Saturday, September 19, 2020
RSN: Mort Rosenblum | We Can't Breathe
19 September 20
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RSN: Mort Rosenblum | We Can't Breathe
Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News
Rosenblum writes: "A gorgeous red-orange full moon hung over the harbor in the darkening twilight, just what beach lovers hope for after a business-as-usual summer day in paradise. But it was afternoon; that moon was the sun."
The world we knew is over. Who would have thought you’d need a Butch Cassidy bandanna to approach a bank teller? Or that we exceptional Americans are refused entry in all but a few score of countries we’d rather not visit anyway.
And if we get it wrong in November, the consequences for America and the rest of a planet it once helped keep on course are beyond imagining. World Bank reports now use a new abbreviation: “FCV” for fragility, conflict, and violence.
I’ve taken a break from the Mort Report to kick into a higher gear. A new book of past dispatches and fresh reporting — /Saving Our World From Trump/ — is out this week. Its focus is vital: What we don’t know is killing us.
As I write, unprecedented wildfires across California have burned an area larger than Connecticut. Nearly two million acres are ablaze in Oregon and Washington. In the Southeast, a deadly hurricane rages from Florida toward Louisiana.
In Oceanside, north of San Diego, no one yet needs N95 masks for smoke, just the normal kind for a deadly pandemic that spreads unchecked despite assurances from a president who says, preposterously, a vaccine will save us before November 3rd.
It was plain in 2016 that an unhinged, narcissistic sociopath portended calamity. A week before Donald Trump’s inauguration, I titled a piece, “This Is a Coup d’Etat, Plain and Simple.” But I never expected so many Americans would cheer him on.
In countless coups I’ve covered since 1967, armed forces crushed resistance, muzzling the press and often leaving streets awash in blood. If Trump succeeds, we will have let our democracy die because of simple apathy and ignorance.
Trump has inured America to so many lies and idiocies that much of the country has lost its grip on reality. Few stop to realize that Earth is a closed ecosystem, and borders are only lines on a map. Rather than work with allies to confront crises, Trump and his Republican enablers chop holes in a sinking ship.
Trump, finally moved to visit California, blamed state officials for not raking underbrush. “It will cool down, you just watch,” he said. When told that science disagreed, he echoed his line on the virus. “I don’t think science knows, actually.”
In fact, 57 percent of California lands are federal. The U.S. Forest Service was set up after wildfires in 1910. Only 3 percent is state land. Lightning ignites drought-stricken forests, which burn across treetops. But Democrats run California.
Bob Woodward erased any doubt that Trump misread Covid-19. He knew in January it was deadly but decided not to frighten people (or spook the markets). Looking back, he told Woodward his non-action was perfect: “Nothing more could have been done.”
Law books define “depraved-heartmurder” as willful negligence, a capital offense in some states. Trump’s victims now approach 200,000. Yet he still masks reality, forcing the CDC to hide data and pushing the FDA to approve quackery.
But even many who follow real news miss the global impact of Trump’s foreign policy based on appealing to campaign donors and his cult – and his desperate need for scapegoats to cover up his own calamitous mistakes.
Wolf Blitzer at CNN, who knows the story well, let Jared Kushner gush about his historic Middle East diplomacy during a self-congratulatory orgy at the White House. Bahrain joined the United Arab Emirates in recognizing Israel.
Blitzer noted that the billions Trump claims America gave Tehran were Iranian assets unfrozen in the deal with Europe, Russia, and China along with the United States. Still, Kushner all but accepted in advance a Nobel Peace Prize for his father-in-law.
In 2018, the Nobel committee rejected two nominations for Trump as fake. This time, a far-right Norwegian legislator added Trump’s name to more than 300 hopefuls on the list. That’s a long shot.
Diplomatic ties are an important step, but this is a transaction, hardly peace in the Middle East. The UAE expects F35 stealth fighters to use against Iran, raising heat in the region. That endangers Israel’s air superiority should things turn ugly.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardliners solidify their position with only an undefined promise to suspend annexation of land attributed to Palestine. Growing anti-Semitism and Iran-backed terrorism feed on perceived injustice to Palestinians.
In a final question, Blitzer tore into Kushner on a subject closer to home. Trump had retweeted a blatantly false accusation that Joe Biden was a pedophile.
Russia looms larger than ever. A bipartisan Congressional report, nearly 1,000 pages and three years in the making, linked Trump’s campaign managers to Russia. Trump, not specifically implicated, dismissed it as yet another hoax.
Richard Clarke, national security coordinator for Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, warns that Russia is working hard to get Trump reelected so it can expand its control in Europe while spreading its power in the Middle East and beyond.
“What Vladimir Putin seeks is to rip the social and political fabric of America, to create chaos, to sow public distrust in the government and to set us at each other’s throats,” he wrote in the New York /Daily News/.
NATO should be a solid defense against Putin’s ambitions, but Trump has turned friends into foes. Angela Merkel, now the effective leader of the alliance, is fending off neo-Nazis at home and Russia to the east. Trump calls her stupid.
The big worry is China, which Trump in a few months’ time turned into an implacable foe when he needed someone to blame for his Covid-19 folly. Xi Jinping is biding time in hopes of regime change in Washington.
China and America need each other. They have to lead global efforts against climate chaos, pandemics and trade barriers. That demands the quiet diplomacy Biden has mastered since the 1990s on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
We badly need eyes and ears in China. The global health experts Trump recalled would have spotted a novel coronavirus early from contacts in Wuhan. Until recently, U.S. newspapers, broadcasters, and agencies staffed Beijing bureaus.
Because of Trump’s bullying, Xi has banned American reporters as he subsumes Hong Kong, menaces Taiwan, militarizes sea lanes, and hurries to reshape the world in his authoritarian image. Vaccine research is no longer shared.
This sampling does not begin to cover it. Given what our planet now faces, if nations don’t work together, it will all be over sooner than most of us realize.
But even here in California, where people fled for their lives from firestorms and breathing the air in some cities was more toxic than inhaling 20 packs of Camels a day, the focus was on the present, not the future.
Media Matters examined TV coverage of the fires over the Labor Day weekend; 15 percent of reports mentioned climate change. During all of August, only 4 percent of broadcast segments on the fires touched on the larger crisis.
And the wider world seems to have vanished in the smoke. Smart people who excel at technology and can tell you the jockstrap size of every player in professional basketball know little about global crises that shape their daily lives.
Over four days of roaming sizable Oceanside, I found no trace of a newspaper, not even a discarded chunk of the /Los Angeles Times/. But I found shops full of beach gear, souvenir tchotchkes, t-shirts and such. Most of it was made in China.
Conversations about threats an ocean away routinely drifted to the beach at close hand. But new reports from Antarctica say two enormous glaciers are breaking free. When warmer air and water melt them, the seas will rise by about 10 feet.
In 1998, Mike Davis, a MacArthur Fellow historian and a fine California writer, published a book titled Ecology of Fear. It imagined the impact of manmade disasters on Los Angeles. Today we are beyond imagining. Just smell the air.
Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
RSN: Jill Lepore | Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Great Equalizer
19 September 20
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19 September 20
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Jill Lepore | Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Great Equalizer
Jill Lepore, The New Yorker
Lepore writes: "Ruth Bader Ginsburg, scholar, lawyer, judge, and Justice, died on Friday at the age of eighty-seven. Born the year Eleanor Roosevelt became First Lady, Ginsburg bore witness to, argued for, and helped to constitutionalize the most hard-fought and least-appreciated revolution in modern American history: the emancipation of women."
The change Ginsburg ushered into American politics began a half century ago, and reckoning with its magnitude requires measuring the distance between now and then. At the time, only three in a hundred legal professionals and fewer than two hundred of the nation’s ten thousand judges were women. In 1971, as Richard Nixon prepared to make two appointments to the Supreme Court, he faced a dilemma. Yet another Southerner he’d tapped had been nixed for an opposition to desegregation, so Nixon decided to look for someone who was, preferably, not a racist. He considered naming a woman. “I’m not for women, frankly, in any job,” he told his aides, in a little fit of hysterics. “Thank God we don’t have any in the Cabinet.” He didn’t think women should be educated, or “ever be allowed to vote, even.” But, given the momentum of the women’s-rights movement, he conceded the political necessity of naming a woman to the bench: it might gain him a small but crucial number of votes in the upcoming election. “It’s like the Negro vote,” he said. “It’s a hell of a thing.” Then Chief Justice Warren Burger, in a similar huff, told Nixon that, if he were to nominate a woman, he’d resign. In the end, Nixon named Lewis Powell.
While all these men were dithering, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was working for the A.C.L.U., writing the brief for a case set to go before the Court, Reed v. Reed. Decided on November 22, 1971, weeks after Powell’s confirmation hearings, Reed v. Reed upended a century of American jurisprudence and the entirety of political thought going back to the beginning of the Republic. Before 1971, as Ginsburg would later write, “Neither legislators nor judges regarded gender lines as ‘back of the bus’ regulations. Rather, these rules were said to place women on a pedestal.” Thomas Jefferson had taken the trouble to explain that women had no part in the Framers’ understanding of the government devised by the Constitution. “Were our state a pure democracy,” he wrote, “there would yet be excluded from their deliberations . . . women; who, to prevent deprivation of morals, and ambiguity of issues, could not mix promiscuously in the public gatherings of men.” Women were to be excluded for their own protection. The early women’s-rights movement, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, had not defeated that argument, and the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, did not explicitly—or implicitly, according to the Court—bar discrimination on the basis of sex. In 1873, ruling on a case in which Myra Bradwell had sued the state of Illinois for denying her the right to practice law, one Supreme Court Justice explained his logic this way: “The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.” That, as Ginsburg liked to say, was a cage, pretending to be a pedestal.
Reed v. Reed, in 1971, involved an Idaho statute that gave preference to men—“males must be preferred to females”—in executing estates. The Court, following Ginsburg’s brief, ruled for the first time that discrimination on the basis of sex violated the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Writing for the majority, Burger used language that had been introduced by Ginsburg: “To give a mandatory preference to members of either sex over members of the other, merely to accomplish the elimination of hearings on the merits, is to make the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; and whatever may be said as to the positive values of avoiding intrafamily controversy, the choice in this context may not lawfully be mandated solely on the basis of sex.” Just a few years later, Ginsburg was arguing her own cases before the Court, and the Chief Justice was stumbling over how to address her. “Mrs. Bader? Mrs. Ginsburg?”
Ruth Bader was born in Brooklyn in 1933 and went to Cornell, where she met Martin Ginsburg. They married and enrolled at Harvard Law School, which had only just begun admitting women. Ginsburg raised their baby, and also cared for Marty, who was diagnosed with cancer, and then she followed him to New York, finishing her law degree at Columbia. She faced discrimination on the basis of sex at every stage of her career. Tied for first in her class at Columbia, she was unable to get a job practicing law at a New York firm. But, far from being defeated by discrimination, she decided to study it. She began teaching at Rutgers in 1963; in 1969, the year her second child entered nursery school, she was promoted to full professor, and began volunteering for the A.C.L.U., where she later headed the Women’s Rights Project.
In 1972, just two months after the Court handed down its ruling in Reed v. Reed, Ginsburg became the first woman to hold a full professorship at Columbia. “The only confining thing for me is time,” she told the New York Times. “I’m not going to curtail my activities in any way to please them.” While teaching at Columbia, Ginsburg argued six cases before the Court, and won four. As Jeffrey Toobin reported in a Profile of Ginsburg, she took a crucial tip from the woman who typed her briefs. “I was doing all these sex-discrimination cases, and my secretary said, ‘I look at these pages and all I see is sex, sex, sex. The judges are men, and when they read that they’re not going to be thinking about what you want them to think about,’ ” Ginsburg said. She decided to rename this type of complaint “gender discrimination.”
Ginsburg sometimes said that tackling gender discrimination, case by case, was like “knitting a sweater,” a phrase perhaps meant to disarm her opponents. The actual sweater should have been a constitutional amendment. Ginsburg advocated, vehemently, for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, which had been passed by Congress in 1972; she argued that it looked “toward a legal system in which each person will be judged on individual merit and not on the basis of an unalterable trait of birth.” And she regretted the Court’s logic in Roe v. Wade, in 1973, a case decided not on an equal-rights argument but on a privacy one. (As I pointed out in a 2018 essay, when asked by the A.C.L.U. to take on the defense of Roe, Ginsburg declined.) In 1980, when Jimmy Carter nominated Ginsburg to the D.C. Circuit Court, an aide in Strom Thurmond’s office, at her confirmation hearings, called her a “one-issue woman.” Thurmond was the only member of the committee to vote against her.
Ginsburg’s position on Roe earned her the ire of many feminists who failed to support her nomination to the Supreme Court, in 1993. “My approach, I believe, is neither liberal nor conservative,” she told the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, chaired by Joe Biden. That her nomination had been uncontroversial is entirely a myth, as is the idea that her opinions, after her confirmation, were caustic and biting, the “Ginsburns” of her character on “Saturday Night Live.” Ginsburg believed in the body of the Court, in collegiality of argument, and in moderation of expression. She was famously, even maddeningly, careful. She took so much time thinking about what people said to her, and choosing her own words, Toobin reported, that “her clerks came up with what they call the two-Mississippi rule: after speaking, wait two beats before you say anything else.”
Her most significant opinions were those she wrote for the majority, including in U.S. v. Virginia, a 1996 case in which the Court ruled that the Virginia Military Institute’s refusal to enroll female students violated the equal-protection clause. Ginsburg’s opinion served as a history lesson, partly for the public and partly for her fellow-Justices. “Through a century plus three decades and more, women did not count among voters composing ‘We the People,’ ” she wrote. “Not until 1920 did women gain a constitutional right to the franchise. And for a half century thereafter, it remained the prevailing doctrine that government, both federal and state, could withhold from women opportunities accorded men so long as any ‘basis in reason’ could be conceived for the discrimination.” The turning point, she observed, had come in Reed v. Reed: “In 1971, for the first time in our Nation’s history, this Court ruled in favor of a woman who complained that her State had denied her the equal protection of its laws.”
Of course, the real turning point had come when Ginsburg joined the bench. For most of Ginsburg’s career, the Court had been fairly moderate. It was not until the nineteen-eighties, when Reagan appointed Antonin Scalia, that modern conservatives began to join the Court. During Ginsburg’s tenure, George W. Bush appointed Justices Roberts and Alito, and Trump appointed Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. As the Court shifted, Ginsburg was cast as its Great Dissenter, though the role went largely against her disposition. Ginsburg cherished honest disagreement, firmly expressed, but she disliked petty, scathing opinions. In “Speaking in a Judicial Voice,” a lecture she delivered in 1992, the year before she joined the Court, she condemned “the immoderate tone of statements diverging from the positions of the court’s majority.” “The most effective dissent,” she wrote, “spells out differences without jeopardizing collegiality or public respect for and confidence in the judiciary.”
She stood by that, even as she found herself writing more and more separate opinions, a turn that began with Bush v. Gore (2000), in which she objected to the majority’s decision to halt the recount in Florida. “The Court’s conclusion that a constitutionally adequate recount is impractical is a prophecy the Court’s own judgment will not allow to be tested,” she wrote. “Such an untested prophecy should not decide the Presidency of the United States.” At the conclusion of that opinion, she allowed a rare breach of decorum, writing not “Respectfully, I dissent,” but, with a quiet fury, “I dissent.”
Ginsburg’s dissents carried a particular power, not only rhetorically but politically. On the Roberts Court, she became the leader of the liberal wing, and, in 2007, in a case involving Lilly Ledbetter, a supervisor for Goodyear Tires, she wrote a dissent objecting to the majority’s denial of an argument about sex discrimination in employment. That opinion was so compelling that it led to the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, signed by Barack Obama in 2009. And perhaps Ginsburg’s most resonant dissent, in light of this year’s election, is the one she wrote in Shelby County v. Holder, in 2013, in which the majority all but struck down the 1965 Voting Rights Act, on the basis of the bizarre argument that it (and one of its features, known as “preclearance”) had effectively solved voter suppression for posterity. “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes,” Ginsburg wrote, “is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” When she read the dissent aloud in Court, as Jane Sherron De Hart observed in a recent biography, she added a conclusion that was not in the written version. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” she said, quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. But it only bends that way, she went on, “if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion.” Much that Ginsburg predicted about the stripping away of voting rights has come to pass.
During Ginsburg’s final two decades on the court, she fought colon cancer (first diagnosed in 1999), pancreatic cancer (2009), underwent heart surgery (2014), suffered injuries from falls (2012 and 2018), underwent surgery for malignancies on her left lung (2018), and had radiation when the pancreatic cancer returned (2019). She seldom missed a day in court. She also regrettably, and presumably thinking Hillary Clinton would defeat Trump in 2016, resisted calls to retire during Obama’s second term, when he could have appointed a liberal Justice as her successor.
The pleasure Ginsburg took in her own celebrity, as she became a feminist icon, is understandable, if also troubling. Historically, the Court is meant to be insulated from public opinion, which also requires of the Justices that they lead largely private lives. Ginsburg was by no means the first to flout this convention, but she flouted it considerably, appearing on late-night television shows and becoming the subject of documentaries, feature films, and books for children. She spoke, in the last years of her life, to crowds numbering in the tens of thousands. And she came to regret the changes to the Court itself, the way hyperpolarization had transformed the nomination and confirmation process. “I wish I could wave a magic wand and have it go back to the way it was,” she said in 2018, after the Kavanaugh hearings.
There is no magic wand, and there is no going back. The Supreme Court, like much of the rest of the federal government, is at risk of becoming an instrument of the executive instead of a check against it. Preserving the Court’s independence will require courage and conviction of Ginsburgian force. And there are changes, too, that most of us would never want undone. A century after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s pioneering career as a scholar, advocate, and judge stands as a monument to the power of dissent. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. It took centuries, and tens of millions of women, to dismantle that nonsense. And no single one of them was more important than Ginsburg, warm-hearted, razor-sharp, and dauntless.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her granddaughter Clara Spera. (photo: Magnolia Pictures)
RBG's Dying Words: "My Most Fervent Wish Is That I Not Be Replaced Until a New President Is Installed"
Jeremy Stahl, Slate
Stahl writes: "On Friday, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died of complications from cancer at the age of 87. Journalists, commentators, former colleagues, politicians, and friends will have much to say about her extraordinary career and legacy in the days ahead."
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People stand in front of the U.S. Supreme Court following the death of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in Washington, D.C., September 18, 2020. (photo: Al Drago/Reuters)
Democrats Shatter Donation Records in the Hours After Ginsburg's Death
Shane Goldmacher, The New York Times
Goldmacher writes: "Democratic donors gave more money online in the 9 p.m. hour after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died - $6.2 million - than in any other single hour since ActBlue, the donation-processing site, was launched 16 years ago."
Turner was fatally shot in 2019 in the parking lot of her apartment complex. (photo: ABC)
Texas Police Officer Charged in Death of Pamela Turner, a Black Woman Whose Killing Was Captured on Video
Crystal Hill, Yahoo News
Hill writes: "A Texas police officer was indicted this week in the death of a Black woman who was killed outside her apartment more than a year ago, an incident that drew national attention and left the victim's family demanding answers."
Texas police officer was indicted this week in the death of a Black woman who was killed outside her apartment more than a year ago, an incident that drew national attention and left the victim’s family demanding answers.
A Harris County grand jury returned an indictment on Monday charging Baytown Police Officer Juan Delacruz with aggravated assault by a public servant in the death of 44-year-old Pamela Turner.
The decision comes after a yearlong campaign by Turner’s family members and supporters for justice in the case.
“The news that my family received on Monday is the exact reason why we have not stopped calling my mother's name for the past 16 months,” Turner’s daughter, Chelsea Rubin, said at a virtual press conference Thursday. “I prayed for this very moment numerous times. And I prayed that my mother's death would not be in vain and that she gets the justice that she deserves.”
Turner was killed on May 13, 2019, as Officer Delacruz tried to arrest her at the Brixton Apartments in Baytown, a city about 30 miles west of Houston. A video clip that partially captured the incident showed what appeared be a verbal confrontation between Turner and the officer, which then escalated into a scuffle.
In the video, posted by local media outlet KHOU, Turner is shown arguing with the officer. “I’m walking. I’m actually walking to my house,” she said, adding, “You’re actually harassing me.” The officer then attempted to subdue her and appeared to discharge a stun gun.
The physical altercation between the two continued until Turner was brought to the ground, at which point she again told Delacruz, “You’re actually harassing me. Why? Why?”
As Delacruz again fired his stun gun, Turner told him, “I’m pregnant.” Moments later, five shots are heard being fired from Delacruz’s gun.
Police said Turner was not pregnant, the Houston Chronicle reported.
Initially police alleged that Turner grabbed Delacruz’s stun gun and used it on him. In May, however, Houston Public Media reported that the model Delacruz used, an X26P, can't fire a second set of darts, according to documents it obtained from the city.
It’s accurate that the model can’t fire darts a second time, Delacruz’s attorney, Gregory Cagle, told Yahoo News on Thursday. But according to the manufacturer’s website, it can still be used to inflict pain in “contact” mode, providing “added insurance in those close encounters.”
“It’s still in play for a full incapacitation,” Cagle said.
Cagle, a former police officer who now represents law enforcement officers in Texas, claims that during the scuffle, Turner grabbed the stun gun and shocked Delacruz.
“There’s no other reasonable defense a police officer has to the Taser.” According to officers’ training, Cagle said, “if they lose their Taser, the only option they have is a firearm. There [are] no other options. You have to protect yourself from being incapacitated by the Taser. And if you’re incapacitated, then you lose control of your firearm.”
An attorney for Turner’s family, Devon Jacob, said the video showed that Turner, whom he describes as mentally ill, appeared to be trying to get away from Delacruz.
“No action of Ms. Turner’s was to go after the officer,” Jacob said at a press conference on Thursday. “It was always in an effort to get away from him. So he fires these five bullets at this female laying on the ground in front of him. Looking up. Trying to get help. Trying to get away from the person who is causing her harm, and he fires bullets into her.”
Cagle said his client was reacting to a situation that escalated quickly.
On Monday, Baytown Police said that a “series of events unfolded which led to Officer Delacruz discharging his duty weapon, resulting in Ms. Turner’s death.”
An investigation into the shooting was done by the Texas Rangers, police said, which turned the findings over to the district attorney’s office for review. The office then presented those findings to a grand jury.
A spokesperson for the police department told the New York Times on Monday that Delacruz remains employed with the department. Yahoo News has reached out to the Baytown Police Department for comment, but had not heard back by the time of publication.
Benjamin Crump, another attorney representing the Turner family, said the legal team is satisfied with the severity of the charge, which is a first-degree felony that carries five years to life in prison.
“We applaud and thank [District Attorney] Kim Ogg and the Harris County District Attorney’s Office,” Crump said. “And the grand jury for sending a clear message that Black lives matter and Black women’s lives matter too.”
The indictment comes the same week that the family of Breonna Taylor, another Black woman killed by police, reached a $12 million settlement with the city of Louisville, Ky. Taylor’s family and supporters have called on the Kentucky attorney general to file criminal charges in her death.
“I continue to try to use the national spotlight to say, ‘I know we’re talking about Breonna Taylor. I know we’re talking about George Floyd. But do not forget how Pamela Turner was executed,’” Crump said.
Federal immigration officials have long transported detainees across America by air. (photo: CNN)
Inside ICE's Pattern of Medical Neglect for Immigrants Flown on Its Planes
Angelika Albaladejo, Capital & Main
Albaladejo writes: "Heart attacks, miscarriages, and even a death have all occurred on Immigration and Customs Enforcement flights, investigation finds."
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'Massacres have risen 30 percent during the first two years of Iván Duque's presidency.' (photo: Contagio Radio)
Massacres in Colombia Lay Bare Next Phase of the Conflict
Thomas Power, NACLA
Power writes: "In recent weeks, seemingly every day there is news of another massacre in Colombia. On August 11, five teens were slayed in Cali, and five days later eight more youth were killed in Nariño."
Under President Duque, massacres are on the rise, especially in areas where FARC-EP guerrillas previously controlled territory.
n recent weeks, seemingly every day there is news of another massacre in Colombia. On August 11, five teens were slayed in Cali, and five days later eight more youth were killed in Nariño. The following week, there were massacres in Arauca, Cauca, Antioquia, and another in Nariño. Then on September 7, there were three massacres in 24 hours, two in Antioquia and one in Bolívar a mere two days after a massacre left three dead in Cauca. On September 9, a video circulated social media showing police in Bogotá killing Javier Ordóñez. Twelve more died in the ensuing protests.
Massacres have risen 30 percent during the first two years of Iván Duque’s presidency. Through August 25, Colombian think thank Instituto de Estudios para el Desarrollo y la Paz (Institute for the Study of Development and Peace, Indepaz) registered 55 massacres this year. The killings coincide with areas where social leaders have been murdered in recent years, and where the now demobilized FARC-EP guerrillas previously controlled territory. While the massacres follow past patterns of violence, they also indicate new dynamics, where the actors and interests behind attacks are not always clear-cut.
The regions with the most massacres this year have been Antioquia with 12, followed by Cauca and Nariño on the Pacific coast with seven each, and Catatumbo on the Venezuelan border and Putumayo on the Ecuadorian border with four each.
“There is an interest to control these areas: Control of strategic corridors, of places for political control, and of places where there is conflict between armed groups,” says Abilio Peña, a human rights defender based in Bogotá who works with the NGO Ansur, which gives self-protection workshops to grassroots communities .
“It’s obviously systematic. It isn’t coincidental that there have been more than 40 massacres this year. There is a pattern,” says Peña.
Leonardo González, author of the Indepaz report, pointed out the conflict between armed groups to control territory is linked the failure to implement the 2016 Peace Accords with the FARC-EP.
“There are two phenomena. One is the homicides of social leaders, and the other is the massacres,” says González. “These phenomena began to appear in 2016, and with a sharp increase more recently. We could say this has been a response by armed groups to impose order in areas vacated by the FARC.”
Post-Peace Accords, Cycle of Past Violence Continue
In August, the number of social leaders assassinated since the 2016 Peace Accords passed 1,000. There is nearly an identical geographical correlation between departments with the highest number of assassinations of social leaders and the highest number of massacres. In Cauca, 240 social leaders have been killed, 133 in Antioquia, 91 in Nariño, 75 in Valle del Cauca, and 61 in Putumayo.
The apparent deepening of the conflict should not be viewed in isolation but, instead, as connected to cycles of past violence. “There have been patterns throughout history. During the times of President Turbay, torture was more frequent. During the time of Samper and Uribe, there were more forced displacement,” Peña says. “Today, they have combined selective assassinations with massacres as strategies of social control. As a way to exercise dominance in certain areas. And, obviously, there are economic and political interests in these areas.”
Willian Aljure can also speak to the connection between today’s violence and the past. He lives in the municipality of Mapiripán, on Colombia’s eastern plains, a disputed territory. He is the president of a network of Indigenous, Afro-Colombian, and campesino communities called Comunidades Construyendo Paz en Colombia (Communities Constructing Peace in Colombia, Conpazcol). Aljure has lost parents and grandparents to the Colombian conflict, and his land is currently occupied by the palm oil company Polygrow.
“This isn’t new, at least, speaking from the experience of the Aljure family. My grandfather had signed peace accords with the government that in the end weren’t upheld,” he says.
The Colombian government has denied that there is conflict. As if lifted straight from the Principles of Newspeak, President Duque described the recent wave of massacres as “collective homicide.” The Colombian Defense Minister blamed drug trafficking, enraging victims and using a common trope for the state to avoid responsibility for its own inaction to prevent these tragedies.
The Colombian High Commissioner of Peace, Miguel Ceballos, went further, denying that there were any massacres at all, and attributing the deaths to disputes between drug-traffickers, except for the assassination of the eight youths in Nariño.
Massacres as a Form of Social Control
Massacres are not collateral damage as armed actors dispute territory. They are an intentional strategy to consolidate social control.
Massacres are intended to send messages to those who live. “If they want to have territorial control, they need to have social control,” says González of Indepaz “For example, illegal armed groups are massacring people for having violated the quarantine. So, it’s a way to tell the population ‘we are the ones who are in charge here.’ Massacres are a message to the population.”
Aljure agrees. “They are different contexts, but in the end it’s the same story. And the story is to kill at all costs to send a message. In Nariño, they were adolescents having a good time, and look at what happened… …They aren’t killing old men anymore, just look at the quantity of children they have killed the past few weeks,” he says. By killing children, those behind the massacres are trying to intimidate any resistance that might oppose their domination.
Another contrast between the current moment and the past is the clandestine nature of the modus operandi of the armed groups carrying out the violence. For example, in 2017, 62 percent of murders of social leaders were perpetrated by an unknown assailant or assassin.
“It isn’t like an armed group is arriving to an area, threatening people, and then carrying out a massacre,” González says. “It’s a new modality because before you knew the identity of the armed group and you knew what this group was trying to accomplish. Today, we don’t know who is moving the chess pieces of war, who is winning and who is losing.”
Violence Linked to Economic Interests and Paramilitaries
Enrique Chimonja is a human rights defender with Fellowship of Reconciliation and Conpazcol, and a victim of the armed conflict who lives in the department of Huila. He adds that in addition to the clandestine nature of today’s illegal armed groups, the political goals of these organizations have been subordinated to economic aims.
Chimonja says that the economic interests go beyond drug-trafficking. “The model has no other option but to resort to what it has always done,” Chimonja says “And that is to resort to violence and criminality. It has to take advantage of the state’s weakness to displace and continue consolidating its economic project of accumulation without limits that characterizes the neoliberal model.”
Armed groups aim not only to control drug-trafficking corridors but the resources in these disputed regions. Extractive economic projects exist in many of the municipalities where there have been massacres. For example, in El Tambo, Cauca, where six were killed on August 21, there are solicitations for coal mining licenses. In Samaniego, Nariño, where two massacres happened this year including the eight youth killed in on August 15, there was a meeting between the mayor and the National Mining Agency in 2017 to explore the extraction of gold and other minerals. Arauca, where five where killed on August 21, has extensive oil interests. The Canadian company Colombian Crest Gold Corp owns gold mining titles in the municipality of Venecia, Antioquia where three were killed on August 23, and the municipality of Andés, Antioquia, where three were killed on August 28, has a dozen mining concessions in gold, coal, and other minerals with solicitudes for dozens more. In the region of Catatumbo, where four massacres have happened this year, there are agro-industrial and mining interests at stake.
Aside from achieving territorial control and controlling populations, Aljure refers to a third factor which he was almost reluctant to admit. The current political context of Colombia includes the recent order by the Supreme Court to put the former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez on house arrest.
Peña says that while there is no direct relation between the order to arrest Uribe and the massacres, there are correlations. He says that since the days of Pablo Escobar, a sort of mafia-drug trafficking-landowning class had been rising in power, peaking with the arrival of Uribe to the presidency in 2002. “And now, we are in a moment where this power is in decline, and the capture of Uribe is a symbol of this. However, this doesn’t mean the power will end soon,” Peña says.
“The spirit, the mentality of paramilitarism has been conceived by the ex-president Uribe. With the Convivir, with the massacres, with the parapolitica, are all connected to the ex-president Uribe. And this continues intact. This hasn’t changed,” Peña says. The Convivir was a legal mechanism created in the 1990s to allow for private citizens to defend themselves against the guerrillas, but became a nexus for coordination between paramilitaries, militaries, and private companies. While governor of Antioquia, Uribe advocated for the use of Convivir throughout the department. The “parapolitica” scandal involved over one hundred Colombian lawmakers and politicians under investigation for relationships with paramilitary groups. Recently released cables show that during the Bush Administration, the U.S. Defense Departments strongly suspected Uribe of having ties to paramilitary groups.
Peña also pointed out the U.S. administration’s “unconditional support” for Uribe. Vice President Mike Pence tweeted his support for the former president.
There has been fear growing in the territories of Colombia. Aljure, as president of Conpazcol, is concerned about community of the Naya River which received news of a possible massacre on August 23. This Afro-descendent community on the Pacific Coast lives in a disputed region, where three people disappeared in 2018.
Aljure says that more international attention to the massacres is needed. “Not just to talk about what already happened, but to avoid what may happen.”
Residents of Azusa watching the Ranch 2 Fire. (photo: Meridith Kohut/NYT)
Climate Change Will Force a New American Migration
Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica
Lustgarten writes: "Wildfires rage in the West. Hurricanes batter the East. Droughts and floods wreak damage throughout the nation. Life has become increasingly untenable in the hardest-hit areas, but if the people there move, where will everyone go?"
ugust besieged California with a heat unseen in generations. A surge in air conditioning broke the state’s electrical grid, leaving a population already ravaged by the coronavirus to work remotely by the dim light of their cellphones. By midmonth, the state had recorded possibly the hottest temperature ever measured on earth — 130 degrees in Death Valley — and an otherworldly storm of lightning had cracked open the sky. From Santa Cruz to Lake Tahoe, thousands of bolts of electricity exploded down onto withered grasslands and forests, some of them already hollowed out by climate-driven infestations of beetles and kiln-dried by the worst five-year drought on record. Soon, California was on fire.
Over the next two weeks, 900 blazes incinerated six times as much land as all the state’s 2019 wildfires combined, forcing 100,000 people from their homes. Three of the largest fires in history burned simultaneously in a ring around the San Francisco Bay Area. Another fire burned just 12 miles from my home in Marin County. I watched as towering plumes of smoke billowed from distant hills in all directions and air tankers crisscrossed the skies. Like many Californians, I spent those weeks worrying about what might happen next, wondering how long it would be before an inferno of 60-foot flames swept up the steep, grassy hillside on its way toward my own house, rehearsing in my mind what my family would do to escape.
But I also had a longer-term question, about what would happen once this unprecedented fire season ended. Was it finally time to leave for good?
I had an unusual perspective on the matter. For two years, I have been studying how climate change will influence global migration. My sense was that of all the devastating consequences of a warming planet — changing landscapes, pandemics, mass extinctions — the potential movement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees across the planet stands to be among the most important. I traveled across four countries to witness how rising temperatures were driving climate refugees away from some of the poorest and hottest parts of the world. I had also helped create an enormous computer simulation to analyze how global demographics might shift, and now I was working on a data-mapping project about migration here in the United States.
So it was with some sense of recognition that I faced the fires these last few weeks. In recent years, summer has brought a season of fear to California, with ever-worsening wildfires closing in. But this year felt different. The hopelessness of the pattern was now clear, and the pandemic had already uprooted so many Americans. Relocation no longer seemed like such a distant prospect. Like the subjects of my reporting, climate change had found me, its indiscriminate forces erasing all semblance of normalcy. Suddenly I had to ask myself the very question I’d been asking others: Was it time to move?
I am far from the only American facing such questions. This summer has seen more fires, more heat, more storms — all of it making life increasingly untenable in larger areas of the nation. Already, droughts regularly threaten food crops across the West, while destructive floods inundate towns and fields from the Dakotas to Maryland, collapsing dams in Michigan and raising the shorelines of the Great Lakes. Rising seas and increasingly violent hurricanes are making thousands of miles of American shoreline nearly uninhabitable. As California burned, Hurricane Laura pounded the Louisiana coast with 150-mile-an-hour winds, killing at least 25 people; it was the 12th named storm to form by that point in 2020, another record. Phoenix, meanwhile, endured 53 days of 110-degree heat — 20 more days than the previous record.
For years, Americans have avoided confronting these changes in their own backyards. The decisions we make about where to live are distorted not just by politics that play down climate risks, but also by expensive subsidies and incentives aimed at defying nature. In much of the developing world, vulnerable people will attempt to flee the emerging perils of global warming, seeking cooler temperatures, more fresh water and safety. But here in the United States, people have largely gravitated toward environmental danger, building along coastlines from New Jersey to Florida and settling across the cloudless deserts of the Southwest.
I wanted to know if this was beginning to change. Might Americans finally be waking up to how climate is about to transform their lives? And if so — if a great domestic relocation might be in the offing — was it possible to project where we might go? To answer these questions, I interviewed more than four dozen experts: economists and demographers, climate scientists and insurance executives, architects and urban planners, and ProPublica mapped out the danger zones that will close in on Americans over the next 30 years. The maps for the first time combined exclusive climate data from the Rhodium Group, an independent data-analytics firm; wildfire projections modeled by United States Forest Service researchers and others; and data about America’s shifting climate niches, an evolution of work first published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last spring. (A detailed analysis of the maps is available here.)
What I found was a nation on the cusp of a great transformation. Across the United States, some 162 million people — nearly 1 in 2 — will most likely experience a decline in the quality of their environment, namely more heat and less water. For 93 million of them, the changes could be particularly severe, and by 2070, our analysis suggests, if carbon emissions rise at extreme levels, at least 4 million Americans could find themselves living at the fringe, in places decidedly outside the ideal niche for human life. The cost of resisting the new climate reality is mounting. Florida officials have already acknowledged that defending some roadways against the sea will be unaffordable. And the nation’s federal flood-insurance program is for the first time requiring that some of its payouts be used to retreat from climate threats across the country. It will soon prove too expensive to maintain the status quo.
Then what? One influential 2018 study, published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, suggests that 1 in 12 Americans in the Southern half of the country will move toward California, the Mountain West or the Northwest over the next 45 years because of climate influences alone. Such a shift in population is likely to increase poverty and widen the gulf between the rich and the poor. It will accelerate rapid, perhaps chaotic, urbanization of cities ill-equipped for the burden, testing their capacity to provide basic services and amplifying existing inequities. It will eat away at prosperity, dealing repeated economic blows to coastal, rural and Southern regions, which could in turn push entire communities to the brink of collapse. This process has already begun in rural Louisiana and coastal Georgia, where low-income and Black and Indigenous communities face environmental change on top of poor health and extreme poverty. Mobility itself, global-migration experts point out, is often a reflection of relative wealth, and as some move, many others will be left behind. Those who stay risk becoming trapped as the land and the society around them ceases to offer any more support.
There are signs that the message is breaking through. Half of Americans now rank climate as a top political priority, up from roughly one-third in 2016, and 3 out of 4 now describe climate change as either “a crisis” or “a major problem.” This year, Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa, where tens of thousands of acres of farmland flooded in 2019, ranked climate second only to health care as an issue. A poll by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities found that even Republicans’ views are shifting: 1 in 3 now thinks climate change should be declared a national emergency.
Policymakers, having left America unprepared for what’s next, now face brutal choices about which communities to save — often at exorbitant costs — and which to sacrifice. Their decisions will almost inevitably make the nation more divided, with those worst off relegated to a nightmare future in which they are left to fend for themselves. Nor will these disruptions wait for the worst environmental changes to occur. The wave begins when individual perception of risk starts to shift, when the environmental threat reaches past the least fortunate and rattles the physical and financial security of broader, wealthier parts of the population. It begins when even places like California’s suburbs are no longer safe.
It has already begun.
Let’s start with some basics. Across the country, it’s going to get hot. Buffalo, New York, may feel in a few decades like Tempe, Arizona, does today, and Tempe itself will sustain 100-degree average summer temperatures by the end of the century. Extreme humidity from New Orleans to northern Wisconsin will make summers increasingly unbearable, turning otherwise seemingly survivable heat waves into debilitating health threats. Fresh water will also be in short supply, not only in the West but also in places like Florida, Georgia and Alabama, where droughts now regularly wither cotton fields. By 2040, according to federal government projections, extreme water shortages will be nearly ubiquitous west of Missouri. The Memphis Sands Aquifer, a crucial water supply for Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana, is already overdrawn by hundreds of millions of gallons a day. Much of the Ogallala Aquifer — which supplies nearly a third of the nation’s irrigation groundwater — could be gone by the end of the century.
It can be difficult to see the challenges clearly because so many factors are in play. At least 28 million Americans are likely to face megafires like the ones we are now seeing in California, in places like Texas and Florida and Georgia. At the same time, 100 million Americans — largely in the Mississippi River Basin from Louisiana to Wisconsin — will increasingly face humidity so extreme that working outside or playing school sports could cause heatstroke. Crop yields will be decimated from Texas to Alabama and all the way north through Oklahoma and Kansas and into Nebraska.
The challenges are so widespread and so interrelated that Americans seeking to flee one could well run into another. I live on a hilltop, 400 feet above sea level, and my home will never be touched by rising waters. But by the end of this century, if the more extreme projections of 8 to 10 feet of sea-level rise come to fruition, the shoreline of San Francisco Bay will move 3 miles closer to my house, as it subsumes some 166 square miles of land, including a high school, a new county hospital and the store where I buy groceries. The freeway to San Francisco will need to be raised, and to the east, a new bridge will be required to connect the community of Point Richmond to the city of Berkeley. The Latino, Asian and Black communities who live in the most-vulnerable low-lying districts will be displaced first, but research from Mathew Hauer, a sociologist at Florida State University who published some of the first modeling of American climate migration in the journal Nature Climate Change in 2017, suggests that the toll will eventually be far more widespread: Nearly 1 in 3 people here in Marin County will leave, part of the roughly 700,000 who his models suggest may abandon the broader Bay Area as a result of sea-level rise alone.
From Maine to North Carolina to Texas, rising sea levels are not just chewing up shorelines but also raising rivers and swamping the subterranean infrastructure of coastal communities, making a stable life there all but impossible. Coastal high points will be cut off from roadways, amenities and escape routes, and even far inland, saltwater will seep into underground drinking-water supplies. Eight of the nation’s 20 largest metropolitan areas — Miami, New York and Boston among them — will be profoundly altered, indirectly affecting some 50 million people. Imagine large concrete walls separating Fort Lauderdale, Florida, condominiums from a beachless waterfront, or dozens of new bridges connecting the islands of Philadelphia. Not every city can spend $100 billion on a sea wall, as New York most likely will. Barrier islands? Rural areas along the coast without a strong tax base? They are likely, in the long term, unsalvageable.
In all, Hauer projects that 13 million Americans will be forced to move away from submerged coastlines. Add to that the people contending with wildfires and other risks, and the number of Americans who might move — though difficult to predict precisely — could easily be tens of millions larger. Even 13 million climate migrants, though, would rank as the largest migration in North American history. The Great Migration — of 6 million Black Americans out of the South from 1916 to 1970 — transformed almost everything we know about America, from the fate of its labor movement to the shape of its cities to the sound of its music. What would it look like when twice that many people moved? What might change?
Americans have been conditioned not to respond to geographical climate threats as people in the rest of the world do. It is natural that rural Guatemalans or subsistence farmers in Kenya, facing drought or scorching heat, would seek out someplace more stable and resilient. Even a subtle environmental change — a dry well, say — can mean life or death, and without money to address the problem, migration is often simply a question of survival.
By comparison, Americans are richer, often much richer, and more insulated from the shocks of climate change. They are distanced from the food and water sources they depend on, and they are part of a culture that sees every problem as capable of being solved by money. So even as the average flow of the Colorado River — the water supply for 40 million Western Americans and the backbone of the nation’s vegetable and cattle farming — has declined for most of the last 33 years, the population of Nevada has doubled. At the same time, more than 1.5 million people have moved to the Phoenix metro area, despite its dependence on that same river (and the fact that temperatures there now regularly hit 115 degrees). Since Hurricane Andrew devastated Florida in 1992 — and even as that state has become a global example of the threat of sea-level rise — more than 5 million people have moved to Florida’s shorelines, driving a historic boom in building and real estate.
Similar patterns are evident across the country. Census data shows us how Americans move: toward heat, toward coastlines, toward drought, regardless of evidence of increasing storms and flooding and other disasters.
The sense that money and technology can overcome nature has emboldened Americans. Where money and technology fail, though, it inevitably falls to government policies — and government subsidies — to pick up the slack. Thanks to federally subsidized canals, for example, water in part of the Desert Southwest costs less than it does in Philadelphia. The federal National Flood Insurance Program has paid to rebuild houses that have flooded six times over in the same spot. And federal agriculture aid withholds subsidies from farmers who switch to drought-resistant crops, while paying growers to replant the same ones that failed. Farmers, seed manufacturers, real estate developers and a few homeowners benefit, at least momentarily, but the gap between what the climate can destroy and what money can replace is growing.
Perhaps no market force has proved more influential — and more misguided — than the nation’s property-insurance system. From state to state, readily available and affordable policies have made it attractive to buy or replace homes even where they are at high risk of disasters, systematically obscuring the reality of the climate threat and fooling many Americans into thinking that their decisions are safer than they actually are. Part of the problem is that most policies look only 12 months into the future, ignoring long-term trends even as insurance availability influences development and drives people’s long-term decision-making.
Even where insurers have tried to withdraw policies or raise rates to reduce climate-related liabilities, state regulators have forced them to provide affordable coverage anyway, simply subsidizing the cost of underwriting such a risky policy or, in some cases, offering it themselves. The regulations — called Fair Access to Insurance Requirements — are justified by developers and local politicians alike as economic lifeboats “of last resort” in regions where climate change threatens to interrupt economic growth. While they do protect some entrenched and vulnerable communities, the laws also satisfy the demand of wealthier homeowners who still want to be able to buy insurance.
At least 30 states, including Louisiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Texas, have developed so-called FAIR plans, and today they serve as a market backstop in the places facing the highest risks of climate-driven disasters, including coastal flooding, hurricanes and wildfires.
In an era of climate change, though, such policies amount to a sort of shell game, meant to keep growth going even when other obvious signs and scientific research suggest that it should stop.
That’s what happened in Florida. Hurricane Andrew reduced parts of cities to landfill and cost insurers nearly $16 billion in payouts. Many insurance companies, recognizing the likelihood that it would happen again, declined to renew policies and left the state. So the Florida Legislature created a state-run company to insure properties itself, preventing both an exodus and an economic collapse by essentially pretending that the climate vulnerabilities didn’t exist.
As a result, Florida’s taxpayers by 2012 had assumed liabilities worth some $511 billion — more than seven times the state’s total budget — as the value of coastal property topped $2.8 trillion. Another direct hurricane risked bankrupting the state. Florida, concerned that it had taken on too much risk, has since scaled back its self-insurance plan. But the development that resulted is still in place.
On a sweltering afternoon last October, with the skies above me full of wildfire smoke, I called Jesse Keenan, an urban-planning and climate-change specialist then at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, who advises the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission on market hazards from climate change. Keenan, who is now an associate professor of real estate at Tulane University’s School of Architecture, had been in the news last year for projecting where people might move to — suggesting that Duluth, Minnesota, for instance, should brace for a coming real estate boom as climate migrants move north. But like other scientists I’d spoken with, Keenan had been reluctant to draw conclusions about where these migrants would be driven from.
Last fall, though, as the previous round of fires ravaged California, his phone began to ring, with private-equity investors and bankers all looking for his read on the state’s future. Their interest suggested a growing investor-grade nervousness about swiftly mounting environmental risk in the hottest real estate markets in the country. It’s an early sign, he told me, that the momentum is about to switch directions. “And once this flips,” he added, “it’s likely to flip very quickly.”
In fact, the correction — a newfound respect for the destructive power of nature, coupled with a sudden disavowal of Americans’ appetite for reckless development — had begun two years earlier, when a frightening surge in disasters offered a jolting preview of how the climate crisis was changing the rules.
On Oct. 9, 2017, a wildfire blazed through the suburban blue-collar neighborhood of Coffey Park in Santa Rosa, California, virtually in my own backyard. I awoke to learn that more than 1,800 buildings were reduced to ashes, less than 35 miles from where I slept. Inchlong cinders had piled on my windowsills like falling snow.
The Tubbs Fire, as it was called, shouldn’t have been possible. Coffey Park is surrounded not by vegetation but by concrete and malls and freeways. So insurers had rated it as “basically zero risk,” according to Kevin Van Leer, then a risk modeler from the global insurance liability firm Risk Management Solutions. (He now does similar work for Cape Analytics.) But Van Leer, who had spent seven years picking through the debris left by disasters to understand how insurers could anticipate — and price — the risk of their happening again, had begun to see other “impossible” fires. After a 2016 fire tornado ripped through northern Canada and a firestorm consumed Gatlinburg, Tennessee, he said, “alarm bells started going off” for the insurance industry.
What Van Leer saw when he walked through Coffey Park a week after the Tubbs Fire changed the way he would model and project fire risk forever. Typically, fire would spread along the ground, burning maybe 50% of structures. In Santa Rosa, more than 90% had been leveled. “The destruction was complete,” he told me. Van Leer determined that the fire had jumped through the forest canopy, spawning 70-mile-per-hour winds that kicked a storm of embers into the modest homes of Coffey Park, which burned at an acre a second as homes ignited spontaneously from the radiant heat. It was the kind of thing that might never have been possible if California’s autumn winds weren’t getting fiercer and drier every year, colliding with intensifying, climate-driven heat and ever-expanding development. “It’s hard to forecast something you’ve never seen before,” he said.
For me, the awakening to imminent climate risk came with California’s rolling power blackouts last fall — an effort to preemptively avoid the risk of a live wire sparking a fire — which showed me that all my notional perspective about climate risk and my own life choices were on a collision course. After the first one, all the food in our refrigerator was lost. When power was interrupted six more times in three weeks, we stopped trying to keep it stocked. All around us, small fires burned. Thick smoke produced fits of coughing. Then, as now, I packed an ax and a go-bag in my car, ready to evacuate. As former Gov. Jerry Brown said, it was beginning to feel like the “new abnormal.”
It was no surprise, then, that California’s property insurers — having watched 26 years’ worth of profits dissolve over 24 months — began dropping policies, or that California’s insurance commissioner, trying to slow the slide, placed a moratorium on insurance cancellations for parts of the state in 2020. In February, the Legislature introduced a bill compelling California to, in the words of one consumer advocacy group, “follow the lead of Florida” by mandating that insurance remain available, in this case with a requirement that homeowners first harden their properties against fire. At the same time, participation in California’s FAIR plan for catastrophic fires has grown by at least 180% since 2015, and in Santa Rosa, houses are being rebuilt in the very same wildfire-vulnerable zones that proved so deadly in 2017. Given that a new study projects a 20% increase in extreme-fire-weather days by 2035, such practices suggest a special form of climate negligence.
It’s only a matter of time before homeowners begin to recognize the unsustainability of this approach. Market shock, when driven by the sort of cultural awakening to risk that Keenan observes, can strike a neighborhood like an infectious disease, with fear spreading doubt — and devaluation — from door to door. It happened that way in the foreclosure crisis.
Keenan calls the practice of drawing arbitrary lending boundaries around areas of perceived environmental risk “bluelining,” and indeed many of the neighborhoods that banks are bluelining are the same as the ones that were hit by the racist redlining practice in days past. This summer, climate-data analysts at the First Street Foundation released maps showing that 70% more buildings in the United States were vulnerable to flood risk than previously thought; most of the underestimated risk was in low-income neighborhoods.
Such neighborhoods see little in the way of flood-prevention investment. My Bay Area neighborhood, on the other hand, has benefited from consistent investment in efforts to defend it against the ravages of climate change. That questions of livability had reached me, here, were testament to Keenan’s belief that the bluelining phenomenon will eventually affect large majorities of equity-holding middle-class Americans too, with broad implications for the overall economy, starting in the nation’s largest state.
Under the radar, a new class of dangerous debt — climate-distressed mortgage loans — might already be threatening the financial system. Lending data analyzed by Keenan and his co-author, Jacob Bradt, for a study published in the journal Climatic Change in June shows that small banks are liberally making loans on environmentally threatened homes, but then quickly passing them along to federal mortgage backers. At the same time, they have all but stopped lending money for the higher-end properties worth too much for the government to accept, suggesting that the banks are knowingly passing climate liabilities along to taxpayers as stranded assets.
Once home values begin a one-way plummet, it’s easy for economists to see how entire communities spin out of control. The tax base declines and the school system and civic services falter, creating a negative feedback loop that pushes more people to leave. Rising insurance costs and the perception of risk force credit-rating agencies to downgrade towns, making it more difficult for them to issue bonds and plug the springing financial leaks. Local banks, meanwhile, keep securitizing their mortgage debt, sloughing off their own liabilities.
Keenan, though, had a bigger point: All the structural disincentives that had built Americans’ irrational response to the climate risk were now reaching their logical endpoint. A pandemic-induced economic collapse will only heighten the vulnerabilities and speed the transition, reducing to nothing whatever thin margin of financial protection has kept people in place. Until now, the market mechanisms had essentially socialized the consequences of high-risk development. But as the costs rise — and the insurers quit, and the bankers divest, and the farm subsidies prove too wasteful, and so on — the full weight of responsibility will fall on individual people.
And that’s when the real migration might begin.
As I spoke with Keenan last year, I looked out my own kitchen window onto hillsides of parkland, singed brown by months of dry summer heat. This was precisely the land that my utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, had three times identified as such an imperiled tinderbox that it had to shut off power to avoid fire. It was precisely the kind of wildland-urban interface that all the studies I read blamed for heightening Californians’ exposure to climate risks. I mentioned this on the phone and then asked Keenan, “Should I be selling my house and getting — ”
He cut me off: “Yes.”
Americans have dealt with climate disaster before. The Dust Bowl started after the federal government expanded the Homestead Act to offer more land to settlers willing to work the marginal soil of the Great Plains. Millions took up the invitation, replacing hardy prairie grass with thirsty crops like corn, wheat and cotton. Then, entirely predictably, came the drought. From 1929 to 1934, crop yields across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri plunged by 60%, leaving farmers destitute and exposing the now-barren topsoil to dry winds and soaring temperatures. The resulting dust storms, some of them taller than skyscrapers, buried homes whole and blew as far east as Washington. The disaster propelled an exodus of some 2.5 million people, mostly to the West, where newcomers — “Okies” not just from Oklahoma but also Texas, Arkansas and Missouri — unsettled communities and competed for jobs. Colorado tried to seal its border from the climate refugees; in California, they were funneled into squalid shanty towns. Only after the migrants settled and had years to claw back a decent life did some towns bounce back stronger.
The places migrants left behind never fully recovered. Eighty years later, Dust Bowl towns still have slower economic growth and lower per capita income than the rest of the country. Dust Bowl survivors and their children are less likely to go to college and more likely to live in poverty. Climatic change made them poor, and it has kept them poor ever since.
A Dust Bowl event will most likely happen again. The Great Plains states today provide nearly half of the nation’s wheat, sorghum and cattle and much of its corn; the farmers and ranchers there export that food to Africa, South America and Asia. Crop yields, though, will drop sharply with every degree of warming. By 2050, researchers at the University of Chicago and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies found, Dust Bowl-era yields will be the norm, even as demand for scarce water jumps by as much as 20%. Another extreme drought would drive near-total crop losses worse than the Dust Bowl, kneecapping the broader economy. At that point, the authors write, “abandonment is one option.”
Projections are inherently imprecise, but the gradual changes to America’s cropland — plus the steady baking and burning and flooding — suggest that we are already witnessing a slower-forming but much larger replay of the Dust Bowl that will destroy more than just crops. In 2017, Solomon Hsiang, a climate economist at the University of California, Berkeley, led an analysis of the economic impact of climate-driven changes like rising mortality and rising energy costs, finding that the poorest counties in the United States — mostly across the South and the Southwest — will in some extreme cases face damages equal to more than a third of their gross domestic products. The 2018 National Climate Assessment also warns that the U.S. economy over all could contract by 10%.
That kind of loss typically drives people toward cities, and researchers expect that trend to continue after the COVID-19 pandemic ends. In 1950, less than 65% of Americans lived in cities. By 2050, only 10% will live outside them, in part because of climatic change. By 2100, Hauer estimates, Atlanta, Orlando, Houston and Austin could each receive more than a quarter million new residents as a result of sea-level displacement alone, meaning it may be those cities — not the places that empty out — that wind up bearing the brunt of America’s reshuffling. The World Bank warns that fast-moving climate urbanization leads to rising unemployment, competition for services and deepening poverty.
So what will happen to Atlanta — a metro area of 5.8 million people that may lose its water supply to drought and that our data also shows will face an increase in heat-driven wildfires? Hauer estimates that hundreds of thousands of climate refugees will move into the city by 2100, swelling its population and stressing its infrastructure. Atlanta — where poor transportation and water systems contributed to the state’s C+ infrastructure grade last year — already suffers greater income inequality than any other large American city, making it a virtual tinderbox for social conflict. One in 10 households earns less than $10,000 a year, and rings of extreme poverty are growing on its outskirts even as the city center grows wealthier.
Atlanta has started bolstering its defenses against climate change, but in some cases this has only exacerbated divisions. When the city converted an old Westside rock quarry into a reservoir, part of a larger greenbelt to expand parkland, clean the air and protect against drought, the project also fueled rapid upscale growth, driving the poorest Black communities further into impoverished suburbs. That Atlanta hasn’t “fully grappled with” such challenges now, said Na’Taki Osborne Jelks, chair of the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, means that with more people and higher temperatures, “the city might be pushed to what’s manageable.”
So might Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, Boston and other cities with long-neglected systems suddenly pressed to expand under increasingly adverse conditions.
Once you accept that climate change is fast making large parts of the United States nearly uninhabitable, the future looks like this: With time, the bottom half of the country grows inhospitable, dangerous and hot. Something like a tenth of the people who live in the South and the Southwest — from South Carolina to Alabama to Texas to Southern California — decide to move north in search of a better economy and a more temperate environment. Those who stay behind are disproportionately poor and elderly.
In these places, heat alone will cause as many as 80 additional deaths per 100,000 people — the nation’s opioid crisis, by comparison, produces 15 additional deaths per 100,000. The most affected people, meanwhile, will pay 20% more for energy, and their crops will yield half as much food or in some cases virtually none at all. That collective burden will drag down regional incomes by roughly 10%, amounting to one of the largest transfers of wealth in American history, as people who live farther north will benefit from that change and see their fortunes rise.
The millions of people moving north will mostly head to the cities of the Northeast and Northwest, which will see their populations grow by roughly 10%, according to one model. Once-chilly places like Minnesota and Michigan and Vermont will become more temperate, verdant and inviting. Vast regions will prosper; just as Hsiang’s research forecast that Southern counties could see a tenth of their economy dry up, he projects that others as far as North Dakota and Minnesota will enjoy a corresponding expansion. Cities like Detroit; Rochester, New York; Buffalo and Milwaukee will see a renaissance, with their excess capacity in infrastructure, water supplies and highways once again put to good use. One day, it’s possible that a high-speed rail line could race across the Dakotas, through Idaho’s up-and-coming wine country and the country’s new breadbasket along the Canadian border, to the megalopolis of Seattle, which by then has nearly merged with Vancouver to its north.
Sitting in my own backyard one afternoon this summer, my wife and I talked through the implications of this looming American future. The facts were clear and increasingly foreboding. Yet there were so many intangibles — a love of nature, the busy pace of life, the high cost of moving — that conspired to keep us from leaving. Nobody wants to migrate away from home, even when an inexorable danger is inching ever closer. They do it when there is no longer any other choice.
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