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“Insurable” has become a loaded term in California. But what does “being insurable” really mean? This conversation slows down and takes the word apart: what a risk actually needs in order to be pooled, where the real limits sit versus where we only think they do, and why getting back to insurability turns out to involve a great deal more than insurance.
Today’s guests have spent years looking at climate risk from opposite ends of the financial system: Spencer Glendon, who spent nearly two decades at Wellington Management before founding the climate literacy nonprofit Probable Futures, and Barney Schauble, who helped build the catastrophe bond market from its earliest days.
They discuss:
- Why human settlement itself is an artifact of roughly 12,000 years of unusually stable climate, and what that means for orchards, sewer systems, mortgages, and municipal budgets built on the assumption it would hold
- Why property insurance is a stranger instrument than most people realize, covering one property, for one year, against a narrowly specified list of perils
- How society reshaped itself around insurance — fire departments, building codes, etc. — rather than the other way around
- Why home hardening runs into a wall when your neighbor does nothing
- What happens to a market when the price signal is quietly removed
- The three axes the group argues every policymaker is choosing whether they name them or not: transparency versus opacity, public versus private, and time
The closing argument is that “solution” may be the wrong word for a problem of this shape. What is available instead: no-regrets policy, frameworks built to be revised, room to experiment, and communities committed enough to do the work together.
- Is the Future Insurable? — Carolyn Kousky, Spencer Glendon & Barney Schauble
- Built on Assumptions: Two Tales of One Building — Glendon & Schauble, Probable Futures (May 2026)
- Probable Futures — climate maps and literacy tools referenced in the episode
- Insurance for Good resource library — primers on parametric insurance and catastrophe bonds
- Housing insurance is melting down — Glendon & Schauble, Fortune (2024)
- The Daily on this year’s El Niño
- Insurance for Good / CA FWD report on the role of insurance in funding and financing resilience
Hashtags
#CaliforniaDreamshot #Insurance #ClimateRisk #Resilience #Wildfire #InsuranceForGood #ProbableFutures #ClimateAdaptation #CaliforniaForward #CAFWD #CAPolicy #CapitalMarkets
