The Mortgage Crisis That Wasn't: How the Media Buries Climate Stories in the Business Section
When Fed Chair Powell warned that entire regions might become unmortgageable, why did it barely make the news?
So here's a question for you. I'm going to ask you about something that happened in February and we'll see if you heard about it. Fed Chair Powell gave a bit of a warning: "There are going to be regions of the country where you can't get a mortgage." This was because of climate-driven issues and the insurance crisis.
So how come this bombshell got minimal coverage while other Fed comments dominate headlines? Yes, interest rates are important, but if no one can get a mortgage in certain states, I don't think most people will care much about the interest rates. There's a gap between what's newsworthy and what's economically transformative.
The Story That Should Have Been Front Page News
As you can see from the quote above, Powell actually said that in 10 to 15 years, parts of the US will be uninsurable and thus unmortgageable. This whole story was buried in financial sections across the country. It was covered a bit, but framed as a housing and banking story. To me, this is a clear-cut climate story.
Climate change is already reshaping American geography, wealth, and the American dream itself. State Farm canceled Pacific Palisades policies months before the fires out there, and that wasn't coincidence. It's happening all over, in red states and blue states, California to Texas. It's just getting harder to get insurance in some places, and that's not going to change without serious reform.
The Pattern: Climate Stories in Disguise
This news story is just part of a broader pattern. Climate impacts are routinely reframed as different issues unrelated to climate. In fact, a lot of newspapers don't have climate sections. Some have environment sections, which is nice to see, but a lot of coverage just misses the connection when related issues come up.
The housing affordability crisis rarely mentions climate change making some regions unlivable. There are only so many safe places to move because almost everybody lives near the coast in this country. Insurance market disruptions aren't called managed retreat from climate reality, they're just called business decisions. Supply chain issues are never attributed to climate disruption.
So why do these things happen? Climate stories feel abstract while economic stories feel immediate and impact you directly. Reporters can get compartmentalized, a finance beat reporter might not focus on climate change because they're covering finance, not environment. Not every reporter does this, and some go in-depth, but space is often an issue in print media, and some of that carries over to digital.
The biggest issue is that climate reporting often requires connecting dots across time and issues. It's easy to forget something that happened six months ago when five other things have happened since then, and we're lucky if our local newspaper covered even one of them.
The Whitewashing Machine
There's also language that helps whitewash everything or make climate change seem less significant than it is. Even semantic softening matters. We've talked about this before, saying "biosolids" instead of "refined sewage sludge." But what about "natural disasters" versus "climate-fueled catastrophes"? It's all in the framing, isn't it?
There's temporal displacement because the focus stays on immediate impacts rather than what's going to happen in 10 or 15 years. It's much easier to dismiss future consequences, especially when there's a big disaster happening right now. There's also agency erasure. Weather happens to us rather than being shaped by us. When a hurricane hits your town, it's not attributed to climate change but to natural weather patterns, with no mention that climate change likely made it a category stronger than it would have been otherwise. (Study.)
Then there's solution theater: technology fixes get coverage while systemic changes don't because they're boring compared to innovation. Technology is new and interesting and makes you feel good because "look, we're going to solve our way out of this, don't worry!" We very well might, but it's silly to bet the house on that. It's not that we can't, but given how we've treated climate change thus far, we probably just won't.
What We Miss When We Miss the Climate Story
Powell's warning isn't about future risk, rather it's about present reality. If he can see it right now, he's saying it so we do something about it. Managed retreat is already happening all over the place; it's just not being called that. There are roads in Key West that the state of Florida has given up on. It'll happen to more and more houses as time goes on. People are choosing not to rebuild where their houses were destroyed, (though businesses and developers are still building in flood plains where they probably shouldn't. That’ll end well, surely.)
Economic transformation is climate transformation. And there's an unequal geography of who gets left behind. Look at Hurricane Katrina and who was left behind in New Orleans. Those with means will likely leave while those without will be stuck without insurance when the next hurricane comes through. It's not sustainable, and we need to do more about it, but we don't even talk about climate change at the federal level anymore.
Wealthy areas get protection while poor areas get abandoned, disguised as market forces. Whole communities are going to suffer, just like what happened to the rust belt, but in really attractive beach towns. Insurance redlining becomes climate redlining. And personal responsibility narratives obscure structural abandonment. You'll hear a lot of "they should've left when they had the chance" in the coming years. The media won't be any kinder to climate refugees than they are to any other kind of refugees.
Reading Between the Lines
So how do we spot climate stories hiding in other sections? I treat it like a little game sometimes. Ask yourself: what's the weather doing in this story? Think about how news stories impact each other and are interconnected. If the media won't connect the dots, we have to connect them ourselves.
Climate literacy is economic literacy. The best economic indicators in the world don't mean much if the factory gets flooded and destroyed a week later by a climate-driven storm. One reason I focus so much on the climate crisis is because it's interconnected to so many other parts of our life and society.
A lot of warnings about climate change tell us how scary things will be, and they very well could be true, but they don't always focus on things people care about. It's easy to say it's not a big deal that large swaths of Florida might be uninhabitable, if you're living in Montana. There are easy ways denial can work because it's not a pressing issue today. That's valid, but some thought needs to go into it, and no one's going to do the thinking for you.
The Stories That Shape Our Future
Media coverage doesn't only reflect reality, it helps construct it. When climate impacts are systematically reframed in the news, it takes away a tool for us, and we lose the ability to respond systemically because most people think this is financial news, not environmental news.
Powell's warning should have been front-page news about American climate reality and the future, as people make decisions to take out 30-year mortgages in places where insurance might not exist in a couple of years. There's so much here, and this is just one little story from a few months ago that many people probably missed. What else are we missing?
The stories we don't tell become the futures we can't imagine or help prevent. Sure, you might sleep better if you're not worried about the climate-changed world that might be coming, but if everybody does that, then we really should be even more worried about the climate-changed world that is coming.
Education is key to advocacy, but even more simply, we have to be honest with ourselves about what's going on. If we're not, we'll probably be surprised in an unpleasant way at some point in the future.