Intensifying wildfires, coastal erosion, and increased hurricane activity are taking an ever-rising toll on humanity. And as the grim consequences of climate change become quotidian, some are starting to ask not how to fix it, but how to profit from it.
In a blistering essay on catastrophe markets, Aeon notes that the rise of weather-based betting rather faithfully follows the development of industrial capitalism. Since at least the 1880s, communities across the US have delighted in weather betting, most often on rain. Continuing into the early 20th century, weather betting continued to spread, becoming a common pastime among American office workers.
As the Fort Worth Star-Telegram wrote in 1915, “gambling on the weather has become an institution throughout a great part of the United States.” Back then, one form of weather gambling involved players paying 15-cents to a clandestine gambling syndicate to place a blind bet on the upcoming temperature in four random cities. (The player who most accurately guessed the four temperatures would win the bulk of the pot.) Over a century later, the technology has obviously changed, but the underlying grift remains.
Look no further than Polymarket bets on the Palisade wildfires of early 2025. That disaster — which scorched over 35,000 acres and took 31 lives — was fueled by high winds and drought conditions, which are symptoms of heat-trapping gasses linked to fossil fuel burning, two separate analyses found. Whatever the cause, gamblers were eager to cash in. As the Palisade fires raged, they bought into a million-dollar game of chance in which bettors wagered on how fast the fires would spread, how long they would last, and how many acres would ultimately burn.
Needless to say, the situation is anything but tasteful. One Polymarket bettor quoted by Aeon quipped that trading volume was “so high in this market it cause[d] another fire.” Tyler Austin Harper, an environmental studies professor at Bates College, remarked at the time that turning natural disaster into events to wager on was “depraved.”
“The gamblification of everything is Evil in [the] fullest sense of the word,” he wrote. “Capital-E Evil.”
While prediction market platforms like Polymarket have evidently cooled it on the wildfire markets in the ensuing months, they still offer plenty of climate catastrophes for users to wager on. Will the superheated waters of the Atlantic ocean produce a named hurricane before the typical season starts in June? Will March of 2026 have been the hottest on record?
Gambling on the climate and weather might not be new, but the ever rising rate of major disaster declarations means there are more crises than ever for everyday consumers to bet on. And as unregulated bookie platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi gain prominence, the result will be a citizenry trained to treat environmental catastrophe not as a problem to solve, but as a line to bet.
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