According to some professor of real estate and finance in Pennsylvania, in the New York Times, “Climate Change Should Make You Rethink Homeownership”. See, if a house is on fire and under water it’s not a good investment or something. Sure, owning your own home is “core to the American dream”. But who needs that old thing? Mind you, being so simple-minded we still read Henry Hazlitt and Frédéric Bastiat, we do have to ask the learned professor (a) do you own a house? and (b) if doing so is now the act of a chump, from whom exactly are your followers going to rent one?

It’s far from obvious. According to the professor:

“As insurance premiums and property taxes rise and future home values grow more uncertain, it’s time for some prospective buyers set on living in areas with high risk of hurricanes, floods, wildfires and tornadoes to reconsider homeownership as a financial goal. Renting is quickly becoming a better way for many people to enjoy these places with much less financial baggage.”

Except that rising insurance premiums and property taxes and “uncertain” future home values, a new thing in the era of climate change we assume, will surely also hit any fool who buys a bunch of houses in order to rent them. Which means rents will get more expensive and so it won’t be a better deal, especially as anyone who’s now carrying the risk of a massive capital loss will, uh, incorporate it into the rent.

Never mind. See:

“climate change is most likely making homeownership more expensive and less predictable in large areas of the country, and it’s only getting worse.”

Most likely. As in you just made it up? After all, if extreme weather is not getting worse, and it’s not, then “climate change” isn’t getting worse either because, as we’ve pointed out before, climate change isn’t some mysterious metaphysical force that causes weather to deteriorate, temperatures to rise and worlds to end, it is changes in weather and temperature. But some people just can’t get enough of telling us we shouldn’t want what normal people want, like a home of our own and some land on which to walk, and to let our children play, that is ours, and even if we do want them, we can’t have them.

Including affordable energy. Though when voters actually get a choice, it turns out that all the tut-tutting in luxury-belief big-city newspapers by people with high academic salaries doesn’t prevent them from repealing ill-considered rules that prevent them from, say, having a gas stove. In their own kitchen. In their own house.

Or their own working car. Robert Bryce reports that Ford Motor Company lost another $1.2 billion on EVs in the 3^rd quarter of 2024, which would be a lot even if Ford were still one of the dominant firms proving America’s industrial prowess instead of a long-standing emblem of the decline of the heartland. Indeed the loss is $58,391 “for every EV it sold during the quarter” which sounds like a lot since the typical nice new car, of the ICE variety, doesn’t even cost that much with a profit margin built in. And here the government said we’d all want them and if not it would force us to buy them anyway.