According to Bloomberg Green, “UK banks confront flood risk”. Well, it’s the email clickbait, anyway. The actual story says “Banks in the UK are under pressure to prove they’re not underestimating the problem of flooding in their mortgage books.” Which calls to mind the saying about it being impossible to prove a negative, especially when the government really wants the other answer. And not only is “pressure” an odorless, colourless activist substance that causes journalists to write headlines, the story of course fingers climate change as the culprit for a perceived increase in risk due to people building more and more houses in those crowded isles in places where it has always flooded and now, thanks to “climate change”, might continue to flood.

It is good to know that our affairs, economic as well as political, are in the hands of deep thinkers. For instance, in that Bloomberg Green item, “Mark Cunningham, managing director at PriceHubble, a property data company” is the authority for this pearl of wisdom:

“The risk is that a bank is ‘going to end up with mortgage prisoners’ if it’s the only institution ‘lending to stuff which everyone else says is flooding,’ Cunningham says. As a bank in that scenario, ‘you’re stuffed, and your customers aren’t going to be able to re-mortgage.’”

Yeah. We can see how being the one fool might expose you to the costs of your folly. But what does it have to do with climate? Well, see:

“In England, there are already 6.3 million properties in areas at risk of flooding from surface water, coastal swells and overflowing rivers, according to the government’s Environment Agency. At the same time, more properties are being built on flood-prone land, with the insurer Aviva estimating that roughly 11% of new homes built between 2022 and 2024 are in areas facing medium to high flood risks, compared to 8% over the previous decade.”

Uh, that’s not climate. But don’t worry. They’ll flounder to it eventually:

“The new reality is largely down to climate change, exacerbated by urban landscapes that often prevent excess water from draining away. This year, floods have already wreaked havoc in Britain’s southwest, with Cornwall experiencing its wettest January on record.”

Oh, exacerbated, you say? It is poor urban design, not just that business of paving all the absorbent surfaces then going blimey, mate, why’s all the water collecting but also continuing to build bigger and bigger urban agglomerations largely in the places people have always lived, namely on rivers near coasts. And to think they flood. Someone tell King John. (In case you missed it, he “lost the crown jewels in the Wash” in October 1216, prompting giggles from generations of schoolchildren back when history wasn’t grievance studies.)

Meanwhile someone tell the climate finance alarmists that they need to go back to Henry Hazlitt. If people are continuing to build more and more homes somewhere, it’s not because they’re losing on every unit but hoping to make it up on volume. It’s that they’re making money.

By a remarkable coincidence, or not, the Guardian was also onto this flooding is making homes so unaffordable people keep building and buying more of them thing. Although strangely that piece, from a paper that wants capitalism hurled onto the rubbish heap of history and distrusts corporations as greedy shortsighted self-interested plundering wretches, relies on data from a company with a very clear self-interest here, because it’s an insurance company. And one in a panic over people building homes in flood-prone areas that are not covered by the government’s encourage-stupidity Flood Re scheme to shelter people from their own folly, so the cost will fall on… insurance companies. To be safe, the Guardian’s Aditya Chakrabortty also warns that much of the UK is going permanently dry due in part to “climate breakdown and the sprawl of housing” plus evil capitalism. Either way.

Likewise, the Bloomberg Green item eventually gets around to admitting that nothing discernible is actually happening. It’s just, as so often, and not only on climate, clickbait sensationalism about what might:

“The development threatens to upend the dynamics around real estate in Britain, not just environmentally but also financially. Banks risk seeing property values take a hit as the homes they’re financing get damaged in more frequent and destructive floods. Homeowners affected by floods, meanwhile, often get inundated by additional costs that make it harder for them to meet mortgage payments.”

Threatens to upend. Not “is upending” or “has upended”. Might, maybe, could; cue the panic.