| ON THE MOVE The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America Abrahm Lustgarten New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2024 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-374-17173-5 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-374-17173-4 | 234pp. | HC/GSI | $30.00 | |
It is arguable that 2020 was the year when large numbers of citizens of the United States began to think seriously about climate change. Joe Biden was elected president that year, and he achieved, against considerable opposition from Republicans in Congress, the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act with its groundbreaking provisions for tackling the effects of climate change. It came none too soon, for those effects, at both the personal and societal levels, kept getting worse — often faster than scientists had predicted.
These anecdotes drive home the personal impact of climate change, and they show it moving closer to home; that is, to the United States. They do nothing, however, to convey its scope, its universality. For though it's not affecting all places equally, there is no place in the nation that it doesn't affect in some degree. And the severity of its effects will only grow, no matter what we do. All we can change now is the pace at which those effects will come on, and perhaps their ultimate magnitude.
Portraying the scope of climate change's effects in the United States is the author's purpose in researching and writing this book. To that end, he has assembled statistics on weather changes, crop-yield losses, heat-wave deaths, and the like. These data go into models by the Rhodium Group, by various academic teams, and by the author's own team. The picture he presents is grim, but the book is also essential reading. It reveals how the migrations caused by climate change are likely to develop, and shows that economic factors are a vital part of the picture. For example, would you choose to live in a state where insuring your home was impossible? Once unthinkable, this is close to becoming the reality in several states — most notably, Florida.
Florida and North Carolina are two states where denial of climate change has made inroads. But as far as I know, none but Georgia (home to Marjorie Taylor Greene) has so pervasively and persistently fought any action to mitigate the effects of climate change. Abrahm Lustgarten has the details.
In Atlanta, in many ways, Jairo Garcia feels like the battle was nearly lost before it began. As a major city in a southern state, Atlanta has for a long time been an isolated blue island in a sea of red; Georgia's conservative legislators oppose virtually everything that the city's progressives try to do. When, across the country, regulators started phasing out gas appliances in new construction, a hard move away from fossil fuels, conservatives in the Georgia legislature passed a bill to ban the ban. On the Georgia coast, sea turtles on Jekyll Island were being suffocated by petroleum-based plastic shopping bags, so Atlanta looked to get rid of those, too. Then the state tried to pass a resolution to ban cities from banning plastic bags. The state has also resisted the net metering utility systems that other states use to encourage the adoption of solar power, stunting any sort of energy transition. And Georgia state law prohibits rent control, perhaps the one mechanism Atlanta could use to prevent rampant displacement in neighborhoods surrounding the city's greenest developments, which are full of renters. The state has even pushed back on Atlanta to make it harder for it to expand its public transportation. That MARTA train system? Though it was built and authorized in the 1970s, Georgia never funded it. MARTA has long been the only metropolitan rail network in the country that operates almost entirely without statewide funding. In fact, says Garcia, Atlanta gives what he calls "peace blood" to keep it; the city pays a percentage of its local sales tax to the state just to let MARTA keep operating. "It's insane," he laments. And so, he argues, Atlanta deserves some credit for getting as far as it has. – Pages 251-252 |
An America mapped with an eye to the threats posed by climate change is an America with the walls closing in around it. Goblins of risk are marching from the coasts, taking the forms of fires in the West, heat in the South, floods in the Southeast, and dense, wet, hot air right up the middle, all somehow sapped by an earth-withering, mud-cracking drought that threatens to deplete scarce water, including the nation's largest underground aquifer. New Dust Bowl-like events are likely. In the southern states, as in parts of India and south Asia, the combination of extreme temperature and humidity will hijack the human body's ability to cool itself down. Entire weather patterns—like the predictable west-east arc of the jet stream—will change shape, heightening the severity of storms and how long they last, and shepherding in an era of cataclysmic change. – Page 40 |
The dire situation is worsened by resistance to changes the models indicate are necessary. Insurance regulators, pressured by real estate interests, tend to keep rates artificially low — at taxpayer expense. The state of Georgia is perhaps the queen of recalcitrance, sunk deep in "the Nile" (see the sidebar.)1
The book presents comprehensive statistics that result from the rapidly advancing models. For example, the table on page 214 shows the counties at greatest risk from heat, lower crop yields, rising sea levels, and wildfires. Another example is this paragraph.
The greatest economic setbacks will stem from the costs of sea level rise on heavily populated coasts. But running a close second, and with perhaps more profound implications for America's broader economy and security, is the decimation of its farmland. More than one thousand counties across the United States will see their crop yields decline by 2040. The data measures corn and soy yields because they are major industrial proxies for the farm economy, and also representative of farmland's ecological capability to sustain significant growth with the available water and nutrients. By 2080, crop failure will spread to more than 1,900 U.S. counties—representing more than half the country. In more than 100 of those counties, according to the modeling data, the declines in crop yields will be total, or about 100 percent. They will become unfarmable. – Page 215 |
It also provides nine maps which illustrate the changes expected across the United States as the climate continues to grow warmer. The general expectation is for large numbers of people to migrate northward over the course of this century, and for increasing conflict as the demands for limited water supplies rise. By 2021, more than one million people in the United States had been displaced by natural disasters. That number will not soon diminish. The best we can hope for at this point is to boost resilience to the changes. But there will be no resilience for America's traditional ease of living, as Abrahm Lustgarten observes here.
I thought about my own California dream: big mountains and clear skies and safety in the seclusion of wilderness. I thought about what climate change takes away. The sublime has been replaced by a near-permanent sense of unease. I no longer go deep into the mountains in August. I don't know if my children will learn the value of nature or experience the adventures that I was able to. At least not here. But the changing climate isn't just affecting our safety or health. It is muddying my sense of why I moved to California in the first place, 2,790 miles from the hills I grew up in. Back then, everywhere seemed safe. Moving was a matter of preference, and mine was to be near the wild. And so I migrated toward that. Now climate change is also whittling away at my freedom and capacity to choose, whittling down the choices themselves, replacing preferences with imperatives. And so I am plagued with more doubt and anxiety. This is the cultural impact of climate change. – Page 280 |
Abrahm Lustgarten is an excellent writer and reporter. This book is dense with information. While that information is well presented, its sheer density makes it difficult to read. Thus, while I give the book top marks and rate it a must read, I consider it a keeper only for those who seek to compare ongoing effects of warming against what the models predict.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.