The Bold Idea To Move Millions To Climate Havens

Fernando Kaskais

Oct 3

How the U.S. can motivate people to migrate before climate change causeschaos in their cities.

Justin H. Vassallo is a writer and researcher who specializes in party systems and ideology, political economy, American political development and modern Europe.

The race against time to plan for climate migration has begun.

In 2022, climate change and climate-related disasters led nearly 33 million people to flee their homes and accounted for over half of all new numbers of people displaced within their countries, according to data from the United Nations' High Commissioner for Refugees and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. This amount will surely increase over the next few decades.

Outside the United States and Canada, the World Bank predicts that climate change will compel as many as 216 million people to move elsewhere in their countries by 2050; other reports suggest that more than one billion people will become refugees because of the impacts of a warming planet on developing countries, which may exacerbate or even precipitate civil wars and interstate armed conflict.

A 2020 report by ProPublica, meanwhile, estimates that at least 13 million Americans will be forced to migrate from coastal areas and that wildfires and other natural catalysts could potentially multiply that amount significantly. Regardless of how such displacement is measured and reported, it seems likely given current trends that slower-moving migration flows will be routinely punctuated by extreme weather events and climate-aggravated infrastructural collapses. This has already been exemplified by the devastating floods in Libya earlier this month, which claimed thousands of lives and reportedly displaced over 43,000 people.

The extraordinary pressure that continued international and domestic climate migration will impose upon state resources and social goods like schools, hospitals and housing is difficult to fathom. Over the past year, city and state governments in the U.S. have feuded over the distribution of migrants stemming from the Southern border, with New York Mayor Eric Adams declaring that the current migration wave will "destroy" the city.

Though such rhetoric is plainly demagogic, Adams' remark nevertheless channeled deep-seated fears about whether U.S. cities can absorb new migrants amid the ongoing crises of homelessness and food insecurity. The episode is a preview of the public anxiety and ugly politics to come in this age of the Anthropocene.

Beyond Industrial Policy

In conceiving how to manage internally displaced persons and high-risk populations in a wealthy country such as the U.S., policymakers must factor in how regional inequality, deindustrialization, and other structural changes in the national economy have conditioned the migration flows of recent years.

They must consider that climate migrants can not be simply relocated to other densely populated areas or to more rural locales that might seem to benefit from an influx of people but need capital and ample federal support to accommodate this sort of demographic transformation.

Such a task demands an unprecedented level of economic planning and federal-regional coordination — no less so than the process of building out climate infrastructure. Unless progressives begin to contemplate seriously how climate migration policies must dovetail with the goal of a green economy, the social, political and economic upheaval that climate migration portends could easily overwhelm efforts to realize any clean energy transition.

And yet, the dynamic between large-scale climate migration and the pace of decarbonization remains a distant concern in day-to-day governance: There is virtually no public debate about how climate change itself may constrain the spread of green technology.

The Biden administration has heralded the preliminary investments sparked by the year-old Inflation Reduction Act — the manufacturing basis of a sustainable green economy — and the prospect of a long boom generated through manufacturing and installing various components of climate resilience like solar panels, advanced batteries and electric vehicle charging stations. But while it is encouraging that the IRA and other industrial policies have pushed the private sector to announce new factories that produce such technology, the administration's renewable energy agenda has not addressed the economic viability of large swathes of the U.S. over the next several decades.

The administration's 2021 report on climate migration, for instance, only focuses on international impacts and contains few specific prescriptions about how to manage said flows. Beyond a brief mention in the report of the need to take a future look at how to coordinate domestic "migration/relocation" with special consideration for high-risk, densely populated areas, the U.S. government has still not detailed how it plans to address climate migration. Instead, the administration has trumpeted fixed investment in renewables that, outside of Michigan and Ohio, looks to be especially concentrated in the Southeast and Southwest.

While this is a worthy goal under normal conditions, encouraging a disproportionate amount of manufacturing investment in the South could be ill-conceived given the risk of annual, prolonged heatwaves with increasing wet-bulb temperatures and multifarious floods that threaten to severely undercut the region's future labor productivity...

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