Hawaii Has a Bold Idea to Make Big Oil Pay for Disasters

Hawaii may seem like Eden to those of us living in, say, New Jersey. But lately the only thing biblical about it has been the scale of the punishment it’s taking from nature. In the process, it’s also becoming a battleground in the fight over who will ultimately pay for all the destruction.

The Aloha State is bracing this week for its third “Kona low” storm in a month. The first two of these cyclones delivered high winds, torrential rain and flash flooding that destroyed homes, farms and infrastructure. The back-to-back blows inflicted more than $2 billion in damages and economic losses, the private modeling firm AccuWeather has estimated. The third storm will hit places that haven’t started to recover from the first two. Some were still scarred by the Maui wildfires of the summer of 2023, which took 100 lives and caused at least $14 billion in losses, by AccuWeather’s count.