The Climate Apartheid

After the grid overloads, it takes weeks for the power situation to normalize. Bottled water, abundant at the start of the disaster becomes scarce. In conversations with friends and snippets of time online, you learn that much of the Midwest has been subject to titanic mudslides and flooding. Hurricanes hit the Southeast, driving up demand for disaster supplies even further than putting more stress on interstate commerce. Work is basically impossible for days. You're not even really sure if your

job's going to exist much longer anyway. Outside of a few high end shopping districts, life just hasn't gone back to normal for most people, So you've settled into a new normal using your car, and you're now copious free time to ferry supplies to and from a handful of collection points and new encampments. You felt bad for days after fleeing when the cops broke up the first camp. Aaron, your community organizer friend, told you not to worry about it.

Not everyone's ready to go face to face with riot cops. Tom the former marine, said the same thing, but then offered to give you some self defense training if you wanted it. He and a couple of other combat vets had started organizing regular self defense sessions at one of the camps, based out of an old apartment complex abandoned when it's holding company went bankrupt. For a couple of weeks,

you lose yourself in the work. Gradually you realize that the network of encampments you and your new friends have been working to support have become something more than just a stop gap. For one thing, the number of folks without housing just keeps on rising. All the added stress on the power grid and the questionable ways some people dealt with it led to a spate of urban fires, which forced hundreds of people out of their homes. The local economy is in free fall too. You're not the

only one whose work just disappeared. And while you've got enough saved for a little while, you're ever aware that you won't be able to pay rent forever. That possibility doesn't scare you as much as it did before. It helps that you're spending half your time in one camp or another. Anyway, you decide your best bet at any kind of comfort in the future is to make sure life in the camps is as comfortable for every one

as possible. To that end, you and Tom scrounge up a crew and spend days flitting in and out of abandoned buildings, scrounging solar panels, batteries, and wiring. None of you know much about how to use that ship, but a collective of electricians and engineers put together a list of the parts they needed and how to safely get them. By the time summer comes to an end, almost three thousand people are living in camps with regular power and

cooling stations. Other collectives have spent the weeks building solar stills to filter waste water and deal with the drinking water shortage that still in dim it across the southern half of the country. Life is by almost any measure, harder than it was a year ago, but the stories of wild fires in the northwest and massive police crackdowns across the Great Lakes region make it clear that you're not struggling alone. You feel lucky that it's been weak

since you've so much as seen a police patrol. There's been a lot more property crime in the parts of town where the economy is still functioning somewhat close to normal. You've heard shoot out several nights, and you've grown increasingly glad to be off on the margins with a good community of people who take care of each other and don't have much worth stealing. And then in late September

things take a turn. Some right wing live streamer visited the largest of the three camps, now almost fifteen hundred strong. He stitched together in narrative blaming a series of downtown arsons and burglaries on organized Antifa extremists in their war camp. One of Tom's friends, who's been doing armed security at night, shows you a handful of posts from far right extremists

threatening to raid the camp. You hear rumors the police might finally be planning a crackdown too, ever, fired a gun, tom asks you shake your head no, and he nods, well, that's probably about time you learn. In two thousand eighteen, the Camp and Woolsey fires raged across California, burning hundreds of thousands of acres and wiping out whole towns. The Camp wildfire is so far the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history, although that may have changed by

the time this episode drops. It was the most expensive natural disaster in the world in two thousand eighteen. It killed more than eighty people, destroyed fourteen thousand homes, and displaced fifty thousand people. Not included among the ranks of the displaced where Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, who hired a team of private firefighters to protect their sixty million

dollar mansion and hidden hills. Private firefighting has become a popular boutiques service in the era of climate change induced disaster. Large insurance companies like chub and a I G offered their wealthy clients private firefighters to help prevent property damage. Wildfire defense systems based in Montana sent fifty three engines

to California during the fires. They protected people like Kanye and Kim, while lower income individuals in the nearby town of Paradise lost their homes and loved ones to the blaze. On July one, Jeff Bezos, occasionally the world's wealthiest man, became the second billionaire in space, or at least he got pretty close to space. That same day, news broke of massive flooding in China's Henan province, eclipsing even the apocalyptic floods that left more than a thousand Germans missing

just a few days earlier in Germany. Whole villages were destroyed. In China, more than a hundred thousand people were forced to relocate. While Jeff Bezos took his first look into outer space, passengers drowned on a flooded subway in zhang Zau. At almost the same time, authorities in Oregon announced that the Bootleg Fire, the largest in the state's history, had grown big enough to generate its own weather patterns. Officials admitted that the blaze could not be extinguished until the

rains returned in the fall. Many of the Oregonians caught in the smoke from the Bootleg Fire are transplanted Californians. Men and women who fled Los Angeles or the Bay Area to escape the increasingly brutal fire season and retreat to Oregon's famously moist climate. Most of these transplants were upper middle class, well paid employees in the tech or entertainment sector. I'm sure some of them felt betrayed when their affluence proved insufficient to shield them from the seasoned climate.

That mindset was most clearly embodied by a middle aged German woman interviewed by Deutsche Well News in the wake of apocalyptic flooding and so many people dead. You don't expect people to die in a flood in Germany. You expected maybe in four countries, but you don't expect to hear. But it was all too fast to click. It is undeniable that as extreme weather events grow more common, the victims of such catastrophes will include ever greater numbers of

what was formerly the global one percent. The truth is that we have all of us spent our entire lives in climate apartheid. Western nations, through extracting resources and outsourcing industrial processes to the rest of the world, have avoided the worst early consequences of industrialization. Until wildfires changed the calculus. We had no cities with air as dirty as New

Delhi or Shinzhen, China. Even when climate disasters hit cities and affluent countries, the level of suffering experienced within that city still breaks down on class lines. I'm not just talking about something as obvious as who has enough money for a c or who can afford a car that drives well in the snow. When the Pacific Northwest Heat Dome briefly made Portland, Oregon, one of the hottest cities on the planet, the actual heat experienced in different neighborhoods

varied bay Ston income. This is because wealthy neighborhoods had lower building density in much more trees, which provided enough shade that so called A grade neighborhoods were eight degrees fahrenheit cooler on average than poor neighborhoods. But as the consequences of industrial society hit harder, the wealth line necessary to avoid them rises. It is no longer simply sufficient

to live in a rich country. If you aren't wealthy enough for a second or a third home, for your own private firefighters, for a bunker in New Zealand, or a space shuttle. Sorry, but you're getting left behind. Welcome to the wrong side of climate apartheid. If you want an idea of what climate apartheid will look like for tens of millions of Americans, including a sizeable chunk of you listening right now, there's probably no story more important

than the tale of Paradise, California. When the camp fire blazed through eighteen thousand homes, it created a flood of climate refugees. Chico, the nearest city, gained twenty thousand residents almost overnight. For a city of just a hundred thousand. That men a significant strain, and the people of Chico responded beautifully with a flood of charity and mutual aid. People donated tents, sleeping bags, Volunteers cooked hot food, local kids organized team sports for the kids who just lost

their town. Many and Chico opened their homes to strangers who just lost theirs. Mark Stemmen, a geography professor at California State University, described it this way to Intercept reporter Naomi Klein. A tsunami of fire and terror rolled down the hill from Paradise, but that tsunami was buffeted by a blanket of love and comfort. Unfortunately, the reaction of Chico was by enlarge a feat of charity, not of mutual aid. This is a problem because charity is something

you give two less fortunate people. And when news coverage of the disaster faded, so too did sympathy and willingness to help the victims of the camp fire. Six months after the camp fire destroyed Paradise, California, more than a thousand families were still without even secondary housing. Before the fire hit, there was already a massive housing shortage in northern California. Rates of homelessness had been on the rise

for years now. The campfire inspired the city of Chico to create a climate plan, which included more affordable housing in order to make the community more resistant to displacement caused by climate disruption. But this is not what happened from the intercept quote. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit, throwing many more people in Butte County as elsewhere into various states of economic and social distress. Stimmon told me local activists were all geared up to hold a big rally

calling for a green new decade. He said, we had banners and sunflowers and were ready to rock. Then lockdown happened, and the signs just sat in his yard for months. Brown recalled that once the pandemic was declared, there wasn't much room for a conversation about planning for the future when we were dealing with these immediate crises. In late August and early September, another wildfire struck the region, incinerating two towns and displacing yet more people in the county.

The city opened up some hotel rooms to older people who were particularly vulnerable to COVID nineteen, but there were not nearly enough rooms for everyone who needed shelter. Through this two and a half year period of shock after shock, housing costs and Chico have continued to soar. First, it was in response to the uptick and demand from Paradise evacuees and people working on post disaster reconstruction, which saw a spike and rents and made Chico among the hottest

housing markets in the country. Today, the boom continues, but now it is in response to a pandemic fueled influx of Bay Area professionals and retirees looking to telecommute or chill out in a more affordable, low key community. According to the California Association of Realtors, the price of a single family house in Butte County increased by a staggering sixteen point one percent last year, with Chico at the

center of the frenzy. A headline at a local ABC affiliate summed up the market's current trajectory, up, up, up, so real estate and Chico became much more valuable very quickly, which killed an motive to create more affordable housing. Every low income apartment building is one less set of luxury condos for Bay Area transplants. After all. Now by twenty most of the middle and upper middle class Paradise refugees had either bought or built new homes, but those had

been renters or living in mobile homes got nothing. In two thousand nineteen, MPR talked to Dominica Sprague, who moved to Paradise because she had been priced out of the Bay Area. In the six months since the campfire, she and her family had been forced to move to six different camps. They were interviewed outside of a camper on a fair ground in Eubis City. They were not being hosted there by the city, nor had they been placed

there by the state. The Sprague family paid seven hundred and fifty dollars a month for the privilege of camping out. Many who were displaced by the campfire simply never recovered. Chico county is homeless population surged by sixteen percent after the fire, and it has not gone back down in

the years since. Twenty three percent of Chico's homeless a refugees from the Paradise Fire, and when these people became permanent fixtures of the town, getting in the way of a profitable real estate boom, the warm welcome and charity that had greeted them in two thousand eighteen evaporated. In two thousand and twenty, the Chico City Council elected a slate of right wing candidates, primarily on a platform of using the cops to brutalize and break up homeless encampments

for the good of local businesses. Citizens for a Safe Chico put two hundred and fifty thousand dollars into a sweeping ad campaign that painted these people as vagrance and transience, despite the fact that most had resided in the county for years. In many cases, Chico police confiscated and threw away donated clothing, tints, and sleeping bags that had been

given to Paradise refugees just a few years earlier. During her reporting for the Intercept, Naomi Klein talked to Alexander Hall, a twenty three year old camp fire survivor who had subsequently lost his new home in police sweeps of encampments. He told her, we're homeless, We're not a disease. You can't just get rid of us and then expect us to be gone. That's not the way it works. Were people were trying to survive. Were like anybody else. Everybody

is one paycheck away. And the reality of the situation is that, thanks to climate change, we are all considerably less than one paycheck away from calamity. Wildfires and other natural disasters aren't the only thing that's growing more common. A less stable world means a less stable economy. We're already seeing inflation on the rise, and everyone listening remembers how calamitous the first weeks of the pandemic were for tens of millions of people. A bad economy makes members

of a community less resilient. It means they have less to donate to their neighbors in the wake of a disaster. It also means their community, their city or town, or state, will have fewer resources to put into things like protecting infrastructure from natural disasters, paying emergency workers, and providing affordable housing to prepare for the inevitable. The story of Chico has told us what happens when affluent liberal enclaves find

themselves forced into this position. They cut funding to everything but cops and use those cops to do violence marginalized communities from the intercept quote the combination of factors that has created this crisis, and Chico is far from unique

to Northern California. After decades of defunding social programs coupled with wild overfunding of police, a great many communities across the country find themselves stretched too thin to absorb a major shock, particularly when it comes to housing and mental health supports. And without these other tools, every challenge quickly turns into a matter of public safety. I think Chico provides a fairly realistic expectation for how most climate disaster

related scenarios will be handled by most municipal governments. In the immediate future. The rich will buy new homes, invest private and public resources into protecting their neighborhoods. The communities that suffer the worst from climate change will experience a wealth drain as residents with the funds to do so, leave drinking the tax base and leaving everyone with fewer

resources to dedicate to rebuilding and resiliency. In two thousand seventeen, Scientific American published an outstanding article titled Natural Disasters by Location. It analyzed ninety years of data and found that every major environmental catastrophe like a huge tornado, hurricane, or wildfire, increases a US county's poverty rate by one percent quote. We found that if a county experienced two natural disasters, migration out of that county increased by one percentage point.

With the strongest reactions happening in response to hurricanes, this translates into a loss of around six hundred residents from a typical county. The effect of one very large disaster responsible for a hundred or more deaths was twice as big. Poverty rates also increased by one percentage point in areas hit by super severe disasters. This suggests that people who aren't poor are migrating out, or that people who are poor are migrating in. It might also mean that the

existing population transitioned into poverty. The researchers were particularly interested in seeing how the creation of FEMA in ninety eight impacted things. FEMA exists in the theory to coordinate federal response to natural disasters and help communities rebuild. With that in mind, if FEMA does its job, you would expect residents of stricken areas to be less likely to move after the date FEMA started responding to disasters with federal

relief checks. If you happen to live in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, you already know where I'm leading you quote. We found that, if anything, residents were more likely to migrate out of counties struck by natural disasters after FEMA was created. This pattern is consistent with recent research documenting that the federal funds that flow to victims of disasters come mainly in the form of nonplace based programs like

unemployment insurance and food stamps. It appears that many people in disaster affected areas take the money and move to another county, and so the study concluded. Our research suggests that the rich may have the resources to move away from areas facing natural disasters, leaving behind a population that is disproportionately poor. But of course, that study focused primarily on coastal areas and the sort of disasters suffered by

people who live in those communities. Two thousand seventeen was an age in which the Pacific Northwest and many other mountainous parts of the West didn't suffer from wildfires in the way they do now. In other words, it was a time in which coastal elites had real choices on where to flee. Those days appear to be coming to

an end. The super wealthy will, of course continue to run to safe places, but the number of places they consider safe will shrink, the amount of available bunker properties will decrease, and the wealthy will eventually split into two separate groups, those with the funds to flee to truly safe locations and those who will use their money and power to try and build islands of security within endangered communities.

The people who will do this are the middle class, rich, millionaires and multi millionaires, the kind of people who sit on local business association boards, the kind of people who run towns like Chico but can't afford or don't want to flee. We've seen tie meantime again that these local elites tend to use the police as a cudgel to beat down any marginalized people who disrupt the look or profitability, or whatever isolated parts of the city they care about.

In Portland, that's downtown and the members of the Portland Business Alliance have spent much of the last year lobbying the mayor form more brutal crackdowns on both anti capitalist protesters and houseless people. The goal is never to actually help struggling people. Portland has a street Response unit dedicated to providing unarmed responders for people in mental health crises. Such units have proven to work extremely well, saving lives and cities like Denver, but in Portland the unit has

continually struggled with a lack of funding. In twenty the city Council voted to move four point eight million dollars from the police budget into a reserve fund for the street Response unit. This would have expanded it from a test program in one neighborhood Lents into a citywide program with six teams. In may one, Ted Wheeler and two council members allied with the Business Alliance voted against this amendment. Mayor Wheeler claimed that the reason was the program needed

better performance metrics in order to judge its efficacy. The fact that no such metrics exist for measuring how police handle mental health crises does not seem to have bothered him. The money went back to the cops, and days later, a Portland police officer responding to a mental health crisis in Lynce Park killed an unarmed man. Wealthy business owners in Portland, like wealthy business owners in Chico, have no

interest in improving services to marginalized people. Those folks don't shop at their stores, and they don't look good in glossy magazine spreads about downtown restaurants. The number of homeless people in America has increased for the last four consecutive years.

As we saw with Chico, climate change will only increase the number of desperate people sleeping rough the nice liberal mayors of nice liberal cities like Portland will hymn in hall about metrics while they send jack booted thugs out to clear these people away from good neighborhoods using violence. In Chico, where the local government is shifted a hard right due to the influx of homeless people, the justification

was commensurately harsher. From the intercept, One of Safe Chico's talking points is that the city's unsheltered population has suffered from something they call toxic compassion The idea is that by attempting to help, a culture of drug dependence and camping by choice is being enabled. According to this logic, if camping as banned and clean needles aren't available, then people will find shelter beds and get the mental health

and addiction treatments they need. It's a domestic version of the discourse of deterrence at the southern border, the idea that treating people with some modicum of humanity encourages them to take risky journeys. Cruelty, therefore, is the greater compassion. Today we see the compassion of cruelty preached by politicians on the left and the right. They just use different terms for it. And as protests against police violence continue to go viral, local elites will increasingly contract out for

their violence. The most intense version of this has happened in Minneapolis, where a mercenary outfit named Conflict as Alution Group or cr G, has been hired by its city to provide armed security in the wake of protests over police violence. CRG guards started showing up with guns, conveniently at the same time as the federal government started an investigation into the Minneapolis police they've been accused of the same sorts of physical violence as well as the questionably

legal practice of detaining citizens. But the more unsettling and much mercurier story is that these guys at least brag about possessing a significant surveillance capacity. They have drones and advertise that they can use them to spy on local dissidents. Seriously, I'm want to play you an excerpt from one of their ads, and you should know that the video playing during this excerpt shows a group of armed insurgents, as

viewed through a drone camera, marching down a desert road. Well, it's very law enforcement personnel as well as utilizing specialist equipment such as also known as unmanned aerial vehicles used to such specialized equipment gives Conflict Resolution Group and its clients the clear advantage for binding a better security model,

thus insurance success. It's important to remember than a world of uncertainty your securities paramount, Conflict Resolution Group provides the tools, resources, experience, and highly trained personnel to make that uncertainty go away. Prior to c r G, the most intense example of a private security firm being used to surveill dissidence was

probably Tiger Swan. During the Standing Rock occupation, they are alleged to have used technology called a dirt box mounted on aircraft to spy on the cell phone data of activists. This kind of ship is growing more normalized every day, and you're fooling yourself if you don't think it's because large corporations and local business associations want cops and even

militaries of their own. The Portland Business Alliance has contracted armed and unarmed guards with Portland Patrol Incorporated for years. Most of these guards operate in what the city calls an Enhanced Services District. This is just a quirky Portland term for a nationwide trend. E s d s are more often called business improvement districts. B i d s

are increasingly common all over the United States. In a legal sense, they are urban areas where private organizations are given the power to do things normally relegated to the local government. This includes security. B i d s were developed in the nineteen seventies is a way to fight the economic stagnation that had settled on many U. S cities. There are more than a thousand b i d s nationwide, and the one in Downtown Portland, founded in nineteen eighty eight,

is particularly large and influential. When the Portland Business Alliance was formed in two thousand two, they took control of the downtown b I D called Downtown Clean and Safe. The district expanded to more than five hundred blocks, and there has been talk of expanding it to include residential areas. From teen Vogue quote the formation of e s d s is patently undemocratic To institute one in Portland. Interested parties form a business nonprofit and campaigned to have the

city's Revenue Division levy fees on in district. Property owners in accordance with the city code. Then unelected e S d overseers, often some of the wealthiest enterprises in the city, use the proceeds to hire security and police, contract cleaning companies, make infrastructural improvements, and fund their lobbying and marketing efforts.

Portland alternative weekly will Emette Week recently reported that some funds collected from property owners for Clean and Safe are actually channeled to the Portland Business Alliance for staffing and administrative costs. In response, the p b A issued a statement defending its sharing of resources there are a few exemptions to the fees. Private public and nonprofit properties are liable via this arrangement, along with revenue from parking fees

and special appropriations from the city's general fund. Portland's three e s d s together taken over eight million dollars per year, and no point is the public permittive voice in this process. The imposition of an E s D is a decision made exclusively by a business in collaboration with local governance. So already in dozens of American cities, local elites wealthy business owners are permitted to tax the public and deploy security forces without any accountability to voters.

In twenty the Western Regional Advocacy Project or WRAP, a social justice organization, audited Portland's b I d s. They found that the city carried out almost no oversight, failing to review the annual budget, monitor the use of funds, or investigate complaints about violence by security officers. Quote cleanan safe pays the full salaries of four dedicated police officers. These are public employees invested with the power to carry out the full spectrum of policing actions while on the

corporate payroll. An internal police memo reviewed by teen Vogue lays out the function of Clean and Safe officers. Clearly, the offers do make arrests to be responsive to businesses needs to conduct successful commerce in the downtown core area or allow people to use the sidewalk. These officers act in concert with the numerous security guards, some of whom are armed in a sty employ like those of Portland

Patrol Inc. The largest Clean and Safe contractor. Private security guards surveil and rouse the unhoused right exclusion orders call in Clean and Safe police officers to issue citations and make arrests. City officials have argued that guard conduct is

wholly unaccountable to the public, wrote the City Auditor. A district contract with a private security provider says that the city Police Commissioner currently the mayor, will obtain and review reports on security officers activities, including complaints against officers and the resulting investigations. We did not find evidence that this was done now. The impact of all this on marginalized

people is startlingly clear. In parts of Portland outside downtown cleanan Safe, the average number of unhoused people arrested per square mile is six point one. Inside Clean and Safe, that number jumps to more than a hundred and thirty seven. This is because things that are often not in four wors to even treated as crimes elsewhere in Portland, are crimes in the b I D. These places can literally

have their own justice systems. Up until one of these districts even had its own assistant district attorney whose salary was paid by private interests. This sort of anti democratic structure is exploding in popularity. In February of one, the governor of Nevada announced a plan to launch innovation zones

to rejuvenate the state economy. From the A P quote, the zones would permit companies with large areas of land to form governments carrying the same authority as counties, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and courts, and provide government services. And of course, government services includes security.

As the crumbles accelerate and more people slipped through the cracks and wind up desperate, the task of policing them will increasingly fall to private interests, empowered to act as unelected governments in the name of economic revitalization. It is a vicious cycle. The economy at contractions caused by environmental disaster and unrest reduce the capacity of local governments to

serve citizens. This makes the case for innovation zones or business improvement districts easier to make over and over again. From California and Oregon to Nevada and beyond, we see the same story. Disasters are used to justify power grabs by the same kinds of people who for decades lobbied against action on climate change. Now that the consequences are here, they will divert their resources towards establishing their own boutique legal systems with their own boutique security forces to protect

their comfort and keep you out. I haven't devoted nearly enough of this episode to the international situation by necessity, but we can and should draw a direct line to the climate refugees at the US border, facing tear gas and beatings and internment and concentration camps, and the violence being increasingly enacted by domestic political elites against US citizens. In June of one, news broke that South Dakota Governor Christie Nome had used a private donation to send fifty

National Guard soldiers to the Texan border. The decision caused tremendous debate, but legal experts seemed to agree that it was in fact legal, although it had never been done before. Back in two thousand nineteen and the first season of It could happen Here I talked about Fucau's boomerang, the idea that tactics and weapons used to police imperial possessions inevitably rebound to police the subjects of the Imperial interior.

I will tell you here and now that this will not be the last time private money sends National Guardsmen on a domestic mission, and the next time it happens, it may be considerably closer to your home.