The Climate Crisis Is the Greatest Economic Threat Americans Face — And Big Oil, Dark Money, and Corrupt Politics Are to Blame
While corporate polluters cash in, American families are left paying the price — it’s time to fight for our homes, our economy, and our democracy.
While politicians stall and corporate polluters rake in record profits, the climate crisis is already crashing home values, gutting local economies, and threatening the financial security millions of families rely on. This isn’t a distant problem, it’s unfolding right now, in neighborhoods just like yours. If we don’t fight back, the cost will be measured in lost homes, lost jobs, and a future we no longer control.
The Problem
You might picture polar bears on melting ice, but the real frontlines of the climate crisis are right here — hitting your wallet, your home, and your hometown. Rising seas, raging fires, and monster storms are already damaging millions of homes, gutting insurance markets, and setting off a chain reaction that’s crashing property values and shaking the entire economy at its core. When insurers pull out, homeowners can’t get mortgages. When homes become uninsurable, banks stop lending, neighborhoods collapse, and trillions of dollars in real estate could be wiped off the map.
This isn’t a distant sci-fi scenario or some future generation’s problem. It’s happening right now, in our neighborhoods, to families who did everything right. If we don’t face it head-on, the financial security millions of Americans count on will slip away — while corporate polluters keep cashing in. The time to act isn’t someday. It’s today.
For families, the impact is immediate and personal. Picture your child’s college fund sinking because your property tax base cratered after a hurricane. A neighbor who played by the rules, got an insurance policy and a home loan, now faces skyrocketing premiums or no renewal at all. Meanwhile renters are getting squeezed by higher rents to cover landlord insurance, or see landlords abandon rentals altogether. Our entire economy can’t escape this domino effect: crashing home values, tainted mortgages, weakened banks, and a spiral of lost jobs in construction, retail, and services as communities struggle to recover.
Insurers are declaring climate-related losses unsustainable and retreating from high-risk areas.
Without insurance, mortgages dry up and people can’t sell or refinance their homes.
3. Plummeting home values lead to loan defaults and losses for banks.
4. Municipal budgets shrink as tax revenues fall, undermining schools, hospitals, and recovery projects.
Insurance Markets Are Under Siege
Take a look at states like Florida, California, Louisiana, and even Montana, each facing an insurance train wreck. In Florida, back-to-back hurricanes and a wave of lawsuits drove nine insurers into insolvency between 2021 and 2023. Premiums there have exploded to some of the highest in the country, and private companies are leaving, leaving state-run insurers, and Florida taxpayers, holding the bag. In California, climate-fueled wildfires sent insurers fleeing. Long-standing homeowners with spotless records are suddenly dropped, and the state’s last-resort insurer (the FAIR Plan) warned it was about to go bankrupt after covering billions in recent fire claims. Lawmakers are scrambling to bail it out with a billion-dollar lifeline.
In hurricane-hit Louisiana, storms like Laura, Delta, and Ida battered homes year after year, forcing dozens of local insurers out of business. Residents see their rates surge while coverage shrinks. And even in places once seen as safe, the risk is rising. In Montana, wildfires this decade have hit harder than ever. Nearly 70% of all Montana wildfires happened after 2000, and insurers are scrambling. One analysis ranks Montana among the top five states with the fastest-growing home insurance rates because homes in fire-prone areas can’t be priced affordably.
Insurance companies shouting that “the math no longer works” should be a wake-up call to all of us. When insurance dries up, so do loans, home sales, and economic stability. Communities built by generations of hard work could be written off.
Dark Money and Big Oil Lies
Behind all this unfolding crisis is a hidden hand: the fossil fuel industry’s web of dark money and disinformation. For decades, oil and gas companies have funneled vast sums into shadowy nonprofits, think tanks, and political campaigns, without telling the public who pays the bills. These dark money groups spend millions to prop up politicians who turn a blind eye to climate risk and to churn out fake news claiming “climate change is no big deal.” Just last year congressional probes exposed a network of Big Oil front groups hiring politicians and pundits to polish natural gas, gaslighting the public with half-truths about “clean” fuels.
The pattern is chilling: lobbyists and anonymous Super PACs pumping ad dollars into telling ordinary Americans that bad weather is a hoax, or that drilling in Alaska will lower your gas bill. They drown out honest debate with slick propaganda. In 2023 investigations revealed oil-backed websites posing as local news sources, pushing stories like “solar panels hurt birds” or “drilling jobs lift communities,” all designed to muddy the truth. Meanwhile, fossil fuel mega-corporations still pocket more than half a trillion dollars each year in taxpayer subsidies, tax breaks, loopholes, direct grants, all handed to them by lawmakers who share their agenda. Every dollar spent on paying off polluters is a dollar not spent shoring up coastal defenses, fueling electric cars, or building wind farms.
What’s worse, our campaign finance system lets this corruption run rampant. Since the 2010 Citizens United ruling, there’s no limit on how much oil executives or anonymous billionaires can pour into elections. Secret Super PACs and LLCs now write our politics. The result? Policy underwritten by polluters. Members of Congress fly through revolving doors into big gas jobs. Congress repeatedly tries to gut electric vehicle incentives and boost offshore drilling, always on cue after a payday from oil CEO donors. In contrast, voices for climate action are drowned out by this tidal wave of cash.
The Trump Era And The Turbocharged Rollback
A casual observer might think this is just politics as usual, but it isn’t. We’ve seen what happens when Big Oil gets exactly the policies it wants. The last time Republicans held the White House, environmental rollback became the law of the land. The Trump administration eviscerated more than a hundred environmental safeguards. He gave away public lands for mining and drilling, opened the Arctic Refuge to oil rigs, and gut-renewed offshore leases. Clean energy mandates were stamped out like a cigarette butt. Even pipeline safety rules were loosened.
The impacts are real and immediate. Under those policies, pollution rose, and the EPA even shelved climate risk from its financial oversight. Toxic spills and highway runoff went unchecked. And through it all, our leaders did little more than thank the fossil barons. In Congress, many who bristle at clean energy instead praise LNG exports and vote against clean-air laws. The handful of lawmakers who call themselves climate champions see every climate report twisted into excuses by this network of influence.
We saw it again in 2023 and 2024: state legislatures raced to nullify clean car standards, roll back building codes, and fast-track drilling permits for the very next oil boom. Even during record heat waves and flood disasters, politicians in power argued the market would solve it, while meeting privately with petroleum lobbyists to chart out new subsidy plans.
Our leaders used to think differently. Remember when Republicans created the EPA and passed the Clean Air Act? Or when they joined Democrats to ban ozone-depleting chemicals and set tailpipe pollution rules? That was an era when stewardship of land and air was bigger than short-term profit. Today, corruption has eclipsed that legacy. Energy companies hand out loyalty everywhere. As a result, climate-science reality TV plays out while reality TV actually plays on our weather channels.
Taxpayer Subsidies Powering Corporate Greed
Even as Americans struggle with high energy bills, polluters enjoy a mountain of public handouts. Right now, U.S. tax policy still lets oil companies write off massive drilling costs, avoids charging them for carbon pollution, and even gives coal a surprising array of credits. If a hurricane destroys an offshore rig, guess who pays for the cleanup and rebuilding? It’s often us. The Pentagon, the Foreign Aid budget, and our own Treasury have quietly backed tar sands and Arctic oil projects abroad with billions.
It would be easier to swallow these giveaways if Big Oil were failing. Instead, they are swimming in profit. In 2022 and 2023, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and friends reaped record earnings as prices rose. Yet instead of saving or sharing that windfall with consumers, they got sweetheart tax deals on top. Every barrel drilled and burned is effectively subsidized, making it cheaper for them but far costlier for society.
Failed promises of “green energy transition?” Congress itself tipped the scale. Lawmakers tacked on oil industry tax breaks and regulatory rollbacks to pandemic and infrastructure bills. Even new aid packages kept fossil fuels on the payroll. Meanwhile, real solutions to high gas prices, like refunding consumers for storm damages or boosting home insulation, were dismissed as “socialism.”
The Economic and Democratic Red Line
Financial experts have been shouting about this crossroads for years. Central bankers and Wall Street analysts warn that unchecked climate change could wipe out trillions in assets. In 2023, a Federal Reserve leader said in a hearing: fast forward a decade or two, and entire regions might have no banks, no mortgages, no ATMs, as insurance deserts take shape. The Business Roundtable also told Congress that unchecked climate loss would require huge taxpayer bailouts that ordinary people would feel in every bill.
Globally, bodies like the International Monetary Fund have said the same: climate disasters cause inflation spikes, ruin budgets, and risk financial collapse. Already, climate shocks push up prices on food, fuel, and homes, all of which squeeze working families. What’s happening is basically a hidden tax: we all pay more when fires burn lumber and storms flood crops, but the corporations responsible do not pay their share.
For our children, this is no abstraction. Today’s toddlers will inherit a world where their parents struggled to buy houses and faced more extreme heat, flooding at every turn, and an economy lurching from disaster to disaster. Do we want their future to be funding bailouts for oil barons, or building solar panels and safe levees? For our democracy, the stakes are equally dire: if moneyed interests get to write the climate rules, why would voters bother speaking up? In recent elections, millions of dark dollars from energy companies went into ads attacking climate policies or boosting candidates who downplay climate. Meanwhile, media savvy teenagers see photos of flooded communities and demand change, often feeling ignored.
Our Future Depends On Us
There’s no nonpartisan way to sugarcoat this: we face an urgent choice. We can stand by as corporate greed and climate disasters team up to wreck our economy and silence our politics – or we can fight back. The power belongs to the people. We must demand that leaders of every party stop pandering to polluters. We need tough rules to force oil and gas to pay their costs (no more unlimited subsidies and loopholes), honest disclosure of who’s bankrolling political ads, and an end to mass disinformation campaigns. We must hold insurance companies accountable and invest in resilient infrastructure, so home insurance is affordable again.
This is about you, your family, and your children. It’s about the dream of an America where democracy works – not one where our vote is drowned out by secret money, and our paychecks shrink under a climate tax we didn’t choose. Our grandparents set aside land for parks and fought for clean air so their kids could breathe freely. Now it’s our turn. By speaking out, supporting climate-smart policies, and holding greedy corporations and bought-off politicians to account, we can protect both our wallets and our planet.
Nothing less than the future of our economy, our democracy, and our children’s world is on the line. It’s time we rose to meet it.
Mitch Jackson, Esq. | links
How We Fight Back: Three Solutions That Can Make a Difference
1/ End Fossil Fuel Subsidies and Close the Dark Money Pipeline
We need to shut off the taxpayer-funded gravy train for oil, gas, and coal companies and demand full transparency in political donations. Every dollar handed to corporate polluters is a dollar stolen from resilient infrastructure, clean energy, and disaster recovery. Congress must immediately eliminate fossil fuel tax breaks and require full public disclosure of who is funding political ads and campaigns. If companies want to participate in our democracy, they should have to show their faces.
2/ Rebuild Insurance Markets by Investing in Climate Resilience
We cannot stand by while insurers flee and mortgages vanish. Federal and state governments must invest directly in hardening homes, updating building codes, and protecting communities from floods, fires, and storms. If we make neighborhoods safer and more resilient, insurance stays affordable and banks keep lending. Ignoring these risks means every family and every local economy will eventually pay a much higher price.
3/ Elect Leaders Who Work for Voters, Not Polluters
We have the power to fire politicians who sell out our future and replace them with leaders willing to take real action on climate, housing, and economic stability. It’s not enough to hope for change, it starts by showing up, voting smarter, and demanding real accountability. I invite you to review past Uncensored Objection issues because there’s a good chance I have already shared detailed answers and practical steps on how we get there.
Related:
They’re Destroying Everything We Love: Trump’s 2025 Assault on the Environment and Our Future
How Trump’s 2025 Agenda Destroys the Earth — and U.S. Business
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