Speaker 1: Welcome back to Drilled.
Speaker 2: I'm Amy Westerveldt. We will be bringing you another season soon,
Speaker 2: but in the meantime, I'm back with weekly updates on
Speaker 2: various aspects of climate accountability and occasionally with some book
Speaker 2: recommendations and interviews related to them. Like today, I have
Speaker 2: joining me Jake Biddle. He's a journalist for Grist, and
Speaker 2: he also had a book come out just a couple
Speaker 2: months ago about internal migration in the US caused by
Speaker 2: climate change. It's called The Great Displacement. It's a great book.
Speaker 2: All stick a link to it. In the show notes,
Speaker 2: Jake talked to me about all kinds of things he
Speaker 2: discovered while reporting this book, and it's pretty fascinating stuff.
Speaker 2: That conversation is coming up after this quick break.
Speaker 3: Hi, my name is Jake Pittle. Okay.
Speaker 1: I want you to start by kind of setting the
Speaker 1: stakes for people.
Speaker 3: I feel like we hear.
Speaker 1: Lots of numbers bandied about around climate migration. So, in
Speaker 1: terms of internal migration within the US driven by a climate,
Speaker 1: what kinds of numbers are we seeing right now in
Speaker 1: the projections?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 4: So, the most recent numbers suggest that each year, you know,
Speaker 4: upwards of a million and closer in the past few
Speaker 4: years to two or three million people are displaced from
Speaker 4: their homes for any amount of time by a climate disaster, right,
Speaker 4: and so the vast majority of those people end up
Speaker 4: pretty quickly moving back to their homes, the original homes,
Speaker 4: once they can repair the damage, or once the immediate
Speaker 4: disaster is over. But a substantial number do not. And
Speaker 4: we don't really know what that number is, but it's
Speaker 4: probably safe to say that tens of thousands of people
Speaker 4: every year end up having to spend you know, at
Speaker 4: least a year out of their home, or they end
Speaker 4: up moving to a different home eventually. So the cumulative
Speaker 4: toll of this displacement over the next few decades is
Speaker 4: going to get pretty large.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: You could imagine that multiple millions of people over the
Speaker 4: next few decades, certainly by the middle of the century,
Speaker 4: will have made a permanent relocation, you know, as a
Speaker 4: result of either pressure from a climate disaster or what's
Speaker 4: even harder to gauge, you know, they make a voluntary
Speaker 4: movement away from a vulnerable area, you know, to avoid
Speaker 4: a future disaster.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, honestly, that played into my decision to leave. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sure, and I know a few other people who
Speaker 1: also because we had it wasn't the snow. It was
Speaker 1: like we had multiple summers in a row of being
Speaker 1: trapped inside by smoke from yeahs, like my kids' school
Speaker 1: started to have more smoke days than snow days. Wow,
Speaker 1: which was really just brutal.
Speaker 3: Ye was it the Caldor fire that was all around
Speaker 3: that all around for a few weeks, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we actually evacuated twice because of that fire. Like
Speaker 1: the first time was just the smoke got so bad
Speaker 1: that like it was, you know, like my kids were
Speaker 1: complaining about their eyes hurting inside the house even with
Speaker 1: all the windows closed. I mean, you know, most of
Speaker 1: Tahoe's housing stock was like built in the nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: and never touched since, so it's not like we've had
Speaker 1: really great, you know, seals on our windows. So I
Speaker 1: kind of was like, oh, I guess we could just
Speaker 1: leave for a few days to get a break from
Speaker 1: the smoke. That would probably be good. And since you
Speaker 1: know we're able to do that, we should did. And
Speaker 1: then the second was actually like they were worried it
Speaker 1: was going to kind of like tear up the west
Speaker 1: shore of Lake. So they were everyone in West and
Speaker 1: North Tahoe to evacuate, so it wasn't like running from
Speaker 1: a fire.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I feel like people have this idea that it's like
Speaker 1: that it's always like disaster or not disaster emergency emergency,
Speaker 1: and like a lot of people end up, you know,
Speaker 1: leaving for either a short period of time or forever
Speaker 1: just because of like a building of it.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely, definitely.
Speaker 1: So anyway, I want to have you talk about some
Speaker 1: of the things that you heard from folks about how
Speaker 1: they make the decision to stay or leave, both temporarily
Speaker 1: and more permanently.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, I think this is This was a really
Speaker 4: interesting and kind of surprising part of the reporting process
Speaker 4: for the book is that I guess I had kind
Speaker 4: of assumed when I started that there would be a
Speaker 4: kind of you know, psychological shift that took place in
Speaker 4: most people, where as the risks got larger and more frequent,
Speaker 4: they would, you know, decide that they were more afraid
Speaker 4: of then they were hesitant to leave and find a
Speaker 4: new home. That was certainly true for a lot of people,
Speaker 4: but I think there was this whole other set of
Speaker 4: push and pull factors which were primarily financial that I
Speaker 4: don't think I considered at the start. Right, So, the
Speaker 4: availability and extent to which someone had bought homeowners insurance
Speaker 4: or flood insurance and flood print areas was like a
Speaker 4: prime driver of whether they had the resources to rebuild
Speaker 4: the same kind of home that they lived in before.
Speaker 4: And then the ambient sort of level of housing shortage
Speaker 4: in a place was really really important for renters. Right So,
Speaker 4: in places like northern California, if there's a wildfire that
Speaker 4: destroys hundreds or thousands of housing units, the rents go
Speaker 4: up precipitously overnight, and people, even if their homes didn't
Speaker 4: actually get destroyed in the fire, they can't find a
Speaker 4: place to rent that's anywhere near affordable and they have
Speaker 4: to leave.
Speaker 3: So there's these hool This is.
Speaker 1: Exactly what happened to me, Like my landlord decided to
Speaker 1: sell the house that we were renting or maybe move
Speaker 1: a family member, and I don't.
Speaker 3: Know, you wanted to you know, yeah, yeah, And it.
Speaker 1: Was right after the caled Or.
Speaker 3: Fire, right right, right, Yeah, it.
Speaker 1: Was like, oh my god, there's nothing that we can
Speaker 1: find that's less than four thousand dollars a month.
Speaker 4: It's yeah, and I think, like, like the most people
Speaker 4: that I spoke to who ended up having to move
Speaker 4: or choosing to move, it seems to exist on a
Speaker 4: spectrum between having to move and choosing to move. But
Speaker 4: I guess I was sort of surprised about how, you know,
Speaker 4: their attitudes about leaving kind of existed in this this
Speaker 4: limbo where some of them didn't really think that they
Speaker 4: were leaving for good, some of them didn't want to leave,
Speaker 4: but they were going to leave. Some of them still
Speaker 4: thought of themselves as people who would never leave, even
Speaker 4: as they had to kind of come to grips with
Speaker 4: the fact that maybe they weren't coming back. I think
Speaker 4: I had sort of imagined there would be a binary
Speaker 4: between people who chose to stay and people who chose
Speaker 4: to leave, and there was really not. The financial pressure
Speaker 4: of the post disaster world, you know, really was the
Speaker 4: main factor I think that made it impossible for people
Speaker 4: to stay even when they thought that they would not leave.
Speaker 1: That's so interesting. I mean, it makes total sense when
Speaker 1: you say it, But yeah, I think a lot of
Speaker 1: times you hear about it in this kind of stay
Speaker 1: or go binary. Okay, I want to talk about climate
Speaker 1: gentrification and this way that black and brown people in
Speaker 1: particular are getting pushed into more disaster prone zones. I
Speaker 1: think the first time I heard the term climate gentrification
Speaker 1: was in Miami, and I just had this image in
Speaker 1: my head of people being literally pushed into the sea.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I'm curious to hear about what you saw
Speaker 1: and your reporting on that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's really really interesting.
Speaker 4: I think that that case study in Miami has been
Speaker 4: really really influential for the way that a lot of
Speaker 4: people see the problem. And it's certainly true that many
Speaker 4: of the highest elevated areas in Miami have historically been
Speaker 4: areas of quite low property values home to black and
Speaker 4: brown communities, and now there's like a substantial placement pressure.
Speaker 3: Going on in those communities.
Speaker 4: Now, whether the developers are actively trying to make investments
Speaker 4: on a high ground, I mean, they'll tell you that
Speaker 4: they're not, and they just think it's a good place
Speaker 4: to gentrify, which in many respects it actually is. It's
Speaker 4: like right next to the other gentrified neighborhoods. But I mean,
Speaker 4: it's hard to imagine that they don't have the ability
Speaker 4: to look at a map, you know, and see what's
Speaker 4: going to happen. But I think that there's this whole
Speaker 4: other set of pressures that I think you could call
Speaker 4: gentrification pressures, right like what I was talking about before
Speaker 4: in northern California and also in other parts of Florida,
Speaker 4: where as financial interests like insurance companies and mortgage lenders
Speaker 4: try to reduce their exposure, you know, they reduced the
Speaker 4: total available supply of credit and insurance coverage, and that
Speaker 4: increases a lot of pressure, financial pressure on lower middle
Speaker 4: class and middle class homeowners in particular. Renters have a
Speaker 4: really hard time of it all the time. But I
Speaker 4: think that there's a kind of specific gentrification pressure that's happening,
Speaker 4: especially in Florida with windstorm and flood insurance, where a
Speaker 4: lot of homeowners can no longer keep up with the
Speaker 4: financial burden of paying insurance and keeping that coverage and
Speaker 4: sort of like pushing people out of the threshold of
Speaker 4: homeownership already, especially in parts of Miami where winstorm insurance
Speaker 4: has gotten extremely expensive. I think this is like a
Speaker 4: kind of invisible climate gentrification pressure that we don't always
Speaker 4: hear about because it's not quite so graphic and visible,
Speaker 4: but the risks are getting transferred onto homeowners and residents
Speaker 4: of these places, and that's like really really hard for
Speaker 4: a lot of people to bear, and it pushes people
Speaker 4: out of those areas.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know that in California, as insurers kind of
Speaker 1: stopped offering really any fire insurance at all or really
Speaker 1: raise premiums to the point that people couldn't afford them,
Speaker 1: the state kind of stepped in, which is obviously not
Speaker 1: necessarily sustainable in the long term. Are you seeing that
Speaker 1: in other states as well, like states kind of getting
Speaker 1: in on the insurance game as a way to mitigate
Speaker 1: that impact.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4: In Florida and Louisiana, which have both seem sort of
Speaker 4: downward spirals in their homeowners' insurance markets thanks to the hurricanes,
Speaker 4: the state has gotten involved sort of bailed out insurance
Speaker 4: that are collapsing, and then in Florida they pumped like
Speaker 4: a bunch of money into what's called reinsurance to help
Speaker 4: the insurers themselves get insurance. And then they also produced
Speaker 4: all these different legislative reforms to try to stabilize the system.
Speaker 4: And in California, I think in particular, there's a lot
Speaker 4: of interest in regulating the way that insurers can choose
Speaker 4: to set prices not so much in Florida and Louisiana,
Speaker 4: probably for obvious reasons. But in California, the state has said,
Speaker 4: you know, if a homeowner takes steps to make her
Speaker 4: home more resilient to wildfire, then the insurer has to
Speaker 4: offer them a discount rate. You know, you have to
Speaker 4: take that into account when you set the price of premiams.
Speaker 3: I think that's like it's the probably the.
Speaker 4: Best policy that the state really has the legal authority
Speaker 4: to do, I think, or one of the best, and
Speaker 4: it should incentivize homeowners to do some of this, and
Speaker 4: hopefully the burdens are not so much that people just
Speaker 4: can't afford to pay the money up front, but it
Speaker 4: would lead to some big discounts. Yeah, and I think
Speaker 4: that that you're going to have to see probably more
Speaker 4: that kind of policy in order to prevent like a
Speaker 4: serious collapse in one of these markets, which we haven't
Speaker 4: quite seen yet.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about a term that I find
Speaker 1: to be terrifying because it sounds so and bureaucratic, but
Speaker 1: it is like kind of a major deal and that
Speaker 1: is managed to retreat.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like every time I.
Speaker 1: Hear that term, I think as people like slowly running
Speaker 1: and screaming exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: It is like a very sanitized term for something that's
Speaker 4: often you know, very very painful.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I'm curious just well, I want have you
Speaker 1: defined this term for people? And then I want to
Speaker 1: hear more about what you saw around that, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of across the country where people are at with
Speaker 1: this idea, you know, where are their local governments that
Speaker 1: are actually trying to plan how you know, how it
Speaker 1: gets managed. I know, like sometimes when it gets mentioned
Speaker 1: in any kind of official way, like you know, property
Speaker 1: values plummet, and get really worried about that too. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm curious to hear what you saw in them from Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so manager treat is, as you said, the kind
Speaker 4: of sanitized term for the government, a state sponsored you know,
Speaker 4: relocation of people away from the most flood prone or
Speaker 4: disaster prone areas, or I guess relocation to people, buildings
Speaker 4: or infrastructure. Right, So any kind of you know, if
Speaker 4: you're moving the wastewater treatment plant back from the ocean,
Speaker 4: or if you're tearing down a neighborhood and giving people
Speaker 4: money to move elsewhere, that's all under the sort of
Speaker 4: unbrellt of managed retreat. I think that the main way
Speaker 4: that this has happened in the United States so far
Speaker 4: is through this FEMA's home buyout program, where basically FEMA
Speaker 4: will give a local jurisdiction, a city or county, money
Speaker 4: to pay everyone in a certain area to leave or
Speaker 4: offer them the opportunity to leave.
Speaker 3: Really, it's not a mandatory program.
Speaker 4: FEMA gives you money, you leave your house, you find
Speaker 4: another house, and then FEMA tears down your house or
Speaker 4: the county really tears down your house, and then they've
Speaker 4: removed a structure from the floodplain, and that you know,
Speaker 4: they've reduced their future risk of flooding, and they've also
Speaker 4: reduced your future risk of flooding.
Speaker 3: Hopefully.
Speaker 4: This is like in theory, right, it's one of the
Speaker 4: most cost effective and really like the most sort of
Speaker 4: forward looking tools we have to adapt to climate change. Right,
Speaker 4: you can build levy you know, x feet y feed
Speaker 4: z feet. There's always potential risk that another flood will
Speaker 4: overtop it in the future, but if you make sure
Speaker 4: that you move somebody away from the world, then you
Speaker 4: know the chances are if there's no home there the
Speaker 4: home camp flood, right, and so like in theory this
Speaker 4: this looks pretty good as the last resort option in
Speaker 4: places where there's either no money to adapt, you know,
Speaker 4: to build these structures, or where for some reason we
Speaker 4: feel like it's not worth it, like the dangers are
Speaker 4: just too extensive. The problem, and what I found in
Speaker 4: the book is that almost everywhere that this happens, it
Speaker 4: turns out to be really ugly and to leave people
Speaker 4: in quite a bit of pain. So I wrote about
Speaker 4: like a test case of this in eastern North Carolina,
Speaker 4: there was this community called Lincoln City. It was a
Speaker 4: historic African American community right on the banks of this
Speaker 4: river on land that was sort of considered worthless by
Speaker 4: the white planters who had dominated the area in the
Speaker 4: late nineteenth century.
Speaker 3: And the government, after two hurricanes, came in and said,
Speaker 3: we would like to give you all money to leave.
Speaker 4: We're never going to build a levee around you, we're
Speaker 4: never going to help you elevate your homes because they're
Speaker 4: not worth enough.
Speaker 3: Everyone basically took the offer. They left.
Speaker 4: This community was raised in two years, and now they're
Speaker 4: all scattered around and they still retained very painful memories
Speaker 4: of like the government coming in ton and they had
Speaker 4: to leave this place that was really the only place
Speaker 4: that had ever felt like home for them. This has
Speaker 4: happened all over the country. Some places people are okay
Speaker 4: with leaving, you know, but other places, especially black communities,
Speaker 4: where there's not enough home values in the government's has
Speaker 4: to justify, you know, the expense of flood protection. This
Speaker 4: is often a really painful process, and it's just sort
Speaker 4: of like it's one of these things where, you know,
Speaker 4: a lot of adaptation experts and sort of planners see
Speaker 4: it as a really really sound tool for adapting, and
Speaker 4: to a certain extent, it is, but it comes with
Speaker 4: all kinds of implications for racial and economic justice that
Speaker 4: we really haven't begun to tease out yet.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, I mean, we haven't figured out how to
Speaker 1: build housing or approach development in an equitable way, period,
Speaker 1: So the idea that we're going to do manage to
Speaker 1: retreat in an equitable way seems really implausible unfortunately. But
Speaker 1: I also think, like, you know, kind of leaving it
Speaker 1: to a disaster to take care of has similar impacts.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, at least at least in
Speaker 4: the case of you know, a manage retreat policy, you
Speaker 4: could in theory design a policy that works better than
Speaker 4: the one that they have currently does, right, Like, so
Speaker 4: the buyout program, you just get a check for the
Speaker 4: pre flood market value of your house, right So for
Speaker 4: a lot of people, that's not a sufficient payment for
Speaker 4: them to find another house they can afford in the
Speaker 4: same area, you know, Like, if you've got to buy
Speaker 4: out right now in Austin, Texas, which they've tried to
Speaker 4: do in the test, there's no home you could could
Speaker 4: afford for the amount that your previous home probably costs
Speaker 4: because costs have risen so much. But you could, in theory,
Speaker 4: you design a program that would include like a top
Speaker 4: up for instance, or a long term relocation STIPE and
Speaker 4: to help people make up that difference. But if you
Speaker 4: just wait for people's houses to get destroyed and then
Speaker 4: let them go willy nilly wherever they want, then you
Speaker 4: definitely know that it won't work, you know. I Mean,
Speaker 4: there's just no way that that will end well for
Speaker 4: most people. So I think like biots are like a
Speaker 4: good start, and there's a way that it could be
Speaker 4: done well. It's just that it's not being done well
Speaker 4: right now. But yeah, I mean, managed retreat probably preferable
Speaker 4: to unmanaged retreat if you have to retreat right.
Speaker 1: Have you seen any examples of either a managed retreat
Speaker 1: policy or other types of mitigation policies that have worked well?
Speaker 1: I know you get into this in the book. I
Speaker 1: want to have you like walk people through, you know,
Speaker 1: some examples of things that either you've seen actually implemented
Speaker 1: or you've heard people kind of talk about it sound
Speaker 1: like they could be you know, effective solutions.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I mean so probably the best example of
Speaker 4: this working well is in New Jersey. So after a
Speaker 4: Hurricane Sandy, the state started this program called Acres, which
Speaker 4: is basically like a they.
Speaker 3: Took the FEMA bioprogram.
Speaker 4: When they expanded it, they staffed up this office that
Speaker 4: does these individual consultations with homeowners. They keep the offer
Speaker 4: to the homeowner on the table for a long time
Speaker 4: so the homeowner can really think about it. They I
Speaker 4: believe includes some sort of supplementary financial assistance or you know,
Speaker 4: connect people with resources that can help them find a
Speaker 4: new home.
Speaker 3: They really have approached it.
Speaker 4: From a longitudinal I guess perspective, like it's not just
Speaker 4: we show up, we give you the money, and we
Speaker 4: look away. Is that we're sort of guiding the homeowner
Speaker 4: from the process of making the decision to sell to
Speaker 4: finding a new home, you know, preferably in the same
Speaker 4: jurisdictions that the tax base doesn't suffer and people can
Speaker 4: maintain their existing social and economic ties. And I think
Speaker 4: the other example of something that's worked well in Norfolk, Virginia,
Speaker 4: and this is not a perfect project by any means,
Speaker 4: but the Obama administration created a grant program, the National
Speaker 4: Disaster Resilience Competition, and this program basically doled out a
Speaker 4: billion dollars to some communities that wanted to experiment with
Speaker 4: some climate adaptation projects that had never really been tried before.
Speaker 4: And in Norfolk, Virginia, they took a pretty flood prone
Speaker 4: African American neighborhood on the banks of this tidal river,
Speaker 4: and they spend about one hundred and fifty million dollars
Speaker 4: retrofiting basically every part of the neighborhood's infrastructure. They built
Speaker 4: this big grassy berm along the water to stop storm
Speaker 4: search flooding. They fixed the entire sewer system and the
Speaker 4: storm drain system. They created these new parks that sort
Speaker 4: of function as like tidal estuaries to soak up water.
Speaker 4: They really took a kind of holistic approach, and it's
Speaker 4: not perfect by any means. Some people are a little
Speaker 4: discontented with what it's done to the way that the
Speaker 4: neighborhood looks, for instance, but for most people it's created
Speaker 4: a massive.
Speaker 3: Reduction in flood vulnerability.
Speaker 4: You know, this was a neighborhood where property values were
Speaker 4: falling thanks to the vulnerability, and now they've probably bought
Speaker 4: the neighborhood thirty to fifty years, depending on sea the liverlizer,
Speaker 4: or even longer. And it really does show how with
Speaker 4: enough money and enough willingness to take apart the way
Speaker 4: that neighborhood was built, you know, and redo it from
Speaker 4: the bottom up, you can kind of control that these
Speaker 4: impacts that seemed really scary on the surface of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's super interesting. You mentioned one thing that surprised
Speaker 1: you before, which was the various factors that come into
Speaker 1: people deciding whether to stay or go. I wonder if
Speaker 1: there is anything else that was particularly surprising to you
Speaker 1: as you did the reporting for the book.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean, I think that for many people this might
Speaker 4: not be surprising, but I was surprised by how many
Speaker 4: people moved from one dangerous home to another without necessarily
Speaker 4: realizing what it was that they were doing. Especially in Houston,
Speaker 4: a lot of people took biots or they decided to
Speaker 4: move after a big hurricane, and they ended up doing,
Speaker 4: you know, really what the government would really not have
Speaker 4: wanted them to do. They moved, They took the money,
Speaker 4: and they moved to another flo zone because there was
Speaker 4: no long term monitoring what happened with these buyouts and
Speaker 4: in other places people moved from. This is surprising to me,
Speaker 4: but it's not really surprising when you think about it.
Speaker 4: Like a lot of touch with a lot of people
Speaker 4: who moved from New Orleans to Arizona, you know, after Katrina,
Speaker 4: or they moved from from Houston to northern California to
Speaker 4: a very fire prone area. And it seems like people's,
Speaker 4: you know, their psychology is really affected by what they've experienced.
Speaker 4: People don't really assess, you know, risk from a neutral ground.
Speaker 4: You know, they don't really see, okay, what is a
Speaker 4: place that's free of risk.
Speaker 3: They just want protection from the trauma that.
Speaker 4: They've already experienced in most cases, right, And so I
Speaker 4: did speak to people who left Houston after flood and
Speaker 4: went to California and got an RV there and then
Speaker 4: the RV burned down in a fire. And there's just
Speaker 4: things stories like this that are like, I think it's
Speaker 4: sort of emphasized for me that you can't really divide
Speaker 4: the United States into places that are safe and places
Speaker 4: that are not safe, right, you know, or really the
Speaker 4: world for that matter of course, there's only degrees of risk,
Speaker 4: and there's there's risk, and then there's you know risk
Speaker 4: like people in Miami face or or you know, Greenville
Speaker 4: or somewhere in the sierras. But everywhere faces some level
Speaker 4: of vulnerability, and so I think everywhere has the risk
Speaker 4: of descending into this kind of like housing instability that
Speaker 4: I sort of tried to document in the places where
Speaker 4: I went.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what are some of the things that US either
Speaker 1: federal or state government officials could learn or maybe have learned.
Speaker 1: Are learning from the kind of cross border climate migration stuff.
Speaker 1: Are there applicable lessons there for internal migration?
Speaker 3: Oh, that's really interesting.
Speaker 4: I had never thought of it that way, and I
Speaker 4: kind of feel like, I guess at the end of
Speaker 4: the book, I kind of said the opposite, which is
Speaker 4: where I was, like, I basically said that, you know,
Speaker 4: in this country, we don't really have even the beginnings
Speaker 4: of a plan to deal with international climate migration. It
Speaker 4: all gets routed through the immigration system, in the asylum system,
Speaker 4: which are so deeply broken and they're fucked up, and
Speaker 4: there's nobody who even wants to start trying to fix
Speaker 4: it right. And I think that to me, the lessons
Speaker 4: of the few places where we have done internal climate
Speaker 4: migration successfully have really demonstrated that you kind of have
Speaker 4: to have not only you know, a really really robust
Speaker 4: post disaster recovery system where you're staying with people for
Speaker 4: a long period of time and making sure that they
Speaker 4: get back in their feet, you know, three, four or
Speaker 4: five years after a disaster, but you also have to
Speaker 4: sort of get your own house in order, so to speak.
Speaker 4: It's really hard to make sure that there's no climate
Speaker 4: displacement unless you make sure that there's no housing displacement.
Speaker 4: And so like a program like Section eight or a
Speaker 4: social housing program. I sort of say at the end
Speaker 4: that those are like a really necessary second or third
Speaker 4: step to solving this problem, because you know, people who
Speaker 4: are displaced by climate disasters end up in the same
Speaker 4: cycle of you know, displacement and relocation as people who
Speaker 4: just get displaced from from normal so to speak, financial pressure.
Speaker 4: And so that lesson I thought was really important when
Speaker 4: you think about international climate migration, which is like, if
Speaker 4: you think of all these displaced people as existing on
Speaker 4: a kind of continuum, the solution to both of them
Speaker 4: is kind of the same, which is like the jurisdictions,
Speaker 4: the countries that have the most money and that have
Speaker 4: the legacy responsibility for carbon emissions need to the state
Speaker 4: needs to take a really really strong role in ensuring
Speaker 4: that there is like safe affordable housing for everybody.
Speaker 3: And when I say everybody, I mean everybody.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And the border thing is getting in the way
Speaker 4: of even acknowledging that, even the beginnings the twinkling of
Speaker 4: an acknowledgment of that, because this political roadblock is standing
Speaker 4: in the way of that.
Speaker 3: So that's kind of how I was thinking about it.
Speaker 3: But the way you said it is really interesting too. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, the US is obviously not great on this,
Speaker 1: but I wonder if anywhere is good on it and
Speaker 1: could potentially be you know, writing lessons. I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't know, I don't know the answer.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 4: I mean, like, I gosh, it's really hard for me
Speaker 4: to think of an example. Well, okay, here's actually an
Speaker 4: example that I've always found really interesting and it was
Speaker 4: going to be a big part of the book. And
Speaker 4: then it wasn't because I didn't have enough space and
Speaker 4: it just didn't work out. But so in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 4: the United States conducted nuclear tests on the Marshall Islands
Speaker 4: in the Pacific, and they gave people unlimited ability. They
Speaker 4: gave Marshally's unlimited ability to come to the United States,
Speaker 4: and many people did, and they ended up in Arkansas
Speaker 4: and Oklahoma.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Oklahoma.
Speaker 4: There's like pretty thriving Marshally's communities in those places.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And now that sea.
Speaker 4: Level rice has been a big started to become a
Speaker 4: big factor for the Marshall another generation of Marshals has
Speaker 4: started to come to those same communities and they're taking
Speaker 4: advantage of the same legal authority I believe, to end
Speaker 4: up in the same places. And I think that this
Speaker 4: is like really telling where it's like, once you take
Speaker 4: away the restriction of the border, people have the ability
Speaker 4: to not only you know, get away from the big risks, right,
Speaker 4: but they end up being able to I mean, it's
Speaker 4: not that those communities in Arkansas and Oklahoma are free
Speaker 4: from any kind of struggle, but they end up kind
Speaker 4: of being able to build something new once you remove
Speaker 4: that that blockage and once you don't make them go
Speaker 4: through the you know, terrifying rigmarole of asylum claims, et.
Speaker 3: Cetera, well, and they end up able to rebuild communities
Speaker 3: exactly exactly right. And so I think that like this
Speaker 3: is an example of something.
Speaker 4: It's this is like point zero one percent of the
Speaker 4: total population of people who would need to move because
Speaker 4: of climate change, But I think it does show that
Speaker 4: there's kind of nothing to be afraid of, I guess
Speaker 4: was my conclusion. There is, like I think a lot
Speaker 4: of times the numbers, you know, five hundred million or
Speaker 4: a billion people moving get kind of bandied about as
Speaker 4: this terrifying you know, horde that's going to show up
Speaker 4: at the United States border or in Europe, you know,
Speaker 4: trying to seek a sound. But I really don't think
Speaker 4: that there's anything scary about it. And I think that
Speaker 4: if you just seems like if you provide people with
Speaker 4: the right amount of support and you don't put these
Speaker 4: things in their way, you end up actually with potentially
Speaker 4: eventually positive impacts both, you know, for the communities and
Speaker 4: for the people where they live from this kind of
Speaker 4: movement from you know, a risky area to a safer area.
Speaker 1: Yeah, kind of along those lines too. I'm curious what
Speaker 1: you have seen in terms of the potential intersection between
Speaker 1: eco fascism and climate migration.
Speaker 3: Like I know, I was. Someone just sent me this.
Speaker 1: Insane video last month from a group called Progressives for
Speaker 1: Immigration Reform where there yes.
Speaker 3: In the US, I'll send you the video. It's wild.
Speaker 1: They are basically saying, like, if you care about climate
Speaker 1: and conservation, then you should be pushing for tighter immigration
Speaker 1: controls because like all of these people coming into the
Speaker 1: US will increase the population, which will be bad for
Speaker 1: the environment and for climate action.
Speaker 4: And that's really funny because it kind of implies that
Speaker 4: they won't be part of the population if they aren't
Speaker 4: in the case.
Speaker 1: Right, exactly, that's right, that's right. But also it's just
Speaker 1: this thing that like, you know, everyone kind of knew
Speaker 1: was going to happen, and now of like people going
Speaker 1: from saying climate change isn't real to now using it
Speaker 1: as a reason to be anti immigration.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is far from my strongest subject
Speaker 4: area into like my colleague Gaby delve Valla has done
Speaker 4: a ton of work on this. I think Brendan O'Connor
Speaker 4: has as well. But I do think that like, there's
Speaker 4: there's a substantial risk of this becoming a mainstream political position,
Speaker 4: and I think that, like, to me, this is maybe
Speaker 4: a really maybe a really inapt comparison, But I've always
Speaker 4: sort of thought of it in the same vein as
Speaker 4: like the way that a lot of progressive people will
Speaker 4: become really really nimbyish when there's some kind of affordable
Speaker 4: housing project that's going to be built near them, or
Speaker 4: like a homeless shelter. There's this tendency right of people
Speaker 4: who have theoretically liberal political views, once there's like a
Speaker 4: change in their local environment, they become really vile and
Speaker 4: really opposed to any kind of like thing that could
Speaker 4: improve other people's welfare by you know, slightly changing the
Speaker 4: way it looks where they live. I'm not sure that
Speaker 4: that isn't what goes on in part when people are
Speaker 4: you know, use conservation or climate risk as.
Speaker 3: A weapon to kind of in a way all.
Speaker 4: Kinds of like social policies or inclusivity or you know,
Speaker 4: accommodation of other people and like, I mean, it feels
Speaker 4: like eco fascism is not part of the mainstream political
Speaker 4: conversation in the US right now, but I feel like
Speaker 4: it certainly could be, right and it's hard to imagine
Speaker 4: that it wouldn't be, you know, if the sort of
Speaker 4: trajectory of international climate migration continues the way that it is.
Speaker 4: But right now, it's hard to imagine our immigration control
Speaker 4: is getting much stricter in the United States. I mean,
Speaker 4: they're already really damn strict, and we just don't really
Speaker 4: think of immigration and climate change as being connected. But
Speaker 4: I think that if we ever did, there would be
Speaker 4: a substantial downside because people could come to the precise
Speaker 4: wrong conclusion by connecting those things. And that's something to
Speaker 4: look out for, and that I kind of dread the
Speaker 4: day that people do start to put those things in conversation,
Speaker 4: because I think it's going to lead to more things
Speaker 4: like that that video that you that you mentioned. That's
Speaker 4: what's so scary about the way that those theoretical statistics
Speaker 4: of future migration are discussed. I think that that Alexander
Speaker 4: Tempest has written about this as well, right, and I
Speaker 4: think she's arguing and I pretty much agree that they're
Speaker 4: not really useful numbers, Like you can't just add that
Speaker 4: number to the population of the United States and they that, well,
Speaker 4: this is like it's not useful. And I think a
Speaker 4: really serious way to know the numbers to think about,
Speaker 4: you know, the potential influx of people or the potential
Speaker 4: population growth. Like I think it can really only be
Speaker 4: weaponized for for negative events, and I think that like
Speaker 4: we have to start I guess that's sort of why
Speaker 4: I said, like getting our own house in order, Like,
Speaker 4: I think we just have to think through the implications
Speaker 4: of what it would mean to take care of everyone
Speaker 4: who's displaced by climate change, and then not so much
Speaker 4: try to like schedule you know, this kind of influx
Speaker 4: of people, but just think about what would what would
Speaker 4: a benign policy look like for any number of people, right,
Speaker 4: including the ones who already live here, right, Like, let's
Speaker 4: just imagure we're trying to keep track of everyone and
Speaker 4: keep safe everyone who already lives here, and then like
Speaker 4: let's try to expand that out, you know, but do
Speaker 4: not really do that well for current citizens, right, So
Speaker 4: it's like, yeah, I think it's I think it's a
Speaker 4: little it's a little like rich in a negative way
Speaker 4: to be like, oh, we can't handle all that, Like
Speaker 4: it's not really the question is can we handle It's
Speaker 4: not really the question at all.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, and I think to your point about, you know,
Speaker 1: shoring up housing availability and affordability and access and all
Speaker 1: those things across the board in general could also mitigate
Speaker 1: some of the potential for anti immigration centiment because I
Speaker 1: feel like the number one thing that you often hear
Speaker 1: is like, well, I don't have access to a house,
Speaker 1: so why should I care right about giving this person
Speaker 1: who's not even from here an apartment or whatever, you know, Right, So,
Speaker 1: like again, sort of just taking care of people, good
Speaker 1: move across the board.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, I mean it's really true. The reasons people
Speaker 4: cite for why we couldn't and absorb a lot of
Speaker 4: people in the United States are the same. Like, those
Speaker 4: shortcomings are shortcomings that we actually should solve, but they're
Speaker 4: not really a reason to do not let people in,
Speaker 4: especially when you consider what it is that they're trying
Speaker 4: to leave behind.
Speaker 1: Drilled is an original critical frequency production. Our producer is
Speaker 1: Sarah Entry. Sound design, mixing and mastering are by Peter Duff,
Speaker 1: who also wrote our original score. Our first amendment attorney
Speaker 1: is James Wheaton at the First Amendment Project, and the
Speaker 1: show is reported written and hosted by me Amy Westervelt.