Tuesday, September 15, 2020

Nowhere to Run To, Baby. Nowhere to Hide. America Comes to Grip With Climate Breakdown.



Some Americans are beginning to ask,  "is it time for me to leave?" They're rethinking the choices they made on where they wanted to live, decisions that now seem unfortunate.

The New York Times has a long but riveting read from Abrahm Lustgarten, an environmental scribe for ProPublica that questions how long he and other Americans from the southern half of their country can hold out before they have to seek "high ground" from environmental calamities from droughts and floods, water insecurity, wildfires, severe storm events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration, and every other variety of environmental threat.
For two years, I have been studying how climate change will influence global migration. My sense was that of all the devastating consequences of a warming planet — changing landscapes, pandemics, mass extinctions — the potential movement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees across the planet stands to be among the most important. 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. I had also helped create an enormous computer simulation to analyze how global demographics might shift, and now I was working on a data-mapping project about migration here in the United States.

In recent years, summer has brought a season of fear to California, with ever-worsening wildfires closing in. But this year felt different. 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?
When wealth becomes a pariah.
Census data show us how Americans move: toward heat, toward coastlines, toward drought, regardless of evidence of increasing storms and flooding and other disasters. 
The sense that money and technology can overcome nature has emboldened Americans. Where money and technology fail, though, it inevitably falls to government policies — and government subsidies — to pick up the slack. Thanks to federally subsidized canals, for example, water in part of the Desert Southwest costs less than it does in Philadelphia. The federal National Flood Insurance Program has paid to rebuild houses that have flooded six times over in the same spot. And federal agriculture aid withholds subsidies from farmers who switch to drought-resistant crops, while paying growers to replant the same ones that failed. Farmers, seed manufacturers, real estate developers and a few homeowners benefit, at least momentarily, but the gap between what the climate can destroy and what money can replace is growing.
Perhaps no market force has proved more influential — and more misguided — than the nation’s property-insurance system. 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. Part of the problem is that most policies look only 12 months into the future, ignoring long-term trends even as insurance availability influences development and drives people’s long-term decision-making.
A Climate Ponzi Scheme
In an era of climate change, though, such policies amount to a sort of shell game, meant to keep growth going even when other obvious signs and scientific research suggest that it should stop.

That’s what happened in Florida. Hurricane Andrew reduced parts of cities to landfill and cost insurers nearly $16 billion in payouts. Many insurance companies, recognizing the likelihood that it would happen again, declined to renew policies and left the state. So the Florida Legislature created a state-run company to insure properties itself, preventing both an exodus and an economic collapse by essentially pretending that the climate vulnerabilities didn’t exist.

As a result, Florida’s taxpayers by 2012 had assumed liabilities worth some $511 billion — more than seven times the state’s total budget — as the value of coastal property topped $2.8 trillion. Another direct hurricane risked bankrupting the state. Florida, concerned that it had taken on too much risk, has since scaled back its self-insurance plan. But the development that resulted is still in place.
When neighbourhoods spontaneously combust - Santa Rosa, California
The Tubbs Fire, as it was called, shouldn’t have been possible. Coffey Park is surrounded not by vegetation but by concrete and malls and freeways. So insurers had rated it as “basically zero risk,” according to Kevin Van Leer, then a risk modeler from the global insurance liability firm Risk Management Solutions.

What Van Leer saw when he walked through Coffey Park a week after the Tubbs Fire changed the way he would model and project fire risk forever.  ..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. It was the kind of thing that might never have been possible if California’s autumn winds weren’t getting fiercer and drier every year, colliding with intensifying, climate-driven heat and ever-expanding development. “It’s hard to forecast something you’ve never seen before,” he said.
A "Climate Housing Bubble" to rival 2007
Under the radar, a new class of dangerous debt — climate-distressed mortgage loans — might already be threatening the financial system. Lending data analyzed by [Tulane University's Jesse]Keenan and his co-author, Jacob Bradt, [Kennedy School of Government, Harvard] 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. At the same time, they have all but stopped lending money for the higher-end properties worth too much for the government to accept, suggesting that the banks are knowingly passing climate liabilities along to taxpayers as stranded assets.
Once home values begin a one-way plummet, it’s easy for economists to see how entire communities spin out of control. The tax base declines and the school system and civic services falter, creating a negative feedback loop that pushes more people to leave. Rising insurance costs and the perception of risk force credit-rating agencies to downgrade towns, making it more difficult for them to issue bonds and plug the springing financial leaks. Local banks, meanwhile, keep securitizing their mortgage debt, sloughing off their own liabilities.

Keenan, though, had a bigger point: All the structural disincentives that had built Americans’ irrational response to the climate risk were now reaching their logical endpoint. 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. Until now, the market mechanisms had essentially socialized the consequences of high-risk development. 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.
This recalls the warning from Munich Re, one of the world's giant re-insurers, in March, 2019, that climate change could make homeowner insurance premiums unaffordable.
“If the risk from wildfires, flooding, storms or hail is increasing then the only sustainable option we have is to adjust our risk prices accordingly. In the long run it might become a social issue. Affordability is so critical [because] some people on low and average incomes in some regions will no longer be able to buy insurance.”

“The sector is concerned that continuing global increases in temperature could make it increasingly difficult to offer the affordable financial protection that people deserve, and that modern society requires to function properly.”
Lustgarten gets the hard truth. Get Out
As I spoke with Keenan last year, I looked out my own kitchen window onto hillsides of parkland, singed brown by months of dry summer heat. This was precisely the land that my utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, had three times identified as such an imperiled tinderbox that it had to shut off power to avoid fire. It was precisely the kind of wildland-urban interface that all the studies I read blamed for heightening Californians’ exposure to climate risks. I mentioned this on the phone and then asked Keenan, “Should I be selling my house and getting — ” 
He cut me off: “Yes.”
The Future?
Once you accept that climate change is fast making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this: With time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and hot. Something like a tenth of the people who live in the South and the Southwest — from South Carolina to Alabama to Texas to Southern California — decide to move north in search of a better economy and a more temperate environment. Those who stay behind are disproportionately poor and elderly. 
In these places, heat alone will cause as many as 80 additional deaths per 100,000 people — the nation’s opioid crisis, by comparison, produces 15 additional deaths per 100,000. The most affected people, meanwhile, will pay 20 percent more for energy, and their crops will yield half as much food or in some cases virtually none at all. That collective burden will drag down regional incomes by roughly 10 percent, amounting to one of the largest transfers of wealth in American history, as people who live farther north will benefit from that change and see their fortunes rise.
The entire article, reprinted in the New York Times magazine, is available without firewall at ProPublica here.

9 comments:

the salamander said...

.. outstanding post, thanks.. very amazing
and thanks re the link at the end to avoid NYT paywall
But your post sets it up, summarizes it perfectly

BTW - off topic
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-bitumen-sturgeon-refinery-nwrp-1.5718044
Andrew Leach is like a polar bear that came out of its winter slumber and decided to growl and rampage.. Followed him for years and never saw such claws before.. but now !! The article and facts are way over my head but the monies, risks are staggering.. its Site C all over again deja vu.. and what might earlier have been 'just a not nice potential economic threat' are more like an economic asteroid hit in our current times. Jason Kenney keeps piling the horseshit higher and deeper.. but he's so glib and in total denial / lie his face off modality.. ALWAYS. The public monies he has thrown at TC (Trans Canada) Energy is outrageous.. and his assault on Healthcare Professionals & their patients as well as Educators & their students is to be seen as complete insult to all Canadians

Alberta is a key part of the Canada I know and love.. I give no free passes to those who pollute or threaten it.. or threaten other provinces. In many ways, Alberta is a northern example of certain states in your post. Climate change has not hammered Alberta.. yet - but in the same way.. its already caught in a 'cascade' .. or a 'tipping point' as you describe them.. they are catastrophic

The Disaffected Lib said...

Sal, the ProPublica expose is about the consequences of living in the past, in denial, and what befalls the foolish, the arrogant and the greedy when they get overtaken by reality. In many ways our governments act as though we're still in the 80s or 90s. In the process they leave the public exposed, vulnerable and the future in real jeopardy. It leads to an attitude that's larcenous.

The refinery saga is sheer incompetence. The time to build that refinery was decades ago when bitumen was somewhat more economically viable. There's an American market for that crud as feedstock for existing heavy oil refineries but those energy companies aren't interested in giving up the value-added refining income. That's the only thing that makes buying bitumen worthwhile - that, and being able to offload the environmental nightmare on Canadian taxpayers. Ever since Ralph Klein, Alberta governments have been patsies to foreign fossil energy companies.

Anonymous said...

In addition, Mound, those American heavy oil refineries are located in areas being hard hit by the effects of climate change. The Gulf coast, where AB sends its tar, is regularly razed by increasingly destructive hurricanes. How long can that continue?

Cap

the salamander said...

.. When I see Public Servants giving the Public a smoke job I go on high alert for the following scumbaggery. Jason Kenney is an interesting, totally nasty variant on Authoritarian. Why we elect such thugs is a bit of a mystery. Better said, why do we even tolerate them anywhere near actual society or community.

That refinery is just what it is.. Jason inherits it.. just as Horgan inherited Site C and Doug Ford inherited Grassy Narrows, Justin Trudeau inherited Lavalin and F-35's.. But its what you do with 'opportunity' or your better angels that defines one.. There are no better angels in the vicinity of Jason Kenney.. he'll be a Canadian boat anchor, best left high n dry landlocked in a province he seems determined to ransack ethically, financially and culturally.. mebbe he could migrate and be Dean at Univ of San Francisco and fuck over less people

The Disaffected Lib said...

I hadn't thought of that, Cap. Those Gulf coast refineries and environs are America's first Dystopia. When those areas flood, all manner of nasty gets released, some of it flushed out to the Gulf itself. And a refinery doesn't run well without its workers. I suspect your point reflects one of a number of environmental nightmares looming for the southern US.

I just checked and it seems it'll still set you back 7-figures USD for a shack in the Florida Keys. In case you're in the market, I even found a Jeffrey Epstein-grade, 26 acre private island, house with all mod cons included, for $95 million.

The Disaffected Lib said...

Sal, when I was a reporter I learned that there's almost always a back story to political decisions and it's usually more interesting than the line the pols pitch to the media. I learned more from watching my personal idol, Patrick Watson, conducting interviews than I ever gleaned from journalism classes or in any newsroom. He had a manner that allowed him to be confrontational without ever being challenging or offensive. He didn't put his subjects on their guard. Often the subject didn't feel the knife on the way in or on the way out.

There's a lot of quid pro quo in politics, real under-the-table horse trading that never sees the light of day. For some, most but not all, it becomes a cumulative problem. Compromise and accommodation become routine, principles fade. Think Mitch McConnell.

Owen Gray said...

A truly disturbing post. Obviously, those of us who thought the damage would be limited to the Southern Hemisphere were fools.

Anonymous said...

Now Kenney is spending millions on upgrading parks, handing them over to private enterprise. Those parks that cannot be sold are reverting back to crown land. Those parks belong to the Canadian people. But Kenney thinks he is the second Christ and the saviour of the Country. It is nothing short of raping the Canadian people. He is now also riding his great white horse advocating pipe line east to N.B. again. What is it he does not hear? The Maritimes do not want Albert’s dirty oil. Anyong

Northern PoV said...

"when bitumen was somewhat more economically viable"

temporarily 'in demand' again ... curious?

Some of those at-risk gulf refineries were (successfully) built to process heavy oil. Now they can't seem to get enough from their (former) primary source ... Venezuela.

Freeland's (& Jr. of course) support for the regime change and the clown,Juan Guaido, wouldn't have anything to do with that eh.

For Freeland, it's a twofer. Make tRump happy and support the tar-sands.

Where is the Canadian media?