This week, my latest story for Floodlight was published in The Guardian, the Louisiana Illuminator and the New Orleans Lens. It’s an attempt to answer a “How does this make any sense” question: How can insurers (probably correctly) identify that insuring homes in some of hardest-hit areas by climate change is no longer a viable business decision, but still agree to insure giant fossil fuel projects in the same exact area, exposed to the same risks?
If your knee-jerk answer to that question is “greed” or “money” or “capitalism,” you’re not entirely off the mark. But I’m never particularly satisfied with one-word answers, and need to understand how these factor into what feels like an irrational decision. You can read the whole story here, but in this members-only email I wanted to get into how this story came to be and what the reporting process was like.
(Rule 1 of reporting on a place you're not from: make sure you're pronouncing place names correctly)