The Young Turks - TYT Extended Clip - October 13, 2020

Episode Date: October 14, 2020

Nancy Pelosi got into a heated discussion with Wolf Blitzer. Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur discuss on The Young Turks. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to The Young Turks, the online news show. Make sure to follow and rate our show with not one, not two, not three, not four, but five stars. You're awesome. Thank you. I'm going to be able to be. Hello everybody. We're welcome to staying home, your revolutionary guide to the Green New Deal. I'm Josh Fox. As you know, on this program, we mostly talk about different aspects of the Green New Deal. And that has to do with the renewable energy components, the components that are focused on social and economic justice, racial justice, frontline communities, justice for those who are at the brunt and the brink of real problems because of climate change. And we also deal a lot, of course, with the aspects of climate change that we all know so very well, right, hurricanes, floods, fires. And some of the reasons why it's so important that we combine the issues of a value-based transformation with a technologically based transformation. What I mean is we're transferring to renewable energy, but we're also talking about justice.

We're also talking about equity. We're also talking about fairness. And we're talking about how do we address problems that people who are in the midst of having impact from climate change who didn't cause those problems to begin with. And in some cases, people who even did cause those problems, right? Like people who use an enormous amount of carbon. So one of the aspects of the climate crisis that we don't talk about a lot, which I think, and I've started to focus on this about two years ago, really, really needs to be focused on is the issue of climate change and migration. Climate refugees.

Now, from my focus has been about refugees coming to the United States or coming from the global south to the global north, right? The global south places where poor people who haven't used a lot of carbon, right, who didn't cause the crisis in the first place, now are besieged with fires and storms and droughts and things that make it impossible for them to continue to live in their homes, right? folks in Guatemala, farmers who can no longer grow crops because of either a severe drought or extreme weather that's decimated the entire place. And those people migrating up through Mexico to our southern border, climate refugees.

Similarly, people from the war in Syria. Many people note that because there was a five-year drought in Syria, that caused the destabilization of that entire political system, which led to the civil war there. the people who are leaving there are not just war refugees, they're also, in a sense, climate refugees. And we're going to see this as glaciers dry up, as water patterns shift, as it gets hotter and more inhospitable in a lot of places. And it occurs to me that we very much need to start to build a morality around the idea of climate refugees and climate change and how those shifts are occurring. Now, most of that discussion, which is in my mind, is internationally

based. We're talking about issues of immigration, issues of people coming to the United States, coming to places like Germany and Italy and the global north from places that are being ravaged by climate change, which of course brings to mind the idea of climate reparations, right? In the global south, these people did not burn a lot of carbon. They did not pioneer the industrial revolution. They did not pour, you know, carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere for centuries like England and France and Europe and now China, India, and the United States are doing. But what about, so we have to talk about that on a separate episode, but what about within the United States borders? What about people who are suffering wildfires, hurricanes,

floods, and all sorts of damage inside this country? So my guest today wrote this cover piece for the New York Times Magazine, it's an incredible article about climate migration within the United States. How will climate change remap where Americans live in the Sunday New York Times? And also online, of course. It's brilliant to look at it online also because there's really amazing photographs. So how will climate change remap where Americans live internally in our own borders. And this is obviously a picture of the California wildfires. Abram Luskarden is the writer of this. And I've known Abram Lusgarden for more than a decade. Because back in 2008 and 2009,

there were two rather intrepid, plucky, skinny, young reporters investigating an issue that nobody had ever heard of in Pennsylvania called fracking. And that was myself with a camera and to make my film Gasland and Abram, who was working with ProPublica. at the time, and still is, this is a ProPublica article, even though it's in the New York Times. So we've been on this beat for a long time. So it's exciting to have a Brown back

to talk about the evolution of Americans thinking in terms of extreme fossil fuel energy, but also in terms of what does this mean? Where will Americans live in a climate changed future? This is an issue that's going to be true that's gonna need to be investigated and really talked about. Because right now in the Trump administration, we have the most hostile possible policies towards immigrants.

We're separating families at the border. We're torturing them. Horrific stories are coming out of the concentration camps in the south of this country in places like Texas and Louisiana, where forced surgeries are happening on migrants. Children are being separated from their families, tortured, COVID running rampant. We're in a state of absolute tyranny and immorality when it comes to migrants from other countries. Hopefully, and maybe some of this remapping from Americans will make us more sympathetic towards the plight of others who are having to flee climate chaos. But let's get right to it.

Let's discuss the issues and let's discuss the piece with Abram-Las Garden from New York Times slash Proposloka. here he is. So, Bram, amazing to see you again. I did tip off in the intro that 12 years ago, there were two young, spirited, skinny guys in investigating fracking that nobody never heard of here out in the woods of Northeast Pennsylvania, and it was you and me. And I have to also tell you, when I saw this, I flipped out because for the last two years, I'm actually engaged in working on a film on climate refugees, not internal to the United States border like this article, but of course, the bigger issues of migration between the global south and the global north. And that film was put on hold and paused by the coronavirus because I can't travel to do it.

But I'm so thrilled to discuss this topic with you and such an interesting wrinkle that you've brought up here about internal migration within the United States. And this is an article that's unusual for you because you're writing it in first person. Talk about what brought this piece, this amazing piece to the fore here. Yeah, thank you. You know, it actually grew out of looking at the international. scope of global migration related to climate change. So, you know, there was a part one in this series looking at global migration. And I'd been spending the last better part of the last year and a half down in Central America and Guatemala and El Salvador and Honduras looking at how migrants were or potential migrants were, you know, dealing with the changes in their landscape and their environment and their food supply and grappling with the decision to move. And through, you know, all those dozens and dozens of conversations. with migration experts, it became pretty clear that the United States was going to more or less face a version of the same thing. So, you know, maybe not as extreme, but certainly will be

affected by climate. And like you said, I live, you know, I live now in California just north of San Francisco. And so in the two years I'm reporting on this story, our fires, our wildfires, have gotten significantly worse. It started in, you know, 2016, 2017. I was working on the story already, in 2018 and the fires were terrible. And then obviously, you know, this year, you know, they're, they feel cataclysmic. So that's just continued in the background. And, you know, the idea that, you know, that I might be facing the same sort of decision I was interviewing people about came up a while ago between me and my editors.

But by the time, you know, we were drafting a final story this year, it became a real question. I found myself right in the middle of it. Let's just put that aside for a second, though. let's talk about the international situation because this is first, and then let's move on to the United States as you can. Let me first say, you're tuned in to staying home, you're a revolutionary guide to the Green New Deal,

I'm Josh Fox. I'm with Abram Luskarden, and we'll be right back. You're tuned in to staying home, your revolutionary guide to the Green New Deal, I'm Josh Fox. I'm with Abram Lusgarden. Brilliant writer that I've known for many years on fracking first, ProPublica, and now his piece in the New York Times

about, will climate change remap where Americans live? We're talking about climate migration. Let's talk about the specifics of what's happening in Central America. There have been climate refugees that are coming from the global south to the global north. And specifically, you mentioned Guatemala. Tell us about the conditions and what's forcing people to move. Yeah, you bet. I mean, obviously, we see a lot of pressure here in the United States.

The migrant caravans coming out of Central American Mexico. towards the United States. There's a lot of reasons why those people are moving and it ranges from intolerable violence to just the economic opportunity in the United States. And I went down to spend some time and try to figure out, you know, to what degree environmental factors played a role in the migrant care of events we were seeing, but also how do people in general respond to environmental change to because we know that that environmental change is going to get a lot worse there in the future. You know, and so it was just in rural villages, farming communities where they grow maize and

beans and not places that are really well connected in terms of a migration relationship with the United States. There are many parts of Guatemala where, you know, every other home is built with U.S. dollars and remittances are a big part of the economy. I went to places that were much more remote than that and disconnected indigenous Mayan communities. So they weren't thinking of migration as the obvious solution to the problem. but they were literally starving.

They were fourth, fifth, sixth generation farmers whose family history had no comprehension of how to deal with the depth of drought and heat and also just even if not complete annual drought, but the unpredictability of precipitation. So they would have no water for six months of a growing season and then get deluged by enormous storms that would bring landslides down on top of them

and they just like they can't grow food. And, you know, so I realized there wasn't much of a sort of pros and cons list in their thinking about whether to migrate. They were just starving. So they were moving. And the big picture behind that is that, you know, the science says that it's going to get hotter and drier and more difficult with climate change, that those parts of the world will suffer, you know, disproportionately to the rest of the world. They'll suffer worse. And so if the people there are responding to environmental change now and moving, then, you know, safe to say. that flow of population movement is going to increase in the future.

At any time during the last month, I could say to you, well, there's a major hurricane that's just about to hit the coast or the Yucatan or, you know what I mean? There's an incredible prevalence of that swing back and forth, as you mentioned. You're describing a situation, which is, first of all, if you have massive drought, you can't farm. If you have extreme floods, you also can't farm. So this sounds like a really horrible situation. So in my thinking about this, I feel that, so looking at this situation internationally,

from the standpoint of human rights, for me, knowing full well that, unless we do incredible overhaul of all society, which we have a plan for it, New Deal. They'll reach two degrees of global warming. Within the next several decades, the United Nations predicts 780 million to a billion climate refugees worldwide at that point. And looking at the way we, or international law deals with refugees, and I know this intimately because my parents were refugees, my father was, anyway, that there is a, you know, the Geneva Convention,

allows for certain things to say you can declare asylum if you're being, you know, you oppressed from the standpoint of religion or race or gender or sexual preference. What about a status of climate refugees? What about the legality of saying, well, I need to declare asylum because of climate change? Any thoughts on that or the values that we need to start to evoke when we think about this crisis that's approaching? Yeah, well, I'm with you, I think. it sounds like in that the people that I've met that are displaced by climate-related factors to me meet every definition of, you know, sort of colloquial definition of what a refugee is. And I think

it's important to think about these people that way. But it's come up as a surprising, you know, point of contention in my reporting. So, you know, I use that phrase climate refugees. And, you know, I get fact checks from people affiliated with the United Nations that say, you know, no, these aren't refugees. That's a legal definition that applies to, you know, victims of conflict. or political persecution. And, you know, luckily, we are not bound to use only legal terms approved by the United Nations as journalists, so we can use them as adjectives.

And, you know, and I think that, you know, refugee status applies because in my experience, in my travels and interviewing, I'm not talking to people who were, like I said, making voluntary or particularly subjective decisions. I mean, they were forced into their situations, by life or death predicament. They have very few options.

And it's really a heartbreaking move for them as well as for anybody else. It's not a decision to migrate out of convenience or in pursuit of luxury or something. And does the politics of their particular situation also sometimes apply, right? We're talking about Honduras, one of the most hostile countries

in the world to environmentalists, certainly probably also to people we're fleeing for environmental reasons. Do you have insights about that? Yeah, I mean, only to say that the politics of climate and migration are all so fraught and that, you know, climate change is an exacerbating factor for everything. And so if there's, you know, a political conflict, then it tends to exacerbate that too. I mean, it's not that I, you know, worked with people who were persecuted for their environmental activism, though I'm sure that's prevalent. But it all intermingles. I mean, I spent time the woman in El Salvador who would cut in San Salvador who had moved there from the countryside

because her family was killed, you know, by gangs. And she wanted to move to the United States. And so I interviewed her as a climate migrant because, or sorry, I, I, she would normally be classified by people who look at migration as a victim of violence. If she moves to the United States, she'd be sort of put in that bucket of, you know, Salvadorans are, are victims of gang violence. And so they are moving to the United States. But, but I, I talked to, to her as a climate migrant because her first choice would have been to go back to her rural hometown village on the Guatemalan border of El Salvador, but there's no water. They can't grow food there. Her remaining family farms for a living. They don't have work. Their crops haven't

come to full yield in five or six years straight. And so she feels like her only option is not only to move to the United States, but she feels that she is a victim of violence from gang warfare now only because the climate pushed her to be in that situation in the first place. And that's the way in which these things all get in or mingled. Right. Yeah. And that's so much of the thinking behind an idea like the Green New Deal, which is an intersectional political framework that deals with justice, but also about climate crisis.

Is there a way to think about this? Since so many of these people from the global south are not the perpetrators of climate trains, they're not the people burning carbon, they're not the people driving SUVs, They're not the people who are, you know, plugged into a massive electrical grid running on coal or frat gas. Is there a way to think about this as climate reparations, right, dealing with the victims of the climate crisis who are inexorably a part of the damages, but not people who caused it? Yeah, I mean, that comes up a lot in my conversations, and there's many researchers they would advocate for that, you know, that point out Americans. disproportionate role in causing climate change and suggest our disproportionate responsibility in helping the people who are most affected by it. I think that's logical and I think there's a really

strong moral argument. Unfortunately, I doubt that that's a realistic pathway for us politically in our future. Well, right. The word reparations isn't politically popular. But from a standpoint of morality, I think it's an interesting notion. What about this idea, though, of getting refugee status? How would that occur and have you pursued the thought of that with have you asked around because you're getting pushed back on that question? Yeah, I haven't much yet. It's come up in some conversations. I mean, what's necessary is to change some of the legal frameworks around support for and even identification of climate migrants. And it starts with some difficult questions, even valid data questions, like who's a migrant and who's a climate migrant and how do you define that? You know,

so I think there's a lot of people thinking about that now. I've heard some arguments that, you know, by people who are concerned for the welfare of climate migrants who still don't think that climate refugees is the right sort of bucket to put them in because, um, uh, some of those refugees want to be seen as more sort of, you know, self-empowered and less victims of, you know, of the state, uh, or less subject to sort of political whims. But, um, I don't know, it's a, it seemed, I haven't gone deep into the political. I'm just fascinated by the idea. because like the refugee status comes from 60 years ago, right, the Geneva Convention, right? All these things that were based on identity politics, or the wars based on identity, right?

Naziism. And so it seems to me that the future framework has to be different and has to be about climate. But let's go and move on to, before we start to get into the specifics of where Americans are moving and how it might be remapped, what are some of the emotions that you're going through when you have, when you have a planner, in your article of urban planning telling you you should sell your house right away and move what are some of the things that you're going through in terms of the mentality of a person on the you know in on the front line right because we talk about frontline communities as I guess victims of fossil fuel extraction but but this is a different front line talk about the emotions yeah yeah I mean

it's been a lesson to me, particularly about the subtleties of this decision that it's not so black and white, right? I mean, like, if I look at data and I look at the facts that I've learned and the science that I've gathered around, you know, what should or, you know, might not suggest that someone move. It's kind of clear, like, I shouldn't live where I live. Many Californians maybe might want to move, but I don't want to. I'm not ready to. I have a lot of reasons for living where I live and most of them are subjective or emotional or you know whatever you know I love the landscape I love the place I have a community um so you realize I realize in processing that uh both how painful um you know this sort of climate displacement can be ultimately even even as

you know one of them on the spectrum of how privileged people in the world are you know I have to be among the most, but also how, you know, how gray that decision-making area is. And so, you know, when you think about, like, how slow people have been to adapt generally to the idea of climate disrupting their lives. Well, you know, now I realize there's a lot of reasons for that. Well, it reminds me of back in the day, like when the fracking industry, oh, I should say, you're tuned in to staying home, your revolutionary guide to the Green New Deal. I'm Josh Fox. We'll be right back. You're tuned in to staying home, your revolutionary guide to the Green New Deal.

I'm Josh Fox. My guest is a Brahmsk Garden talking about climate migration, his brilliant piece in New York Times magazine, New York Times, on how climate change will remap where Americans live. It reminds me a lot of when we were looking at people in the fracking wells who were completely surrounded by fracking wells or fossil fuel infrastructure, and it was unsafe for them to live where they were living because of the very infrastructure and that poisons them in their own homes and causes this type of problem. So now we're seeing that migration not only from the frontline poisoned communities, right, but also from the impacts of climate.

You talk a bit about the decision to move. When are people's backs against the wall, when they're cornered, when they don't have a choice. And you talk about how migration can happen fast. I mean, with COVID, we saw a lot of people leave New York City and go up to the Hudson Valley and home price, second homes, homes. in the out of New City, the prices were doubling overnight. There's a shift that happens in the marketplace before it happens in terms of an actual avalanche or flood or fire. Talk a little bit about how that works. Yeah. Well, it starts with the idea that, you know, Americans have been particularly illogical

about where they live with respect to their environment for a long time. And they've done that because the marketplace has kind of pushed us in the wrong direction, right? Like you can live on the coast of Florida in the path of hurricanes because you can get cheap subsidized insurance policies that the state of Florida mandates be available to you, even if the free market, so to speak, doesn't want to provide that. And the same in California now. I mean, the state is making it state law that you have to be able to buy fire insurance for your home if you live in a dangerous fire prone area. And that encourages people to live in dangerous fire prone areas, or at least makes it possible. So one of the changes that's happening in the market is that, you know, we're going

to see less and less of that kind of subsidization of, you know, negative incentives. So insurers are less likely than they were in the past to insure dangerous areas. Government They're actually dropping policies, right? They're dropping policies as fast as they can. Yeah, you're seeing things like the National Flood Insurance Program start to resist building, rebuilding homes in places that are repetitively flooded in the same place, which they've rebuilt homes five, six, seven times in exactly the same spot. And now they're going to say, we'll give you your money, but you have to move out of that flood zone, which seems like an intelligent response. So that's all happening at the same time that, you know, that we need to talk about a

relatively new show called Un-F-The Republic or UNFTR. As a Young Turks fan, you already know that the government, the media, and corporations are constantly peddling lies that serve the interests of the rich and powerful. But now there's a podcast dedicated. to unraveling those lies, debunking the conventional wisdom. In each episode of Un-B-The-Republic, or UNFTR, the host delves into a different historical episode or topic that's generally misunderstood or purposely obfuscated by the so-called powers that be, featuring in-depth research, razor-sharp commentary, and just the right amount of vulgarity, the UNFTR podcast takes a sledgehammer to what you thought you knew

about some of the nation's most sacred historical cows. But don't just take my word for it. The New York Times described UNFTR as consistently compelling and educational, aiming to challenge conventional wisdom and upend the historical narratives that were taught in school. For as the great philosopher Yoda once put it, You must not learn what you have learned. And that's true whether you're in Jedi training or you're uprooting and exposing all the propaganda and disinformation you've been fed

over the course of your lifetime. So search for UNFDR in your podcast app today and get ready to get informed, angered, and entertained all at the same time. People are obviously coming to grips with the reality of their changing climate and changing the way they think about it. But, you know, so all of that sort of comes together

to provide a big economic, push, maybe an economic tipping point. You know, and when that happens, the people I talk to, as you read, suggests that tipping point can happen kind of quickly. And that's not necessarily a point in a fire marching down the hill, but also in perception, right? Why are we still here? What are we doing?

You know, I was on this program with Brobson Lutz from New Orleans, who's a very famous doctor who helped a lot of the post-Katrina recovery. And he said, well, look, New Orleans could become a Venice. I'm not leaving. You know, I'm going to hitch my boat to do Main Street. And so there's people like that. At the same time, I remember being out in Colorado investigating the high park fire with firefighters up there in the mountains who said the fire was coming at 35 miles per hour.

Trees were literally, not to quote Donald Trump, but what they said was trees were literally exploding with fire in front of them. And they had to run to get away. These are the firefighters. And they were talking about how people were choosing to live up in the hills because they could. Because now all of a sudden zoning changes and people like. to live up there. They like to live in the isolated mountains. And that's why so many of those homes burned and people died because they moved further up into the hills. That is still very much going on.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the wildland urban interface is, you know, what they call that. And it's a big deal in Colorado. It's a big deal in California. And, you know, I'm as guilty as anyone. I love those environments. They're beautiful. I mean, that's partly why people move there. And so, you know, the scientists I talk to say, you know, that's a big part of the blame for what's happening in terms of wildfire destruction. Is it 30% or 50% that and forest management? I mean, those are both real factors. But what happens is climate comes and piles on top of that and then just amplifies whatever, you know, whatever risk already existed. But for sure, our behavior, our development patterns are zoning the way the economy pushes, you know, people and home prices and values, you know, those properties. That's all perpetuating. You know, kind of, you know, irresponsible behavior. Is there a scenario in which the tide of this is reversed? I mean, of course, I know the answer. But is that the perceptual shift that, you know what I mean?

Like, let's say we roll all sixes, Biden gets in, we have this $2 trillion climate plan, we're reimagining our cities to become completely different green places, we're cutting down carbon emissions. This process is still going to advance, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, so take a step back, a big picture. I mean, you know, as you know, like a certain amount of climate change is locked in. We've already done the damage. But an enormous amount of what's to come or how severe the future changes are

still depends on what we do right now to slow emissions, first and foremost. So action we take towards climate will make the long-term changes, you know, that I'm describing whether for the United States or for Guatemala less. So right away, I mean, we have an opportunity still. to make this transition less painful. But at the same time, I mean, one of the lessons that I'm taking very personally from, you know, from climate change is that it removes your ability to, you know, to live your life exactly how you wanted and to make all of those decisions.

And it's a little bit, you know, painful to have that sort of reality imposed, you know, on you. And that's, that's what's going to happen. So it's not that everybody will be forced to move or that every place, every part of California where the Louisiana coast will become, you know, completely uninhabitable disaster zones, but they will become, you know, less attractive and less livable and require a little bit more, you know, commitment to that if you do, if one chooses to continue to live in that environment. So, you know, I think, you know, the best case for the future is that we, you know, curb emissions and slow the rate of climate change, that the U.S. government continues to invest and help

you know, foreign governments through foreign aid and things that can slow sort of some of that, you know, equatorial region, food insecurity, growth that's going to drive international migration. And in the United States, that we come up with every policy we can. And it's really a mixture of, you know, whether it's local planning or limiting expansion of houses into, you know, forest, forest land or forest interfaces or planning for urban growth so that when people do move, you know, and they move to, you know, to the city of Atlanta or whatever, that they can, you know, that there's infrastructure for them. there's affordable housing and there's a fair equitable market and all that.

Let's talk about Atlanta for a second. You mentioned that in the article. You talk about one out of every 10 households making less than $10,000. You're talking about a driver with climate change that exacerbates every other one of our social ills, right? This is a social justice issue and how people get dealt with in this way, whether they get a fair deal or a raw deal. I mean, I know communities that I've been in where the landscape was polluted and they put a subdivision on top of it and they moved in the black community and lo behold 20 years later they all get cancer and then the settlement comes but they don't give them enough money to move this is the kind of thing that has to talk about we have to talk about basic principles of justice

talk a little bit about Atlanta as a tinderbox you say for social conflict and what do you think is going to have to happen in many of those areas that are those quote unquote tinder boxes yeah so I mean, the broad dynamic is that, you know, as migration in the United States increases, like everywhere, it will likely lead to more urbanization. So people are going to move to cities. We also know climate is already to the cities, yeah, probably reversing the kind of trend that we see now, you know, post-COVID. The demographers I talk to think that's sort of a temporary blip. But our long term, you know, over the last 50, 60 years, the United States has gravitated towards being increasingly urbanized and probably will continue. Maybe they're wrong, you know, but assuming they're right, or either way, you know, the other thing that we know about climate is that it's already and will continue to exacerbate all of the inequalities that we're familiar with. So, you know, the poorest parts of the United States, minority communities, black communities, indigenous communities on the Gulf coast are already the ones hardest hit. And when you see, you know, new climate effects,

whether it's in California or Houston or whatever, it's those same communities that have the the least resources, the least valued property, the poorest health conditions, the least access to doctors, and all those things that make them more vulnerable. And so those climate changes, just like COVID has affected minority communities worse, those climate changes are going to affect minority communities worse. And so Atlanta is, you know, an example of several things. It's one of, you know, the most divided cities in the country in terms of the gap between extreme wealth and extreme poverty. There's few cities in the United States that have deeper poverty than Atlanta, and yet that city is booming. Atlanta is also a place that's tried to adapt. It's begun to

adapt. And so it's become sort of a case study in this climate gentrification, which is this process that we're seeing, you know, in a lot of places, California, Louisiana, and elsewhere, where from a policy perspective, they made some, you know, laudable efforts to go in and do the right thing or to green parts of the city or increase infrastructure, make more green space and so forth. But without a sort of dynamic planning that considers the broad effect of those changes on all sorts of communities, the effect has been to make those new places more attractive to the wealthy and pushes the poor out. And so it, you know, it basically deepens the same kind of issues that we already have. And so what you see arising out of that conversation or rising

out of the Green New Deal is an acknowledgment that this becomes a really dynamic problem that needs to be, you know, attacked from multiple angles and not just from a let's lower emissions and plant trees and save water perspective. That it's more complicated than that. You're tuned in to staying home, your revolutionary guide to the Green New Deal. I'm Josh Fox. We'll be right back. You're tuned in to staying home, your revolutionary guide to the Green New Deal. I'm Josh Fox. My guest is a Bromless Garden. We're talking about climate migration. Let's talk about this term that you just brought up, which is a new one, I think, for a lot of us, although it's very clear and makes a lot of sense.

Climate gentrification, right? The process of climate safe areas being obtained and grabbed out of the hand of poorer and black and brown communities by gentrifiers, right? We've seen this in New Orleans, right? We see this liver along the river, right? The bywater, the Marini, the French Quarter, these areas, which didn't flood during Katrina, being ultra desirable and in many cases now turning over completely in their culture of those neighborhoods being decimated by gentrifiers coming from abroad because those are the areas that are safer for climate. What does that mean in some of the context that you just brought it up,

California and other places? Yeah. So a lot of my reporting, this came up again, you know, in Louisiana and Alabama, Mississippi, sort of the Gulf Coast regions, but not just in New Orleans, but in rural areas. When you see, you know, there's sea level rise concerns on the coast, North Carolina is another example, and it's going to, you know, it's beginning to push some of those coastal homeowners away from the coast, but they don't want to move to Atlanta. They want to sort of stay connected to their community, maybe keep their job, maybe they're willing to drive 35 minutes, you know, to their job. And so they move 40 miles inland and they, you know, they move into a little small town that was, you know, had been there for a hundred

years, but had existed, you know, at a fairly impoverished sort of, you know, status quo. And they move in, they fix up their houses, they dry, you know, they change the literally the color of that community. They change, you know, the economic status of that community and the people who were there can't afford to stay there. And so they move on. And that's a, that's a sort of climate gentrification, climate displacement. And, you know, you see it, you see similar, similar things happening, you know, in California, in the Bay Area, you know, where I live. You know, sea level rise is a big concern, but the, but the fire threat is another concern. And, um, You know, the mobility is a reflection of wealth to a certain degree, even in Guatemala.

I mean, but it's all relative, right? So the people who recognize the situation and have the means to move and put themselves in, you know, in, you know, in a safer environment or a better investment environment, inevitably to place, displace somebody who's already there and also leave others behind who don't have those means. and that's the dynamic of gentrification. So I've experienced this on a continental scale. When I was in Milwaukee, when I was on tour there, I was doing my solo performance. And after the show, the solo performance was all about climate change. All the activists came up to me after the show and said,

well, you know what? Milwaukee is one of the best places to live in the future. And you mentioned, I was sort of like, oh, geez. You know, you mentioned in your article, Detroit, Rochester, Buffalo, Milwaukee, seeing a renaissance. What does that mean? So it means two things. It certainly means it's a risk, Vancouver, already one of the most expensive cities in the world. But for cities that aren't, I mean, there's the risk of that gentrification if that's not addressed and planned for.

And I think there's an opportunity to plan for it. But what it means, you know, more generally is that there are cities that have, and those are the examples of them, you know, that have excess capacity, basically. Maybe it's because they passed their prime like Detroit, you know, or they were built for a larger population and they've seen out migration in the past. And so they have capacity for in migration now. They already have water infrastructure. They have, you know, other cities are behind in terms of improving infrastructure,

Atlanta or Philadelphia or Washington, D.C. I mean, you can never get enough money to build the things that. they think they need for the growth that's coming or happening, those other cities, the Rochester's and Buffaloes, I mean, they have that to spare and there's room for people to move in. So is there the equivalent of the global south? At TYT, we frequently talk about all the ways that big tech companies are taking control of our online lives, constantly monitoring us and storing and selling our data. But that doesn't mean we have to let them. It's possible to stay anonymous online and hide your data from the prying eyes of big tech. And one of the best ways

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x p r e s s vpn dot com slash t yt check it out today in america who are those people where are you seeing that and what policies need to be put in place to to address that issue yeah so i mean we crunched a whole lot of data uh in my reporting and we tried to overlap a couple so you could map them and just see what the United States looks like. And so, you know, to summarize, it's like you got fire risk and drought and extreme heat that basically stretches, you know, down the west coast and into the southwest and all across the southern part of the country and then up to the east coast. And so those threats range from extreme heat to sea level rise, but it's basically a U-shaped around the bottom half of the United States. And by far, I mean, the worst hit parts of the country will be, you know, the Gulf Coast and, you know, in the deep southeast and the deep south. They're going to face extreme heat, extreme humidity, sea level rise to some degree wildfire risk, crop failure, and so on.

And so, you know, the policies that address that range from, you know, policy support for things like forced retreat. I mean, the kind of programs you've heard about, you know, on the coastal coast of. Louisiana that are taking communities and relocating them, you know, out of the risk range of sea level rise to infrastructure expansion in cities that are likely to absorb a whole lot of new people so that there are, you know, good systems in place for people to live good lives when they arrive at wherever they go, like Atlanta, to just curbing climate. You know, those are, you know, those are the three, you know, when I talk to experts and really the biggest is like preparedness and planning and usually urban planning. But, you know, that policymakers have to begin

to wrap their heads around the idea of population change and, and be ready for that in those destination places. One of the books that I love kind of on this subject is A Paradise in Hell by Rebecca Solnit, which talks about how communities that are facing disaster, often, you know, you see total chaos and craziness, but often inside of those communities, there's a response that is about us all being brothers and sisters in a community and helping each other out and building things that are free resources, right? And that's a kind of paradise that she posits, right? This idea that in the wake of the great San Francisco fire

and there was a cafe that was open with all this free food and people came in and out and they socialized and it was all in a tent somewhere in the Presidio or whatever one. Have you experienced communities that are dealing with it in that way? That you walk into places, and it's not doom and gloom and division and strife and violence and anger and hatred and xenophobia but actually okay let's roll up our sleeves and get this done have you experienced any of that yeah you know i don't think i have deep experience in that personally but it's come up you know through some of my

reporting i think that dynamic which is very human and very understandable probably matches disasters more than this sort of slow onset change right like you know hardship makes us stronger and it draws your community together and you, you know, you find your, you know, your brotherly love and willingness to, you know, to help, you know, your neighbors and your friends. The slow onset change, I think, can have a similar effect. And I, you know, I'm thinking of Vermont. You know, Vermont has, is an example of a place that's planning for climate-driven growth and is trying to build a sense of community around that. It's encouraging people to move. It's, you know, it's planning for a long-term population increase and building a, you know, a sustainable

environment and sustainable systems and incentives for, you know, solar and renewable energy and all of those things. So taking a proactive stance towards, you know, towards the needs of the people that are going to be coming there, you know, is one kind of approach to that. But unfortunately, I mean, I think I more often see and I experience here, know, kind of every man for themselves kind of dynamic. And I hate to be dark about it, but what that is, I mean, that's a reflection of a lack of policy and support because sometimes, you know, a disaster, a Katrina, or an earthquake in San Francisco is a finite thing. It begins and it ends and you can see the damage that it did and you can respond to that. And you can

respond to it by, you know, locking arms with the community around you. But a bigger, slower onset kind of change without policy to support that, to define it, to slow it down or to present alternatives, it leaves people with sort of no choice, but to, it's not, we're not in a life or death situation here the way farmers in Guatemala are, but we still, but it could happen in the blink of a night. Not yet. Okay. Not yet, but yeah.

In the last minute we have, I asked this of a lot of people who are on the show from frontline communities, and since that definition now extends. to you. In this regard, what does justice look like? Green New Deal is so dedicated to the idea of justice. What does justice look like for communities that have to migrate? So I'd go back to what I learned about Atlanta. I mean, what activists in Atlanta told me is that the planning for disadvantaged communities has to happen at the same time that there's planning to build response and adaptation to climate change. And that if they don't happen at the same time, then it amplifies inequity.

So this idea of resilience being a term that's about defending the status quo, but we don't want the status quo because it's too divided. And what we need is kind of a new status quo that's more balanced and more equitable. And so we want to look to respond to climate change in a way that spreads its benefits and, you know, it's increased resiliency across communities that don't benefit from it now. Like taking the problem and making that the solution, right? In many ways, like looking at the Green New Deal is to the climate plan, but also it's a jobs plan.

And the idea of migration now as a justice plan. I love this. Abram, thank you so much for spending time with us today. Thanks for reporting is so brilliant. And I know that we're going to have further conversations on this because we're both working in the same area once again. It's great to see you again. Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, that's our show for today. You've been tuned in to staying home, your revolutionary guide to the Green New Deal. I'm Josh Fox. We'll see you tomorrow. So, man, I can't, when I saw this, like, holy crap, you know, man, we're a parallel exist, but it's not so surprising. at apple.com slash t yt. I'm your host, Shank Huger, and I'll see you soon.