Welcome back to Drilled.
I'm Amy Westerveldt. We will be bringing you another season soon, but in the meantime, I'm back with weekly updates on various aspects of climate accountability and occasionally with some book recommendations and interviews related to them. Like today, I have joining me Jake Biddle. He's a journalist for Grist, and he also had a book come out just a couple months ago about internal migration in the US caused by climate change. It's called The Great Displacement. It's a great book.
All stick a link to it. In the show notes, Jake talked to me about all kinds of things he discovered while reporting this book, and it's pretty fascinating stuff. That conversation is coming up after this quick break.
Hi, my name is Jake Pittle. Okay.
I want you to start by kind of setting the stakes for people.
I feel like we hear.
Lots of numbers bandied about around climate migration. So, in terms of internal migration within the US driven by a climate, what kinds of numbers are we seeing right now in the projections?
Right?
So, the most recent numbers suggest that each year, you know, upwards of a million and closer in the past few years to two or three million people are displaced from their homes for any amount of time by a climate disaster, right, and so the vast majority of those people end up pretty quickly moving back to their homes, the original homes, once they can repair the damage, or once the immediate
disaster is over. But a substantial number do not. And we don't really know what that number is, but it's probably safe to say that tens of thousands of people every year end up having to spend you know, at least a year out of their home, or they end up moving to a different home eventually. So the cumulative toll of this displacement over the next few decades is going to get pretty large.
You know.
You could imagine that multiple millions of people over the next few decades, certainly by the middle of the century, will have made a permanent relocation, you know, as a result of either pressure from a climate disaster or what's even harder to gauge, you know, they make a voluntary movement away from a vulnerable area, you know, to avoid a future disaster.
Yeah, I mean, honestly, that played into my decision to leave. Yeah, I'm sure, and I know a few other people who also because we had it wasn't the snow. It was like we had multiple summers in a row of being trapped inside by smoke from yeahs, like my kids' school started to have more smoke days than snow days. Wow, which was really just brutal.
Ye was it the Caldor fire that was all around that all around for a few weeks, right, Yeah.
Yeah, we actually evacuated twice because of that fire. Like the first time was just the smoke got so bad that like it was, you know, like my kids were complaining about their eyes hurting inside the house even with all the windows closed. I mean, you know, most of Tahoe's housing stock was like built in the nineteen seventies and never touched since, so it's not like we've had
really great, you know, seals on our windows. So I kind of was like, oh, I guess we could just leave for a few days to get a break from the smoke. That would probably be good. And since you know we're able to do that, we should did. And then the second was actually like they were worried it was going to kind of like tear up the west shore of Lake. So they were everyone in West and North Tahoe to evacuate, so it wasn't like running from a fire.
I don't know.
I feel like people have this idea that it's like that it's always like disaster or not disaster emergency emergency, and like a lot of people end up, you know, leaving for either a short period of time or forever just because of like a building of it.
You know.
Yeah, definitely, definitely.
So anyway, I want to have you talk about some of the things that you heard from folks about how they make the decision to stay or leave, both temporarily and more permanently.
Right, Yeah, I think this is This was a really interesting and kind of surprising part of the reporting process for the book is that I guess I had kind of assumed when I started that there would be a kind of you know, psychological shift that took place in most people, where as the risks got larger and more frequent, they would, you know, decide that they were more afraid of then they were hesitant to leave and find a
new home. That was certainly true for a lot of people, but I think there was this whole other set of push and pull factors which were primarily financial that I don't think I considered at the start. Right, So, the availability and extent to which someone had bought homeowners insurance or flood insurance and flood print areas was like a prime driver of whether they had the resources to rebuild the same kind of home that they lived in before.
And then the ambient sort of level of housing shortage in a place was really really important for renters. Right So, in places like northern California, if there's a wildfire that destroys hundreds or thousands of housing units, the rents go up precipitously overnight, and people, even if their homes didn't actually get destroyed in the fire, they can't find a place to rent that's anywhere near affordable and they have to leave.
So there's these hool This is.
Exactly what happened to me, Like my landlord decided to sell the house that we were renting or maybe move a family member, and I don't.
Know, you wanted to you know, yeah, yeah, And it.
Was right after the caled Or.
Fire, right right, right, Yeah, it.
Was like, oh my god, there's nothing that we can find that's less than four thousand dollars a month.
It's yeah, and I think, like, like the most people that I spoke to who ended up having to move or choosing to move, it seems to exist on a spectrum between having to move and choosing to move. But I guess I was sort of surprised about how, you know, their attitudes about leaving kind of existed in this this limbo where some of them didn't really think that they were leaving for good, some of them didn't want to leave,
but they were going to leave. Some of them still thought of themselves as people who would never leave, even as they had to kind of come to grips with the fact that maybe they weren't coming back. I think I had sort of imagined there would be a binary between people who chose to stay and people who chose
to leave, and there was really not. The financial pressure of the post disaster world, you know, really was the main factor I think that made it impossible for people to stay even when they thought that they would not leave.
That's so interesting. I mean, it makes total sense when you say it, But yeah, I think a lot of times you hear about it in this kind of stay or go binary. Okay, I want to talk about climate gentrification and this way that black and brown people in particular are getting pushed into more disaster prone zones. I think the first time I heard the term climate gentrification was in Miami, and I just had this image in my head of people being literally pushed into the sea.
Oh yeah, I'm curious to hear about what you saw and your reporting on that.
Yeah, it's really really interesting.
I think that that case study in Miami has been really really influential for the way that a lot of people see the problem. And it's certainly true that many of the highest elevated areas in Miami have historically been areas of quite low property values home to black and brown communities, and now there's like a substantial placement pressure.
Going on in those communities.
Now, whether the developers are actively trying to make investments on a high ground, I mean, they'll tell you that they're not, and they just think it's a good place to gentrify, which in many respects it actually is. It's like right next to the other gentrified neighborhoods. But I mean, it's hard to imagine that they don't have the ability to look at a map, you know, and see what's
going to happen. But I think that there's this whole other set of pressures that I think you could call gentrification pressures, right like what I was talking about before in northern California and also in other parts of Florida, where as financial interests like insurance companies and mortgage lenders try to reduce their exposure, you know, they reduced the total available supply of credit and insurance coverage, and that increases a lot of pressure, financial pressure on lower middle
class and middle class homeowners in particular. Renters have a really hard time of it all the time. But I think that there's a kind of specific gentrification pressure that's happening, especially in Florida with windstorm and flood insurance, where a lot of homeowners can no longer keep up with the financial burden of paying insurance and keeping that coverage and sort of like pushing people out of the threshold of homeownership already, especially in parts of Miami where winstorm insurance
has gotten extremely expensive. I think this is like a kind of invisible climate gentrification pressure that we don't always hear about because it's not quite so graphic and visible, but the risks are getting transferred onto homeowners and residents of these places, and that's like really really hard for a lot of people to bear, and it pushes people out of those areas.
Yeah, I know that in California, as insurers kind of stopped offering really any fire insurance at all or really raise premiums to the point that people couldn't afford them, the state kind of stepped in, which is obviously not necessarily sustainable in the long term. Are you seeing that in other states as well, like states kind of getting in on the insurance game as a way to mitigate that impact.
Yeah. Yeah.
In Florida and Louisiana, which have both seem sort of downward spirals in their homeowners' insurance markets thanks to the hurricanes, the state has gotten involved sort of bailed out insurance that are collapsing, and then in Florida they pumped like a bunch of money into what's called reinsurance to help the insurers themselves get insurance. And then they also produced all these different legislative reforms to try to stabilize the system.
And in California, I think in particular, there's a lot of interest in regulating the way that insurers can choose to set prices not so much in Florida and Louisiana, probably for obvious reasons. But in California, the state has said, you know, if a homeowner takes steps to make her home more resilient to wildfire, then the insurer has to offer them a discount rate. You know, you have to take that into account when you set the price of premiams.
I think that's like it's the probably the.
Best policy that the state really has the legal authority to do, I think, or one of the best, and it should incentivize homeowners to do some of this, and hopefully the burdens are not so much that people just can't afford to pay the money up front, but it would lead to some big discounts. Yeah, and I think that that you're going to have to see probably more that kind of policy in order to prevent like a serious collapse in one of these markets, which we haven't quite seen yet.
Yeah. Yeah, Okay.
I want to talk about a term that I find to be terrifying because it sounds so and bureaucratic, but it is like kind of a major deal and that is managed to retreat.
Yeah, Like every time I.
Hear that term, I think as people like slowly running and screaming exactly.
Yeah.
It is like a very sanitized term for something that's often you know, very very painful.
Yeah.
Yeah, So I'm curious just well, I want have you defined this term for people? And then I want to hear more about what you saw around that, you know, kind of across the country where people are at with this idea, you know, where are their local governments that are actually trying to plan how you know, how it gets managed. I know, like sometimes when it gets mentioned in any kind of official way, like you know, property
values plummet, and get really worried about that too. So yeah, I'm curious to hear what you saw in them from Yeah.
Yeah, so manager treat is, as you said, the kind of sanitized term for the government, a state sponsored you know, relocation of people away from the most flood prone or disaster prone areas, or I guess relocation to people, buildings or infrastructure. Right, So any kind of you know, if you're moving the wastewater treatment plant back from the ocean, or if you're tearing down a neighborhood and giving people money to move elsewhere, that's all under the sort of
unbrellt of managed retreat. I think that the main way that this has happened in the United States so far is through this FEMA's home buyout program, where basically FEMA will give a local jurisdiction, a city or county, money to pay everyone in a certain area to leave or offer them the opportunity to leave.
Really, it's not a mandatory program.
FEMA gives you money, you leave your house, you find another house, and then FEMA tears down your house or the county really tears down your house, and then they've removed a structure from the floodplain, and that you know, they've reduced their future risk of flooding, and they've also reduced your future risk of flooding.
Hopefully.
This is like in theory, right, it's one of the most cost effective and really like the most sort of forward looking tools we have to adapt to climate change. Right, you can build levy you know, x feet y feed
z feet. There's always potential risk that another flood will overtop it in the future, but if you make sure that you move somebody away from the world, then you know the chances are if there's no home there the home camp flood, right, and so like in theory this this looks pretty good as the last resort option in places where there's either no money to adapt, you know, to build these structures, or where for some reason we feel like it's not worth it, like the dangers are
just too extensive. The problem, and what I found in the book is that almost everywhere that this happens, it turns out to be really ugly and to leave people in quite a bit of pain. So I wrote about like a test case of this in eastern North Carolina,
there was this community called Lincoln City. It was a historic African American community right on the banks of this river on land that was sort of considered worthless by the white planters who had dominated the area in the late nineteenth century.
And the government, after two hurricanes, came in and said, we would like to give you all money to leave.
We're never going to build a levee around you, we're never going to help you elevate your homes because they're not worth enough.
Everyone basically took the offer. They left.
This community was raised in two years, and now they're all scattered around and they still retained very painful memories of like the government coming in ton and they had to leave this place that was really the only place that had ever felt like home for them. This has happened all over the country. Some places people are okay with leaving, you know, but other places, especially black communities, where there's not enough home values in the government's has
to justify, you know, the expense of flood protection. This is often a really painful process, and it's just sort of like it's one of these things where, you know, a lot of adaptation experts and sort of planners see it as a really really sound tool for adapting, and to a certain extent, it is, but it comes with all kinds of implications for racial and economic justice that we really haven't begun to tease out yet.
Well yeah, I mean, we haven't figured out how to build housing or approach development in an equitable way, period, So the idea that we're going to do manage to retreat in an equitable way seems really implausible unfortunately. But I also think, like, you know, kind of leaving it to a disaster to take care of has similar impacts.
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, at least at least in the case of you know, a manage retreat policy, you could in theory design a policy that works better than the one that they have currently does, right, Like, so the buyout program, you just get a check for the pre flood market value of your house, right So for a lot of people, that's not a sufficient payment for them to find another house they can afford in the same area, you know, Like, if you've got to buy
out right now in Austin, Texas, which they've tried to do in the test, there's no home you could could afford for the amount that your previous home probably costs because costs have risen so much. But you could, in theory, you design a program that would include like a top up for instance, or a long term relocation STIPE and to help people make up that difference. But if you just wait for people's houses to get destroyed and then let them go willy nilly wherever they want, then you
definitely know that it won't work, you know. I Mean, there's just no way that that will end well for most people. So I think like biots are like a good start, and there's a way that it could be done well. It's just that it's not being done well right now. But yeah, I mean, managed retreat probably preferable to unmanaged retreat if you have to retreat right.
Have you seen any examples of either a managed retreat policy or other types of mitigation policies that have worked well? I know you get into this in the book. I want to have you like walk people through, you know, some examples of things that either you've seen actually implemented or you've heard people kind of talk about it sound like they could be you know, effective solutions.
Yeah, yeah, I mean so probably the best example of this working well is in New Jersey. So after a Hurricane Sandy, the state started this program called Acres, which is basically like a they.
Took the FEMA bioprogram.
When they expanded it, they staffed up this office that does these individual consultations with homeowners. They keep the offer to the homeowner on the table for a long time so the homeowner can really think about it. They I believe includes some sort of supplementary financial assistance or you know, connect people with resources that can help them find a new home.
They really have approached it.
From a longitudinal I guess perspective, like it's not just we show up, we give you the money, and we look away. Is that we're sort of guiding the homeowner from the process of making the decision to sell to finding a new home, you know, preferably in the same jurisdictions that the tax base doesn't suffer and people can
maintain their existing social and economic ties. And I think the other example of something that's worked well in Norfolk, Virginia, and this is not a perfect project by any means, but the Obama administration created a grant program, the National Disaster Resilience Competition, and this program basically doled out a billion dollars to some communities that wanted to experiment with some climate adaptation projects that had never really been tried before.
And in Norfolk, Virginia, they took a pretty flood prone African American neighborhood on the banks of this tidal river, and they spend about one hundred and fifty million dollars retrofiting basically every part of the neighborhood's infrastructure. They built this big grassy berm along the water to stop storm search flooding. They fixed the entire sewer system and the storm drain system. They created these new parks that sort of function as like tidal estuaries to soak up water.
They really took a kind of holistic approach, and it's not perfect by any means. Some people are a little discontented with what it's done to the way that the neighborhood looks, for instance, but for most people it's created a massive.
Reduction in flood vulnerability.
You know, this was a neighborhood where property values were falling thanks to the vulnerability, and now they've probably bought the neighborhood thirty to fifty years, depending on sea the liverlizer, or even longer. And it really does show how with enough money and enough willingness to take apart the way that neighborhood was built, you know, and redo it from the bottom up, you can kind of control that these impacts that seemed really scary on the surface of it.
Yeah, that's super interesting. You mentioned one thing that surprised you before, which was the various factors that come into people deciding whether to stay or go. I wonder if there is anything else that was particularly surprising to you as you did the reporting for the book.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that for many people this might not be surprising, but I was surprised by how many people moved from one dangerous home to another without necessarily realizing what it was that they were doing. Especially in Houston, a lot of people took biots or they decided to move after a big hurricane, and they ended up doing, you know, really what the government would really not have
wanted them to do. They moved, They took the money, and they moved to another flo zone because there was no long term monitoring what happened with these buyouts and in other places people moved from. This is surprising to me, but it's not really surprising when you think about it. Like a lot of touch with a lot of people who moved from New Orleans to Arizona, you know, after Katrina, or they moved from from Houston to northern California to
a very fire prone area. And it seems like people's, you know, their psychology is really affected by what they've experienced. People don't really assess, you know, risk from a neutral ground. You know, they don't really see, okay, what is a place that's free of risk.
They just want protection from the trauma that.
They've already experienced in most cases, right, And so I did speak to people who left Houston after flood and went to California and got an RV there and then
the RV burned down in a fire. And there's just things stories like this that are like, I think it's sort of emphasized for me that you can't really divide the United States into places that are safe and places that are not safe, right, you know, or really the world for that matter of course, there's only degrees of risk, and there's there's risk, and then there's you know risk like people in Miami face or or you know, Greenville
or somewhere in the sierras. But everywhere faces some level of vulnerability, and so I think everywhere has the risk of descending into this kind of like housing instability that I sort of tried to document in the places where I went.
Yeah, what are some of the things that US either federal or state government officials could learn or maybe have learned. Are learning from the kind of cross border climate migration stuff. Are there applicable lessons there for internal migration?
Oh, that's really interesting.
I had never thought of it that way, and I kind of feel like, I guess at the end of the book, I kind of said the opposite, which is where I was, like, I basically said that, you know, in this country, we don't really have even the beginnings of a plan to deal with international climate migration. It all gets routed through the immigration system, in the asylum system, which are so deeply broken and they're fucked up, and there's nobody who even wants to start trying to fix
it right. And I think that to me, the lessons of the few places where we have done internal climate migration successfully have really demonstrated that you kind of have to have not only you know, a really really robust post disaster recovery system where you're staying with people for a long period of time and making sure that they get back in their feet, you know, three, four or five years after a disaster, but you also have to sort of get your own house in order, so to speak.
It's really hard to make sure that there's no climate displacement unless you make sure that there's no housing displacement. And so like a program like Section eight or a
social housing program. I sort of say at the end that those are like a really necessary second or third step to solving this problem, because you know, people who are displaced by climate disasters end up in the same cycle of you know, displacement and relocation as people who just get displaced from from normal so to speak, financial pressure.
And so that lesson I thought was really important when you think about international climate migration, which is like, if you think of all these displaced people as existing on a kind of continuum, the solution to both of them is kind of the same, which is like the jurisdictions, the countries that have the most money and that have the legacy responsibility for carbon emissions need to the state needs to take a really really strong role in ensuring
that there is like safe affordable housing for everybody.
And when I say everybody, I mean everybody.
Yeah, And the border thing is getting in the way of even acknowledging that, even the beginnings the twinkling of an acknowledgment of that, because this political roadblock is standing in the way of that.
So that's kind of how I was thinking about it. But the way you said it is really interesting too. Yeah.
I mean, the US is obviously not great on this, but I wonder if anywhere is good on it and could potentially be you know, writing lessons. I mean, I don't know, I don't know the answer.
I don't know.
I mean, like, I gosh, it's really hard for me to think of an example. Well, okay, here's actually an example that I've always found really interesting and it was going to be a big part of the book. And then it wasn't because I didn't have enough space and it just didn't work out. But so in the nineteen eighties, the United States conducted nuclear tests on the Marshall Islands
in the Pacific, and they gave people unlimited ability. They gave Marshally's unlimited ability to come to the United States, and many people did, and they ended up in Arkansas and Oklahoma.
Yeah, Oklahoma.
There's like pretty thriving Marshally's communities in those places.
Yeah. And now that sea.
Level rice has been a big started to become a big factor for the Marshall another generation of Marshals has started to come to those same communities and they're taking advantage of the same legal authority I believe, to end
up in the same places. And I think that this is like really telling where it's like, once you take away the restriction of the border, people have the ability to not only you know, get away from the big risks, right, but they end up being able to I mean, it's not that those communities in Arkansas and Oklahoma are free from any kind of struggle, but they end up kind of being able to build something new once you remove that that blockage and once you don't make them go
through the you know, terrifying rigmarole of asylum claims, et.
Cetera, well, and they end up able to rebuild communities exactly exactly right. And so I think that like this is an example of something.
It's this is like point zero one percent of the total population of people who would need to move because of climate change, But I think it does show that there's kind of nothing to be afraid of, I guess was my conclusion. There is, like I think a lot of times the numbers, you know, five hundred million or a billion people moving get kind of bandied about as this terrifying you know, horde that's going to show up at the United States border or in Europe, you know,
trying to seek a sound. But I really don't think that there's anything scary about it. And I think that if you just seems like if you provide people with the right amount of support and you don't put these things in their way, you end up actually with potentially eventually positive impacts both, you know, for the communities and for the people where they live from this kind of movement from you know, a risky area to a safer area.
Yeah, kind of along those lines too. I'm curious what you have seen in terms of the potential intersection between eco fascism and climate migration.
Like I know, I was. Someone just sent me this.
Insane video last month from a group called Progressives for Immigration Reform where there yes.
In the US, I'll send you the video. It's wild.
They are basically saying, like, if you care about climate and conservation, then you should be pushing for tighter immigration controls because like all of these people coming into the US will increase the population, which will be bad for the environment and for climate action.
And that's really funny because it kind of implies that they won't be part of the population if they aren't in the case.
Right, exactly, that's right, that's right. But also it's just this thing that like, you know, everyone kind of knew was going to happen, and now of like people going from saying climate change isn't real to now using it as a reason to be anti immigration.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is far from my strongest subject area into like my colleague Gaby delve Valla has done a ton of work on this. I think Brendan O'Connor
has as well. But I do think that like, there's there's a substantial risk of this becoming a mainstream political position, and I think that, like, to me, this is maybe a really maybe a really inapt comparison, But I've always sort of thought of it in the same vein as like the way that a lot of progressive people will become really really nimbyish when there's some kind of affordable housing project that's going to be built near them, or
like a homeless shelter. There's this tendency right of people who have theoretically liberal political views, once there's like a change in their local environment, they become really vile and really opposed to any kind of like thing that could improve other people's welfare by you know, slightly changing the way it looks where they live. I'm not sure that that isn't what goes on in part when people are you know, use conservation or climate risk as.
A weapon to kind of in a way all.
Kinds of like social policies or inclusivity or you know, accommodation of other people and like, I mean, it feels like eco fascism is not part of the mainstream political conversation in the US right now, but I feel like it certainly could be, right and it's hard to imagine that it wouldn't be, you know, if the sort of trajectory of international climate migration continues the way that it is. But right now, it's hard to imagine our immigration control
is getting much stricter in the United States. I mean, they're already really damn strict, and we just don't really think of immigration and climate change as being connected. But I think that if we ever did, there would be a substantial downside because people could come to the precise
wrong conclusion by connecting those things. And that's something to look out for, and that I kind of dread the day that people do start to put those things in conversation, because I think it's going to lead to more things like that that video that you that you mentioned. That's what's so scary about the way that those theoretical statistics
of future migration are discussed. I think that that Alexander Tempest has written about this as well, right, and I think she's arguing and I pretty much agree that they're not really useful numbers, Like you can't just add that number to the population of the United States and they that, well, this is like it's not useful. And I think a really serious way to know the numbers to think about, you know, the potential influx of people or the potential
population growth. Like I think it can really only be weaponized for for negative events, and I think that like we have to start I guess that's sort of why I said, like getting our own house in order, Like, I think we just have to think through the implications of what it would mean to take care of everyone who's displaced by climate change, and then not so much try to like schedule you know, this kind of influx of people, but just think about what would what would
a benign policy look like for any number of people, right, including the ones who already live here, right, Like, let's just imagure we're trying to keep track of everyone and keep safe everyone who already lives here, and then like let's try to expand that out, you know, but do not really do that well for current citizens, right, So it's like, yeah, I think it's I think it's a little it's a little like rich in a negative way to be like, oh, we can't handle all that, Like
it's not really the question is can we handle It's not really the question at all.
Yeah.
Well, and I think to your point about, you know, shoring up housing availability and affordability and access and all those things across the board in general could also mitigate some of the potential for anti immigration centiment because I feel like the number one thing that you often hear is like, well, I don't have access to a house, so why should I care right about giving this person who's not even from here an apartment or whatever, you know, Right, So,
like again, sort of just taking care of people, good move across the board.
Right, Yeah, I mean it's really true. The reasons people cite for why we couldn't and absorb a lot of people in the United States are the same. Like, those shortcomings are shortcomings that we actually should solve, but they're not really a reason to do not let people in, especially when you consider what it is that they're trying to leave behind.
Drilled is an original critical frequency production. Our producer is Sarah Entry. Sound design, mixing and mastering are by Peter Duff, who also wrote our original score. Our first amendment attorney is James Wheaton at the First Amendment Project, and the show is reported written and hosted by me Amy Westervelt.