Could Climate Change be Detroit's Salvation?

Will climate change be America's 21st century equivalent of William Tecumseh Sherman's "march to the sea"?  The Union general has a lasting place in infamy in the southern states for leading his army on a devastating march from Atlanta to Savannah, laying waste not only to military targets but also infrastructure, industry and civilian property along the route. 

In recent decades the south has "risen again."  Industries, such as Boeing, chasing cheap labour and weak labour laws, have flocked to the region.  But the region is also the most vulnerable part of America to climate change impacts - floods, droughts, severe storm events, sea level rise and coastal saltwater inundation plus killer heatwaves.  This leads some experts such as Matthew Kahn, professor of economics, UCLA Institute of the Environment, to believe that climate change will revive the fortunes of the languishing Rust Belt states and even abandoned cities like Detroit.

Climate change poses several significant risks to US south-west cities. Major south-west cities such as Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas face mega-drought and severe heatwave risk. Climate scientists continue to study how long drought could last. Policymakers debate how to allocate increasingly scarce water between agricultural and urban interests.

While economists advocate raising water prices to reflect increased scarcity, politicians shy away from this in order to gain short-term political support. Suppose that the mega-drought persists and desert cities such as Phoenix begin to experience summer temperatures above 43C? In my book Climatopolis, I predict that US urbanites will adapt to these new realities by moving to other cities that are better able to adapt to the new conditions.

Locations such as Detroit (to the north and endowed with water) are prime examples of where we can build our future cities.

The US has more than 300 major cities. These cities will compete to see which (due to natural geographic features and smart local public policies) are best able to cope with Mother Nature's blows. The winners from this competition will experience a net influx of population and rising property prices.

Urbanites will win because they will have a greater menu of destination locations to choose from. Property owners in cities whose quality of life suffers will experience an asset value loss.
They bet on the wrong location.

It does raise the question of what a major exodus out of the US south, especially the south-central and south eastern states, or as I like to call them, Redneckistan, could mean to the more liberal north.  Will they leave that knuckle-draggin', white trash, Dixie culture behind or will they carry that cultural ebola with them? 

The idea of a Rust Belt renaissance is intriguing.  It would be great to see economic and political power restored to the north.  That would be better, all round, for Canadians.
 

Sometimes In Life, It's the Little Things That Matter

It's really a little thing.  A little worse.  A little more frequent.  A little longer lasting.  A little more severe.  A little more damaging.

That's the face of early onset climate change. It's the face of severe weather events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration.  It's weather made a little worse, a little more often, a little longer.  Yet it is, indeed, the little things that can really matter.

A little heavier rain, an extra day or two, once or twice more often per month. The thing is, all these little things add up and they multiply the overall impact and the long-term damage.  For example, metro Detroit got hit with more flash flooding yesterday.  That, by my count, is the fourth or fifth incident in the past two months.  That might even be something of a record.  That area is just full of records.  They experienced a record cold winter thanks to the Polar Vortex. Record snowfalls too.  Now record floods.  They can't seem to catch a break.

The little things count.  In many urban areas, infrastructure was designed and built for another climate from another time when population demands were a good deal less pressing.  With the passage of time and steady growth, infrastructure systems that were once ideal become old and increasingly inadequate to meet demand. Then you compound that with climate change impacts that were never foreseen by planners even twenty years ago and, quite suddenly, you can find yourself overwhelmed, your infrastructure overtaken by events.

Canada's premiers know we need a major infrastructure programme and it's needed urgently.  They're dealing with a prime minister for whom what the provinces and the Canadian people need doesn't matter much.  Why bother about pressing and costly needs at home when you can get all the press you need by howling at Vlad Putin to the delight of the media's trained seals?

Stiglitz Casts the Bones and Reads the Entrails of Detroit,

Nobel laureate economist Joe Stiglitz argues that it's vital not to get misled about the real significance of the bankruptcy of Detroit.

Detroit’s most serious problems are confined to the city limits. Elsewhere in the metropolitan area, there is ample economic activity. In suburbs like Bloomfield Hills, Mich., the median household income is more than $125,000. A 45-minute drive from Detroit is Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan, one of the world’s pre-eminent hubs of research and knowledge production.

Detroit’s travails arise in part from a distinctive aspect of America’s divided economy and society. As the sociologists Sean F. Reardon and Kendra Bischoff have pointed out, [America] is becoming vastly more economically segregated, which can be even more pernicious than being racially segregated. Detroit is the example par excellence of the seclusion of affluent (and mostly white) elites in suburban enclaves. There is a rationale for battening down the hatches: the rich thus ensure that they don’t have to pay any share of the local public goods and services of their less well-off neighbors, and that their children don’t have to mix with those of lower socioeconomic status.
The trend toward self-reinforcing inequality is especially apparent in education, an ever shrinking ladder for upward mobility. Schools in poorer districts get worse, parents with means move out to richer districts, and the divisions between the haves and the have-nots — not only in this generation, but also in the next — grow ever larger.
Residential segregation along economic lines amplifies inequality for adults, too. The poor have to somehow manage to get from their neighborhoods to part-time, low-paying and increasingly scarce jobs at distant work sites. Combine this urban sprawl with inadequate public transportation systems and you have a blueprint for transforming working-class communities into depopulated ghettos.
Adding to the problems that would inevitably arise from such poorly designed urban agglomerations is the fact that the Detroit metropolitan area is divided into separate political jurisdictions. The poor are thus not only geographically isolated, but politically ghettoized as well. The result is a separate, poorer inner city with a dearth of resources, made even worse because the industrial plants that had provided the core of the tax base are shut down.

As historians like Thomas J. Sugrue have demonstrated, the disintegration of Detroit precedes the conflicts over social-welfare programs and race relations (including riots in 1967) and reaches back into the postwar decades, a time when the roots of deindustrialization, racial discrimination and geographic isolation were planted. We’ve reaped what we’ve sown.

Lacking regional political unity, there is no overall structure to improve the infrastructure and public services between poorer inner cities and affluent suburbs. So the poor fall back on what means they have, which is not good enough. Cars inevitably break down and buses are late, making workers appear to be “unreliable.” But what is really unreliable is the iniquitous design of the city. No wonder America is becoming the advanced industrial country with the least equality of opportunity.

 The same skewed priorities that have gutted Detroit at the local level are echoed in a void at the level of national policy.

Rather than deal purposefully with this changing economic landscape with useful policies encouraging the growth of other industries, our government spent decades papering over the growing weaknesses by allowing the financial sector to run amok, creating “growth” based on bubbles. We didn’t just let the market run its course. We made an active choice to embrace short-term profits and large-scale inefficiency.

There may be something inevitable about the structural changes that have made American manufacturing less central to our economy, but there is nothing inevitable about the waste, pain and human despair in cities that have accompanied that change. There are policy alternatives that can soften such transitions in ways that preserve wealth and promote equality. Just four hours from Detroit, Pittsburgh, too, grappled with white flight. But it more rapidly shifted its economy from one dependent on steel and coal to one that emphasizes education, health care and legal and financial services.

American workers were sold “free” trade policies on the promise that the winners could compensate the losers. The losers are still waiting.

Of course, the Great Recession and the policies that created it have made this, like so many other things, much worse. The mortgage bankers marched into large sections of some of our cities and found them good subjects for their predatory and discriminatory lending. Once the bubble burst, those cities were abandoned by all but the debt collectors and foreclosure sheriffs. Rather than saving our communities, our politicians focused more on saving the bankers, their shareholders and their bondholders.

Detroit’s bankruptcy is a reminder of how divided our society has become and how much has to be done to heal the wounds. And it provides an important warning to those living in today’s boomtowns: it could happen to you. 

And if you can stand any more of America's fiscal madness, check out Paul Krugman's column on the disappearance of Milton Friedman from the radical (as in modern mainstream) right's discourse.