Abrahm Lustgarten is a senior environmental reporter, with a focus on the intersection of business, climate, and energy. 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. What might change? Rising seas and increasingly violent hurricanes are making thousands of miles of American shoreline nearly uninhabitable. And then they were gone. 2020. I mentioned this on the phone and then asked Keenan, “Should I be selling my house and getting — ”. Billions of people call this land home. Even where insurers have tried to withdraw policies or raise rates to reduce climate-related liabilities, state regulators have forced them to provide affordable coverage anyway, simply subsidizing the cost of underwriting such a risky policy or, in some cases, offering it themselves. In 2017, Solomon Hsiang, a climate economist at the University of California, Berkeley, led an analysis of the economic impact of climate-driven changes like rising mortality and rising energy costs, finding that the poorest counties in the United States — mostly across the South and the Southwest — will in some extreme cases face damages equal to more than a third of their gross domestic products. by Abrahm Lustgarten ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Review of the Year: Belarus and Bulgaria rocked by anti-government protests. Hurricane Andrew reduced parts of cities to landfill and cost insurers nearly $16 billion in payouts. The freeway to San Francisco will need to be raised, and to the east, a new bridge will be required to connect the community of Point Richmond to the city of Berkeley. The sense that money and technology can overcome nature has emboldened Americans. Like the subjects of my reporting, climate change had found me, its indiscriminate forces erasing all semblance of normalcy. Those who stay risk becoming trapped as the land and the society around them ceases to offer any more support. I had an unusual perspective on the matter. I live on a hilltop, 400 feet above sea level, and my home will never be touched by rising waters. Even 13 million climate migrants, though, would rank as the largest migration in North American history. Three of the largest fires in history burned simultaneously in a ring around the San Francisco Bay Area. Jorge waded chest-deep into his fields searching in vain for cobs he could still eat. (Explore them in more detail here.) 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. Another extreme drought would drive near-total crop losses worse than the Dust Bowl, kneecapping the broader economy. The land was turning against him. Hurricanes batter the East. Today, 1% of the world is a barely livable hot zone. Cassidy Plaisance surveying what was left of her friend’s home after Hurricane Laura. Lightning Complex fire approached in August. https://www.kcrw.com/.../climate-change-migration-abrahm-lustgarten This article, the second in a series on global climate migration, is a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center. The corn sprouted into healthy green stalks, and there was hope — until, without warning, the river flooded. He joined Cheddar to discuss how climate migration is impacting the … Their families are all facing the same excruciating decision that confronted Jorge. Projections are inherently imprecise, but the gradual changes to America’s cropland — plus the steady baking and burning and flooding — suggest that we are already witnessing a slower-forming but much larger replay of the Dust Bowl that will destroy more than just crops. In the next century, millions of people are likely to flee their homes to … Lending data analyzed by Keenan and his co-author, Jacob Bradt, for a study published in the journal Climatic Change in June shows that small banks are liberally making loans on environmentally threatened homes, but then quickly passing them along to federal mortgage backers. Wildfires rage in the West. Climate Change. His 2016 expose "Bombs in Our Backyard" examined the U.S. Department of Defense's $300 billion environmental liabilities, and 40,000 acres of American lands polluted by military testing. That kind of loss typically drives people toward cities, and researchers expect that trend to continue after the Covid-19 pandemic ends. Abrahm Lustgarten is a senior environmental reporter at ProPublica. ALTA VERAPAZ, GUATEMALA. This process has already begun in rural Louisiana and coastal Georgia, where low-income and Black and Indigenous communities face environmental change on top of poor health and extreme poverty. Where will they go? Their interest suggested a growing investor-grade nervousness about swiftly mounting environmental risk in the hottest real estate markets in the country. Soon, California was on fire. Soon he made a last desperate bet, signing away the tin-roof hut where he lived with his wife and three children against a $1,500 advance in okra seed. It will soon prove too expensive to maintain the status quo. What I found was a nation on the cusp of a great transformation. The Great Climate Migration Begins. Many semiarid parts of Guatemala will soon be more like a desert. 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. A pandemic-induced economic collapse will only heighten the vulnerabilities and speed the transition, reducing to nothing whatever thin margin of financial protection has kept people in place. Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his last seeds into the ground. I watched as towering plumes of smoke billowed from distant hills in all directions and air tankers crisscrossed the skies. 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 surge in disasters offered a jolting preview of how the climate crisis was changing the rules. Then what? Such neighborhoods see little in the way of flood-prevention investment. Corn and soy production will decrease with every degree of warming. The Memphis Sands Aquifer, a crucial water supply for Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana, is already overdrawn by hundreds of millions of gallons a day. The resulting dust storms, some of them taller than skyscrapers, buried homes whole and blew as far east as Washington. From state to state, readily available and affordable policies have made it attractive to buy or replace homes even where they are at high risk of disasters, systematically obscuring the reality of the climate threat and fooling many Americans into thinking that their decisions are safer than they actually are. The odd weather phenomenon that many blame for the suffering here — the drought and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño — is expected to become more frequent as the planet warms. But as the costs rise — and the insurers quit, and the bankers divest, and the farm subsidies prove too wasteful, and so on — the full weight of responsibility will fall on individual people. Across the United States, some 162 million people — nearly one in two — will most likely experience a decline in the quality of their environment, namely more heat and less water. the potential movement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees across the planet, raising the shorelines of the Great Lakes, suggests that one in 12 Americans in the Southern half of the country will move, a new study projects a 20 percent increase in extreme-fire-weather days by 2035, Eighty years later, Dust Bowl towns still have slower economic growth, the University of Chicago and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies found, led an analysis of the economic impact of climate-driven changes, warns that the U.S. economy over all could contract by 10 percent. 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. Coastal high points will be cut off from roadways, amenities and escape routes, and even far inland, saltwater will seep into underground drinking-water supplies. 2006. Keenan calls the practice of drawing arbitrary lending boundaries around areas of perceived environmental risk “bluelining,” and indeed many of the neighborhoods that banks are bluelining are the same as the ones that were hit by the racist redlining practice in days past. By 2070, some 28 million people across the country could face Manhattan-size megafires. Perhaps no market force has proved more influential — and more misguided — than the nation’s property-insurance system. Read more … The hopelessness of the pattern was now clear, and the pandemic had already uprooted so many Americans. Even as hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans fled north toward the United States in recent years, in Jorge’s region — a state called Alta Verapaz, where precipitous mountains covered in coffee plantations and dense, dry forest give way to broader gentle valleys — the residents have largely stayed. John Kerry shares his views on climate migration, open borders, the threat of nationalism, the China challenge by Abrahm Lustgarten December 20, 2020 December 21, 2020. Similar patterns are evident across the country. When power was interrupted six more times in three weeks, we stopped trying to keep it stocked. It happened that way in the foreclosure crisis. 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. Sitting in my own backyard one afternoon this summer, my wife and I talked through the implications of this looming American future. Abrahm Lustgarten and Meridith Kohut. I awoke to learn that more than 1,800 buildings were reduced to ashes, less than 35 miles from where I slept. Its history dates back several centuries. 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. He’s been reporting extensively on climate migration for a series in partnership … It can be difficult to see the challenges clearly because so many factors are in play. 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 four million Americans could find themselves living at the fringe, in places decidedly outside the ideal niche for human life. 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. Across the country, it’s going to get hot. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Not every city can spend $100 billion on a sea wall, as New York most likely will. And federal agriculture aid withholds subsidies from farmers who switch to drought-resistant crops, while paying growers to replant the same ones that failed. Florida, concerned that it had taken on too much risk, has since scaled back its self-insurance plan. By 2060 in Missouri and throughout the Midwest, people will experience weeks of “wet-bulb” temperatures above 82 degrees, a humidity threshold that makes outdoor labor dangerous. Now, though, under a relentless confluence of drought, flood, bankruptcy and starvation, they, too, have begun to leave. CHARLES LAKE, LA. A woman lost consciousness in a parking lot after Hurricane Laura left her without electricity or air-conditioning for several days. Nobody wants to migrate away from home, even when an inexorable danger is inching ever closer. By comparison, Americans are richer, often much richer, and more insulated from the shocks of climate change. And if so — if a great domestic relocation might be in the offing — was it possible to project where we might go? PHOENIX. A climate migration is a familiar theme in the news in recent weeks, as fires rage throughout the west and hurricanes stack up in the Atlanta Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. Environmental Migration Research. Climatic Change 76 (1-2): 31-53. THE GREAT CLIMATE MIGRATION By Abrahm Lustgarten | Photographs by Meridith Kohut Jimmy Schmidt July 23, 2020 No comments Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. Local banks, meanwhile, keep securitizing their mortgage debt, sloughing off their own liabilities. Van Leer determined that the fire had jumped through the forest canopy, spawning 70-mile-per-hour winds that kicked a storm of embers into the modest homes of Coffey Park, which burned at an acre a second as homes ignited spontaneously from the radiant heat. But Van Leer, who had spent seven years picking through the debris left by disasters to understand how insurers could anticipate — and price — the risk of their happening again, had begun to see other “impossible” fires. Another direct hurricane risked bankrupting the state. In September 2020, The New York Times released an article called " How Climate Change Will Reshape America " written by Abrahm Lustgarten, a California resident mulling over leaving … ... Abrahm Lustgarten, senior environmental reporter for ProPublica; Tags: climate. It was no surprise, then, that California’s property insurers — having watched 26 years’ worth of profits dissolve over 24 months — began dropping policies, or that California’s insurance commissioner, trying to slow the slide, placed a moratorium on insurance cancellations for parts of the state in 2020. Listen longer. The Dust Bowl started after the federal government expanded the Homestead Act to offer more land to settlers willing to work the marginal soil of the Great Plains. Fareed and reporter Abrahm Lustgarten lay out the huge migratory flows that climate change is likely to trigger, including to the south of the United States. We discuss climate migration. Let’s start with some basics. Half the children are chronically hungry, and many are short for their age, with weak bones and bloated bellies.
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