it is creating market distortions. Two examples of distortions: paying more for healthcare for victims of heat stroke and paying to rebuild coastal homes flooded by hurricanes.
The government wants climate change risk factored into Americans’ decisions, and insurance companies want it factored into their prices. But inevitably, those paying the biggest price will be low-income Americans with fewer resources to relocate.
A general view as North Korea fired two missiles from a submarine at an underwater target at an undisclosed location in North Korea March 12, 2023.
Hard Numbers: North Korea goes ballistic about “puppets”, Iran pardons protesters, Lula sacks soldiers, Freddy ravages Southern Africa
2: In response to new military drills by “the US imperialists and the South Korean puppet forces,” North Korea on Monday announced it had tested two new cruise missiles, which it says it plans to fit with nuclear warheads.
22,000: Iran on Monday pardoned 22,000 people arrested for participating in the wave of protests that erupted last fall over the death of Mahsa Amini, a woman arrested for not wearing a headscarf. Is this a sign that pressure from the streets is forcing the regime to moderate or, conversely, that the Supreme Leader now feels comfortable enough to show some mercy without risking a fresh wave of protests?
100: Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has ousted more than 100 military men who were serving in key government posts, replacing them with civilians. The move is part of Lula’s efforts — in the wake of the Jan. 8 riots — to establish firmer control over the armed forces, where there is a lot of sympathy for his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro.
99: Cyclone Freddy, one of the strongest storms ever recorded in the southern hemisphere, continues to cut a path of destruction through Southern Africa, where it has so far killed more than 99 people in Malawi and Mozambique.
Why biodiversity loss from climate change matters
Raging fires, droughts, and superstorms like Sandy and Katrina are very visible impacts of climate change, but the damage to animals and plants flies under the radar. For UN environment chief Inger Andersen, that's because humans often take biodiversity for granted despite having messed up more than three-quarters of the planet's land and sea — and the consequences will be severe when nature stops behaving. "We have fragmented […] and converted so much land that nature is being squeezed into little corners." Watch her interview with Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
Watch this episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: Surviving a warming planet
Storm-battered Philippines cleans up
In a matter of hours, swathes of the main Philippine island of Luzon were flooded by record downpours from Typhoon Vamco. Rivers burst their banks, landslides smashed into villages and rice fields were flattened. Much of the capital Manila was inundated by muddy water that quickly reached the rooftops of homes in some areas.
Philippines braces for new storm Vamco
Areas including Metro Manila was placed on alert.
Two dead after landslide hits luxury resort in Ipoh
A landslide believed to have been triggered by heavy rain has claimed the lives of two people staying at a resort in the Malaysian state of Perak.