I have some personal experience to add to this excellent assessment. People need to know the human horror stories of what's already happening right now.
In 2020, I left the conservative desert in Eastern Washington due to the intensifying Christian Nationalism, fascism, rogue militias, and an ever extending wildfire season that kept me trapped indoors for weeks on end fighting for my asthmatic life to get my family to what I thought would be a safer place—Savannah, Georgia. I mistakenly thought a blue city in a red state might be safer than a red city in a blue state. But boy was I wrong.
Decades of Republican-crafted deregulation of industry and defunding of vital public services made living in Georgia a deadly money pit for a multitude of reasons, but I will focus on the housing situation here.
Even far inland, homes were becoming uninsurable. The mortgage payments kept creeping up $300 to $500 a month each year, mainly because of the rising cost of insurance. Calling around to compare policies taught me that most companies wouldn't insure homes in our zip code at all.
The cheaply constructed homes, which I came to learn included ours, started falling apart within 5 to 8 years of being built, just long enough for the builders to escape any accountability. I learned that no level of homeowner’s insurance or home warranties could protect us financially in such a broken and dysfunctional system.
We spent the majority of the summer of 2021, in a home I'd just bought months before, suffering from a non-working air conditioner. The home was beautiful on the surface, and only 10 years old, but underneath it was an expensive death trap.
It's too long a story to detail, but the lack of any accountability for businesses in a state ruled by corporate con artists meant our home warranty was useless and the problems of hastily built, low-quality homes with HVACs way too small for the square footage meant mass regional failures and an HVAC industry ill equipped to handle the load.
Our house was consistently over 85 degrees inside, even at night, which coupled with the heavy humidity of the area meant we could barely bring ourselves to do anything but lay around trying to not succumb to heat stroke in our own home, quite a problem when your home is also where you work for a living!
I could write a book about what I witnessed and lived through in my 2.5 years of living in Georgia, which I saw as clear evidence of the massive-scale failure of neoliberalism and capitalism as a whole.
I also want to mention the retirement communities popping up in these dangerously hot areas. My parents fell for the marketing gimmicks of an adult living city outside of Tucson, AZ (not just a community, but a whole city that's over age 55). I worry about these vulnerable elderly folks being lured into these hot zones with water scarcity problems being left to die. When you have developers convincing a population of over twenty thousand aging and elderly folks it's a good idea to live a 30-minute drive across the desert to the next nearest population center that contains people under the age of 55 that they rely on for health care and basic assistance from community, how is this not sending off more people's alarm bells? I am just in awe that this is happening and no one seems to realize how insane and inhumane it is.
Miami native, left 2010. Climate so much worse than my 1980s childhood, heat went from “sweaty fun” to “oh hell no.” Even winter is worse - rain every day during the dry season, or droughts. Whole family bailed except brother who runs pool cleaning business and loves guns more than being melanoma free. Hard pass
As a native rustbelter who traveled the world and settled back in his rustbelt hometown, I will admit a measure of schadenfreude. We've endured decades of mockery and shame. Chase opportunity to the big coastal cities, they said. Your city is dead, they said. Abandon your homes and towns and move to the desert. 20 years of that, a constant refrain admonishing us for retaining any hope for the future in our towns.
Well, turns out, the Great Lakes really are a fantastic place for humans to live and thrive. Buying a house and a farm in Ohio was, in fact, a fantastic decision.
Americans whine about housing affordability and resource scarcity. I sit back and relish it. My greatest concern is the flood of climate refugees pushing up the cost of...everything, in their scramble for the resources they thought they didn't need.
Our tree-hugger group read several books on the water situation out west and watched a couple of documentaries. I can't remember which documentary it was, but one of them said people were going to move to "places like Cleveland." (I myself live in KC where we have plenty of water but a few years ago I read an article that pretty much said "Come to Duluth! The water's fine! We'll be sitting pretty for climate change." OK but my first thought was, the rich people will move to Duluth and pretty soon those who aren't as rich will get forced out.)
Really great piece. We moved to Las Vegas with three young kids in 2006 on the promise of good schools to come from a booming economy. One thing never materialized and the other soon ended. Added to the frustration was how unbearably hot it was for most of the day, most of the year. And the shrinking reservoir nearby was a reminder that we needed to get out. Now we're 8 miles west of Cleveland, two blocks from 20% of the planet's fresh water. I expect the Great Lakes region, the oft-maligned 'Rust Belt', will see a boom.
I went to Vegas this past weekend as part of an annual weekend I do with my friends. I usually get up early-ish, go for a nice walk in the “hot” early morning, hang out during the day doing fun things/activities, and walk the strip at night.
Not this year. It never got below 90 during my waking hours, it was already 100 by 9:00am, and was still in the 90s at midnight. I spent the morning in my room instead of walking (and there was basically no one else out), and skipped walking the strip entirely. I kept thinking “what if the power goes out? What will everyone (including locals in their homes) do?”.
On the way to the airport, the driver told me he was used to the heat, but this wasn’t normal. One hundred was ok, but more than that wasn’t (it got to 111-112 during every day I was there).
This isn’t sustainable.
One thing that occurred to me this morning is how the right’s filibustering of doing anything wrt climate change is that it’s either not an issue, is being exaggerated, or needs to be studied more.
But what if both sides are wrong? What if the science that’s tracking a gradual warm up over time, and assumes it will continue to go up, is right about it going up but wrong about it being gradual? Science can be wrong both ways!
I posted above and wanted to add a thought re living out there. It takes a lot of water to make electricity, a story we covered at the Las Vegas Sun. They have punched the third straw into the depths of Lake Mead to try to get what's left. It's dire and as mentioned, one of the drivers for our exit. But the new construction house I bought in 2007 in the SW Vegas valley was incredibly energy efficient. Amazing really, compared to the (older) houses I owned in Dallas. But I hear ya — I'd leave for work at 8:30 am and it would already be 95•... Then my wife would take the kids to the park later and the play apparatus was untouchable.
Well said. I live in Chicago, and I've worked professionally on environmental and energy issues for large chunks of my career. I've been convinced for years that we'll see substantial northward migration out of the Sun Belt within the next 10-15 years for exactly the reasons you cite.
This terrifyingly trenchant article clearly delineates the unhappy future we may well be facing. The quote “picking up pennies in front of a steamroller” well describes what the world and, in particular, those who run it have been doing for decades. But the bill is coming due. The concept of a climate crime may be an idea whose time has come.
The one question I have is whether a total global ecological collapse might overwhelm us before all this comes to pass.
The book _The Ministry for the Future_ includes some vigilantes taking matters into their own hands as far as the ultra-rich and climate crimes. (It's a novel but it's about climate change and its consequences.) There's the official world governing body I guess you'd call it trying to work on solutions, and one of their policies is every fat cat gets a "haircut." Also no one is allowed to fly on planes...they go back to balloons for air travel. Random vigilantes have other ideas for how to deal with climate-destroying fat cats, so a lot of the book is about "should the main character go along with the vigilantes or the official channels?" You may have read the book...it gives a lot to think about.
I just moved out of Austin because of the heat, and because of the recent wave of abnormally cold (and increasingly frequent) winter storms and resulting power failures.
I’m going to nitpick a bit regarding the blanket comments on California. Coastal California and Central California have distinctly different climates. Coastal California, where all the major cities are, benefits from the cooling effect of the Pacific Ocean including a strong marine layer that keeps temperatures down. We lived there for years and I call it the land without summer. In fact, the coastal fog is so persistent we nicknamed our summer months May Grey, June Gloom, and Fogust. Even LA benefits from the marine layer effect. Modesto, Fresno, Riverside in the Central Valley are a different story of course.
True to a point but I lived through some weeks-long heatwaves in LA that are only getting more frequent. And it’s not just the heat there but also drought and ever-lengthening fire season as you surely know. We used to look forward to the cooler seasons of autumn and winter but weeks and weeks of smokey air in 2017 and 2018 is what finally got us to seriously plan our exit.
My meaning was that it's a death trap for many reasons in addition to the climate emergency. Thankfully, there are still places on Earth where death by such things as a collapsing healthcare system, an imploding economy pushing people into homelessness, and direct fascist violence aren't part of the equation.
I disagree about the limited effect of insurance in climate change-affected areas. When homes stop being insured/insurable, a massive amount of migration will occur to those places where insurance isn't a big issue. The Outer Banks, southern Florida, Literally New Orleans, no one will be able to buy a house anymore because the risk is too high. Despite the best efforts of the Republican-dominated state houses in those states, this is Capitalism actually working.
My penance for being a dumb-dumb: 1) leaving this comment unedited so my ass gets continually shown to the world, and 2) becoming a paid subscriber. Proud to support your work HamNo!
There will first be a long period of special pleading in which all the rich libertarians and low tax mavens in those areas will get socialist government programs to help bail them out of their unwise real estate decisions. The Florida state last-resort insurance fund is totally inadequate to the task, though.
This is probably in that article I am about to read but when Allstate and State Farm stopped selling new CA home owner policies statewide… talk about a canary in a coal mine.
There should be a list of all those who fought climate-preserving action: the fossil fuel executives who raked in the profits, the marketing and PR folks who pushed the lies, the politicians who knowingly peddled the talking points, the pundits and ideologues…
Why let them parlay their pilfered wealth into a lasting legacy? If they’re on that list, let them live in the hellscape in the South that they helped build. Wanna live up North? Sorry, you bought a one way ticket to the new dust bowls and deserts. Have fun finding a snowball to own the liberals with.
I have some personal experience to add to this excellent assessment. People need to know the human horror stories of what's already happening right now.
In 2020, I left the conservative desert in Eastern Washington due to the intensifying Christian Nationalism, fascism, rogue militias, and an ever extending wildfire season that kept me trapped indoors for weeks on end fighting for my asthmatic life to get my family to what I thought would be a safer place—Savannah, Georgia. I mistakenly thought a blue city in a red state might be safer than a red city in a blue state. But boy was I wrong.
Decades of Republican-crafted deregulation of industry and defunding of vital public services made living in Georgia a deadly money pit for a multitude of reasons, but I will focus on the housing situation here.
Even far inland, homes were becoming uninsurable. The mortgage payments kept creeping up $300 to $500 a month each year, mainly because of the rising cost of insurance. Calling around to compare policies taught me that most companies wouldn't insure homes in our zip code at all.
The cheaply constructed homes, which I came to learn included ours, started falling apart within 5 to 8 years of being built, just long enough for the builders to escape any accountability. I learned that no level of homeowner’s insurance or home warranties could protect us financially in such a broken and dysfunctional system.
We spent the majority of the summer of 2021, in a home I'd just bought months before, suffering from a non-working air conditioner. The home was beautiful on the surface, and only 10 years old, but underneath it was an expensive death trap.
It's too long a story to detail, but the lack of any accountability for businesses in a state ruled by corporate con artists meant our home warranty was useless and the problems of hastily built, low-quality homes with HVACs way too small for the square footage meant mass regional failures and an HVAC industry ill equipped to handle the load.
Our house was consistently over 85 degrees inside, even at night, which coupled with the heavy humidity of the area meant we could barely bring ourselves to do anything but lay around trying to not succumb to heat stroke in our own home, quite a problem when your home is also where you work for a living!
I could write a book about what I witnessed and lived through in my 2.5 years of living in Georgia, which I saw as clear evidence of the massive-scale failure of neoliberalism and capitalism as a whole.
I also want to mention the retirement communities popping up in these dangerously hot areas. My parents fell for the marketing gimmicks of an adult living city outside of Tucson, AZ (not just a community, but a whole city that's over age 55). I worry about these vulnerable elderly folks being lured into these hot zones with water scarcity problems being left to die. When you have developers convincing a population of over twenty thousand aging and elderly folks it's a good idea to live a 30-minute drive across the desert to the next nearest population center that contains people under the age of 55 that they rely on for health care and basic assistance from community, how is this not sending off more people's alarm bells? I am just in awe that this is happening and no one seems to realize how insane and inhumane it is.
Miami native, left 2010. Climate so much worse than my 1980s childhood, heat went from “sweaty fun” to “oh hell no.” Even winter is worse - rain every day during the dry season, or droughts. Whole family bailed except brother who runs pool cleaning business and loves guns more than being melanoma free. Hard pass
As a native rustbelter who traveled the world and settled back in his rustbelt hometown, I will admit a measure of schadenfreude. We've endured decades of mockery and shame. Chase opportunity to the big coastal cities, they said. Your city is dead, they said. Abandon your homes and towns and move to the desert. 20 years of that, a constant refrain admonishing us for retaining any hope for the future in our towns.
Well, turns out, the Great Lakes really are a fantastic place for humans to live and thrive. Buying a house and a farm in Ohio was, in fact, a fantastic decision.
Americans whine about housing affordability and resource scarcity. I sit back and relish it. My greatest concern is the flood of climate refugees pushing up the cost of...everything, in their scramble for the resources they thought they didn't need.
Our tree-hugger group read several books on the water situation out west and watched a couple of documentaries. I can't remember which documentary it was, but one of them said people were going to move to "places like Cleveland." (I myself live in KC where we have plenty of water but a few years ago I read an article that pretty much said "Come to Duluth! The water's fine! We'll be sitting pretty for climate change." OK but my first thought was, the rich people will move to Duluth and pretty soon those who aren't as rich will get forced out.)
Really great piece. We moved to Las Vegas with three young kids in 2006 on the promise of good schools to come from a booming economy. One thing never materialized and the other soon ended. Added to the frustration was how unbearably hot it was for most of the day, most of the year. And the shrinking reservoir nearby was a reminder that we needed to get out. Now we're 8 miles west of Cleveland, two blocks from 20% of the planet's fresh water. I expect the Great Lakes region, the oft-maligned 'Rust Belt', will see a boom.
I went to Vegas this past weekend as part of an annual weekend I do with my friends. I usually get up early-ish, go for a nice walk in the “hot” early morning, hang out during the day doing fun things/activities, and walk the strip at night.
Not this year. It never got below 90 during my waking hours, it was already 100 by 9:00am, and was still in the 90s at midnight. I spent the morning in my room instead of walking (and there was basically no one else out), and skipped walking the strip entirely. I kept thinking “what if the power goes out? What will everyone (including locals in their homes) do?”.
On the way to the airport, the driver told me he was used to the heat, but this wasn’t normal. One hundred was ok, but more than that wasn’t (it got to 111-112 during every day I was there).
This isn’t sustainable.
One thing that occurred to me this morning is how the right’s filibustering of doing anything wrt climate change is that it’s either not an issue, is being exaggerated, or needs to be studied more.
But what if both sides are wrong? What if the science that’s tracking a gradual warm up over time, and assumes it will continue to go up, is right about it going up but wrong about it being gradual? Science can be wrong both ways!
Anyway, have a nice day.
I posted above and wanted to add a thought re living out there. It takes a lot of water to make electricity, a story we covered at the Las Vegas Sun. They have punched the third straw into the depths of Lake Mead to try to get what's left. It's dire and as mentioned, one of the drivers for our exit. But the new construction house I bought in 2007 in the SW Vegas valley was incredibly energy efficient. Amazing really, compared to the (older) houses I owned in Dallas. But I hear ya — I'd leave for work at 8:30 am and it would already be 95•... Then my wife would take the kids to the park later and the play apparatus was untouchable.
Well said. I live in Chicago, and I've worked professionally on environmental and energy issues for large chunks of my career. I've been convinced for years that we'll see substantial northward migration out of the Sun Belt within the next 10-15 years for exactly the reasons you cite.
This is a damn damn good article, Hamilton. You put it all into perspective beautifully.
This terrifyingly trenchant article clearly delineates the unhappy future we may well be facing. The quote “picking up pennies in front of a steamroller” well describes what the world and, in particular, those who run it have been doing for decades. But the bill is coming due. The concept of a climate crime may be an idea whose time has come.
The one question I have is whether a total global ecological collapse might overwhelm us before all this comes to pass.
The book _The Ministry for the Future_ includes some vigilantes taking matters into their own hands as far as the ultra-rich and climate crimes. (It's a novel but it's about climate change and its consequences.) There's the official world governing body I guess you'd call it trying to work on solutions, and one of their policies is every fat cat gets a "haircut." Also no one is allowed to fly on planes...they go back to balloons for air travel. Random vigilantes have other ideas for how to deal with climate-destroying fat cats, so a lot of the book is about "should the main character go along with the vigilantes or the official channels?" You may have read the book...it gives a lot to think about.
I’ll just pick up enough pennies to buy the steamroller. Why has no one tried this.
I just moved out of Austin because of the heat, and because of the recent wave of abnormally cold (and increasingly frequent) winter storms and resulting power failures.
Bonus: The ice storms and the heat are both damaging the city's tree cover, which makes summers hotter. (and our local hawk population more aggressive toward humans; https://www.kxan.com/news/surly-hawk-causes-disruptions-in-usps-deliveries-in-south-austin/ )
I lived in Tucson for nearly 10 years (2003 - 2012) and I loved it, but I knew how unsustainable it was.
You are spot on in this analysis.
I’m going to nitpick a bit regarding the blanket comments on California. Coastal California and Central California have distinctly different climates. Coastal California, where all the major cities are, benefits from the cooling effect of the Pacific Ocean including a strong marine layer that keeps temperatures down. We lived there for years and I call it the land without summer. In fact, the coastal fog is so persistent we nicknamed our summer months May Grey, June Gloom, and Fogust. Even LA benefits from the marine layer effect. Modesto, Fresno, Riverside in the Central Valley are a different story of course.
Yes I hope it goes without saying that there is more than one climate in the state of California.
True to a point but I lived through some weeks-long heatwaves in LA that are only getting more frequent. And it’s not just the heat there but also drought and ever-lengthening fire season as you surely know. We used to look forward to the cooler seasons of autumn and winter but weeks and weeks of smokey air in 2017 and 2018 is what finally got us to seriously plan our exit.
P.S. I don’t live in the U.S. anymore at all now. The whole country is a death trap imo.
Where isn’t? It’s hard to find places that won’t be negatively and harshly impacted.
My meaning was that it's a death trap for many reasons in addition to the climate emergency. Thankfully, there are still places on Earth where death by such things as a collapsing healthcare system, an imploding economy pushing people into homelessness, and direct fascist violence aren't part of the equation.
Frying Pan --> Fire?
https://www.theportugalnews.com/news/2021-08-13/portugal-one-of-the-most-vulnerable-to-climate-change/61659
I am aware, which is why I was careful about where in Portugal I moved to.
I disagree about the limited effect of insurance in climate change-affected areas. When homes stop being insured/insurable, a massive amount of migration will occur to those places where insurance isn't a big issue. The Outer Banks, southern Florida, Literally New Orleans, no one will be able to buy a house anymore because the risk is too high. Despite the best efforts of the Republican-dominated state houses in those states, this is Capitalism actually working.
https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/insurance-politics-at-the-end-of
My penance for being a dumb-dumb: 1) leaving this comment unedited so my ass gets continually shown to the world, and 2) becoming a paid subscriber. Proud to support your work HamNo!
DANG IT I KNEW I read that somewhere. WHOOPS.
There will first be a long period of special pleading in which all the rich libertarians and low tax mavens in those areas will get socialist government programs to help bail them out of their unwise real estate decisions. The Florida state last-resort insurance fund is totally inadequate to the task, though.
This is probably in that article I am about to read but when Allstate and State Farm stopped selling new CA home owner policies statewide… talk about a canary in a coal mine.
There should be a list of all those who fought climate-preserving action: the fossil fuel executives who raked in the profits, the marketing and PR folks who pushed the lies, the politicians who knowingly peddled the talking points, the pundits and ideologues…
Why let them parlay their pilfered wealth into a lasting legacy? If they’re on that list, let them live in the hellscape in the South that they helped build. Wanna live up North? Sorry, you bought a one way ticket to the new dust bowls and deserts. Have fun finding a snowball to own the liberals with.
I live in Columbus; the migration is already happening and driving up our rental and housing prices like crazy.