How Climate Change Will Reshape Where Americans Live 42:49

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In the worst case scenarios, right, depending on the disasters themselves, which you can't really predict, you could see a state of a permanent downward spiral driven by heat, driven by sea level rise, similar downward cycle has happened in like in Appalachia or in the Midwest Rust Belt after the deindustrialization phenomenon, right? Where they're just, it's not like nobody lives there, but there's not a lot of new money coming in, right? And that I think is like,

For a lot of people, it's as scary as the disaster.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. For decades, Americans have been moving south and west. That migration pattern was visible in political terms when seven congressional districts moved states after the 2020 census, and it continues to be visible in the booming construction and job markets in cities across the Sunbelt. Atlanta, Miami, Houston, Austin, Phoenix.

In his new book, though, author Jake Biddle makes the case that it's only a matter of time before those trends reverse, or at least shift.

Although this time, he argues, it won't be cheap housing, low taxes, and plentiful jobs that attract people to new places. It will be a harshening climate that pushes them away. His new book is called The Great Displacement, Climate Change, and the Next American Migration. And he joins me now. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for being here. So this book is really not focused on...

on what-if scenarios based on levels of carbon emissions. This isn't about imploring people to use electric cars or eat less meat or whatever. It just acknowledges as a given that the climate in America is changing and that there are going to be repercussions as well.

a result. What is the scale we're talking about here? How many Americans do we expect to be living today in places that they can't live by the end of the century? Yeah, that's a really good question. And it's hard to say with absolute certainty, but I think you can kind of get a sense if you look at the recent statistics from the past few years, right? So last year, 3 million Americans were displaced from their homes by climate disasters for any length of time that could have been, you know, a few days or a few weeks. And

And some non-zero proportion of them, probably in the tens of thousands, ended up living somewhere else. And then you can look at the scale of vulnerability and say there's tens of millions of people who live in the Sun Belt right now. There's about 120 million people or so who live on the coasts.

And of course, California also has tens of millions of people in places that are pretty vulnerable to wildfire. And then, of course, heat can basically strike anywhere. And basically, once you go below the Mason-Dixon line, there's a lot of places that are going to face chronic risk of summer heat over the coming decades. So the thing is, like, you know, most people probably will remain where they are in all cases because they're, you know, a few miles inland or they're outside the most dangerous zone for fire or they have enough money to buy air conditioning.

But if you look at the scale of vulnerability and you say, okay, this is in the tens of millions getting into 100 million plus, then you can probably say that, you know, 10 million plus people will probably end up moving, you know, by the middle of the century, end of the century. That's like...

not really far-fetched to think at all. And there is some precedent for it. If you look at events like the Great Migration or the Dust Bowl, comparable numbers of people moved over the course of multiple decades. And the impacts of that were seismic. It wasn't always clear to people at the time that it was even happening or the scale in which it was happening. So those things can get going over the course of a couple of decades. And you could see certainly millions, tens of millions by the end of the century without a doubt.

The question is just where are they moving from, where are they moving to, and how many from each place? Yeah, I'm curious what are the places in the country that are most vulnerable because, you know, you make a distinction here between there's living in a place where the climate will change perhaps in a way that makes your quality of life worse but doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to move from South Florida to the Midwest. And there are other situations, which you describe at length in the book, where

where actually places may become inhabitable. So where are the places that you're thinking by the end of the century people may well actually need to move out of? Right, yeah. And so I think that it's tricky because the earliest places that are going to face this sort of existential vulnerability are places that are relatively sparsely populated. They're on the outskirts of existing populous areas, right? So the mountain wilderness of California or the most rural parts of the U.S.,

Gulf Coast and the East Coast. These are places where there just isn't infrastructure to protect against climate disasters. And after a hurricane or a wildfire strikes, there just isn't sufficient money to rebuild. So those are the places, and these also happen to be the places that face the greatest risk from flooding and wildfire. So those are the places where the calculus, I think, will tip earliest.

toward, okay, we just can't live here. And then, you know, you're talking about a very different situation for, you know, a big city like Miami, for instance, where there's a lot of money to invest in a lot of infrastructure and there's a lot of

incentives tied up with keeping that place inhabitable. So saying that Miami is going to be inhabitable is like a completely another question. But we can see over the next few decades, there are certainly, you know, places coastal Louisiana, for instance, the mountainous parts of California and Oregon, where it's just going to be considered to and certainly the desert southwest,

Whereas it can be, okay, there's just too much stress on resources. There's just perennial risk financially, culturally, socially, psychologically. There's just not the will to keep these places around. So that's definitely within view. And when you broaden it out and think of places in America where quality of life will worsen because of climate, where are you talking about? I mean...

If you define quality of life, you know, to include the expense of purchasing energy and water or the difficulty of living through a summer heat wave or the, you know, potentially once in a few years inconvenience or danger of like a flash flood. There's very few places that would see, you know, no change in quality of life or an improvement in quality of life.

I think you could probably argue that the Great Plains and the upper Midwest would maybe be exempted from some of the impacts that we've already seen, not necessarily from the impacts that we haven't yet seen and can't predict. But yeah, I mean, you know, most both coasts, the Gulf Coast, the South, you

That basically includes almost everybody in the country. Yeah, it's a pretty, you know, the range of vulnerability, if you're just talking about inconvenience, harm, financial burden, that's really broad. Yeah, I mean, there are multiple things going on here because in reading your book, actually, I listened to your book on audiobook. I don't know if you had the narration. Yeah, I did. You didn't narrate it. I was a little disappointed. No, but I really liked the fellow who did. He did a good job. Yeah.

So in listening to your book, there is something of a distinction in my mind, which is one, the climate is changing. And as a result, there may be more severe storms and seawater levels are rising. But there's another issue going on, which is that

urban and suburban sprawl have created developments in parts of the country that were probably never going to be sustainable long-term just because of existing resources. So a good example is the American Southwest and the availability of water or California and wildfires and not having controlled burns. And then also as housing has gotten more expensive, building closer and closer to where the forest fires are.

And so you may be able to draw some connection to human-caused climate change because droughts may come more often or the conditions that help wildfires burn may happen more often. But these are problems that have long existed that human development into those areas have exacerbated. So I'm curious, like, in reporting this out, how much of this story is this is about man-made climate change and how much of this story is about humans trying to bend nature to their will, right?

in terms of development in a way that was just never going to work out regardless of climate change? Yeah, that's a really good question. And I do think, I can't remember if I used this metaphor in the book, but it does seem like there's sort of like a collision course, like two trains on the same track between the last century of really, really audacious innovation

construction techniques, and just real estate development pushing into vulnerable areas, and just the intensifying risk of climate disasters, thanks to the, you know, one point, whatever degrees of warming we've seen, right. So I don't, I do think that in a certain way, you can't really talk about one without talking about the other. I don't know which one, you know, would be responsible for the preponderance of the risk. Although,

You know, certainly there's like this phrase that always gets passed around and disaster studies and disaster policy, which is like, you know, God makes floods, man makes disasters, right? They can't be a flood disaster unless there's something in the way. So I think when I was reporting the book, I wanted to say, okay, what does climate change look like in the United States right now? Like, what does these climate disasters actually look like? And what I turned out was like, you can't really talk about a hurricane or wildfire without talking about the specific history of the built environment where that happened.

hurricane or wildfire or drought strikes. And you know, what these disasters end up doing in a lot of cases, just exposing all the kind of cracks and flaws in the society that we've already built there, if that makes sense. Yeah, for example, Hurricane Harvey in Houston, I was actually down in West Houston right after Hurricane Harvey hit. And a lot of the issues there are the fact that all of the escape hatches for the water that used to exist in Houston, they're

no longer exist because they've been paved over with concrete. And so any hurricane that may be exacerbated by climate change is even further exacerbated by the fact that the water has no place to go with the urban and suburban sprawl. Right, exactly. And this is true on a really, really small scale and a really big scale, right? Like you mentioned the Southwest, like

It's very, very difficult to support a giant city like Phoenix and a huge cotton and alfalfa farming industry on the pretty unpredictable resources of the Colorado River. Like that much is clear. That's a giant metroplex. It's also really difficult to support, you know, specific neighborhoods in Houston, not the whole city, but, you know, communities of a few hundred people that were built, you know, really, really close to these creeks and rivers. That's a, and

in many ways, like a microscopic and very acute risk that's faced by one specific subdivision. But then in other cases, you see like an entire project of building out a city is really tied up with a lot of those climate risks. So it's true kind of everywhere. And it's true on different scales where sometimes, you know,

One developer made a really bad decision. And then other times, you know, just the cultural history of the United States kind of led us in a bad direction. I want to get into some of the specifics around migration patterns and some of the other places that you talk about. But in reading, sorry, again, listening to your book, one of the things I caught myself thinking is,

Wow. So much of this book is about the degree to which humans have bent nature to their will. Is the solution going to be migration or is the solution just going to be humans going even further in trying to bend nature to their will, like in trying to solve the water crisis in the American Southwest itself?

Are there things that people can do to just will the Phoenix suburbs and agriculture outside of Phoenix to continue to exist, even if the Colorado River runs dry? I mean, maybe not. Maybe this is truly...

outside of human will. But are there also examples of just human will being so strong that you make it happen? I mean, I guess, of course, with seawalls and things like that, there are. Yeah, I mean, this is a really, really good question. And I think that I, you know, for basically every peril, you'll find people debating that as kind of a live ball right now. I mean, just to talk about the Southwest, right? Like, there's been kind of a really, really profound change in how

political appointees and water managers are thinking about this crisis where I think, yeah, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, there would have been an enormous amount and was an enormous amount of emphasis on augmenting the water supply, desalination, right? Groundwater usage, you know, in California, there's been a long campaign, mostly, you know, by farming interests in the state to build new reservoirs and dams to store more water or underground aquifers.

But there's a huge, huge sort of momentum right now behind conservation. Let's find the limits to growth. There's technology that can be used to make, you know,

you know, water usage more efficient or to reuse water, which is sort of more on the conservation side than like the bending nature to your will side. And then, you know, like, you know, another example would be hurricane storm surge risk, right? Like in Houston, there's a $30 billion plan to build a giant wall slash gate system in front of Galveston Bay. This would be like the largest civil works engineering project that the U.S. federal government has undertaken outside of like the highway system, for instance.

And there's the people who say like, that's not going to work. We should make space for the water. We should, you know, sort of try to unwind some of this development, give water a place to go. And that's, you know, you sort of probably, if you're in the sort of triage situation that we're in, you probably need a little bit of both at this point. Like, I don't think anyone should say we shouldn't try to, you know, protect an existing city against storm surge, but it's,

True that there's been a lot of emphasis historically on bending nature to our will further or trying to undo those mistakes with more engineering solutions. And I think that has changed a lot in the past decade. And there's a lot more emphasis now on finding room for nature because we've seen how futile in a lot of ways the other strategy can be.

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humans bending nature to their will and also the rising tide of climate change, which is the Florida Keys. For example, life was always going to be a little precarious out there, but with rising sea levels, it's become far more precarious. And you describe a situation where the conventional wisdom is that a dollar spent on climate mitigation is generally, they say, worth $6 in disaster spending down the line. But local officials in the Keys say,

that that wasn't actually the case for them, that a dollar spent on mitigation now was worth 40 cents down the line on disaster spending. How did they come to that conclusion? And what does that mean for the future of the Keys essentially?

Yeah, yeah. And I should say that there's definitely different estimates on this. Like some of them will argue like, no, it's closer to like 87 cents. And some will say like, no, it's like probably $1.15. But I mean, basically, they just they look at the combined value of all the property. And sometimes they'll include like sort of cultural assets and, you know, commerce that's protected by a given intervention. And they basically compare that to the cost of the intervention, the projected cost, which is usually an underestimate. Right. And so,

It's a really, really scary thing to find that that doesn't pencil out. And I think that it doesn't mean that they won't spend money on, you know, raising highways or buying out some homes or trying to get these sort of living shorelines that can protect against sea level rise. But it does sort of signal like the long term future of this place is going to require us to keep going.

basically spending money, quote unquote, at a loss in order to prop it up. It's like a bailout almost, a repeated bailout of a failing company, right? Like you just keep pumping money in and it's not working and you keep losing money, but you just keep putting it in. And I think that that's really, really scary for a lot of people. And what does that actually mean for the Keys in practice? Does it mean that they're giving land back to nature? Yeah, I mean, I think that...

you know, for the next few years, decades, they're going to kind of keep going through the old motions of we try to raise money from the state, from the federal government for these infrastructure projects. And I think over time they're going to find certain places they're just not getting to fast enough and the risks are increasing faster than they can, you know, pull down the grant money and, you know, fund these emergency interventions or raise the roads. And I think in those places you'll find that the property values will sink pretty fast and

once those risks become clear and it becomes clear the government can't keep up. And then people will leave, right? And then so those homeowners will be, they'll be underwater literally on their mortgages or they'll find a way to sell out or they'll rent their homes, you know, for the dry months when the tides are lowest. And yeah, I think eventually those places, you know, there'll be a kind of involuntary, unless the government steps in and buys them out, there'll be a kind of involuntary, uncoordinated retreat from those places that just don't seem to be able to support people

you know, human development anymore, right? And so that, it's unclear to me, and I think to a lot of people, what exactly that will look like in each given place, but certainly we've seen some places that just sort of die out, and there's a lot of economic pain in the interim, but the end result is, yeah, that people will just cease to live in certain parts of those islands or on certain islands within that archipelago because they'll literally be underwater, you know, on a four or five decade timeline. Yeah.

What does that process look like from a governmental perspective? Like, what is the United States policy toward providing flood insurance for people who live in areas that are liable to be flooded repeatedly to the point of being difficult to live in? Or, you know, what are the local governments to what kinds of decisions are they making about flooding?

where to spend their money. Yeah. So the policy is basically threefold. One is that if you get hit by a big hurricane, FEMA will come in and try to help you get back on your feet. They'll distribute temporary housing assistance. They'll help you rebuild your home. They'll clear the debris. Number two is that, yeah, the federal government offers flood insurance because private insurance companies won't offer it because it's not profitable. The federal government will offer you flood insurance.

It's not very good coverage in a lot of cases. It's too expensive for a lot of people to afford at this point. And it basically functions as a way of, it's like a way of recouping some of the cost of rebuilding after disasters. It's also supposed to be a disincentive, sort of encouraging people by...

basically a tax on floodplain living. You have to pay insurance if you wanna live here. That's pretty expensive, so maybe you wanna do it. And then the third sort of plank of this, which is growing fast, I think, is that there are all these grant programs for instead of just rebuilding everything, we're gonna give a city money to raise its roads, we're gonna give a city money to do this managed retreat, sort of buyout stuff.

And that policy, I think, probably has the most promise, although it's also the one that we've done the least of. But yeah, I mean, the government's trying to help. It's trying to keep things more or less the way they are and help people rebuild after disasters, but it can't really keep up.

what happens in that situation. I, you know, from looking at public opinion data for a long time, I have a general sense that individual freedom and freedom to choose where you want to live is pretty valued by Americans. And so straight up saying you can't live here or you have to live here seems like it would be very unappealing and politically not viable. In fact, I,

I don't think we've like really ever heard that in mainstream political discourse. Right. And so how do you create those incentives without, without,

straight up saying, we're not going to pay for you to rebuild or you can't live here. Yeah. And it's worth noting too, that every time that we've in US history tried to say, you can't live here to somebody, it's always been very, very dark. Like the history of forced relocation or involuntary takings is really, really troubled. And there's substantial reason to think that, you know, freedom loving Americans are right, that it's the government shouldn't say, you cannot live here, right? I think what it looks like

for the government now and probably like any foreseeable future government is like, we're just gonna try to make the financial incentives so good to leave and so bad to stay that you can't really say no. So like for instance, with flooding, it's probably the easiest example. Flood insurance is gonna keep getting more expensive. That's like a scheme that the federal government has come up with to create this kind of tax. You're gonna have to pay in many cases, thousands of dollars a year for flood insurance. And then the government will come in and say,

Well, look, we'll buy you out. We'll give you the pre-flood market value of your home, plus maybe a little top up, and you go live somewhere else. And maybe in the future, they'll say you agree not to live in anywhere flood prone because they've had problems with people taking the money and going to live somewhere else that's flood prone. But that's like that's a really difficult thing. And it leads to like a patchwork process, right? Where like this happened in Staten Island after Hurricane Sandy, for instance, the state came in and said, we'll do this.

A bunch of people left. A bunch of people didn't. And then over time, they said, I'm kind of lonely here. Everyone left. Now I want to leave. And then there's two or three holdouts that don't want to leave and they may never want to leave. And in those cases, all you can do, you can't say you are not allowed to sell this home to a private party. You just kind of have to hope that at some point somebody, the next, you know, the current owner dies or passes it on. And then somebody is willing to take the money.

But I do think that that you're bumping up as an insufficient policy because it relies on people being willing to all get out. But you're bumping up against the limits of what it's ethical, I think a lot of experts believe, for the federal government to do. Right. Like, I mean, eminent domain is is a legal precedent in the US, but it's very expensive. It's very long, takes a long time to work. And yeah, people get hurt by it.

You do tell the story of Lincoln City, which is a very small town in North Carolina that ended up moving as a result of flooding and getting bought out of their homes. I mean, how was that process going?

able to move forward and what was the result? Yeah, that was like a, that was one of the first times, this was one of the oldest black communities in the country and this is one of the first times that FEMA had tried to do this thing where they give a local government money to buy out

people who have been flooded. And, you know, first, and from a statutory perspective, this was a voluntary program, you could have said no. But the local officials who were in charge of administering it did their best to convince the residents that there wasn't really another option. And then years later, you know, residents said, I didn't really think I had a choice, right?

So that was like a cultural tragedy in a lot of ways because this was a thriving community. A lot of people in it really wanted to stay despite really, really significant flood risk. And then the government came in and

The money was enough to convince most people to leave. In fact, everybody ended up leaving eventually. But it wasn't really enough to give them a good life in a part of the state that was, you know, more expensive than the one that they had left behind. This was some of the cheapest land available. The homes were, you know, worth practically nothing. And people ended up in more expensive homes and higher tax prices.

parts of the city, and they couldn't really keep up. So a lot of them entered foreclosure, a lot of them bounced around and ended up living with family members. And I think in general, most people who participated in the program would say that this wasn't, you know, maybe they never got flooded again, but it wasn't really a positive experience for them because they ended up, you know, in substantial housing instability or just having lost a community that was really their whole world. Yeah. Yeah.

You mentioned that the private market doesn't offer flood insurance in many cases, or that it can't be profitable for insurance companies to cover. What does the private market have to say about all of this? In the sense that, you know, I'm reading your book, listening, and thinking, you know, a lot of the parts of the country that you're describing are areas that have very expensive real estate, right? I mean, right on the Gulf, right on the shore, can be some of the

most expensive houses in the country, at what point does the market say, hey, it's a long-term risk to have a house here. And so you're going to start seeing a downward spiral where these properties are losing value, regardless of what FEMA or the government says. Yeah, for sure. That is certainly already happening, right? And so the private market hasn't offered...

flood insurance widespread in a long time, but they do insure for fire coverage that's included in the standard homeowners policy. And then you also get windstorm insurance, right? So a hurricane can flood your house or the wind can knock it over. The wind part of it, confusingly, is covered by traditional homeowners insurance. And those companies, they're screaming right now. I mean, they're basically saying, we cannot keep up with this. It's sort of the way that the private flood insurance market

And this was in the 1920s. But they're basically saying, you know, in California, the 2018-2017 fire seasons wiped out, I think, 25 years of underwriting profits that the companies had made for the previous quarter century. And then, you know, in Louisiana and Florida right now, the windstorm insurance companies are collapsing. The premiums that they're taking in from the customers aren't enough to keep up with the amount of damages that they have to pay.

pay out, right? So those costs, especially in Florida and California, are getting very, very high. And I think a lot of homeowners in Florida have basically been telling me that they sort of feel like they're about to be pushed out

of homeownership altogether if you're on the lower end of the income scale by the rising insurance burden. And certainly in California, the insurance companies are saying, we don't wanna offer you insurance at all to people in these mountain towns. And then if you don't have insurance, your lender's not happy about that. So yeah, this is like the private market is trying to, I mean, they're not trying to devalue homes,

but they're trying to send a really strong signal. And that is going to take a haircut off the value of these homes. And there's all sorts of consequences. That's already happening. It's just not easy to see in a lot of cases. Yeah. And in fact, it seems like in many cases, the opposite is actually happening. I mean, we have seen over the past several decades, and I think increasingly in the past few years, that

As I mentioned at the top, Americans moving south and Americans moving west and leaving the upper Midwest, leaving the Northeast, parts of the country that have overwhelming access to clean water and have much lower hurricane risk and are much higher ground. And so in large part, people are moving because cheap housing, plentiful jobs. It's beautiful. In some cases, the weather is very nice when it's not too hot. Low taxes, low

So if the goal is in some ways to attract people to parts of the country where they're going to be less prone to natural disasters, how do you do that? I mean, because what is attracting people to the South and West is intentional. It's states that say, okay, we want businesses to come here. We want people to move here.

So, you know, does the Rust Belt need to say, like, lower business taxes, lower income taxes, build more housing, just make it more appealing for young people and families to live there? Yeah, I mean, that's a really, really good question, right? And I think that

You know, I'm not going to say that you should lower business taxes, but I think that you should like you've seen like Detroit, for instance, after the recession, they, you know, created like a stipend for people to come live there. Like Vermont, I think, has done this. There are places that are saying that we really want more people. Can you please come live here? And it's not really working very well. I mean, you know, that hasn't contributed to Detroit becoming the comparable with Phoenix in terms of its growth at all.

at all by any means. I think it's controversial to say that the federal government, that the national scale is to try to like pick winners and losers. But I do think that, you know, if things continue apace,

it's incumbent on the government to have kind of like a national plan for adapting to climate change. That doesn't mean telling people to leave, but it might mean steering investment toward places that can, you know, demonstrate that they can build in a sustainable way. They can show that there's not significant flood risks, you know, and that there's going to be, you know, sustainable water sources. But I think that it's not so much

This is something that I thought about a lot. And I think the question that I was left with was, is this really a matter of getting people to leave the Southwest and go back to the upper Midwest? Or is it just about the upper Midwest becoming rather like a site for future investment? I don't think it's outlandish to think that, you know, by 2050, if Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Austin are facing, you know, chronic summer heat, plus

plus hurricanes in many cases, you would see like a startup say, we don't really want to go there because we don't think we can attract talent. Let's instead go, maybe not Duluth, but let's go to Nashville, Tennessee. Let's go to Arkansas. Let's go to Cincinnati or something. And because there's a cheap real estate, maybe there's a good business environment, maybe there's some other inducements, but maybe they just think like, this is where we need to go to attract talent. I don't think that's outlandish at all.

And I think that like it's a little early now, but there's not there's going to be like a shift in sort of where people want to put their money, where people want to start their lives rather than people. You know, I don't know if there's going to be snowbirds in reverse, like elderly people leaving the Southwest and going back north. But it does feel like there may be places that emerge as good sort of sites for capital and investment that don't seem that way right now.

In fact, you write in your book about a demographer at Florida State University, Matthew Hauer, who has tried to model what these kinds of migration patterns could look like. And you're right. It's not like I think there are folks in the Northeast who are like, oh, everyone's going to come back here. You know, like look at all of this sort of climate proof land in upstate New York or throughout the Great Lakes or whatever. And that's not really what's happening.

liable to happen, at least in this century. It's more like, as you're right, instead of living in Miami, maybe you live in Orlando or you live in Atlanta. Exactly. It's folks moving from the aptitude

coasts, a little inward, but still in the southeast, for example. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's a significant difference between the hurricane risk in Miami and the hurricane risk in Atlanta, between Houston and Dallas, right? And there's a significant difference in the water availability between Phoenix and Denver, right? It's pretty easy to imagine those intermediate places becoming like the fastest growing parts of the country over the next decade.

You know, over the middle of the century. But I also think it's important to note that places like Miami, they're not going to sort of like give up without a fight. Like there's a lot of things that they can do, A, to make it attractive, certainly for capital to say there, but B, to batten down the hatches against climate change, to shore up their water supply, to protect against hurricanes. And they're going to pursue those aggressively. And some of them, some of those strategies are effective.

right like Miami probably has enough money to make itself relatively safe from all but the worst hurricanes some of the more rural places less well resourced places along the coast of Florida don't so they might not be able to stay so safe and some people might go to Miami or they might go from those places elsewhere but I think like

So urbanization in some ways could be exacerbated by this. I think so because, I mean, you're already kind of seeing it where a lot of the rural communities, like in Louisiana, I read about this, they're the rural communities tend to be the most dependent on climate sensitive industries like aquaculture, for instance, or agriculture. And so those places, as those jobs become harder and harder to get, they need to go, people need to go to cities because there's abundant housing, there's relatively abundant jobs.

Well, there's abundant housing, relatively speaking. And also, it's easier for a city like Miami to pull down money from the federal government to protect itself against climate change than it is for a town of 3,000 people, you know, 50 miles away. So I think, yeah, like urban areas in all parts of the country are probably going to become

relatively attractive as time goes on. And that's that includes the southwest right where being at the water supply in Phoenix City proper is far more secure than it is in the outer suburbs of Phoenix, or in the agricultural communities, you know, farther outside.

Yeah. I mean, how are those decisions going to be made? I think we enter this process with the assumption that New York City is going to build a seawall at some point over the next several decades. As you said... It's under construction right now. It's under construction right now. There's a barrier around Manhattan that's being built right now. And it seems like a little more complicated in Miami just because of how porous the groundwater is and...

But as you mentioned, there will be a lot of money spent trying to secure Miami. How are those decisions going to get made? Is it going to be the federal government? Is it going to be how do we as a public decide what's worth prioritizing and making, you know, climate proof? Yeah, that's a really, really good question. And it seems like there's the way we do it now. There's a lot of issues with it. Right. So the way we do it now is if there is a disaster in a place, then the faucet turns on and you get a bunch of money.

or if you have a pretty effective congressional delegation and you lobby for a bunch of years, as Texas did with the Houston storm surge barrier, you can get the Army Corps of Engineers, which is the big flood control authority in the United States, to spend billions of dollars that Congress will give it in order to build. So it's basically like,

disaster will lead to money and then like political pressure will lead to spending projects in a lot of cases. But like that's not the way that it should be done, right? First of all, we shouldn't be, you know, spending to protect places only after disasters occurred. And secondly, you know, getting a big infrastructure project shouldn't be contingent on years of lobbying and a friendly Congress, etc. So I think that's where you go back to what people say, you know, the United States should have some kind of national climate adaptation strategy where

We should have parameters for making those decisions. We should try to think about what's an effective use of money. We don't ask those questions right now. And I think for a lot of people, it's scary to think about what would happen if we asked them because there's some people would, like the Keys, for instance, where there's not the cost-benefit analysis for climate spending isn't so good. Those places would come out looking not so great. And that's a scary thing for a lot of people, including people who live in those places. But I do think...

Most experts would agree that the way we currently do it is pretty wasteful. It's not necessarily effective. It's leaving a lot of people behind. And we should start to think about it.

What is the right place for the U.S. government writ large to put its adaptation money? Yeah. In fact, in the key is one of the most poignant parts of your book for me was when a local administrator describes preparing for whatever lawsuit will come once the county makes the assessment that it cannot actually save some county roads and that giving up on those county roads will spark a lawsuit by homeowners in that area who won't want to see them given back to the sea, but that

you know, long term just really won't be economically viable to save them. So I guess, like you said, if we do ask those questions, what are some of the awkward answers that we'll get beyond the keys? Yeah, I think that there's a typical example here in North Carolina, you know, in the Outer Banks, this is even well before climate change, this is just a perennially eroding barrier island. And, you know, the city was trying to

get rid of some houses that were literally like, you know, they were on stilts above the water because the beaches had eroded so much. There was one house that the guy wasn't in it because it was uninhabitable, but he owned it and they were trying to take it, eminent domain, I think either they used eminent domain or they were trying to condemn it. And the Pacific Legal Foundation, the conservative law group, represented him in trying to oppose this action, even though he couldn't live in the house, couldn't sell it to anybody, obviously, but just didn't really want to give it up, right? So I think that

The awkward answer that you're going to find is that there are people who will do everything in their power for justifiable or unjustifiable reasons to stay. And there's no amount of incentive that can convince them to leave, right? Like in the Ildichon Charles community in Louisiana, this is an indigenous community that the state tried to move in its entirety. There are holdouts who say, I'll never leave. And

that there's a really, really deep connection to the land there. A lot of people believe like, yeah, they should be able to stay. But I think the awkward answer is like, you can't bring everybody along and there's always going to be holdouts. And the question is just, how do you plan around that? And can you get as many people out as possible? And

And I think the other awkward question slash answer is like, we have no idea what to do with people once they leave a vulnerable place. And we've never really thought about building a climate resilient place for people to go to. And like, we've had enough trouble coming around to the idea that we should be trying to get out of these vulnerable places that that is like a big next step for us that I don't think we've taken on yet. Well, where do you think, when do you think, how do you think that,

switch flips because it's clearly not right now right like as we're recording this interview talking about oh you know like people are going to be getting out of vulnerable area coastal areas or whatever like still those coastal areas are the most expensive housing markets in the country they're seeing more and more development and like this is what people want and we live in america and you know whatever they're free to do it so in

In my imagination, things change once there's a cultural change, once there's a social change, once really bad things happen and people change their minds. Not because the government tells them they need to change their minds. That's not going to happen. So what is it? How do you see this evolving? I think in a lot of cases, the sequence of events will basically be very bad thing happens, private housing market goes haywire, homes lose value, and then you have a rush for the exits.

or just a temporary panic. And I think it's at that point that the government can come in and say, we have the resources and the private market doesn't to make people whole and help them get out of here, right? So, like, studies show that, you know, after a hurricane, property values tend to collapse and the place gets hit by the hurricane, but then they rebound immediately, right? Like,

It's people forget and they want to come to Houston again. And I think it's you're going to see a point at which those decreases in value are longer lasting, especially on the coasts where there's perennial flood risk. It's not just every now and then when there's a hurricane. Those home values are going to go down. There's probably going to be some kind of slow or fast panic in the market. And I think at that point, it'll be incumbent on the government to take out the money hose and say,

We're not saying get out for no money. We're saying we'll give you money to get out. And it's at those moments that that's an opportune time to do that policy intervention. But yeah, you're right. Showing up when everything's fine. I was doing this reporting in 2021, Virginia, Florida, Texas. The housing market there was as good as it's ever been.

And people were saying, hell no, why would I ever leave? You know, I'm going to stay here. My home's going to keep going up and up and up in value. And it was, you know, some people bought homes in 2020. They were worth twice as much by 2022. Why would they ever think like, I got to go, I got to go. But yeah, at some point there'll be a temporary, you know, or sort of like shock driven decline in value. And I think it's at that point that the government's appeal would be, would be more convincing, right?

And sort of just to put, like, this is what we started with, but to sort of put a button on this conversation, how much and by when? Like, by the end of the century, to what extent does what you're describing happen? It does get into, like, warming trajectories. Like, it is really dependent on how much things get bad and how fast. But I think that by the end of the century, you'd certainly see tens of millions of people having left original homes and moved somewhere else because of climate change. I think you also would probably...

by 2100, if these places aren't actually declining in population fast, they at least are no longer growing, right? Like I think you could start to see Miami by 2080, 2090 as being like a stagnant city. You could start to see Phoenix as a city that's in some ways given up on extensive growth, right? Like that's certainly within the picture. And, you know, in the worst case scenarios, right, depending on the

which you can't really predict, right? Like you could see a state of sort of like a permanent sort of downward spiral driven by heat, driven by sea level rise, where a place looks sort of like a similar downward cycle has happened in like in Appalachia or in the Midwest, you know, Rust Belt after the deindustrialization phenomenon, right? Where they're just, it's not like nobody lives there, but there's not a lot of new money coming in, right? And that I think is like,

For a lot of people, it's as scary as the disaster. I think that's what I had to wrap my mind around in writing the book, and that's what a lot of people, I think, have to wrap their minds around is like,

Given how growth-oriented we are as a society, the end of growth in these places is sort of tantamount to an actual decline. And that is, you know, we don't know exactly when and by how much the population of Phoenix will go down, but looking at the maps and the calendars and the climate phenomena, it seems pretty clear that a lot of those places in the South are just doomed to have to stop growing and stop getting more dynamic by the end of the century. ♪

All right. Well, we're going to leave things there for today. Thank you so much, Jake. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. That was really fun. Jake Biddle is the author of the book, The Great Displacement, Climate Change, and the Next American Migration. My name is Galen Druk. Tony Chow is in the control room and also on video editing. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you soon. Bye. Bye.

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