I’ve been waiting for someone to put forward this scenario. Eric Scigliano in Seattle’s Crosscut does so here – at the bottom of his article:
An old friend in New Mexico whom I hadn’t seen in decades showed up in Seattle, saying he’d looked at the map and decided it was time to finally visit the Pacific Northwest. My neighbor met a woman who’d just moved here from Texas. “Climate refugee?” he joked, but she didn’t laugh or give him a WTF look. “Of course,” she said.
The changing climate won’t wear easy on us either. The best projections say we’ll get wetter winters, with more floods and less snowpack, and hotter, drier summers. But our temperatures won’t rise nearly as much as those almost everywhere in the country. …
Instead, we’ll face 50 million desperate, gun-toting climate refugees from the new Super Sunbelt, clamoring to eat our last berries and roots. The new livability.
Or how about this: It’s been two months of plus 112-degree weather in Phoenix, AZ – about the point where human beings begin to die in prolonged exposure. That’s why air conditioning has made civilization possible in desert-like environments. Unfortunately, the power grid goes down, and people do indeed begin to die. The result is the beginning of an exodus from the Valley of the Sun, and the arrival of thousands, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands, in the cooler parts of the continent. Almost overnight.
What do we do?
A new version of the PPP pray, preserve and pedal.
I’m a climate refugee too … from the tropics (Philippines)
Nice catch, Gordon. At the recent ULI Vancouver event, “The City in 2050”, I mentioned the likelihood of climate refugees, but the person I was speaking with looked at me like I was crazy. These refugees are going to be fleeing without any wealth to speak of (obviously) because they’re already underwater on their mortgages and eyeballs-deep in consumer debt. And like “boat people”, they won’t exactly be educated in the ways of the economy of the future; by definition, they will be refugees because they are currently working in an economy with no future.
For years, James Howard Kunstler has been warning anyone who would listen that most of the South and Southwest is doomed (check out “The Long Emergency” and his latest, “Too Much Magic”). The combination of Peak Oil and climate change are going to bring an end to the relatively short-lived period of cheap-energy-fueled southern prosperity. We’re talking about a region that was one of the most culturally backward and underdeveloped parts of the Western world until the Tennessee Valley Authority electrified it, the Interstate system paved it, and the US military/aerospace industrial complex funneled billions of dollars into it. Within a couple of decades, the south was transformed from a barely-inhabitable backwater into an air-conditioned suburban “paradise”. Most of its current inhabitants seem oblivious to the fact that a bonanza of cheap energy and federal largesse are the two primary reasons for their current mode of living. See how Mitt Romney exploited this mindset in his mischaracterization of Obama’s “you didn’t build that” comments. Their religious leaders preach the prosperity gospel, which tells them that their wealth and comfort are rewards from heaven for being God’s elect. It’s going to be very hard for them to let go of their current way of life when economic and environmental changes force the issue. The housing crash of 2008 was a pretty clear signal that there is no future in desert cul-de-sacs of poorly-built McMansions clustered around Wal-Mart Supercenters miles away from employment. We’re already seeing thousands of foreclosed homes remaining unoccupied, probably permanently, stripped of all their valuable piping and wiring and left to blight neighborhoods. Sustained droughts are practically guaranteed to wipe out whatever enclaves hold on past the next financial meltdown.
But to be fair, southerners are not alone in their denial of a changing reality. Just look at the kind of investments we are making in Canada, repeating the mistakes of a previous sprawl-enchanted generation. In the 50s and 60s, highways lined with endless burger joints and gas stations seemed like a swell idea. But since we have the benefit of hindsight, our mistakes are not so forgivable.
What do we do? Well, repopulate the emptied out cities in the northeast and midwest might be one place to start. Akron, Dayton, Cleveland, Detroit even… The list is long. All of these places are situated in a region with plentiful rainfall and superb agricultural land adjacent. Barbara Kingsolver came to this conclusion when she abandoned Tucson for Tennessee (or was it one of the Carolina’s). As JHK said at the CNU conference in Austin a few years back, when peak oil really bites, “In Vegas, the excitement will be over. Well, not for the tarantulas; lots of excitement for them!”
Agree. While I’m biased towards growth in Metro Van, using the “good bones” of midwestern urban infrastructure we already have is clearly more efficient.
What do we do? Ensure our regulations (zoning and transport) result in liveable resilient urban forms: mixture of uses, narrow walkable, car-last streets. Ensure our corporate laws make start-ups stupid-easy. Ensure there are no barriers to entrepreneurs setting up third-spaces where the young and foolish can mingle with the older and wealthier (I’m looking at you, liquor laws).
I look forward to more people moving northwards, and Metro Vancouver having a population and dynamic urban form more akin to Paris, Zurich or London. Metro Vancouver is a wonderful place: we have one of the most amazing natural endowments on Earth. So it’s even more important that we mature-in-place, that we fill-in the urban space we’ve already built on. It’s really important all the newcomers aren’t all forced to live in sprawling motordom by our current silly zoning laws and highway geometry regs. Not just for the environment, but for the health, wealth and happiness of the city: we can’t keep sending all that money out of the city to buy fuel and car parts, never mind the congestion.
As for the “wetter winters, with more floods and less snowpack, and hotter, drier summers”, I want to see all new electricity investments getting us towards solar microgrids, and more canals in edge cities like Tsawwassen. Narrow streets with fountain-water’d squares deal with heat pretty well. Arcades in the form-based code on every arterial.
Today’s setbacks, single-use and 20m “local” ROWs – not mention new malls and Matt’s 50s-style highways – are exactly wrong, and we can fix them today with a stroke of a pen.
http://midrisemixeduse.tumblr.com/
http://stroadtoboulevard.tumblr.com/
What do we do? Desalinate?
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“Those huge economies will not be able to step forward without a solution to water scarcity, and one of the solutions is going to be desalination,” said Avshalom Felber, chief executive officer of IDE Technologies, an Israeli company that’s the biggest operator of the plants. “Besides China and India, the southern U.S. is going to be a major market for us.”
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-23/water-trumping-carbon-spreads-17-billion-market.html
Phoenix radio announcer Sept 1998.. “Today’s high 95, cool”, without a hint of irony.
There’s still snow under the Lions, should tide us over until the rainy season.
Having lived in the Sonoran desert, water supply will be an additional deciding factor.
I spend part of the time in the Desert near Palm Springs. Electricity — my one summer there cost me $700 per month in July and August with the thermostat set at 85.