[music] I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, author of On the Move the Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America.

Abrahm Lustgarten, thank you so much for your time today.

Thanks for having me.

What compelled you to write this book in the first place, Abrahm?

Well, there was a stage of brainstorming what the next bit of reporting was going to be.

When I look at climate change, which I've covered for a whole bunch of years.

At this time in 2018 or so, there was a lot of focus on the science and on the physical changes to our planet, but not so much on the human experience.

And so when I went looking for, what are the most significant human experiences?

The way people are changing the way they live in response to our climate.

The way people move on the planet came up, pretty early in my research as the most significant aspect of that.

And you couple that with, you know, during that period of my research, which happened in a lot of other countries and throughout Central America and Mexico and places like Guatemala.

I live in California, and we were in the midst of a multi-year run of, really horrendous wildfires ourselves.

And so the focus of my reporting really turned back to myself this question of, what would it take to make me move?

How will I experience?

How will my family experience the changing climate?

And that led to this renewed focus on climate migration in the United States.

And when you identified the criteria to relocate, and to be uprooted as a result of extreme temperature, as a result of hurricanes, what did you find?

You know, speak for yourself, too.

But the bulk of people in making that assessment in a place like Florida, facing hurricanes that are more debilitating now as a result of extreme climate, or in the case of what you describe, wildfires in California or extreme heat in the southwest, Phoenix and Arizona experiencing the most consecutive 100 plus days in the period of three plus months.

Were they different in the interviews you did in assessing that criteria for what will uproot you?

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, the sort of profound lesson about this question of what makes me move, what makes a person move is that the answer is different for everybody.

And that threshold, I find it's kind of on a spectrum, right?

And climate change is always, often a factor, it's rarely the factor.

It blends with all sorts of other things that you might imagine, like economic opportunity or economic hardship or a new job in a different place or family connections and things like that.

So it's this very layered, kind of thing.

And then each individual obviously has, you know, our own thresholds for what bothers us or what instigates change.

But what I found, the sort of the primary thread or, you know, thesis I arrived at in my book is that, in the United States, anyway, that climate migration will really be a factor of economic change, more than that physical change.

And so we might all kind of, you know, pile on our building reasons for why we may or may not want to move, but it's when the effects of climate change, make our economic lives unstable, raise costs to a point we can't afford them or inflict a disaster that is economically devastating, or remove our home insurance or things like that.

That that will often become the primary instigator of a decision to move.

And when you looked at the economic impact.

And you have some important graphs and data points in the book.

But when you look at that economic impact, the unavailability of insurance, for Floridians, for example, you know, if you were to take us through some of these places that are grappling with extreme climate events, where would you say the economic impetus, has been most forceful right now?

And where are people seeing opportunities for resilience, like I'm going to re-locate to a place that I don't anticipate these events, happening or, economically debilitating me in the same way.

Yeah.

So first, it's important to recognize, I think that this is a, what I forecast is a slow moving change that we might be in the earliest stages of it now.

And there are plenty of anecdotes of people moving because of climate change.

But the kind of large scale waves of demographic change that I anticipate are some years in the future.

And so I say that because the places you ask, what are the places kind of most at risk, experiencing these pressures most now and they're some of the fastest growing parts of the country, places like Arizona and Phoenix or Florida, which continues to increase in its population size as people continue to move there.

But I collected an enormous amount of data, worked in partnership with an economic research firm called the Rhodium Group.

And we looked at different, different measures, not just economic cost, but the cost of energy, the crop yields for farming, rising temperatures, which effects energy usage, need for cooling and so forth, as well as sea level rise and wildfires and so forth and across the board, what we see is the lower third, the lowest third, southernmost third of the United States is, going to bear the brunt of these impacts.

So really from Los Angeles all the way across to Tallahassee, Florida, those states and those communities south of that line are going to and are experiencing now, the most severe hurricanes, the most severe heat waves, and the economic costs associated with them.

And so that's where I expect to see most of that movement start to happen.

And I think with the storms this past fall, we've started to see, inklings of that kind of movement.

We're seeing articles in the Wall Street Journal about homeowners frustrated in Florida, politically conservative people, who have had enough of storm after storm, or were just getting the sheetrock up in their repairs from last season, when their homes were devastated again this season.

And those are the kinds of personal pocketbook costs and personal resilience, you know, impacts that will, over time, lead people to move.

Did you do any, comparison analysis here, when it comes to the risk reward ratio of continued economic development, in a place like Phoenix, where high rises are going up, there's a massive amount of construction, to actually make downtown Phoenix more livable.

The purpose, in effect, is to gentrify it so that it is a place that does not, occupy 20 to 30,000 people.

The metropolitan sprawl that is Scottsdale, Glendale, Avondale.

I mean, that represents, a million plus people.

And yet, under 30,000 people live in downtown Phoenix.

So I can understand the imperative there more than building houses along the beaches.

Where did you come out on that?

Yeah.

I mean, Phoenix is a fascinating example, and it's a teaching point, because the patterns that researchers see when they look at migration in response to environmental change is not that places just kind of empty out.

And so the thesis here is not that Phoenix will be abandoned and nobody should live there.

But rather that people kind of move out of rural areas with lower levels of support and smaller support networks, into consolidated places where they have services and where there's a tax base to support those services.

And so while one thesis of my reporting is that on balance, a lot of people are going to move northward, the northeast, the Great Lakes area looks really positive by a lot of the measures that I looked at.

Another part of, what I expect will happen is that urban areas, will consolidate a large number of people, and Phoenix is probably one of those places.

So you would, in theory, start to see smaller towns, rural parts of Arizona, kind of hollow out, as Phoenix continues to grow and rural parts of Texas hollow out, as Houston continues to grow and so on.

And, you know, yeah, Phoenix is fascinating because there's an enormous amount of investment, new chip manufacturing, an incredible amount of housing being built, and the construction boom is just going crazy.

And one of the risks there is that as that city continues to grow and continues to become more vibrant, it's also becoming costlier to live there.

So there's going to be and they're starting to be a division, among the people most affected by extreme heat in drought in the case of Arizona, who can afford to move to a place like Phoenix or who cannot afford to move anywhere or might have to choose a different kind of place to resettle because of the economic implications of that resettlement.

So it's a kind of complex thing with a lot of moving parts.

But, you know, Phoenix is going to be around for a while.

Well, your suggestion is that there may be a renaissance in the cities.

But specifically the Rust Belt cities.

You identify, having the capacity to grow in a sustainable way, anew.

Which I found fascinating, in thinking through the benefits associated with living in those places.

Whats your sense of telling the story of the Exodus again?

Because that was the one thing that drew me in, into the speculation that these states and cities that are viewed as, kind of had been abandoned, that they could come to life again.

And they have to say, Detroit is an example of that.

But, I'm interested in analyzing it from the perspective of why people left in the first place and why you think, they may be more fertile ground to build again.

Yeah.

I mean, these are cities that reach their peak of population in the early 1970s, right?

With kind of the peak of the American manufacturing boom.

So whether it's Detroit in auto manufacturing or just the heavy industry that was across that whole region from places like Gary, Indiana, the Buffalo, New York, and they've been by many measures in decline for a long time between then and very recently.

And so, there's a reason for their decline and their excess capacity and what that excess capacity means is that at some point they were able to house and built for more people than live there today.

So there are more lanes than are needed on the freeways.

And more ability to move fresh water into homes than is needed, at least in theory, a lot of those systems would need some investment and need some repair.

On the sharp end of the climate transition of climate migration by the data that I looked at, these are regions of the country that will really be relatively sheltered from the kinds of of threats that I looked at.

And that's not to say that any place will be risk free.

And we've learned that lesson, with intense flooding that we've seen across the northeast, for example, or in North Carolina.

But generally, the northeast, the Great Lakes region, even the Pacific Northwest, it's going to remain cooler.

It's not subject to sea level rise and coastal flooding.

The way so many other parts of the country is, it will not be subject to wildfires the way the West Coast is or parts of Florida and the southeast are.

And so on.

So it's a relatively safe place with abundant fresh water.

The Great Lakes hold 20% of the planet's surface fresh water.

And you combine that with the space in these cities, the eagerness of many of these cities and their surrounding areas to welcome new people, to build new economies off of it and to use it as kind of a tool of revitalization.

And, there's a lot of reasons why these become kind of the ideal targets for the United States.

Part of your book is focusing on travels, to regions that have already seen the despair and destruction that we speculate.

Without new public policy, may be the future in parts of the United States.

If you were to identify any places around the world that their circumstances kind of mirror what you would speculate, coastal Florida or, you know, some parts of rural southwest might look like, or your native California.

Where do you see those examples out of the US that, are lessons, teachable moments of what we don't want to become or certain regions should not become?

Yeah.

I mean, the United States will not be the same as these exemplary places around the world, but we can learn lessons from the trials that those parts of the world are going through.

In my research, I relied a lot on reporting by the world Bank and modeling that the world Bank had done.

And then my own research and reporting.

And so that looks at places like, North Africa, the Sahel region of North Africa, which just has, you know, hundreds of millions of people and one of the highest reproductive rates in the world.

And, has seen and will continue to see, really epochal drought and the inability to grow food.

And so, the researchers I talked to predict kind of what they call a constant outpouring of people from that region into Europe.

I spent time, as I mentioned, in Central America, where, farming communities were struggling to grow the food that they needed to feed their children.

And this was separate from the kind of pattern of migration to the United States for economic reasons that also has deep roots in the region.

I was talking to people who weren't interested in migration.

But were dependent on their local environments and were finding that that land, that that water supply could no longer, provide them with the resources that they needed, the food that they needed to survive.

And so it's really about food insecurity.

And you see that around the world.

And what that means in those places is, deepening poverty and ultimately deepening instability.

Because what the pattern looks like is that, you have an outpouring of people from poor rural areas into urban areas, but they still don't have the economic means.

And so, slums grow in those big cities like Guatemala City, and those slums become not just a place of suffering, but the potential for the festering of political instability, growth of extremism and things like that.

And then the outmigration.

Now, the United States is really entirely different because we are, a comparatively wealthy country.

We also will not see the same degree of extreme environmental change as places closer to the equator or places like North Africa.

So it's, in my view, it's a question of relativity.

And we have a different kind of economic basis.

So I believe we're going to see and we're starting to see, extreme change in the United States.

But that's not to say that South Florida is going to become an undeveloped world in the future.

I do think we're going to see a rapid urbanization, and that living in rural parts of the United States, in these most affected parts of the South, whether that's flooding parts of Florida or Arizona.

Those communities are going to, over time, lose that collective stability.

They're going to lose services and not have a tax base to support them.

So it's kind of going to be like going back in time.

If you live in these regions, you're going to be a frontier person, you're going to have to be self-sufficient.

-And, youll -Yeah.

you'll, you know, have to live on your own.

I want to broaden the conversation because you actively cover climate, beyond the scope of the book.

But feel free to allude any passage in the book that you want to.

There was a feeling in 2008, that climate would be on the agenda.

Then you had the financial meltdown and crisis and the ensuing, steps that the Obama administration had to take to save people's, you know, literal lives so that were not on bread lines.

Lost in that was the aspiration of, now, Senator Markey, Congressman, Markey, Congressman Waxman, to do cap and trade, there were some policies that were positioned to be the great hope.

And, because the Green New Deal has been, a tortuous political proposition and has been made into, demonize hay, it doesn't seem to be a textbook plan now, beyond maybe, stipulations that we should end certain types of production that were resumed during the Trump administration, methane gas emissions.

But, when it comes to kind of the policies that are going to change the trajectory profoundly or fundamentally, where are they or what are they?

We are disappointingly slow and have been for for decades now, right?

In responding to this climate crisis and one other historical point of interest, I would add to yours is that we didn't used to disagree about the threat of climate change, even as we were coming to understand what it was.

But through the 80s through the 90s, Republicans and Democrats were on the same page with their concern over this change.

The Inflation Reduction Act or the goals that it sets, if it's fully implemented, the way it's designed.

I mean, I really think that goes a long way towards catching the United States up on its commitments to reduce its emissions and reducing emissions as quickly as possible.

You know, is something that's still critically important.

And I can't stress, as quickly as possible.

So anything that does that transition of consumers to electric vehicles, a transition by consumers to electrify the appliances in their homes, reducing consumption in ways that reduces our emissions.

So those are all steps in a really positive direction.

And, political consensus on those, is elusive.

And so, you know, I don't know that I have that much optimism about our ability to do that.

But I support those efforts to move in that direction.

But I also think we're at a tipping point or we've recently passed a tipping point in our collective experience of climate change where, mitigating climate change and reducing those emissions, is only half the battle now, right?

So a certain amount of change is locked in and we're experiencing it already.

And we need to start adapting to that change.

And that's really what my book focuses on.

But I also think it's really, it's a “bipartisan” to be a little cliche about it kind of challenge.

And, in subsequent reporting, I'm spending a lot of time in communities that are, not liberal, not supportive of talking about climate change or policy to address climate change.

But I'm hearing concern within these communities about environmental change, and I'm hearing testimony to environmental change and the hardship that's arising from that, and that it's like a whole other slate of policy priorities that can start to address those things.

And some of them aren't that novel.

You know, it comes back to things like heartening a community or building a seawall or making sure your water flow, drainage, is adequate for big storms and big floods, and really basic things like that, and having roads and transportation and good schools in communities that are growing, those are the priorities of the future.

The father of modern climate science is Jim Hansen of Iowa.

And when I have interviewed him, I always ask him, what are your neighbors saying?

What is Iowa thinking right now?

And in your book, were there examples of that?

I've seen conditions of flooding in the Dakotas and in Iowa that have blocked roads.

Likewise, drought that has, precluded the production of food manufacturing.

Were there any of those kind of seminal moments that have been defining in acknowledging the facts, again, about what's occurring?

It's really tough to pinpoint, you know, a turning point, like that.

And I'm not sure that we've arrived at it politically.

I mean, my experience... And just to, just to to clarify, I'm really asking you about traditionally conservative constituencies that had a, coming to whatever moment, in recognizing conditions that might have been exacerbated by climate.

Yeah.

The best example I can think of at the moment is, the people that I'm talking to in places like, eastern Oregon and eastern Washington.

So we're talking about agricultural communities that are, suffering from drought and suffering from repeated wildfires.

And so what I find in those communities is an eagerness to discuss those changes, and to try to understand how to become more resilient in the face of them, but still a reluctance to use the kind of language that we're using today, you don't want to talk about, the phrase “climate change”.

-They might not -Right.

ascribe the actual science of climate change to the changes that they're experiencing.

But they will talk readily about the challenge of trying to figure out what's happening to them, to their farms.

So I think we're in a kind of a cultural interstitial, period where, the reality is sinking in, but there's still great disagreement about what you want to call it.

And I think that means that we're still a short ways off from being able to politically rally around addressing it.

I thought, Abrahm, that you were going to say the victims of Hurricanes Harvey, Ian...not as much there, from your reporting?

-No, I mean, I -Or.

Yeah.

those are all turning points, -right?

-Yeah.

I mean Harvey in Houston certainly absolutely changed the way that city and the people in that city think about the potential for, torrential rain and flooding.

Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, a conservative place, where liberals in Asheville, North Carolina, thought that they were in a climate haven, more conservative folks in the mountains of North Carolina hadn't really given it much thought one way or another, because it's not a place that's stricken.

And this is, you know, that's a moment, that is causing people to ask what's happening, causing a reconsideration of disagreement over climate policy, of disagreement over climate language.

But I don't think we're at the end of that process yet, to say that that was, you know, a turning point.

Do you think climate activists are aware of the environmental stipulations in the Inflation Reduction Act?

To the extent that they were also in the Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

I get the sense that, not to use our vice presidents favorite analogy, the coconut tree, but that some of the climate activists really did, just awake and came off the coconut tree.

Don't necessarily understand, that to the legislators minds, this was not salvageable as a, strictly environmental measure, its economic productivity as a stimulator had to be promoted in order to get the environmental protections instituted.

Yeah.

I mean, I think you're exactly right about that.

I've been surprised to see, the simplicity with which some of the climate movement has viewed, those legislative efforts, viewed climate action and sort of an inability or it seems from a distance to me to be an inability to see them for the successes that I think that they are, because, they might not be sexy pieces of legislating, but they move markets and they move industries and they incentivize behavior change in, really kind of pragmatic ways.

And, they have the potential to do it quickly.

And, that's what we need.

And that should be exactly what a lot of those groups were seeking and are asking for.

And, it's been very surprising to me to not see them fully, cheer those pieces of legislation as being as effective as I think they are.

And will be.

And is your sense, and my final question, that we have not seen, Democrats like Markey and Waxman's failed effort, a cap and trade, try to put forward an environment first agenda or legislation, that it's just not politically salvageable, they would like to propose something that on its face is most bold in the environmental protection.

But it's not going to have legs.

I think our current election cycle, is showing how difficult it is to have that conversation.

And we have reverted for the better part of a year now, towards, kind of the benign, the generalized conversation and that's made it in the latter part of the Biden administration, unpalatable to have a continued intense conversation about climate legislation.

I don't know, what might be in Senator Markey's mind.

Except to say that, to come back to what I was saying before, that I do think that there is a growing appetite, when phrased the right way, and pitch to people the correct way, which I believe is because of, is in the context of economic harm.

You know, to build more support for climate related, legislation.

And it's been, frustrating to see how slowly that's happened.

Please do check out our guest, Abrahms book On the Move the Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America.

It is definitely one to read in full.

Thank you for your insight today, Abrahm appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me, and for the conversation, and the interest in my book.

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