Climate Change
Floor Speech
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am very grateful to the distinguished senior Senator from New Jersey for joining me again this week to bring attention to the challenges that climate change and rising seas pose for our coastal communities. Our States--New Jersey and Rhode Island--shared the unforgettable experience of Superstorm Sandy, which roared ashore on higher tides and warmer oceans. We know, in New Jersey and Rhode Island, how vulnerable we are.
As sea levels rise and storms intensify, the National Flood Insurance Program should be one of our government's best tools to educate and prepare our communities for the changes that carbon pollution is driving to our coasts. But the program falls well short of this basic goal. Instead of tackling its shortfalls head-on, ahead of the next big storm, for instance, we are getting set to punt again on the Flood Insurance Program.
My Ocean State, much smaller than New Jersey, has 400 miles of coastline threatened by sea level rise and storm surge flooding, so telling homeowners and coastal businesses that we will get to it eventually is not good enough. Our coastal risk is growing, not shrinking.
A 2017 Zillow chart shows that over 4,800 homes in Rhode Island-- 4,800 families' homes--valued at nearly $3 billion would be under water by 2100, using an optimistic assessment of only 6 feet of sea level rise. Rhode Island's Coastal Resources Management Council is now planning for our State to see up to 9 to 12 feet of sea level rise by then. New Jersey, of course, has even more at risk with its bigger shoreline, with over $93 billion worth of property predicted to fall to rising seas.
This problem does not wait until the year 2100. It hits earlier. It hits as soon as 30-year mortgages and insurance get hard to come by because banks and insurers foresee these risks, and that inhibits buyers, so prices fall--perhaps prices even crash, as Freddie Mac is predicting.
Last year, GAO reported that coastal areas face particularly high financial risks and that annual coastal property losses from sea level rise and increased storms will run into the billions of dollars every year in the short run and over $50 billion every year by late century. GAO pointed to an EPA estimate of $5 trillion in economic costs to coastal property from climate change through 2100. Our coastal States can't laugh that off because it makes the oil industry uncomfortable to talk about climate change.
Investors, creditors, appraisers--everybody who works coastal markets--is taking notice. Last December, the credit rating agency, Moody's, adopted indicators ``to assess the exposure and overall susceptibility of U.S. states to the physical effects of climate change.'' This is Moody's. Moody's looks particularly at coasts and at the share of a State's economic activity generated by its coastal communities. It counts the homes built on flood plains, and it counts the risk of extreme weather damage as a share of the local economy.
The managing director at Moody's told the Chicago Tribune that Moody's would be taking these risks into consideration when evaluating the credit ratings of coastal municipalities and States.
Property appraisers are also starting to incorporate these risks into their work. The Appraisal Institute's Valuation magazine quoted Rhode Island appraiser Brad Hevenor's warning that homes that receive a 30- year mortgage today ``might be completely different types of property [by the end of their mortgage] than they are today.'' He points out, as Senator Menendez pointed out, that FEMA flood maps are defective, backward-looking, and often insufficient at accurately predicting risk for communities and homeowners.
My frustrations with FEMA's flood risk maps are no secret. They are notoriously inaccurate, incomplete, and outdated. The Agency's modeling is often based on inaccurate data and on methodology from the 1970s. It has proven particularly incapable of accurately capturing the different wave and dune dynamics that determine real flood risk along coasts during major storms.
The Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council, a small State agency, has had to develop its own models to provide better risk information to coastal residents and communities than FEMA provides. The contrast between the State's work and FEMA's maps highlights just how costly and potentially life-threatening reliance on FEMA's maps can be.
This map is FEMA's map relative to mean sea level for a 100-year storm hitting Charlestown, RI. Here is the code as to how much flooding to expect. The worst flooding for the homes that surround Ninigret Pond, along Rhode Island's southern coast, looks to be around 14 feet around this area here.
This map shows the CRMC's prediction for the same area for the same storm. It projects that homes in this same area may see closer to 20 feet of floodwaters, which means FEMA's map is underestimating flood risk by 6 feet.
It is not just errors in Rhode Island. Rice University and Texas A&M found that FEMA flood risk maps captured only about 25 percent of the actual damage from storms that hit Houston between 1999 and 2009--25 percent. According to the Houston Chronicle, more than half of homes damaged by Hurricane Harvey were not listed in any flood risk areas, meaning they were not required to have flood insurance or meet any flood risk mitigation building codes.
Congress continues to fund these maps on the cheap, leaving Americans to bear the risk of antiquated models that don't reflect the changes that climate change is bringing to our coasts. Families are forced to endure the repeated damage and destruction of their homes, and taxpayers are made to pay the cost of over and over and over rebuilding the same building in the same place that is already washed away.
After Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the Flood Insurance Program hit its $30 billion borrowing limit. We maxed out. So in October of 2017, Congress had to forgive $16 billion worth of debt to free up money to pay off claims for Harvey, Irma, and Maria. The program is currently at least $20 billion in debt, and claims from the 2018 hurricane season are still being processed. The Congressional Research Service, as of September 2018, found that the program had only $9.9 billion of remaining borrowing authority.
It is time to get serious about reforming this broken system and reform it for a changing climate and for changing coasts--the things we know are coming at us. The current system often leaves homeowners no option but to rebuild the same building in the same place on the flooded property. CRS estimates that only about 2 percent of current NFIP-related properties are considered repetitive loss or severe repetitive loss properties--only 2 percent, but that 2 percent accounts for 16 percent of claims, $9 billion. Over the life of the NFIP, those repetitive loss or severe repetitive loss properties have totaled around 30 percent of all claims, about $17 billion.
Insurance should allow homeowners to walk away from flood-torn structures and go find new, safer homes. Currently, only States or municipalities can use FEMA to arrange buyouts of flood-prone properties. FEMA then provides up to 75 percent of funding for the local government to buy the property at fair market value, and then it becomes open space. But the buyout process is cumbersome, it is bureaucratic, it is not in the hands of the homeowners, and it doesn't get much use. How many mayors and city councils want to buy out and turn to public use valuable property that is a part of their tax base and encourage folks, potentially, to leave?
The flood program should work with communities to plan for cost- effective resiliency to flooding, whether it is elevating properties, moving homes, or retreating from rising seas. Homeowners should have these options. It is willful blindness to ignore this problem as seas continue to rise and storms become more unpredictable and ferocious, and it is even worse when you compound it with false and erroneous mapping so that the warnings to these families are wrong.
Property owners and communities deserve proper warning about the flood risks they face, and they deserve alternatives to simply rebuilding the same building in the same place so that it can be flooded again and again and again, which the program now forces them to do.
With so much at risk for American families, it is time to wake up and put in place a smart and reliable system once and for all.
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