Here’s the Climate Message That Can Help Democrats Win Big in 2026

For many Americans, getting any insurance at all is becoming impossible. Since 2021, at least 36 property insurers in 11 states have canceled more than 1.4 million policies, and many insurers are abandoning parts of the country completely—all while continuing to rake in obscene profits. For example, Progressive reported $8.5 billion in profits in 2024, the same year the company canceled 115,000 policies in Florida and stopped writing new policies in Texas; Allstate raised rates by 34 percent in California last year, while reporting $4.7 billion in profits and awarding its CEO $26.7 million total compensation.

And at the same time that rates are rising and coverage is shrinking, millions of Americans’ property values are falling. According to research published last month, houses in areas that are particularly exposed to hurricanes and wildfires have sold for an average of $43,900 less than they otherwise would have because of climate-induced shocks in the home insurance market. For most Americans, the home is the biggest investment they will ever have—a significant decline in its value can be financially devastating.

Homeowners in Washington state recently filed a class-action lawsuit against major oil and gas companies for these losses. The underlying logic is simple: Climate change is the root cause of all of these harms, all these costs, all this chaos. And the oil and gas companies responsible for this climate change knew exactly what they were doing. As one internal report from Shell predicted way back in 1989, the unabated burning of fossil fuels would cause “more violent weather—more storms, more droughts, more deluges.” Yet, at the same time that these companies were redesigning their own infrastructure to prepare for the climate changes they knew were coming, they were executing a vast conspiracy to, as one fossil fuel industry strategy document put it, “reposition global warming as theory (not fact)” in order to fraudulently turn the public against climate action. Big Oil corporations—and the big insurance companies that financed and underwrote them, even as their internal analyses made clear the connection between fossil fuels, extreme weather, and major property damage—knowingly stole our opportunity to address climate change on a timeline that would have averted the insurance crises so many American homeowners are currently facing. They should help pay for the solutions.