Climate Change in America: Is It Too Late to Wake Up?

From Vann R. Newkirk II, a editor & journalist who hosts the Floodlines podcast (about Hurricane Katrina), a long piece about the climate chaos that’s taking hold in the US: What Climate Change Will Do to America by Mid-Century.

Over the next 30 years or so, the changes to American life might be short of apocalyptic. But miles of heartbreak lie between here and the apocalypse, and the future toward which we are heading will mean heartbreak for millions. Many people will go in search of new homes in cooler, more predictable places. Those travelers will leave behind growing portions of America where services and comforts will be in short supply — let’s call them “dead zones.” Should the demolition of America’s rule of law continue, authoritarianism and climate change will reinforce each other, a vicious spiral from which it will be difficult to exit.

Newkirk details how the increasing effects of the climate crisis might play out in “a landscape of inequality” like the United States.

Even if climate change does not trigger a full-fledged economic panic, whole regions will be thinned out and impoverished. Residential areas are the centerpiece of local economies, yet without insurance, people cannot get mortgages, and so most cannot buy houses. The mere prospect of that makes business investment riskier. Jesse Keenan, a professor at Tulane University who studies climate change and real estate, told me that some places are already becoming economic “no-go” zones.

I remember reading about the coming climate-driven crisis in insurance back in the early 2000s — e.g. Michael Lewis’s post-Katrina piece in the NY Times Magazine — and hoping it wouldn’t come to that but knowing that it would as years went by without significant action on climate. And now here we are.

• climate crisis
• USA
• Vann R. Newkirk II