My wife, Antonia, and I have different NPR station habits. I listen to WRTI, the classical and jazz station on the Temple University campus, rebroadcasting as WJAZ from a repeater antenna near Harrisburg. She listens to our local WITF, which switched from classical music to talk about 10 years ago. WITF carries the ‘weekdaily’ Fresh Air show produced at WIYY, on which Terry Gross interviews newsmakers. The March 26 show included an interview of Abrahm Lustgarten whose book “On The Move” was published recently.
The BUY NOW button is not live.
Truth be told, I often slough off Antonia’s suggestion that I might listen because Dr. XYZ will be interviewed (Michael Mann for instance). I think she has reached the ‘why bother’ point, as I really prefer to read rather than listen (as I prefer NPR music radio to NPR talk radio). So she listened to the interview, and then bought the book for me.
This is a powerful book. I summarize below, but I recommend that if you have one climate change book to buy that you make it this one. The book is arranged in three parts:
Part I - The Change
Lustgarten starts with the events - hurricanes and wildfires, for instance - and the conditions - excessive heat and water scarcity - that lead to humans deciding to migrate. Actually, the ‘events’ impetus is more flight from a deadly threat than an element of a decision process. The author introduces research lead by Marten Scheffer that maps the ‘human niches’ on the earth where temperature and humidity have supported H sapiens historically and currently. This research, combined with recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports (ARs), provides views of potential conditions in North America during the next 50 +/- years.
In Chapter 2 Lustgarten explains three representative concentration pathways (RCPs) used by IPCC to project the outcomes of varying degrees of response by governments and individuals to the need to reduce carbon emissions.
RCP2.6 is the ‘most optimistic’ pathway. Earlier ARs had held out the possibility that agressive carbon mitigation efforts might meet the 1.5°C outcome stressed at the Paris Conference of the Parties in 2015. AR6 - the most recent - seems to project an outcome of around 2.5°C.
RCP4.5 might be considered the ‘modest middle’ that recognizes that governments and individuals have been pretty slack, but that this pathway might occur if governments and individuals would actually get busy with mitigation. Projected temperature outcome would be some 3° to 4°.
RCP8.5 has been called the business as usual pathway. Earlier ARs had projected as much as 6°C increase, but AR6 added nuance to this projection, noting that the longer term might not be quite so bad. Well…that’s heartening.
Chapter 3 provides important information about what Lustgarten calls The Great American Climate Scam. He cites Hurricane Andrew in 1992 as an event that shocked Florida residents and imposed catastrophic financial burdens on property insurance companies. The companies proposed huge increases in premiums. Some decided to withdraw from the state entirely. Florida responded by (I think) inventing the Fair Access to Insurance Requirement. The state formed a ‘last resort’ insurance entity to write policies for property owners who could not find affordable insurance. Other states - about thirty of them - and the federal government picked up on the concept, which allowed property and business owners exposed to climate risk to mostly ignore the risk.
You know how this story ends: the FAIR entities will gradually be unable to handle the demand for affordable insurance policies. And the possibility of managed retreat from shorelines and areas threatened by wildfires will have been lost.
Part II - The Move
The author describes how people reach the decision to move, based on his observations in Central America and detailed tracking of residents of Paradise, California after the Camp Fire and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. He suggests that the first move is to somewhere nearby (Chico in the Paradise case) and then gradually to widely dispersed locations. He notes that predicting timing and locations is pretty much guesswork.
Lustgarten also notes the obvious throughout the book: wealth matters a great deal. Poor and elderly people are often left behind as climate migration occurs.
Part III - The Arrival
This section makes you think hard about how climate migrants can be received by the towns and cities to which they migrate. The norm to date is no planning, resulting in varying degrees of chaotic. Lustgarten describes his interactions with urban officials, professional planners and others who know that planning, even purposefully recruiting migrants to settle in specific places could relieve some of the chaos. He mentions the WWII-era recruiting efforts by Ford to bring workers to their factories where bombers were being built for the war effort as a possible model. But he also notes the drift from empathetic receptions to please get the hell out in towns and cities where wildfire and hurricane migrants tried to settle. And the perverse impact of wealthy migrants gentrifying poor neighborhoods as they withdraw from places threatened by climate change.
I plan to soon finish what I started with my two ‘Guessing’ posts. I expect you can sense that I will end up in the 3° to 4°C neighborhood. Which is not going to be a nice place. That is why it has been taking me a long time to state my conclusions.
This book gives us a lot to think about. The graphics - not shiny like the graphics in the IPCC ARs, but very useful - will help us a great deal as we think about from where and to where the movements are likely. This is good information for prospective migrants and prospective host towns and cities.
Finally, my friend, Tim Potts, just launched a Substack to post on politics, education, civic responsibility and related topics. His first post deals with journalism and its habit of glossing over the political middle to report on the farther left and right. I strongly recommend that you subscribe.