American homeowners are experiencing the climate crisis in the most tangible of ways: Home insurance is becoming more costly as companies pay ever-higher costs to fix the damage of climate-driven weather events.

"Insuring your home has never been harder," said The Washington Post. There are a lot of reasons for this, and "intensifying climate risk" that causes "more costly and uncertain extreme weather events" is chief among them. 

"Higher home insurance rates are here to stay," said The Wall Street Journal. Many homeowners also face "increasing risk of nonrenewals" and reduced coverage or special conditions, like paying for a new roof, to remain eligible for coverage. But insurance companies have good reason to raise rates: "Insured losses from U.S. storms have grown 8% a year for more than a decade."

What did the commentators say?
"The answer isn't to patch a broken system; it's to reimagine it," Zac Taylor said at The Tampa Bay Times. Hurricane-prone Florida is particularly hard-hit by the insurance crisis. Premiums there have risen 102% over the last three years. But this "crisis is collective, not just coastal." 

It's time to create housing resilience agencies that link "affordable insurance directly to risk-reduction efforts." Such agencies would advise builders and potential homeowners "where it's unsafe to build" and assist people who need to relocate from "high-risk zones."

"Many houses in climate-risky areas will become stranded assets," Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh and Parinitha Sastry, of the Columbia Business School, said at MarketWatch. To prevent this, it should be costlier to buy homes in high-risk areas. When mortgages in these areas are too cheap, it "encourages building in dangerous locations and having people move there." Raising mortgage prices in disaster-prone regions sends the "proper signal to potential buyers about the climate risks."

What next?
The ripple effects could be devastating. Communities "deemed too dangerous to insure face the risk of falling property values," said The New York Times. That means "less tax revenue for schools, police and other basic services." 

But the trend is accelerating. In California, insurance nonrenewal rates have "increased more than 500% since 2018." So far, however, the high costs haven't dissuaded Americans from flocking to disaster-prone areas. "They may cuss us out," said Jay Taylor, a South Carolina insurance agent. "But they never stop building."

For years, Beijing has sought to use "every means and medium of intelligence-gathering at its disposal" against the West, said Foreign Policy. Its strategy can be "summarized in three words: collect, collect, collect." 

China gathers vast amounts of data from "government websites, parliamentarians, universities, think tanks and human rights organizations" while also targeting "diaspora groups and individuals," said The Spectator. Led by the nominally civilian Ministry of State Security, which is responsible for domestic security, counter-espionage and collecting foreign intelligence, China has "deepened its cyber capabilities while building on old-fashioned human intelligence operations" over the past 20 years. 

How widespread is the network? 
China's intelligence agencies "appear to have fewer constraints" than they once did about "recruiting foreigners and using techniques such as honey-traps," said The Spectator. Even foreign students in China are being approached "in the hope that they can, in time, be maneuvered into positions of influence within their home countries." 

This could just be par for the course for any major power with global ambitions — the U.S., the U.K. and others have been doing this for decades. But China's intelligence services operate in a "fundamentally different way from those in the West — in nature, scope and scale," said Foreign Policy. 

What's the end game? 
Some of the work of the Ministry of State Security focuses on monitoring and suppressing anti-regime activity and actors. But it's increasingly focused on extracting information from foreign governments, individuals and businesses. The Chinese Communist Party's "tentacles are everywhere," said The Telegraph, "seeking to siphon up cutting-edge technology and interfering in the democratic political processes of dozens of countries."