Really, none of us are.
“Hundreds of millions of Americans are about to have a collision with planetary reality,” a Mother Jones article says (read it here).
That reality already includes “superstorms and rising seas; droughts and failed crops; deluges and floods; megafires and orange skies full of gagging smoke; life-threatening heat waves and blackouts; invasive insects spreading infectious diseases, and the loss of native ecosystems.”
Apart from the physical impacts of climate change, as formerly safe places in America turn into disaster zones, insurance will become unavailable or too expensive for most people to afford. That’s already happening in Florida.
“Already, some folks are realizing they have no option but to leave” those places. Some will be displaced by fire or flood, as in California and Texas, while others “will simply find life … untenable” and get out while they still can, Mother Jones says.
The article’s focus is housing. It argues that in those places, house values will plunge as they become uninsurable, mortgage financing dries up, and nobody wants to buy them.
The flip side of the coin is “that rising home prices in the safer communities in the Great Lakes and Northwest are starting to be driven by … wealthier newcomers relocating away from climate change.”
The problem is, “If millions of Americans do start to flow out of the most battered places, we may well see a climate squeeze on housing in relatively safe communities.” That could result in secondary dislocation as rising shelter prices push out less-economically-advantaged locals, similar to what happens when a mountain town becomes a ski resort.
The article author says, “I don’t believe America still has the option of an orderly transition,” not least because the U.S. doesn’t have the leadership it needs to carve a path through impending climate change disruption.
In other words Trump, who’s in bed with the oil oligarchs, both here and abroad in places like Russia, isn’t going to save us. He’s leading us into “a broken and paranoid America — splintered by the incapacity to agree on observable facts, or trust the institutions we depend on to solve major problems — [and] tumbling into the worst version of a climate catastrophe: [A] future almost too grim to contemplate.”
