Fresh Air - Climate-Driven Migration In America

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

ProPublica reporter Abrahm Lustgarten says in the coming decades it's likely tens of millions of us will relocate to escape rising seas, punishing heat, floods and wildfires due to global warming. He says nine of the ten fastest growing regions of the country are on the front lines of the most severe and fast-changing climate conditions. His book is On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America.Ken Tucker has high praise for Tierra Whack's new album, World Wide Whack. For sponsor-free episodes of Fresh Air — and exclusive weekly bonus episodes, too — subscribe to Fresh Air+ via Apple Podcasts or at https://plus.npr.org/freshairLearn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. I read a lot of books in this job, and now and then I come across one that I think everyone should read. One of those is the latest by my guest, ProPublica reporter Abram Lustgarten. It's about climate change, which you may think you've already heard enough about. But Lustgarten paints a detailed and sobering picture of how global warming is already affecting the lives of many people, causing them to rethink where they're living. And he says climate migration will increasingly

reshape the country as tens of millions of people move to escape rising seas, searing heat and humidity, catastrophic floods and wildfires, and earth-withering drought. Decades from now, he writes, the United States will be wildly different, even unrecognizable. He examines what happens when climate refugees take flight, something we're already seeing in other regions, including Central America, and how migrants may be treated in places they choose to settle. Abram Lustgarten writes about climate change for ProPublica and works frequently with the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, and PBS Frontline, among others. His new book is

On the Move, the Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America. Abram Lustgarten, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. You know, we kind of think of climate change as serious, but something in the future, something for our children and grandchildren to really worry about. But this book really brings it home. You didn't grow up in Northern California. You settled there in part because you love the access to the wilderness and the raw beauty. But it's made you rethink that decision.

And you tell us in the book about a woman who had read your stuff and wrote you, Ellen Hurdell. You want to just tell us a bit about her story and why you think it's important? Yeah, sure. And let me, just a little bit of context. I'd been working for about 18 months at this point on a story about global migration in response to climate change. And through that reporting process, become a whole lot more focused on what was happening in my own life and in California. And the second story in that series was about climate migration in the United States and how we were also going to be affected here and that large numbers of Americans were going to move.

And when that story was published, Ellen wrote me an email and she essentially said, you know, you just wrote what's been going through my mind for years now. We constantly debate whether or not we're safe here, whether or not we need to move. We want to know when and where to. And it was really like emails that I got from a lot of people. But what she expressed to me in this little note, I felt like was exactly like my own experience. And so we began talking and I decided to share her story in the book. And she lives about an hour north of San Francisco,

and she is repeatedly affected by wildfires. At the time, 2015, 2017, 2018, she was repeatedly evacuated, her and her family, her two children, living in the hills above Santa Rosa, California. And each of those fires was, you know, not something that destroyed their homes or their property, but was its own sort of traumatic experience and something she had to explain to her children and something she had to live through and packing up the car and unpacking and keeping boxes ready to go. And it was an experience that for her built over some time until she just wondered if she could take it anymore. And her entire family is here in California. Her entire life is here in California. And she was thinking about leaving.

Wasn't one of her in-laws burned out? Yeah. Her husband's family lost their homes, I believe, in the 2015 fire, and they had been repeatedly evacuated in the years since then. So that was her closest experience to actual loss. And then on a couple of other occasions, she was actually evacuated from her own home, or she was regularly hosting family that was evacuated from their homes at her home. She has two kids. They saw all this. Tough on them, obviously.

And then there's the smoke that's there huge parts of the year over the summer, right? That had an effect. Yeah. So this is the thing. You know, all of us living in the state of California one time or another. And now the whole country knows this. But at the time that I was first writing and interviewing, this was a little bit more unique to our part of the country and to maybe parts of Colorado. You live through smoke in wildfire season, whether you have the wildfires in your backyard or not. And so, you know, it's this sort of double-edged sword. You might be grateful that you're not immediately threatened or immediately

in danger this time around. But you can't go outside and play. Your kids can't go outside and play. It's unhealthy to breathe the air. And this can go on as it did in 2018 and 2020 for many weeks at a time. And for Ellen's children, it was also a bit triggering. They'd been through these scary evacuations. They had friends and neighbors who had lost their homes. And so when the smoke came, the conversation about fires came with it. The life at home becomes a little bit more tense. There's a lot more to process. And for children in particular, that was a difficult experience for them. You know, when researchers look at conditions that really support human life in a more or less comfortable way, they find that much of the United States supports it, right?

As the climate changes, and of course there are differing estimates about how quickly the earth will warm. But as you look into the coming decades, how might the United States change? Yeah, scientists have identified a human habitability niche. And historically, it's fallen pretty much like a bullseye in the center of the United States, which is why the Great Plains are fertile for farming, why the southeast is as verdant as it is, and why life generally from the South to the Northern ends of the United States has been relatively comfortable. What the researchers found is that under a medium trajectory of climate change, that niche is shifting northwards. And the sweet spot, instead of being in the middle of the country, is going to fall around the upper Midwest and the Great Lakes region, closer to Chicago and Detroit. And as that niche shifts northward,

the southernmost parts of the country are going to slip outside of it. The southwest and the southeast in particular and the Gulf Coast will be shifting towards really the marginal areas of what has been most habitable for human beings on this planet for the last 6,000 years. Under a more extreme climate warming scenario, kind of a worst case scenario, that niche is going to shift right up to the Canadian border, possibly over it. And it will begin to leave a larger portion, as much as half of the United States, kind of in that marginal zone. Well, I want to talk more about how this change might affect some of those specific regions

and where people live and where they go. But before we get to that, you know, it's interesting that the experts that you conferred with in writing this book weren't just climate scientists and that you find that people who advise investors, people who have money at stake in where people live and where economies thrive are really paying attention to this, right? Imagine tens of millions of Americans moving and what that means. It's not just bad news for the places that they leave from or bad news that force them to move. It's potentially extraordinary growth in the places that they arrive at and also enormous economic implications for both ends of that spectrum. A lot of what I've come to understand about climate migration in the United States is that it will be ultimately an economic decision, not an environmentally driven decision.

And that's to say that people will move when they find that the changing environmental conditions affect their economic standing and their economic security, their jobs, their income, the cost of living. There are a number of businesses, real estate in particular, let's say it's hotel companies or private equity buying up land and properties and rental properties, especially, that are trying to see around the curve on this and anticipate where those fast growth areas are going to be, where maybe some of the sharpest and earliest losses are going to be. And there's a distinct interest, you know, in trying to game that change and time that change. A lot of what I think the, you know, my reporting suggests is that people, individual people can do that as well. You don't have to be a big corporation.

You can think ahead and be proactive about what this means, you know, for your own life and your own economic future and the security of your assets and make those decisions that keep your assets, you know, as secure as possible. I guess one point I drew from this, I mean, you talked about a company called the Rhodium Group in the Bay Area, which spends a lot of time researching what may happen with climate change and how it may affect the country. I guess what interests me about this is that people who may be suspicious of climate scientists, you know, regarding them as liberal doomsayers, might take note that people who actually have money at stake are

taking this seriously, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, understanding climate science, understanding climate data, and developing various tools to use that data is big business. It is a cornerstone of a lot of what's happening in the American economy. And there's quite significant, you mentioned Rhodium Group, and there's others, kind of climate intelligence firms, if you will, that are in a very nonpartisan and objective way gathering this data and analyzing it and trying to find some meaning in it and then selling that meaning to plenty of customers who are out there trying to understand and capitalize on those changes. And that includes the insurance industry foremost, real estate absolutely, transportation industry, healthcare industry, they've all got very significant vested interests in understanding what's happening regardless of the politics of the conversation around climate change.

So I'd like to talk about ways that climate change might affect parts of the country where people now live in large numbers and may choose to leave in large numbers. In the West, wildfires are an increasing problem. And you report that it's not just that they are bigger and more frequent, but veterans of firefighting told you that they're qualitatively different in the way they spread and move through terrain. What's different here? Fires are burning hotter, and because they're burning hotter, they're burning faster. So they are flying across landscapes, sometimes above the ground level, from tree top to tree top. It's just a speed and a heat that scientists have never seen before, and it makes them virtually unfightable. And I think that's what you're seeing some of these last couple of seasons in the West or in Canada last summer where the fires are so out of control

that they just need to burn and reach their natural ending. Right, because they leap over natural barriers like roads and rivers because they're flying through the tops of the trees at great speed with great heat. Yeah, in excess of 100 miles an hour in places. Wow. So there's heat and there's storms and rising seas. And in the West in particular, there's the problem of drought in the West and Southwest. You've written a lot about all of the irrigated agriculture in California and Arizona where they grow a lot of cotton, a lot of it with water from the Colorado River, which clearly can't sustain the level of development in agriculture that it has in the past.

What might the future bring to the west, the southwest agriculture in those areas as climate change advances. Yeah, you're describing these kind of compounding or layering disasters or influences, extreme fire risk, extreme drought, extreme heat. What they will all generally mean is that the population of the United States is likely to shift towards cities and generally towards the north and the northeast in a long-term climate migration pattern. That doesn't necessarily mean that the American Southwest is going to empty out. It's probably a lot more likely that rural areas empty out and cities in that region become bigger. Phoenix might even continue to grow, for example. But the ways that, you know, that the agriculture industry works in places like Arizona, where they grow cotton, or places like Southern California in the Imperial Valley, where they grow winter vegetables for the whole country with Colorado

River water, those places are destined to see enormous change. The water will be available for a long time, but in much, much smaller quantities. The Colorado River, for example, is not only overused between all of the states that share it, but is diminishing in its supply. Supply is supposed to drop about another 9% or 10% with climate change over the next decade, and already has by a similar amount. So farm communities will have to work with less, and the heat will make it more difficult for them to obtain the yields that they're accustomed to

and makes their businesses a lot less workable into the future. And you can expect to see a shift of where people live and where they work in response to that. I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of, you know, West Texas begin to empty out, but Texan cities continue to grow. Atlanta, for example, might be, as far as the South goes, a magnet city for a lot of people coming from further South on the Gulf Coast, where there's different compounding threats, where those threats include sea level rise and extreme heat as well. But people will begin gravitating towards more urban economies and more urban infrastructure and the support network that comes with an urban community.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: What about all the wheat grown in the Great Plains? Peter Van Doren, Jr.: It's a really great and unanswered question. So, you know, farming across the crop yields across the Great Plains have already dropped about 12% due to climate change. And some of the projections that I use in my reporting, which come from the rhodium group, suggest that those yields will drop in the Great Plains, depending on the location, between another 20 to 40, even 50%. And as you go further south, those crop yield losses become much more even total. So parts of into central Texas and down to south Texas, rhodium projects crop yield losses of 90%, even 100%. So some places will become completely

unfarmable. The Great Plains, which is the breadbasket of the United States, the center for a $35 billion annual agricultural industry, it's not really clear what the outcome will be, but it's difficult to imagine that it continue to produce major crops, staple crops, like wheat and corn, the way it does now for long into the future. And that suggests that the communities that farm in those regions and the big corporate farming companies will have to look elsewhere to be able to produce that food. So if agriculture virtually disappears from Texas, then it's drastically reduced in California and wheat yields in the country, in the middle of the country, declined dramatically. What does that do to world food supplies and international relations? Yeah, so the United States is a huge exporter, the second largest global exporter of wheat,

depending on the year, sometimes the first largest with Russia. And much of the world depends on imports of those staple grains from the United States. There's a study out of Columbia University that traced the ripple effect of that sort of decline in American agriculture. And I'm forgetting the exact numbers, but found that it would have a significant impact on the food stocks and the food supplies in North Africa, in places like Yemen, and a lot of other places that rely on both U.S. foreign aid, which often comes in the form of food, or on U.S. food purchases. You write about a town, Ordway, Colorado, and the impact already there,

where a shortage of water has really kind of decimated agriculture. And this was a really bustling place. You know, what was it like? What's happened? What's left? Nordway is a really fascinating example because it underwent this extraordinary change that began a couple of decades ago that's partially due to economic reasons and not solely because of climate change, but it gives us a glimpse into the future of what happens in an American farming community when they run out of water. Ordway is this small town about an hour and a half south of Denver that used to have a thriving agricultural industry.

They grew tomatoes and melons and canned them there and they were shipped by railroad out across the country. And the local – the small towns there were thriving little communities with car dealerships and large grocery stores and feed stores and it was a vibrant place. And a couple of decades ago, Ordway tried to enhance their water availability and they built a pipeline. They funded a pipeline to draw water from the Colorado River on the other side of the Continental Divide and bring that water over to the front range of Colorado. And as they did that, they increased their dependence on that water. And then they had water rights. And as Colorado developed and its population grew and it built more track homes and cities of places like Aurora or Colorado Springs grew, the farmers sold those water rights to go to those booming new municipalities. And

part of their assumption was that even if they sold the water rights that they brought over from the Colorado River, they would always have the natural water supply that Ordway had had for 100 years before that when it was still a vibrant farming community. Trevor Burrus The natural supply being rainfall or aquifers? Peter Van Doren Rainfall, primarily rainfall. And what they found is that the Front Range of Colorado was enduring a long-term and steady decline in rainfall and that water just wasn't naturally available.

And as they sold the water rights in their canals to the cities around them, they didn't have enough to farm. And that effect corresponded with the general decline in American small town agriculture. So people were leaving Ordway anyway, but it accelerated the decline of this community so that by the time I went there, most of the land around Ordway was sitting empty, unfarmable, dust clouds rolling on the horizon, shops in town that used to be vibrant boarded up with plywood. Most of the businesses shut down except for the very basics. The school had declined in population in enrollment by more than half. And it was just a picture of the decline of a small community that can no longer depend on their natural environment to support a robust farming experience. I'm going to take another break here and I'll reintroduce you. Abram Lustgarten writes about

climate change for ProPublica. His new book is On the Move, The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America. He'll be back to talk more after a short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air. We've talked about wildfires in the West and droughts and how it could really damage agricultural production across much of the country. In the South and Southwest and the East Coast, we have a problem of the country. In the south and southwest and the east coast, we have a problem of rising seas. Is it already driving people away from coastal areas? We're already seeing dramatic flooding on the coastlines. And, you know, the way rising seas are experienced by people living next to them is not that one day an acre that used to

be dry is forever buried, but that the floods of that acre of land happen more frequently until they're happening all of the time. It's really difficult to measure on the coast or anywhere else who has moved already in response to sea level rise or in response to a climatic event. But there are obvious examples of homes being swallowed by the sea. We've seen some of those on the coast of North Carolina just in the last year or two, where high tides have literally just taken out the foundations of homes and swept them out into the ocean. And that's the kind of thing that's going to be happening a whole lot more often.

Some of the research that I based my reporting on suggests that there are about 13 million people who currently live in places that are projected to be underwater by later this century. So that's sort of the low end of, you know, the climate migration that we would expect might be driven from sea level rise alone. On the Louisiana coast, you're seeing already some whole communities that have essentially been moved. I spent some time in a place called Ile de Jean Charles, and it's an old Native American community about an hour and a half south of New Orleans. And there's been a formal effort to take that community in its whole and move a couple of hundred residents to a spot about 40 miles north onto dry land, build them new homes, and essentially retreat from that rising coastline.

So I'm starting to see small examples of retreat and displacement along the coast, but it's hard to pick up on the bigger trend at this early time. We're already seeing places like in coastal Florida, for example, where it's increasingly risky to build in places that have been destroyed by hurricanes or flooded. And, you know, business leaders and political leaders resist the idea that people should abandon parts of their communities or that they should move out. And so there's been this need to find insurance. Most insurance companies now, I don't think, write flood insurance anymore because it's

so unpredictable. They have a chapter called The Great American Climate Scam, and this involves how insurance risk is apportioned. Tell us what's going on here. Yeah, so this basically focuses on the countervailing incentives that, you know, the local governments have and that state governments have and that individual people have. And a lot of Americans live in some of the most dangerous regions of the country in terms of climate risk. And nine of the 10 fastest growing regions in the

country are some of the highest climate risk regions in the country. And people have been moving into those places because there are a set of subsidies and government programs in place that essentially mask the risk, that mask the true cost of their decisions to live there. And one of those fundamental subsidies has been an insurance system that basically makes it cheaper to buy a home or cheaper to insure a home than the risk would suggest that it should be. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And that's a subsidy from taxpayers? Peter Van Doren, Jr.: It's indirectly a subsidy from taxpayers. So this began in Florida

after Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Tens of thousands of homes were wiped off the map. Insurance companies fled the state. They dropped people's policies and they didn't want to write new policies in the state of Florida. And so what you saw at that point was the state of Florida and local governments as well thinking we've just had decades of astronomical growth. We love that growth. We can't see that reverse, and we can't see people move out of the state. And so Florida devised a state-run insurance plan that would make insurance available to any homeowner who wanted to buy it through the state. And eventually, they promised to discount that plan so that it would actually be cheaper than what the free market insurance was providing. Systems for insurance like that have now been replicated in about 30 states across the country. They're called fair plans for fair access to insurance. And it has essentially made it less expensive for Americans to move into places that are threatened by hurricanes, threatened by wind damage, threatened by flooding in some cases,

though you mentioned flooding is now covered by the federal government, another form of that subsidy. And in California and a lot of the West, there are similar fare plans now being expanded to cover people who face risk of wildfires. Insurance is becoming harder to buy in places like California, and there is an increasing reliance on those state subsidized plans. So there's all sorts of subsidies, insurance subsidies. Water has been kept inexpensive in the American Southwest. Crops have been supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture when they fail in the Southwest. These are all forms of payments to people to remain living in high-risk areas and they mask a natural signal that might tell somebody that they're living in a high-risk place or that their assets are at risk and that might otherwise

in an uninfluenced environment convince them that they should move elsewhere. Trevor Burrus So there's no pressure on Congress from areas that there ought to be a lot of pressure from because the risk is masked by insurance subsidies. That's right. Americans don't necessarily feel the urgency of the climate crisis because they've been shielded from the consequences of the climate crisis by these subsidies and similar systems. You know, and yet, if the climate crisis deepens and even these subsidized rates really are not sustainable or taxpayers rebel.

It's – things could change. I mean one of the things you write is that when things really start to get serious that everyone including businesses, maybe starting with businesses, will act to protect themselves and that includes banks and insurance companies. So, I mean, like you own a house in Northern California. At some point, if they say, we can't give you home insurance anymore because of the wildfire risk, is that a real possibility? It's happening. I mean, Americans increasingly face greater personal financial risk as climate costs are soaring and insurance and those subsidies are starting to go away. And this is changing their perception of the climate issue from a cultural political issue to a household economics issue. And that's the change that I think is going to start pushing people to reconsider where they live.

And across California, for example, where I am, people are being dropped by their homeowner's insurance on a daily basis because of wildfire risk. And when that happens, they have an option to go to the state subsidized plan, which exists to support people. It's a double-edged sword because people need that support, but it also encourages people to remain in wildfire risk zones. But they're also finding that those plans are extremely expensive. And people in California, people on the Gulf Coast are beginning to consider self-insurance. There's larger numbers of homeowners who are going without insurance.

That means that their personal financial risk is increasing exponentially. And undoubtedly, people will begin to move in response to that, or people will ultimately suffer greater economic consequences the next time there's a devastating hurricane, the next time there's an unexpected wildfire in a suburban or urban area. I'll take another break here, and then we'll talk some more. We are speaking with Abram Lustgarten. He writes about climate change for ProPublica. His new book is On the Move, The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America. We'll talk more in just a moment. This is Fresh Air. You were describing how affluent people in California are responding to these wildfires and where, you know, they may not have really comfortable, breathable air and clear

skies for weeks or months at a time. People will drive long distances to rent a place just to have a weekend in the clear. And you've experienced this yourself, right? This was our experience the summer of 2020, you know, in Northern California. I had close friends who were evacuating, you know, not literally told to evacuate, but were seeking cleaner air virtually every weekend. So they would work from home when they needed to report to their jobs, and then just get in the car and look for a place where they could breathe, where their family or their kids could breathe. I had a similar experience running around the northern part of California one weekend, going camping, I write about in the book, not because we were looking for a vacation,

but we were just trying to get out of the smoke. And the wind shifted during that weekend, and the smoke followed us, and we ended up packing up and moving on to the next place. And it's kind of this harrowing and stressful experience of driving through clouds of really toxic fumes and terrible air and looking for a place where you can just take a good, long, deep breath and that kind of experience, it really teaches you to appreciate the most essential sort of aspects of a clean environment. I think there's a moment in the book where you're talking to some researcher about these

very issues and kind of hanging on in California when ensuring homes is getting increasingly dicey and you ask the guy, should I move? What happened? Yeah, I mean this was a potential turning point for me and then interestingly, I've never turned the corner. But the place that I live is a suburban area and it is adjacent to wildfire risk zones and open space. And I was having this conversation and I was being educated on the economic impact of a lot of what I've just told you about how insurance schemes change, about how state support for insurance changes and how the markets and the banking systems will respond to that. And I was looking out my own window and I asked this person, should I move? And it was a resounding

and urgent yes that I got in response. And that was, you know, a real kind of reality check for me. It was probably the moment that started, you know, the process of writing this book. And also the moment that started this long process of deeply considering what it means to be pushed out of a place on a personal level because of climate change and how to consider what the risks are, what the impacts are, how to try to game that timing and how difficult ultimately it is, that it is not a simple decision to ever decide to move and to uproot your own life, which is something that I haven't done yet. It's like the place that you love so much you wanted to stay there forever isn't that place anymore.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, personally, I've always chosen where I live based on my access to nature and the beauty of my surroundings. I lived in the Rocky Mountains. I came out to California's mountains. I always thought that that was a completely subjective decision and felt like one of my greatest freedoms was my right to make that decision. And this whole process and understanding the climate pressures and how they affect where people live, what that's taught me is, you know, that one impact of climate change is that I'm losing that particular freedom, that, you know, that where to live, you know, ultimately becomes a more difficult decision. Maybe one day in the future becomes a decision that's made for me and taken out of my hands, you know, altogether. simplicity of or the luxury of being able to just sort of choose your environment and place yourself

in it at will, that's a luxury that's going away along with all the other things that are changing. You write in the book that there are a lot of places in the United States, particularly in the South and the West, that are going to be less habitable and that people are going to be moving. And when that happens, there will actually be areas that benefits, the Great Lakes in particular. Why is that? Well, the greatest reason is that the Great Lakes has the world's largest supply of fresh surface water. And throughout global history, people have always found the most sustainable environments in places around an ample supply of water. And as water becomes more scarce in parts of the United States, the Great Lakes will, you know, is a place that has a lot of urban infrastructure cities that passed their population primes in, you know, 1970 and have been declining since. And so they

have what some of the researchers I talked to describe as, you know, capacity. They have housing stock, they have sewage infrastructure and roads infrastructure to support a growing population. They will not experience the same kind of intense climate impacts that coastal areas will from storms or flooding, or the same kind of heat increases as the southern United States. And so they're shielded from a lot of the worst impacts, and they have the capacity to absorb growth. And the expectation is that as people move there, there's a greater ability for those communities to absorb people and to plan for that growth and perhaps to thrive again. This is maybe a self-interested question. We're in Philadelphia here at Fresh Air.

What's in store for us? Sea level rise. I mean, Philadelphia is a pretty temperate environment. And so its risks are not enormous. But it popped up in my book as an example of, you know, one of the East Coast cities that will have to, you know, consider what it means to have, you know, rising water levels that are going to, you know, in a most extreme sense, you know, rising water levels that are going to, you know, in the most extreme sense, you know, turn parts of the city into islands, probably require, you know, new highway construction and new bridges and things like that, as well as, you know, all along the northern part of the East Coast are going to see, you know, an increasing likelihood of strong

hurricanes from time to time. What about New York City? So New York City faces enormous climate risks, both storms and sea level rise, the same story. You know, there's not sure the most current version of the plan to build a seawall outside of the New York Harbor, you know, outside of the Verrazano Bridge. But there was a $120 billion plan last time I checked to, you know, to build a seawall that might just close off New York from sea level rise. And if that kind of major infrastructure development doesn't happen, then you'll just see rising water levels all around the New York coastline. Well, Abram Lustgarten, thanks so much for speaking with us again. Thank you so much for having me.

Abram Lustgarten writes about climate change for ProPublica. His new book is On the Move, The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America. Coming up, Ken Tucker reviews the new album from rapper and singer Tierra Whack, which he says puts her at the forefront of hip-hop creativity. This is Fresh Air. Philadelphia rapper and singer Tierra Whack is known for her playful side. She was nominated for a Grammy a few years ago for a music video about a surreal visit to the dentist. But Wack's new album, titled Worldwide Wack,

widens her subject matter with emotions ranging from ecstatic happiness to the deepest despair. Tierra Wack says she was influenced by the music of Lauryn Hill, Missy Elliott, Eminem, and Stevie Wonder. Rock critic Ken Tucker says this collection of 15 songs displays a dazzling variety of moods and sounds and places the 28-year-old artist at the forefront of hip-hop creativity. When I'm around you, I'm not satisfied You got the job, but you're not qualified For someone better, oh, baby, I might For someone better, oh, baby, I might Yeah, just wait and see

That's Tierra Whack letting a guy know he is just not cutting it as boyfriend material. Over a drumbeat you might hear from a marching band, she bites off that opening line, when I'm around you, I'm not satisfied. Her jokes here are solid. Explaining why it's not working out, she says, like Justin Timberlake, we're not in sync. But there's a firmness in her voice that conveys an underlying seriousness and urgency. On the very next song, she switches to a pretty croon and a pretty melody to yearn for a happiness she fears may only be something she sees in a movie. You never take me to the movies Take me to eat on a foodie

Boy Enjoy Larry Took me to see Something scary Maybe we could get married Marry-go-round Maybe

Took me to see the Matrix Got me pickin' out a gown Mister, can you take me on adventures? Treat me like your sister God, show me love, show me respect Let's make memories, we'll never forget I need love, it ain't hard as you think I want the popcorn with the big ol'. I need love. Let's catch the premiere. Tickets on sale and there's love in the air.

The range of emotions and the variety of their expression only begin to suggest the pleasures of Tierra Whack's new album. She put out a collection in 2018 called Whack World that consisted of 15 songs, each of which lasts exactly 60 seconds. That 15 in 15 minutes was at once a clever, attention-getting stunt and a perfect showcase for her witty range. She refers to the new worldwide whack, however, as her debut album. It too contains 15 songs, but of much more varying length, and both the music and her lyrical concerns have deepened. She's capable of a delightful lightness, as on the tune Shower Song. It's like the best Sesame Street song Kermit or Miss Piggy I sound great When I'm singing in the shower Soap and water give me flowers When I'm singing in the shower

Getting ready for my day So I gotta get fresh Gotta exfoliate You know Dove is the best I ain't never in a rush I perform it like a major And I hurt my flooring But I'll call them back later Sing it like Whitney

Sing it like Britney Sing it like Aretha Sing it like Britney Whoa, whoa, whoa Sing it like Aretha Whoa, whoa, whoa Sing it like Alicia Whoa, whoa, whoa I sound great In one song after another, Tierra Whack describes situations and relationships

she'd like to have and which frequently elude her grasp. She wants to be taken on an old-fashioned date to the movies. Or she'll say she wants a male friend who'll relate to her in a brother-sister way. Or she wants someone who'll be as kind to her as her imaginary friends are. How can I be lonely when I'm hanging with my homie? His name is Tony and he's wearing blue cicones. He's standing right next to me, eating ravioli.

He's my only friend because the rest of y'all are phony. My last best friend said he wish he didn't know me. His name was Oscar and he really hurt my feelings. When I grow up, I want to hang from a ceiling. The roof is leaking. The roof is leaking. Teardrops. Always available.

The perfect companion. Very understanding and swore to never abandon. He fills the gap in my teeth when I'm sour. He's sweet, the better half of me. No one else can compete with my power. We argue today. As sunny as Tierra Whack can be, three songs here, Numb, Tonight, and 27 Club,

are about depression, death, and at least once specifically, suicide. The conviction she brings to her performances is chilling. On Numb, she's so listlessly despairing she can barely bring her mouth to enunciate the words. And the song titled 27 Club refers to the age at which a number of pop stars such as Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse died. And Tierra Wax sings with delicate beauty about the possibility of joining them. I can show you how it feels When you lose what you love When the world seems like it's against you

When your friends and family forget you It ain't really hard to convince you Looking for something to commit to Suicide I'm very glad that Tierra Whack is now 28 years old, and that the rich, imaginative world she builds over the course of World Wide Whack has become a place in which she really wants to live. Ken Tucker reviewed Tierra Whack's new album called Worldwide Whack. On tomorrow's show, why Oregon's groundbreaking experiment with decriminalizing possession of hard drugs is coming to an end. In 2020, voters overwhelmingly approved decriminalization, but painful results generated a backlash that spurred lawmakers to reverse course.

We'll speak with New Yorker contributing writer Tammy Kim, who's covered the issue. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support this week from Adam Staniszewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Sallet, Phyllis Myers,

Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Teresa Madden, Lea Chaloner, and Susan Nyakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies. Hard times just mold me. Como deca son cozy. No affiliate with a hoagie. Treat the fans like homies. Give a tip to a Mosley. Keep it clean like Sobe. Turtleneck try to joke me. Too sharp can't poke me. I always act like Cody.

Feet white like Jody. Teeth white like Joey. Ever since we lost Kobe. I've been balling on my lonely. Horse power that's a pony. Do a big Mick Foley. Phone dead if you phony. A phone dead, you can't phone me.

They all upset, because I'm a threat. You want to bet, coming up next. I work so hard. This message comes from NPR sponsor Grammarly. What if everyone at work were an expert communicator? Inbox numbers would drop, customer satisfaction scores would rise, and everyone would be more productive. That's what happens when you give Grammarly to your entire team.

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