When states are no longer habitable
Fire, heat, and floods will reshape America as millions seek to escape the effects of climate change, said Abrahm Lustgarten in The New York Times Magazine. The migration has already started.
AUGUST BESIEGED CALIFORNIA with a heat unseen in generations. A surge in air-conditioning broke the state’s electrical grid, leaving a population already ravaged by the coronavirus to work remotely by the dim light of their cellphones. By midmonth, the state had recorded possibly the hottest temperature ever measured on Earth—130 degrees in Death Valley—and an otherworldly storm of lightning had cracked open the sky. From Santa Cruz to Lake Tahoe, thousands of bolts of electricity exploded down onto withered grasslands and forests, some of them already hollowed out by climatedriven infestations of beetles and kiln-dried by the worst five-year drought on record. Over the next two weeks, 900 blazes incinerated six times as much land as all the state’s 2019 wildfires combined, forcing 100,000 people from their homes. Three of the largest fires in California’s history burned simultaneously in a ring around the San Francisco Bay Area. Another fire burned just 12 miles from my home in Marin County. Like many Californians, I spent those weeks worrying about what might happen next, wondering how long it would be before an inferno of 60-foot flames swept up the steep, grassy hillside on its way toward my own house. I had an unusual perspective on the matter. For two years, I have been studying how climate change will influence global migration. I traveled across four countries to witness how rising temperatures were driving climate refugees away from some of the poorest and hottest parts of the world.
So it was with some sense of recognition that I faced the fires these last few weeks. In recent years, summer has brought a season of fear to California, with everworsening wildfires closing in. Suddenly I had to ask myself the very question I’d been asking others: Was it time to move? 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.
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, 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. Policymakers, having left America unprepared for what’s next, now face brutal choices about which communities to save—often at exorbitant costs—and which to sacrifice. Their decisions will almost inevitably make the nation more divided, with those worst off relegated to a nightmare future in which they are left to fend for themselves. Nor will these disruptions wait for the worst environmental changes to occur. The wave begins when individual perception of risk starts to shift, when the environmental threat reaches past the least fortunate and rattles the physical and financial security of broader, wealthier parts of the population. It begins when even places like California’s suburbs are no longer safe. It has already begun.
SOME BASICS: ACROSS the country, it’s going to get hot. Buffalo may feel in a few decades like Tempe, Ariz., does today, and Tempe itself will sustain 100-degree average summer temperatures by the end of the century. Fresh water will be in short supply, not only in the West but also in places like Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, where droughts now regularly wither cotton fields. By 2040, according to federal government projections, extreme water shortages will be nearly ubiquitous west of Missouri.
It can be difficult to see the challenges clearly because so many factors are in play. At least 28 million Americans are likely to face megafires like the ones we are now seeing in California, in places like Texas and Florida and Georgia. At the same time, 100 million Americans—largely in the Mississippi River Basin from Louisiana to Wisconsin—will increasingly face humidity so extreme that working outside or playing school sports could cause heatstroke. Crop yields will be decimated from Texas to Alabama and all the way north through Oklahoma and Kansas and into Nebraska.
From Maine to North Carolina to Texas, rising sea levels are not just chewing up shorelines but also raising rivers and swamping the subterranean infrastructure of coastal communities. Eight of the nation’s 20 largest metropolitan areas— Miami, New York, and Boston among them—will be profoundly altered. Imagine large concrete walls separating Fort Lauderdale condominiums from a beachless waterfront, or dozens of new bridges connecting the islands of Philadelphia. Not every city can spend $100 billion on a sea wall, as New York most likely will.
Mathew Hauer, a sociologist at Florida State University who published some of the first modeling of American climate migration, projects that 13 million Americans will be forced to move away from submerged coastlines. Add to that the people contending with wildfires and other risks,
Last fall, though, as the previous round of fires ravaged California, his phone began to ring with private-equity investors and bankers, all looking for his read on the state’s future. Their interest suggested a growing investor-grade nervousness about swiftly mounting environmental risk in the hottest real estate markets in the country. It’s an early sign, he told me, that the momentum is about to switch directions. “And once this flips,” he added, “it’s likely to flip very quickly.”
In fact, the correction—a newfound respect for the destructive power of nature, coupled with a sudden disavowal of Americans’ appetite for reckless development—had begun two years earlier, when a frightening
28 30 31
32 34 37
40