(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Climate migration in the states is underway, and we are not ready for what's to come. [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-27 Hana Mohsin, right, carries belongings from a neighbor's home which was damaged in a mudslide on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021, in Salinas, Calif. The area, located beneath the River Fire burn scar, is susceptible to landslides as heavy rains hit hillsides scorched during last years wildfires. We are in the age of consequences, only in the beginning stage clearly, but the flight from increasingly powerful and frequent natural disasters has already begun in the United States. A destabilizing force in the nation's stability that few know about or ponder. Hurricanes, wildfires, drought, and flooding force people to move from their homes to areas that cannot house them driving unaffordability for everyone. In an opinion piece in The Guardian, Jake Bittle notes that three million Americans were displaced from natural disasters last year. That number will explode as the climate emergency intensifies over the years and decades. Media loves a sexy climate disaster; hurricanes and wildfires get national attention until the water recedes and the smoldering stops, then the cameras and reporters leave. With Katrina, Maria, and Paradise, people had no choice but to leave. The media did focus on the departure of climate victims but not on prolonged coverage—droughts, heat waves, river flooding, more minor cyclones, and fires, not so much coverage. In the case of Fox, the victims abandoned for a newer shiny object such as Pete Buttigieg’s shoes, their pain and suffering ignored. As Bittle notes, the story is just starting for victims; some move in with family and neighbors to a new city or state. We as Americans don’t often hear about this chaotic process of displacement and relocation, but the scale of movement is already overwhelming: more than 3 million Americans lost their homes to climate disasters last year, and a substantial number of those will never make it back to their original properties. Over the coming decades, the total number of displaced will swell by millions and tens of millions, forcing Americans from the most vulnerable parts of the country into an unpredictable, quasi-permanent exile from the places they know and love. This migration won’t be a linear movement from point A to point B, and neither will it be a slow march away from the coastlines and the hottest places. Rather, the most vulnerable parts of the United States will enter a chaotic churn of instability as some people leave, others move around within the same town or city, and still others arrive only to leave again. In parts of California that are ravaged by wildfire, disaster victims will vie against millions of other state residents for apartments in the state’s turbulent housing market. In cities like Miami and Norfolk, where sea levels are rising, homeowners may watch their homes lose value as the market shies away from flood-prone areas. The effects will be different in every place, but almost everywhere the result will be the same: safe shelter will get scarcer and more expensive, loosening people’s grip on the stability that comes with a permanent home. The warming of the planet is only part of the reason for this displacement. It’s true that as the Gulf of Mexico warms up and heat dries out western ecosystems, ordinary disasters become more severe. But again, that’s only part of the story. The other reason for all this climate chaos is that the US has spent much of the past century building millions of homes in the most vulnerable places, pushing into fire-prone mountain ranges and right up to the banks of rivers that were destined to flood. The developers and local officials who were responsible for all this construction were sometimes ignorant of the dangers, but other times they steamrolled ahead even while knowing the potential for ruin. All that construction has put millions of people in harm’s way, and the public and private entities who aid in disaster recovery can’t keep up. The US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) lacks the resources to help the communities hit by disasters achieve a long-term recovery, and the agency spends most of its money on building things back exactly the same as they once were, which locks in the potential for future disasters to ruin the same homes and displace the same people. The Biden administration has funneled billions of dollars into new programs that could help communities armor against future disasters, but progress has been slow. Jonathan Franzen wrote in the New Yorker in 2021 about the likelihood that we will not survive the climate crisis and that hope needs to be redefined with that information in mind. Many were outraged that the article suggested we do nothing (it did not) despite gains in green energy technology and the gallant efforts from green activists and some politicians to head off catastrophic damage to the climate system. The crisis only deepens; we have passed tipping points that we were warned must never occur. Oh, well. There are far too many of us; greenhouse gas emissions from our energy sector and deniers and apathy combine to make for a bleak future. Psychologically, this denial makes sense. Despite the outrageous fact that I’ll soon be dead forever, I live in the present, not the future. Given a choice between an alarming abstraction (death) and the reassuring evidence of my senses (breakfast!), my mind prefers to focus on the latter. The planet, too, is still marvelously intact, still basically normal—seasons changing, another election year coming, new comedies on Netflix—and its impending collapse is even harder to wrap my mind around than death. Other kinds of apocalypse, whether religious or thermonuclear or asteroidal, at least have the binary neatness of dying: one moment the world is there, the next moment it’s gone forever. Climate apocalypse, by contrast, is messy. It will take the form of increasingly severe crises compounding chaotically until civilization begins to fray. Things will get very bad, but maybe not too soon, and maybe not for everyone. Maybe not for me. Some of the denial, however, is more willful. The evil of the Republican Party’s position on climate science is well known, but denial is entrenched in progressive politics, too, or at least in its rhetoric. The Green New Deal, the blueprint for some of the most substantial proposals put forth on the issue, is still framed as our last chance to avert catastrophe and save the planet, by way of gargantuan renewable-energy projects. Many of the groups that support those proposals deploy the language of “stopping” climate change, or imply that there’s still time to prevent it. Unlike the political right, the left prides itself on listening to climate scientists, who do indeed allow that catastrophe is theoretically avertable. But not everyone seems to be listening carefully. The stress falls on the word theoretically. And Frazen writes this: First of all, even if we can no longer hope to be saved from two degrees of warming, there’s still a strong practical and ethical case for reducing carbon emissions. In the long run, it probably makes no difference how badly we overshoot two degrees; once the point of no return is passed, the world will become self-transforming. In the shorter term, however, half measures are better than no measures. Halfway cutting our emissions would make the immediate effects of warming somewhat less severe, and it would somewhat postpone the point of no return. The most terrifying thing about climate change is the speed at which it’s advancing, the almost monthly shattering of temperature records. If collective action resulted in just one fewer devastating hurricane, just a few extra years of relative stability, it would be a goal worth pursuing. Sadly, the crisis is much worse than we are being told. I'll likely take a few bullets; some people can't handle the truth. I don't care anymore; our only choice for the future is destroying the GQP in a fifty-fifty nation, which will be a high mountain to climb. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/27/2155206/-Climate-migration-in-the-states-is-underway-and-we-are-not-ready-for-what-s-to-come Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/