The Climate Apartheid

As the climate changes, more and more of us will fall through the cracks. Here's a look at your future.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Episode three, the climate Apartheid. By the time the heat
waves subsided, at least a thousand people were dead. Those
are the official numbers, at least the numbers no one trusts.
The city government and the police denied breaking up homeless
encampments during the disaster and only acknowledged a handful of
outdoor exposure deaths. On Twitter, someone shares a video of

(00:22):
what might be a mass grave. You're not sure if
it's real, and you don't really have time to find out.
After the grid overloads, it takes weeks for the power
situation to normalize. Bottled water, abundant at the start of
the disaster becomes scarce. In conversations with friends and snippets
of time online, you learn that much of the Midwest
has been subject to titanic mudslides and flooding. Hurricanes hit

(00:45):
the Southeast, driving up demand for disaster supplies even further
than putting more stress on interstate commerce. Work is basically
impossible for days. You're not even really sure if your
job's going to exist much longer anyway. Outside of a
few high end shopping districts, life just hasn't gone back
to normal for most people, So you've settled into a

(01:05):
new normal using your car, and you're now copious free
time to ferry supplies to and from a handful of
collection points and new encampments. You felt bad for days
after fleeing when the cops broke up the first camp. Aaron,
your community organizer friend, told you not to worry about it.
Not everyone's ready to go face to face with riot cops.
Tom the former marine, said the same thing, but then

(01:28):
offered to give you some self defense training if you
wanted it. He and a couple of other combat vets
had started organizing regular self defense sessions at one of
the camps, based out of an old apartment complex abandoned
when it's holding company went bankrupt. For a couple of weeks,
you lose yourself in the work. Gradually you realize that
the network of encampments you and your new friends have
been working to support have become something more than just

(01:50):
a stop gap. For one thing, the number of folks
without housing just keeps on rising. All the added stress
on the power grid and the questionable ways some people
dealt with it led to a spate of urban fires,
which forced hundreds of people out of their homes. The
local economy is in free fall too. You're not the
only one whose work just disappeared. And while you've got

(02:11):
enough saved for a little while, you're ever aware that
you won't be able to pay rent forever. That possibility
doesn't scare you as much as it did before. It
helps that you're spending half your time in one camp
or another. Anyway, you decide your best bet at any
kind of comfort in the future is to make sure
life in the camps is as comfortable for every one
as possible. To that end, you and Tom scrounge up

(02:32):
a crew and spend days flitting in and out of
abandoned buildings, scrounging solar panels, batteries, and wiring. None of
you know much about how to use that ship, but
a collective of electricians and engineers put together a list
of the parts they needed and how to safely get them.
By the time summer comes to an end, almost three
thousand people are living in camps with regular power and
cooling stations. Other collectives have spent the weeks building solar

(02:55):
stills to filter waste water and deal with the drinking
water shortage that still in dim it across the southern
half of the country. Life is by almost any measure,
harder than it was a year ago, but the stories
of wild fires in the northwest and massive police crackdowns
across the Great Lakes region make it clear that you're
not struggling alone. You feel lucky that it's been weak

(03:16):
since you've so much as seen a police patrol. There's
been a lot more property crime in the parts of
town where the economy is still functioning somewhat close to normal.
You've heard shoot out several nights, and you've grown increasingly
glad to be off on the margins with a good
community of people who take care of each other and
don't have much worth stealing. And then in late September
things take a turn. Some right wing live streamer visited

(03:39):
the largest of the three camps, now almost fifteen hundred strong.
He stitched together in narrative blaming a series of downtown
arsons and burglaries on organized Antifa extremists in their war camp.
One of Tom's friends, who's been doing armed security at night,
shows you a handful of posts from far right extremists
threatening to raid the camp. You hear rumors the police

(04:01):
might finally be planning a crackdown too, ever, fired a gun,
tom asks you shake your head no, and he nods, well,
that's probably about time you learn. In two thousand eighteen,
the Camp and Woolsey fires raged across California, burning hundreds

(04:23):
of thousands of acres and wiping out whole towns. The
Camp wildfire is so far the deadliest and most destructive
wildfire in California history, although that may have changed by
the time this episode drops. It was the most expensive
natural disaster in the world in two thousand eighteen. It
killed more than eighty people, destroyed fourteen thousand homes, and

(04:43):
displaced fifty thousand people. Not included among the ranks of
the displaced where Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, who hired
a team of private firefighters to protect their sixty million
dollar mansion and hidden hills. Private firefighting has become a
popular boutiques service in the era of climate change induced disaster.
Large insurance companies like chub and a I G offered

(05:06):
their wealthy clients private firefighters to help prevent property damage.
Wildfire defense systems based in Montana sent fifty three engines
to California during the fires. They protected people like Kanye
and Kim, while lower income individuals in the nearby town
of Paradise lost their homes and loved ones to the blaze.
On July one, Jeff Bezos, occasionally the world's wealthiest man,

(05:31):
became the second billionaire in space, or at least he
got pretty close to space. That same day, news broke
of massive flooding in China's Henan province, eclipsing even the
apocalyptic floods that left more than a thousand Germans missing
just a few days earlier in Germany. Whole villages were destroyed.
In China, more than a hundred thousand people were forced

(05:52):
to relocate. While Jeff Bezos took his first look into
outer space, passengers drowned on a flooded subway in zhang Zau.
At almost the same time, authorities in Oregon announced that
the Bootleg Fire, the largest in the state's history, had
grown big enough to generate its own weather patterns. Officials
admitted that the blaze could not be extinguished until the

(06:13):
rains returned in the fall. Many of the Oregonians caught
in the smoke from the Bootleg Fire are transplanted Californians.
Men and women who fled Los Angeles or the Bay
Area to escape the increasingly brutal fire season and retreat
to Oregon's famously moist climate. Most of these transplants were
upper middle class, well paid employees in the tech or

(06:34):
entertainment sector. I'm sure some of them felt betrayed when
their affluence proved insufficient to shield them from the seasoned climate.
That mindset was most clearly embodied by a middle aged
German woman interviewed by Deutsche Well News in the wake
of apocalyptic flooding and so many people dead. You don't

(06:55):
expect people to die in a flood in Germany. You
expected maybe in four countries, but you don't expect to hear.
But it was all too fast to click. It is
undeniable that as extreme weather events grow more common, the
victims of such catastrophes will include ever greater numbers of
what was formerly the global one percent. The truth is
that we have all of us spent our entire lives

(07:17):
in climate apartheid. Western nations, through extracting resources and outsourcing
industrial processes to the rest of the world, have avoided
the worst early consequences of industrialization. Until wildfires changed the calculus.
We had no cities with air as dirty as New
Delhi or Shinzhen, China. Even when climate disasters hit cities

(07:38):
and affluent countries, the level of suffering experienced within that
city still breaks down on class lines. I'm not just
talking about something as obvious as who has enough money
for a c or who can afford a car that
drives well in the snow. When the Pacific Northwest Heat
Dome briefly made Portland, Oregon, one of the hottest cities
on the planet, the actual heat experienced in different neighborhoods

(07:59):
varied bay Ston income. This is because wealthy neighborhoods had
lower building density in much more trees, which provided enough
shade that so called A grade neighborhoods were eight degrees
fahrenheit cooler on average than poor neighborhoods. But as the
consequences of industrial society hit harder, the wealth line necessary
to avoid them rises. It is no longer simply sufficient

(08:22):
to live in a rich country. If you aren't wealthy
enough for a second or a third home, for your
own private firefighters, for a bunker in New Zealand, or
a space shuttle. Sorry, but you're getting left behind. Welcome
to the wrong side of climate apartheid. If you want
an idea of what climate apartheid will look like for
tens of millions of Americans, including a sizeable chunk of

(08:44):
you listening right now, there's probably no story more important
than the tale of Paradise, California. When the camp fire
blazed through eighteen thousand homes, it created a flood of
climate refugees. Chico, the nearest city, gained twenty thousand residents
almost overnight. For a city of just a hundred thousand.
That men a significant strain, and the people of Chico

(09:05):
responded beautifully with a flood of charity and mutual aid.
People donated tents, sleeping bags, Volunteers cooked hot food, local
kids organized team sports for the kids who just lost
their town. Many and Chico opened their homes to strangers
who just lost theirs. Mark Stemmen, a geography professor at
California State University, described it this way to Intercept reporter

(09:27):
Naomi Klein. A tsunami of fire and terror rolled down
the hill from Paradise, but that tsunami was buffeted by
a blanket of love and comfort. Unfortunately, the reaction of
Chico was by enlarge a feat of charity, not of
mutual aid. This is a problem because charity is something
you give two less fortunate people. And when news coverage

(09:48):
of the disaster faded, so too did sympathy and willingness
to help the victims of the camp fire. Six months
after the camp fire destroyed Paradise, California, more than a
thousand families were still without even secondary housing. Before the
fire hit, there was already a massive housing shortage in
northern California. Rates of homelessness had been on the rise

(10:08):
for years now. The campfire inspired the city of Chico
to create a climate plan, which included more affordable housing
in order to make the community more resistant to displacement
caused by climate disruption. But this is not what happened
from the intercept quote. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit, throwing
many more people in Butte County as elsewhere into various

(10:29):
states of economic and social distress. Stimmon told me local
activists were all geared up to hold a big rally
calling for a green new decade. He said, we had
banners and sunflowers and were ready to rock. Then lockdown happened,
and the signs just sat in his yard for months.
Brown recalled that once the pandemic was declared, there wasn't
much room for a conversation about planning for the future

(10:50):
when we were dealing with these immediate crises. In late
August and early September, another wildfire struck the region, incinerating
two towns and displacing yet more people in the county.
The city opened up some hotel rooms to older people
who were particularly vulnerable to COVID nineteen, but there were
not nearly enough rooms for everyone who needed shelter. Through
this two and a half year period of shock after shock,

(11:12):
housing costs and Chico have continued to soar. First, it
was in response to the uptick and demand from Paradise
evacuees and people working on post disaster reconstruction, which saw
a spike and rents and made Chico among the hottest
housing markets in the country. Today, the boom continues, but
now it is in response to a pandemic fueled influx
of Bay Area professionals and retirees looking to telecommute or

(11:35):
chill out in a more affordable, low key community. According
to the California Association of Realtors, the price of a
single family house in Butte County increased by a staggering
sixteen point one percent last year, with Chico at the
center of the frenzy. A headline at a local ABC
affiliate summed up the market's current trajectory, up, up, up,

(11:55):
so real estate and Chico became much more valuable very quickly,
which killed an motive to create more affordable housing. Every
low income apartment building is one less set of luxury
condos for Bay Area transplants. After all. Now by twenty
most of the middle and upper middle class Paradise refugees
had either bought or built new homes, but those had
been renters or living in mobile homes got nothing. In

(12:18):
two thousand nineteen, MPR talked to Dominica Sprague, who moved
to Paradise because she had been priced out of the
Bay Area. In the six months since the campfire, she
and her family had been forced to move to six
different camps. They were interviewed outside of a camper on
a fair ground in Eubis City. They were not being
hosted there by the city, nor had they been placed
there by the state. The Sprague family paid seven hundred

(12:40):
and fifty dollars a month for the privilege of camping out.
Many who were displaced by the campfire simply never recovered.
Chico county is homeless population surged by sixteen percent after
the fire, and it has not gone back down in
the years since. Twenty three percent of Chico's homeless a
refugees from the Paradise Fire, and when these people became
permanent fixtures of the town, getting in the way of

(13:02):
a profitable real estate boom, the warm welcome and charity
that had greeted them in two thousand eighteen evaporated. In
two thousand and twenty, the Chico City Council elected a
slate of right wing candidates, primarily on a platform of
using the cops to brutalize and break up homeless encampments
for the good of local businesses. Citizens for a Safe
Chico put two hundred and fifty thousand dollars into a

(13:23):
sweeping ad campaign that painted these people as vagrance and transience,
despite the fact that most had resided in the county
for years. In many cases, Chico police confiscated and threw
away donated clothing, tints, and sleeping bags that had been
given to Paradise refugees just a few years earlier. During
her reporting for the Intercept, Naomi Klein talked to Alexander Hall,

(13:46):
a twenty three year old camp fire survivor who had
subsequently lost his new home in police sweeps of encampments.
He told her, we're homeless, We're not a disease. You
can't just get rid of us and then expect us
to be gone. That's not the way it works. Were
people were trying to survive. Were like anybody else. Everybody
is one paycheck away. And the reality of the situation

(14:07):
is that, thanks to climate change, we are all considerably
less than one paycheck away from calamity. Wildfires and other
natural disasters aren't the only thing that's growing more common.
A less stable world means a less stable economy. We're
already seeing inflation on the rise, and everyone listening remembers
how calamitous the first weeks of the pandemic were for
tens of millions of people. A bad economy makes members

(14:30):
of a community less resilient. It means they have less
to donate to their neighbors in the wake of a disaster.
It also means their community, their city or town, or state,
will have fewer resources to put into things like protecting
infrastructure from natural disasters, paying emergency workers, and providing affordable
housing to prepare for the inevitable. The story of Chico
has told us what happens when affluent liberal enclaves find

(14:53):
themselves forced into this position. They cut funding to everything
but cops and use those cops to do violence marginalized
communities from the intercept quote the combination of factors that
has created this crisis, and Chico is far from unique
to Northern California. After decades of defunding social programs coupled
with wild overfunding of police, a great many communities across

(15:15):
the country find themselves stretched too thin to absorb a
major shock, particularly when it comes to housing and mental
health supports. And without these other tools, every challenge quickly
turns into a matter of public safety. I think Chico

(15:39):
provides a fairly realistic expectation for how most climate disaster
related scenarios will be handled by most municipal governments. In
the immediate future. The rich will buy new homes, invest
private and public resources into protecting their neighborhoods. The communities
that suffer the worst from climate change will experience a
wealth drain as residents with the funds to do so,
leave drinking the tax base and leaving everyone with fewer

(16:02):
resources to dedicate to rebuilding and resiliency. In two thousand seventeen,
Scientific American published an outstanding article titled Natural Disasters by Location.
It analyzed ninety years of data and found that every
major environmental catastrophe like a huge tornado, hurricane, or wildfire,
increases a US county's poverty rate by one percent quote.

(16:25):
We found that if a county experienced two natural disasters,
migration out of that county increased by one percentage point.
With the strongest reactions happening in response to hurricanes, this
translates into a loss of around six hundred residents from
a typical county. The effect of one very large disaster
responsible for a hundred or more deaths was twice as big.
Poverty rates also increased by one percentage point in areas

(16:46):
hit by super severe disasters. This suggests that people who
aren't poor are migrating out, or that people who are
poor are migrating in. It might also mean that the
existing population transitioned into poverty. The researchers were particularly interested
in seeing how the creation of FEMA in ninety eight
impacted things. FEMA exists in the theory to coordinate federal

(17:08):
response to natural disasters and help communities rebuild. With that
in mind, if FEMA does its job, you would expect
residents of stricken areas to be less likely to move
after the date FEMA started responding to disasters with federal
relief checks. If you happen to live in New Orleans
during Hurricane Katrina, you already know where I'm leading you quote.
We found that, if anything, residents were more likely to

(17:30):
migrate out of counties struck by natural disasters after FEMA
was created. This pattern is consistent with recent research documenting
that the federal funds that flow to victims of disasters
come mainly in the form of nonplace based programs like
unemployment insurance and food stamps. It appears that many people
in disaster affected areas take the money and move to
another county, and so the study concluded. Our research suggests

(17:52):
that the rich may have the resources to move away
from areas facing natural disasters, leaving behind a population that
is disproportionately poor. But of course, that study focused primarily
on coastal areas and the sort of disasters suffered by
people who live in those communities. Two thousand seventeen was
an age in which the Pacific Northwest and many other
mountainous parts of the West didn't suffer from wildfires in

(18:14):
the way they do now. In other words, it was
a time in which coastal elites had real choices on
where to flee. Those days appear to be coming to
an end. The super wealthy will, of course continue to
run to safe places, but the number of places they
consider safe will shrink, the amount of available bunker properties
will decrease, and the wealthy will eventually split into two
separate groups, those with the funds to flee to truly

(18:37):
safe locations and those who will use their money and
power to try and build islands of security within endangered communities.
The people who will do this are the middle class, rich,
millionaires and multi millionaires, the kind of people who sit
on local business association boards, the kind of people who
run towns like Chico but can't afford or don't want

(18:57):
to flee. We've seen tie meantime again that these local
elites tend to use the police as a cudgel to
beat down any marginalized people who disrupt the look or profitability,
or whatever isolated parts of the city they care about.
In Portland, that's downtown and the members of the Portland
Business Alliance have spent much of the last year lobbying
the mayor form more brutal crackdowns on both anti capitalist

(19:20):
protesters and houseless people. The goal is never to actually
help struggling people. Portland has a street Response unit dedicated
to providing unarmed responders for people in mental health crises.
Such units have proven to work extremely well, saving lives
and cities like Denver, but in Portland the unit has
continually struggled with a lack of funding. In twenty the

(19:41):
city Council voted to move four point eight million dollars
from the police budget into a reserve fund for the
street Response unit. This would have expanded it from a
test program in one neighborhood Lents into a citywide program
with six teams. In may one, Ted Wheeler and two
council members allied with the Business Alliance voted against this amendment.

(20:02):
Mayor Wheeler claimed that the reason was the program needed
better performance metrics in order to judge its efficacy. The
fact that no such metrics exist for measuring how police
handle mental health crises does not seem to have bothered him.
The money went back to the cops, and days later,
a Portland police officer responding to a mental health crisis
in Lynce Park killed an unarmed man. Wealthy business owners

(20:24):
in Portland, like wealthy business owners in Chico, have no
interest in improving services to marginalized people. Those folks don't
shop at their stores, and they don't look good in
glossy magazine spreads about downtown restaurants. The number of homeless
people in America has increased for the last four consecutive years.
As we saw with Chico, climate change will only increase
the number of desperate people sleeping rough the nice liberal

(20:47):
mayors of nice liberal cities like Portland will hymn in
hall about metrics while they send jack booted thugs out
to clear these people away from good neighborhoods using violence.
In Chico, where the local government is shifted a hard
right due to the influx of homeless people, the justification
was commensurately harsher. From the intercept, One of Safe Chico's

(21:08):
talking points is that the city's unsheltered population has suffered
from something they call toxic compassion The idea is that
by attempting to help, a culture of drug dependence and
camping by choice is being enabled. According to this logic,
if camping as banned and clean needles aren't available, then
people will find shelter beds and get the mental health
and addiction treatments they need. It's a domestic version of

(21:29):
the discourse of deterrence at the southern border, the idea
that treating people with some modicum of humanity encourages them
to take risky journeys. Cruelty, therefore, is the greater compassion.
Today we see the compassion of cruelty preached by politicians
on the left and the right. They just use different
terms for it. And as protests against police violence continue

(21:50):
to go viral, local elites will increasingly contract out for
their violence. The most intense version of this has happened
in Minneapolis, where a mercenary outfit named Conflict as Alution
Group or cr G, has been hired by its city
to provide armed security in the wake of protests over
police violence. CRG guards started showing up with guns, conveniently

(22:11):
at the same time as the federal government started an
investigation into the Minneapolis police they've been accused of the
same sorts of physical violence as well as the questionably
legal practice of detaining citizens. But the more unsettling and
much mercurier story is that these guys at least brag
about possessing a significant surveillance capacity. They have drones and
advertise that they can use them to spy on local dissidents. Seriously,

(22:34):
I'm want to play you an excerpt from one of
their ads, and you should know that the video playing
during this excerpt shows a group of armed insurgents, as
viewed through a drone camera, marching down a desert road. Well,
it's very law enforcement personnel as well as utilizing specialist
equipment such as also known as unmanned aerial vehicles used

(22:54):
to such specialized equipment gives Conflict Resolution Group and its
clients the clear advantage for binding a better security model,
thus insurance success. It's important to remember than a world
of uncertainty your securities paramount, Conflict Resolution Group provides the tools, resources, experience,

(23:15):
and highly trained personnel to make that uncertainty go away.
Prior to c r G, the most intense example of
a private security firm being used to surveill dissidence was
probably Tiger Swan. During the Standing Rock occupation, they are
alleged to have used technology called a dirt box mounted
on aircraft to spy on the cell phone data of activists.
This kind of ship is growing more normalized every day,

(23:37):
and you're fooling yourself if you don't think it's because
large corporations and local business associations want cops and even
militaries of their own. The Portland Business Alliance has contracted

(23:59):
armed and unarmed guards with Portland Patrol Incorporated for years.
Most of these guards operate in what the city calls
an Enhanced Services District. This is just a quirky Portland
term for a nationwide trend. E s d s are
more often called business improvement districts. B i d s
are increasingly common all over the United States. In a

(24:21):
legal sense, they are urban areas where private organizations are
given the power to do things normally relegated to the
local government. This includes security. B i d s were
developed in the nineteen seventies is a way to fight
the economic stagnation that had settled on many U. S cities.
There are more than a thousand b i d s nationwide,
and the one in Downtown Portland, founded in nineteen eighty eight,

(24:44):
is particularly large and influential. When the Portland Business Alliance
was formed in two thousand two, they took control of
the downtown b I D called Downtown Clean and Safe.
The district expanded to more than five hundred blocks, and
there has been talk of expanding it to include residential areas.
From teen Vogue quote the formation of e s d

(25:04):
s is patently undemocratic To institute one in Portland. Interested
parties form a business nonprofit and campaigned to have the
city's Revenue Division levy fees on in district. Property owners
in accordance with the city code. Then unelected e S
d overseers, often some of the wealthiest enterprises in the city,
use the proceeds to hire security and police, contract cleaning companies,

(25:25):
make infrastructural improvements, and fund their lobbying and marketing efforts.
Portland alternative weekly will Emette Week recently reported that some
funds collected from property owners for Clean and Safe are
actually channeled to the Portland Business Alliance for staffing and
administrative costs. In response, the p b A issued a
statement defending its sharing of resources there are a few
exemptions to the fees. Private public and nonprofit properties are

(25:49):
liable via this arrangement, along with revenue from parking fees
and special appropriations from the city's general fund. Portland's three
e s d s together taken over eight million dollars
per year, and no point is the public permittive voice
in this process. The imposition of an E s D
is a decision made exclusively by a business in collaboration
with local governance. So already in dozens of American cities,

(26:13):
local elites wealthy business owners are permitted to tax the
public and deploy security forces without any accountability to voters.
In twenty the Western Regional Advocacy Project or WRAP, a
social justice organization, audited Portland's b I d s. They
found that the city carried out almost no oversight, failing
to review the annual budget, monitor the use of funds,

(26:34):
or investigate complaints about violence by security officers. Quote cleanan
safe pays the full salaries of four dedicated police officers.
These are public employees invested with the power to carry
out the full spectrum of policing actions while on the
corporate payroll. An internal police memo reviewed by teen Vogue
lays out the function of Clean and Safe officers. Clearly,
the offers do make arrests to be responsive to businesses

(26:57):
needs to conduct successful commerce in the downtown core area
or allow people to use the sidewalk. These officers act
in concert with the numerous security guards, some of whom
are armed in a sty employ like those of Portland
Patrol Inc. The largest Clean and Safe contractor. Private security
guards surveil and rouse the unhoused right exclusion orders call
in Clean and Safe police officers to issue citations and

(27:20):
make arrests. City officials have argued that guard conduct is
wholly unaccountable to the public, wrote the City Auditor. A
district contract with a private security provider says that the
city Police Commissioner currently the mayor, will obtain and review
reports on security officers activities, including complaints against officers and
the resulting investigations. We did not find evidence that this

(27:40):
was done now. The impact of all this on marginalized
people is startlingly clear. In parts of Portland outside downtown
cleanan Safe, the average number of unhoused people arrested per
square mile is six point one. Inside Clean and Safe,
that number jumps to more than a hundred and thirty seven.
This is because things that are often not in four
wors to even treated as crimes elsewhere in Portland, are

(28:03):
crimes in the b I D. These places can literally
have their own justice systems. Up until one of these
districts even had its own assistant district attorney whose salary
was paid by private interests. This sort of anti democratic
structure is exploding in popularity. In February of one, the
governor of Nevada announced a plan to launch innovation zones

(28:26):
to rejuvenate the state economy. From the A P quote,
the zones would permit companies with large areas of land
to form governments carrying the same authority as counties, including
the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and courts,
and provide government services. And of course, government services includes security.
As the crumbles accelerate and more people slipped through the

(28:47):
cracks and wind up desperate, the task of policing them
will increasingly fall to private interests, empowered to act as
unelected governments in the name of economic revitalization. It is
a vicious cycle. The economy at contractions caused by environmental
disaster and unrest reduce the capacity of local governments to
serve citizens. This makes the case for innovation zones or

(29:08):
business improvement districts easier to make over and over again.
From California and Oregon to Nevada and beyond, we see
the same story. Disasters are used to justify power grabs
by the same kinds of people who for decades lobbied
against action on climate change. Now that the consequences are here,
they will divert their resources towards establishing their own boutique

(29:29):
legal systems with their own boutique security forces to protect
their comfort and keep you out. I haven't devoted nearly
enough of this episode to the international situation by necessity,
but we can and should draw a direct line to
the climate refugees at the US border, facing tear gas
and beatings and internment and concentration camps, and the violence

(29:49):
being increasingly enacted by domestic political elites against US citizens.
In June of one, news broke that South Dakota Governor
Christie Nome had used a private donation to send fifty
National Guard soldiers to the Texan border. The decision caused
tremendous debate, but legal experts seemed to agree that it
was in fact legal, although it had never been done before.

(30:12):
Back in two thousand nineteen and the first season of
It could happen Here I talked about Fucau's boomerang, the
idea that tactics and weapons used to police imperial possessions
inevitably rebound to police the subjects of the Imperial interior.
I will tell you here and now that this will
not be the last time private money sends National Guardsmen
on a domestic mission, and the next time it happens,

(30:33):
it may be considerably closer to your home.