California homeowners are struggling to find insurance against wildfires and other natural disasters, as the state chases insurance companies away, and as the California Insurance Commissioner fails to hold insurance companies accountable.

So what does the California Department of Insurance want to do? Insure “urban forests” against climate change!

The department is working on a pilot project to study how it can work with insurance companies still doing business in the state to insure forests against “storms, extreme heat, drought and pests.”

The idea is to provide “parametric insurance,” which is a lump sum of money, rather than compensation for losses. (That’s how most earthquake insurance works: It won’t be enough to rebuild your house, but some smaller amount.)

The California Department of Insurance is partnering with UC Santa Cruz Center for Coastal Climate Resilience to explore how insurance policies could protect “green infrastructure.”

The United Nations Environment Programme is running a related project, encouraging something called “Total Balance Sheet Transition” (TBS).

The idea is to encourage insurers to write policies to insure the natural environment against the anticipated effects of climate change.

The UN’s idea is designed to let government and corporate players interpret the new world of insurance any way they want — and ultimately con, scam, and fleece hard-working families and businesses.

Bureaucrats will get new powers and cultivate new corporate allies as they force consumers and property owners to pay more for insurance.

Insurance companies will have new justifications to raise rates, supposedly to cover risks like rising sea levels. The companies might never have to pay claims, since sea levels will only rise several feet under the worst-case scenario.

Legislators, regulators, activists, and journalists can continue blaming petroleum companies and their customers for rising seas, wildfires, energy prices, and social and climate injustices.

Meanwhile, the thousands of aggrieved families who lost homes and loved ones in the Palisades Fire, Eaton Fire, Camp Fire, and other recent conflagrations in California will be left out in the cold.

These families won’t even be counted among the “stakeholders” in this grand TBS insurance transition, which barely offers an afterthought about wildfires.

That’s likely because urban, state, and national forest wildfires have been horrifically destructive and lethal in recent years — for reasons that have nothing to do with climate change.

The state’s forest management, endangered species, and fire response policies have prevented tree thinning and brush removal; emphasized diversity over competence in hiring, and failed to ensure adequate water supplies.

TBS mumbo-jumbo says nothing about better forest management, adequate fire insurance, ensuring faster permits to rebuild homes, or holding insurance companies to the terms of their policies.

It’s little wonder State Farm, Allstate, Farmers, and other insurers have paused or stopped selling or renewing property insurance policies in California.

Homeowners left with inadequate or no coverage must now rely on California’s FAIR Plan, the insurance
pool of last resort — which hardly covers victims for their damages.

It’s business as usual for a state that’s become infamous for planning to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a high-speed train system that has yet to lay one inch of track.

These are the typical climate change and “renewable” energy obsessions that bring blackouts, rolling outages, and the highest gasoline and electricity prices in America.

Somehow, the state continues to embrace policies that delay housing permits and raise construction costs — while keeping and even expanding homeless encampments, which are themselves the cause of wildfires.

None of this is surprising when voters have blessed one-party control of state government for most of the past fifty years.

With two Democrats — Bernie Sanders-backed Jane Kim, and State Senator Ben Allen — running for California Insurance Commissioner, voters have limited choice.

But Californians can demand that the two candidates explain if they intend to continue UN-backed pipe dreams like TBS — or if they will finally put homeowners first.

Craig Rucker is president of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that champions free markets.