In a guest NYT essay When Climate Change Comes to Your Doorstep, Alexandra Tempus writes:
We are now at the dawn of America’s Great Climate Migration Era. For now, it is piecemeal, and moves are often temporary. Brutalized by hurricanes, flooding and a winter storm, Lake Charles, La., residents have been living with relatives for months. In early August, the Dixie fire — the largest single fire in recorded California history — claimed at least one entire town, and locals took to living in tents. Apartment dwellers in Lynn Haven, Fla., were forced from their homes to slosh through streets flooded by Tropical Storm Fred. The evacuee tally has continued to rise, from New Englanders in the path of Hurricane Henri to flood survivors in North Carolina and Tennessee to people escaping fire in Montana and Minnesota.
Permanent relocations, by individuals and eventually whole communities, Tempus says, “are increasingly becoming unavoidable” and are better to be taken on before crisis hits.
Not heeding evidence before their very eyes, Americans are, in fact, establishing a pattern of migrating to states which are tapped to be the most impacted by climate change, Many are resettling in large numbers in Texas, Florida, and Arizona rather than choosing to set down roots in ‘climate havens’ like Michigan or Buffalo, New York.
Abraham Luntsgarten, writing for ProPublica/New York Times Magazine in Climate Change Will Force a New American Migration, notes: “In much of the developing world, vulnerable people will attempt to flee the emerging perils of global warming, seeking cooler temperatures, more fresh water and safety. But here in the United States, people have largely gravitated toward environmental danger, building along coastlines from New Jersey to Florida and settling across the cloudless deserts of the Southwest.”
Census data, he says, ”shows us how Americans move: toward heat, toward coastlines, toward drought, regardless of evidence of increasing storms and flooding and other disasters.”
Writing last year, during an historic fire season in the west, Luntsgarten says “The hopelessness of the pattern was now clear, and the pandemic had already uprooted so many Americans. Relocation no longer seemed like such a distant prospect. Like the subjects of my reporting, climate change had found me, its indiscriminate forces erasing all semblance of normalcy. Suddenly I had to ask myself the very question I’d been asking others: Was it time to move?”
What I found was a nation on the cusp of a great transformation. Across the United States, some 162 million people — nearly 1 in 2 — will most likely experience a decline in the quality of their environment, namely more heat and less water. For 93 million of them, the changes could be particularly severe, and by 2070, our analysis suggests, if carbon emissions rise at extreme levels, at least 4 million Americans could find themselves living at the fringe, in places decidedly outside the ideal niche for human life. The cost of resisting the new climate reality is mounting. Florida officials have already acknowledged that defending some roadways against the sea will be unaffordable. And the nation’s federal flood-insurance program is for the first time requiring that some of its payouts be used to retreat from climate threats across the country. It will soon prove too expensive to maintain the status quo.
What’s Being Done
On the national level, the government has been studying international climate migration but little has been done regarding domestic resettlements due to climate change in the US.
“I think that’s a missed opportunity on many fronts.” says Jesse Keenan, an associate professor of real estate at the Tulane School of Architecture who studies climate change adaptation and the built environment. (Luntsgarten, who lives in Northern California, interviewed Keenan for the ProPublica/NYT story. Keenan told him it was time to leave.)
A change in scope is coming, albeit slowly, at the national level. A new FEMA program, Building Resilient Infrastructure, (BRIC) assists cities after disasters by buying out heavily damaged or destroyed properties and encouraging occupants to resettle in a less at-risk location.
New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States
According to new data from the Rhodium Group analyzed by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, warming temperatures and changing rainfall will drive agriculture and temperate climates northward, while sea level rise will consume coastlines and dangerous levels of humidity will swamp the Mississippi River valley.
Taken with other recent research showing that the most habitable climate in North America will shift northward and the incidence of large fires will increase across the country, this suggests that the climate crisis will profoundly interrupt the way we live and farm in the United States. See how the North American places where humans have lived for thousands of years will shift and what changes are in store for your county. projects.propublica.org/...
Insurance rates for properties in climate-impacted areas will soon become prohibitively high, causing an exodus of homeowners. The rich, says Keenan, will be the first to exit, leaving behind the poorer community members.
“What happens if people get left behind?” says Keenan. “You have a diminished economic activity and output, and you can run this risk of reinforcing poverty cycles in very concentrated areas. And I think that’s almost the sole reason that we have to have the federal government engaged in this.”
A suggestion currently under consideration is using Biden’s proposed Civilian Climate Corps (based on the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps) to build houses for those who are displaced by climate change.
Best Places To Live In A Climate Changed World
In the article The Best Places to Live in a Future Troubled by Climate Change, author Rick LeBlanc highlights the factors to consider making a decision to move: a place that’s cool, not near the ocean, has access to water, and is of an adequate elevation to withstand floods.
The top five choices around the world include:
1. Boston, MA
2. The Great Lake States
3. Greenland
4. Denver, CO
5. Ireland
Just last week, grassroots activists from disenfranchised groups called upon the president to establish a climate migration agency. The group is seeking relocation funds to assist them when climate change renders their relocation a fact of life. They hope that federal relocation money and information will be easily accessible to all so that the relocation process will be easier.
Our children and grandchildren will live in a world much different from ours, where permanent changes to climate will have altered population patterns and the way large groups of people get their food and remain safe from the elements. They will have somewhat limited options for where to live, so it’s not too early to consider how to find a safe place during a world tormented by a drastically-changed climate. www.thebalancesmb.com/...
Action
- Talk about climate change with your friends and family members. "Each one teach one," said climate activist and business owner, Jerome Ringo. "I call them kitchen conversations," he said.
- "The most important thing that individuals can do is vote, and vote on the climate," Michael E. Mann, professor of atmospheric science at Penn State, told CNBC.
- "Do anything — anything at all," Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at New York University said. "Students, study. Teachers, teach. Writers, write. Entrepreneurs, invent, build, ship! Whatever it is you do best, consider how climate change figures into it, and do that." How you can help fight climate change in ways that really matter
The writers in Climate Brief work to keep the Daily Kos community informed and engaged with breaking news about the climate crisis around the world while providing inspiring stories of environmental heroes, opportunities for direct engagement, and perspectives on the intersection of climate activism with spirituality, politics, and the arts.
Climate Brief posts every evening,
5pm est