Climate change is affecting insurance coverage, real estate sales

Xcel Energy is just one utility being bankrupted by insurance companies looking for culprits in human-caused disasters now that it's been determined all-day hurricane force winds drove the 2021 Marshall Fire in Boulder County, Colorado. And they're not small fires either as the Smokehouse Creek Fire Complex spread over 1.2 million acres of the Republican Texas panhandle where sixty counties face disaster declarations. NorthWestern Energy, Pacific Gas and Electric, Xcel, Black Hills Energy, Hawaiian Electric Company and Public Service of New Mexico or PNM are all responsible for massive blazes often causing billions in damages. 

As utilities scramble to avoid liability for wildfires, insurance companies are bilking homeowners in the wildland urban interface and denying coverage interfering with mortgages, real estate values and property ownership. Since 2018 nearly two million home insurance contracts have been dropped as companies like State Farm and lobbyists like the American Property Casualty Insurance Association acknowledge humanity's role in a burning planet. 

In parts of Wyoming, Hawaii and California insurance company nonrenewals have increased as much as 1400 percent since 2018. In New Mexico some insurance premiums have gone up more than thirty percent while the state-run high-risk insurance program for homeowners who can’t find coverage on the private market is more expensive and highly provisional. In Grant County, New Mexico utilities, insurers the county commission, lenders and developers have allowed the building of tinder boxes packed so closely together that homeowners can see into each others bathrooms. 

The following quote is behind a paywall at the New York Times.

On a recent afternoon, Eric Casler, an assistant professor of natural sciences at Western New Mexico University, surveyed the neighborhoods that have grown up north of the city limits. “See all these scattered houses out here?” Mr. Casler said. If a wildfire started to burn through the area, “it’s going to be really hard for them to stop it.” Across Grant County, 51 home insurance contracts were not renewed in 2018, based on the data provided to the committee. That’s about one in 100 policies. By last year, that number had doubled to 100 nonrenewals, even as the county’s total population shrank. [Insurers Are Dropping Homeowners as Climate Shocks Worsen]

Driven by forty mile per hour winds a wildfire on Thursday and Friday cleared some 2800 acres of cured grasses near Broken Bow, Nebraska. 

In South Dakota Butte and Fall River Counties lead that state in nonrenewals and an unlocked interactive map is linked here.

Former SD FLDS compound owner sued after fencing public land in CO

At the courthouse in a South Dakota county named for a war criminal Patrick Pipkin and members of a religious splinter group bought a 140 acre compound for a fraction of its value in 2021 that was built in 2005 by now-jailed polygamist Warren Jeffs. The cult was not delinquent on property taxes but the acreage was sold at a sheriff's auction to settle a $2.1 million judgment against the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints or FLDS and the towns of Hildale, Utah and Arizona City, Colorado. In 2023 the parcel sold for $5,237,475 to SDR Training Center, a nonprofit church registered in South Dakota. 

Pipkin has admitted to being manager of Blue Mountain Ranch of Colorado—a summer camp for at risk adolescents but he and his co-owners transferred title to it to a Nevada trust in 2023 and he recently stated he still lives there. In October a group led by Pipkin called the Free Land Holders claimed and fenced some 1460 acres of public land in the San Juan National Forest near Mancos, Colorado so the feds sued in November in part citing watershed protection.

The Free Land Holders argued their ownership with local enforcement, saying they do not respect the jurisdiction of the U.S. Forest Service. Their argument was based on esoteric interpretations of the U.S. Constitution, the Louisiana Purchase Treater [sic], and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The Free Land Holders' methods align with the Sovereign Citizens movement, an extremist anti-government sentiment that believes the government is illegitimate. However, the Free Land Holders have claimed they are not part of the sovereign citizens movement or FLDS. [Community hosts celebration of public lands near Mancos in response to land grab attempt]

Learn more at the Colorado Sun. Image: KUSA teevee.

Earlier this month an FLDS member in Arizona was sentenced to fifty years in prison after being convicted of trafficking girls as young as 12 for sex slaves. 

According to a comment at a Faceberg page the real owner of the compound near Pringle and mostly surrounded by the Black Hills National Forest is Paul Elden Kingston, a polygamist believed to have some 40 wives, over 300 kids and preaches "bleeding the beast." Kingston is an accountant and attorney who has served as the Trustee-in-Trust of the Davis County Cooperative Society (DCCS), a Mormon fundamentalist denomination and part of the Latter Day Church of Christ with assets in the $150 million range.

Blogger's home town going through some things

Back in 2017 Elkton Public School was experimenting with new teaching methods.

In 2018 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals or PETA urged Brookings County Sheriff Martin Stanwick to file criminal charges against Elkton Locker and Grocery, Inc. after a worker abused a lamb. 

In 2023 two men died when their Kia Sorrento struck and derailed a freight train in Elkton. Earlier this year the Elkton School Board accepted the resignation of a teacher who invited a registered sex offender to speak where this blogger attended and graduated high school. 

On Tuesday Sheriff Stanwick spoke to the Brookings County Commission after four students threatened harm to Elkton Public School.

“I have two officers over there today (Tuesday) visiting a school assembly to talk about how serious it is to say that they’re going to shoot up the school or — we take it serious,” Stanwick said. “I have zero tolerance for anything that’s said. We charge it with a terroristic threat and the paperwork goes to the state’s attorney’s office for follow through.” [Multiple Elkton school threats occupy sheriff's attention]

The late South Dakota Democratic Governor Dick Kneip grew up in Elkton and my sister is a former Elkton-Lake Benton High School Spanish teacher who has been tutoring students in math with English as a second language.

Yep, after DonOld Trump and Republican South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem made violence against brown and LBGTQ people acceptable the racist chickens have come home to roost even in rural communities.

 

Today in hypocrisy: GOP landowners say CO2 pipelines bad but DAPL good

Cognitive dissonance doesn't exist within TrumpWorld because hypocrisy is having its way with reality in the folds of those folks. 

So to nobody’s surprise, Earth hating Republicans turned on American Indians when in the days after Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration a career criminal commanded the US Army Corps of Engineers to expedite the Dakota Excess pipeline that violated tribal sovereignty, repeatedly cut funds for Indian education, moved to privatize Native trusts, cut foreign aid to countries with high Native populations and praised Brazil's extreme white wing autocrat who laid waste to Indigenous lands in the Amazon.

A federal judge this week allowed 13 more Republican-led states to intervene as co-defendants in the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s new lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “The Corps has failed to act and failed to protect the tribe,” Standing Rock Chairwoman Janet Alkire said in an October press conference announcing the lawsuit. In a separate federal court case, North Dakota seeks $38 million from the United States government for costs the state says it incurred responding to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. [13 more GOP states sign on to oppose Standing Rock Sioux in new lawsuit over DAPL] 

But wait, there's more! 

Irony is just another casualty of Wyoming's wildfires which cleared nearly a million acres of fences, power lines, dry grasses, sagebrush, ponderosa pine and juniper in Republican ranch country even as the Biden administration reaches out to those serial ecoterrorists who rely on moral hazard to survive. 

The Small Business Administration makes Economic Injury Disaster Loans available when the US Secretary of Agriculture designates an agricultural disaster. Primary Wyoming counties receiving bailouts are Campbell, Converse, Niobrara and Weston but Custer, Fall River, Lawrence and Pennington Counties in South Dakota will also receive federal handouts per the rewards of democratic socialism.

Federal dollars are available to help Wyomingites recover from this year’s large, persistent wildfires. Some 850,000 acres burned in Wyoming this year – the majority on private lands. [State creates guide for navigating federal funds for wildfire recovery on private lands]

And speaking of pooping in your own water supplies then begging for pipeline boondoggle money for lawns, golf courses, feedlots, a ramen factory, the Bismarck Trail Ranch and Rally campgrounds with tax dollars spent on carving through Native America for white privilege instead of empowering communities to harvest snowmelt and rainwater rural communities are still dependent on politicians who exploit need.

Yep, the grassland fire danger index will reach the very high category again Thursday for much of occupied South Dakota.

Irony is dead

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) December 18, 2024

EAFB propping up Mideast drug trade for Trump

A "woke" US military is responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and beyond.

And, as if it isn't bad enough that Senator John Thune (Earth hater-SD) is a tool for Donald Trump and the military/industrial complex in a state where the US Air Force aids and abets pilots who kill children he wanted to bring a doomed fighter jet to Sioux Falls in 2015 after contractor Lockheed Martin gave him $40,000. 

The Trump Organization is an equal opportunity money launderer for the CIA and other Deep State actors for decades. So, there is little doubt in my mind that damning evidence linking the Trump Organization to Russia was destroyed by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on 9/11 and it’s impossible the Obama administration didn’t know Donald Trump was being installed through a vast white wing conspiracy with hostile foreign actors. 

On Trump Organization orders bombers from Ellsworth Air Force Base near Rapid City targeted Taliban drug facilities to prevent harm to "innocent Afghan civilians" all the while escalating its war on civilians to protect the friendly opium fields. But, after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered hits on Americans in Afghanistan the air war was suspended and the Biden administration got smeared with it.

In 2018 KSA Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the murder of Jamal Khashoggi who was investigating the Trump Organization and Jared Kushner's blood money infusions so a cynical observer might wonder how long Trump has been laundering proceeds for Syria's $10 billion captagon industry. 

In Syria, a single pill of the stimulant costs a few cents to produce. But that pill can be sold elsewhere in the Middle East—the only part of the world where captagon is a popular drug—for as much as twenty-five dollars, especially in wealthy cities such as Riyadh. Michael Kenney, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who researches the transnational drug trade, told [The New Yorker] that although the term “narco-state” is often misused, it describes Syria perfectly. Assad’s regime has become dependent on captagon, much the way Bolivia’s government relied on the cocaine trade in the early eighties, and the Taliban stayed afloat on opium revenue during the years that it was fighting U.S. forces for control of Afghanistan. Pills can be shipped overland through Jordan; sent north to Turkey, then taken by boat to their destination; or delivered to one of Syria’s ports, such as Latakia, and shipped to ports in the Red Sea. [How Syria Became the Middle East’s Drug Dealer]

In September EAFB fired a second commander in just two months "due to loss of trust and confidence" after a scathing report revealed "an unhealthy organizational culture that permitted degradation of airmanship skills." 

Contractors say the B-21 Raider isn't expected to be delivered until maybe 2030 so a bomber base in South Dakota with morale problems and an exceedingly poor flying record and ties to Trump's drug operation might never see the new mission.

To boast US settler colonialism and remind Indigenous Americans of prolonged bloodshed EAFB will will conduct a B-1B flyover Tuesday at the start of the Lakota Nation Invitational basketball tournament.

Alex Gibney on "The Bibi Files," Netanyahu's Corruption Case & How Endless War Keeps Him in Power

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— Democracy Now! (@democracynow.org) December 17, 2024 at 9:45 AM