January 16, 2025 • 35 mins
As the blazes in Los Angeles continue to burn, those who have lost their homes are contending with the immediate need for shelter– and difficult questions about whether or not to rebuild in the fire zone. Grist reporter Jake Bittle tells Akshat Rathi how California’s housing market and insurance regulations will shape the recovery. And Nomad Century author Gaia Vince says that in this era of climate instability, everyone should think about how prepared they are to become a climate migrant.
Explore further:
- Past episode about the 1.5C warming goal being surpassed
- Past episode with sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson about imagining the future role of the UN in fighting climate change
- Past episode about climate change, conflict, and migration
- Bloomberg Green story about the aircraft used to scoop water to fight fires in LA
Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Mythili Rao. Special thanks this week to Michelle Ma, Brian Kahn, Sharon Chen, and Sommer Saadi. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to zero. I am Akshatrati. This week climate migrants.
As the fires in Los Angeles continue to burn, displaced
(00:23):
residents are trying to pick up the pieces of their
lives in an evacuations shelter in Westwood, Bloomberg reporter Michelle
Ma spoke with a seventy two year old man named
Paul letter.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Where and can I ask where you live? Well?
Speaker 3 (00:38):
I used to live in the Palaceades.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
Okay?
Speaker 2 (00:40):
And do you know what the state of.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Your home is? Ninety nine percent.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Correct? I'm so sorry.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
I mean they called it a war zone, app apocalyptic,
it's you've seen the pictures. It's it's unbelievable. And when
did you leave?
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Paul had just enough time to grab his two cats,
a few sentimental items before he left, but not much else.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
I and two jackets, my jacket my father used to
wear a sports jacket and a fifty year old leather
jacket that I get complimented on.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Where will he go next? He does not know. Each year,
the number of people making decisions like the ones he's
facing grows. In the US alone, a Census Bureau survey
found that at least a million people were displaced by
climate catastrophes in twenty twenty two, and the International Organization
for Migration estimates that there might be as many as
(01:37):
a billion environmental migrants around the world within the next
thirty years. It's something Gaya Vince has written about in
two superb books. In her twenty fourteen book Adventures in
the Anthroposcene, she traveled the world to document what people
in places like Nepal and Bolivia are doing to deal
with a warming climate, and then in her twenty twenty
(01:58):
book No Matt Century, that thesis forward by talking about
places where people cannot adapt and will need to move
as these fires rage on. I wanted to talk to
her about what it will take for us to adjust
to this new reality.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
This is just more evidence that we are now living
in a different world. We're living in the post climate
change world.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Gaya, as you'll hear, thinks about global solutions to these
kinds of problems, but local solutions are needed to The
geography and politics of the Los Angeles area poses its
own challenges. So I also spoke with climate reporter Jake
Bittle about what California's government is doing when it comes
to the challenges of rebuilding. He's a staff writer for
Christ and the author of The Great Displacement about migration
(02:43):
in the uas Cheke, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
We're speaking as fires continue to burn in Los Angeles,
and one of the many questions that is on a
lot of people's mind is what happens after the disaster,
what gets rebuilt and what is not going to be built.
And you had a very interesting thread on X about
the economics of which neighborhoods get built after a fire
(03:28):
and why they might sometimes be surprising. So, given what
we know of LA right now, how do you think
this plays out.
Speaker 4 (03:35):
Yeah, it's difficult to tell for sure, because you know,
the housing market that burned, you know, in the Palisades
fire especially, is just one of the most valuable and
desirable in the world arguably. But I think that what
we've seen in the past in California is that some
of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the most complex terrain, not
(03:57):
only do they tend to be under insured because they're
so high value. Also, you know, the permitting and construction
process can be really difficult and take a really long
time because you're building just on really really difficult ground. Right, Like,
there's really steep slopes. Developing those canyons is really hard
to begin with, so redeveloping them is also going to
be hard and expensive.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
But is there an assumption that given how wealthy the
people were who could afford to live in the palisades
versus say, the people in the eating fire in places
like Alteradina aren't as wealthy. That is, the palaces that
get rebuilt and Alternina not.
Speaker 4 (04:36):
Yeah. Yeah, you might think right that, oh, well, the
rich people have more money, so they're going to be
able to rebuild faster. But very few people have enough
money on hand to just rebuild a home out of pocket.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
Right.
Speaker 4 (04:46):
You're talking about almost a million dollars of rebuilding costs
in some of these cases, right, So you know, it
really comes down to how much insurance you have, and
in particular, I think how much of the proportion of
the value of your home is insured. Right, So if
you're in a home that's maybe six hundred and seven
hundred thousand dollars, you can probably cover that with a
typical insurance policy. And the insurance situation in Altadena actually
(05:07):
turns out to have been better than in a lot
of other places in California, in part because the insurance
hadn't gotten around to dropping these people yet, because they
hadn't had a fire in a while, and the homes
weren't you know, super super high value. But then in
a place like the Palisades, right, Okay, these homes are
worth millions and millions of dollars, it's hard to find
market insurance coverage that covers that. So if you lose
(05:28):
your home and you didn't have insured the full value, okay,
what are you going to do? Either you dip into
your savings to just rebuild it out of pocket, which
I'm sure some people would do, right, like the wealthiest.
But if you are wealthy and you had a big home,
but not that wealthy to where you can just sport
you just build a new one with the money you
have in your you know, Merrilynch account, then you're really
(05:48):
in a pickle. And I saw this happen in Santa
Rosa after the twenty seventeen Tubs fire. There was a
hillside neighborhood with relatively wealthy homeowners and on complex terrain,
and they really struggled to rebuild.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
The other thing that is a wider problem, which is
just housing in general, and building new housing is now
competing with sort of rebuilding after a disaster. We heard
from Governor Gavin Newsom that he wants to see if
the legislature will suspend some of the Environmental Assessment Act
and the Coastal Planning Act. What do you think happens
(06:22):
in these situations where a government goes beyond in a
desire to want to rebuild, but in the process perhaps
encourage is building in the very same places that are
risky and vulnerable to these disasters in the future. Again.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
Yeah, yeah, it's really really hard. In the past couple
of years before this fire, California and Gavinism, they've been
trying to suspend SECO and the coastal like just to
build regular housing, right, just to build multi family housing.
And they've they've made some progress in getting some of
that permitting streamlined. I think it's a little rich for
the governor to say, oh, I'm going to suspend this stuff.
It turns out we can just do this the whole time.
(07:02):
You know, rebuilding after disasters is really complicated, and permitting
is one part of it. But the truth is it
takes a couple of years even in the best case scenario, right,
But I think that the conversation about whether to rebuild
or where we're going to rebuild is one that the
governor seems, you know, intent on sort of trying to
move past that as fast as possible, which is pretty typical.
(07:22):
But you know, in his defense, I guess it's a
pretty hard conversation to have, right, Like, the land is
still owned by the people who live on it. They
technically have a right to come back, right since they
own the property, And you know, saying let's not do
this is really tough, and very few places really try
to do it, especially in California where property values are
so high.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
And we should talk about insurance because there are two
layers to this, which is one, you cannot really rebuild
without insurance, but also the way insurance is playing out,
especially in California but a few other states in the US,
there is perhaps misbuilding happening because the insurance that is
being provided is not private, it's not really taking risk
into consideration, it's being backed by the state, and so
(08:04):
you're building in the very places that will burn again.
So talk goes through what the changes in the California
insurance system have been and whether you think they are
actually going to work in this hot world that we
are creating and caninue to heat up.
Speaker 4 (08:21):
Yeah, it's a really interesting situation in California and sort
of like a far more acute version of what other
states have experienced, where I think as the fire damage
has gotten worse, they've sort of encountered this trade off
between you know, price pressure and consumers and the availability
of coverage. And for a long time, California basically chose
to limit price pressure and consumers and then they're paying
(08:42):
the price with affordability where you know, tens or hundreds
of thousands of people have lost their coverage and the
state basically like two weeks before these fires finally finish
this failuatory process that Okay, insurers, you can charge more money,
you can you can account for the risk of climate change,
you can pass on your costs in an exchange, Please
stay in these areas. And so I think that you know,
(09:02):
it remains to be seen. And the big question I
think for the post La fires world is whether you know,
if insurers feel like they can set an adequate price,
whether that acts as an effective signal to the homeowners
that you know, from the perspective of fire risk. There
really shouldn't be living in these homes in these places
unless they take substantial mitigation action, right, because that's what
(09:22):
insurance is supposed to do. It's supposed to be a
signal about climate risk in the rational way of viewing it,
and it hasn't been in California effectively. And the question now,
I think is if you have people paying, you know,
upwards of five, six, seven, ten thousand dollars a year
for insurance and it won't go down unless they mitigate
or get out of the way, does that start to
change the building patterns? I'm not sure what the answer
(09:43):
would be, but that's sort of the big, big question
I think.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
So now we take a step back and just look
at the book that you've written on the Great Displacement.
You make the case that you're already starting to see
in some pockets real climate change driven migration within the US,
and that'll get super charged as extreme weather events get worse.
Could you talk us through what kind of notable stories
(10:09):
have stuck with you?
Speaker 4 (10:10):
Yeah, I think on the fires specifically, there's sort of
two big things that stuck with me.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Right.
Speaker 4 (10:16):
One is that for people at the lower end of
the income scale in really tough rental and housing markets.
A lot of times what happened is they either got
pushed out of home ownership and into a really chaotic
rental market where they're being price gouged, or they just
sort of bounced from apartment to apartment. You know, this
happened in Santa Rosa. It was almost impossible to get
an affordable apartment even before the fire. But then you
(10:37):
lose five thousand housing units in the night, and it's
just really really hard to find a place to settle.
The other thing that's really interesting, I think, and you
may see this happen too in La but maybe to
a lesser extent, just given the political geography of the place.
Because a lot of people in Northern California, in places
like Paradise, which are relatively conservative and compared to the
state as a whole, which is trending left, they took
(10:59):
them insurance payout that they got from the fire, and
they just made an elective move to a different part
of the country.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Right.
Speaker 4 (11:05):
So I think most notably, like a lot of people
from Paradise, I want to say it's in the dozens
ended up moving to Boise, Idaho, which is obviously more
conservative state. These people were not on the wealthy end
of the income scale in California, but in the Boise
housing market they were like titans. You know, they could
get huge houses in the suburbs of Boise, and you
know that they went through a lot. I'm not trying
(11:25):
to say that they made out great, but like you
can either for people who are maybe have less equity
in their home or they're renting to begin with, it
just ends up being this sort of scramble. You know,
a disaster could honestly be a sort of unsticking point
where it, you know, induces a move that they maybe
otherwise wouldn't have made.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
But there's also a sort of stunning admission in the
book where if you look at current migration patterns, yes,
California and perhaps Louisiana the two states from where people
are leaving, and some of that might be climate links,
some of that might be just affordability link, but more
to the migration is actually happening towards stages that are
(12:03):
being affected by climate change. So Florida is seeing a
lot of migration. State that gets hit by hurricanes all
the time. Arizona another state which gets hit by droughts
and heat. Is that just us seeing an old pattern
of economic migration, or are we going to start to
finally see a reversal because of climate change? Like how
(12:25):
do you square the circle here?
Speaker 4 (12:27):
Yeah, this was the most deviling question that still remains
with me from the book. You know, it's climate migration.
It's just people not liking the climate in Michigan and
deciding to move to Fort Lauderdale, you know. And that's
the median form of climate migration, even in just in
the twenty first century so far. I don't know at
(12:48):
what point that trend reverses itself, but I do think
a lot of the places that the post war housing
boom took place in the United States, where there was
a ton of cheap land, I think we've sort of
gotten to a point. This is true in Colorado too,
like at the Front Range. You've gut to a point
where we're just pushing out from what was the sort
of central cities at those times into really really risky land.
(13:10):
And in Arizona, of course, it's just very hot there.
I think insurance, you know, probably is the mechanism, at
least in the case of Florida, right, that would sort
of force like a slow down or a cessation of
this dynamic. I think like Florida is probably the place
to look for this, right because you also have to
pay for flood insurance and wind insurance there. And I've
spoken to people and these these rapidly developing metroplexes right
(13:32):
like Fort Myers or Tampa where I'm from, sometimes they
can pay upwards of twenty thousand dollars a year and
insurance costs combined between the two formats, and that is
just not sustainable for almost anybody. And then you know,
the rebuilding rules are really tough too. So I think
that it's possible that in the next couple of decades,
in a geographically specific way, you might sort of start
to see the housing market be unable to tolerate further
(13:55):
expansion into these areas. And then what comes out to
that is another big question.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
So most climate change link migration, as we know, happens
within countries. Obviously, you focused on the US with your book,
but are there lessons that the rest of the world
can take from it? Noting that, of course the US
is is, you know, the world's largest economy, one of
the richest countries in the world has a much more
(14:21):
developed and widespread insurance market. But still are there lessons
that others can take.
Speaker 4 (14:29):
Yeah? Absolutely. I think that the main lesson is that
for a lot of disasters, climate displacement just kind of
looks a lot like regular housing displacement does, right, And
so I think like La is a good example. Right,
this is like a giant housing market, and it's a
giant rental market. It's like one of the biggest in
(14:49):
the country. So you're not likely to see people get
up out of their house in Altadena and walk up
to North Dakota, right, or to Canada.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
Right.
Speaker 4 (14:59):
They can go to the suburb or the next suburb of,
or the next suburb of. And that's the way that
housing displacement works in LA generally, Like if you get evicted,
you're not going to go to North Dakota, right, So,
and I think that's probably true in other countries too, right,
Like people sort of move in ways that are typical
of those places. I think that the typical image in
the United States and other places of a climate migrant
is someone who you know, flees from one climate to another, right,
(15:22):
Like they want to make an elective move away from,
you know, one type of weather event, and I think
that it's probably better from a policymaking standpoint if we
just think about climate change as being kind of a
factor that exacerbates all the other weaknesses in the way
that we house people. In the United States, we have
specific weaknesses, as you know, and then in other countries
there are other weaknesses.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Thank you, Jake, No problem. After the break, Guy Evins
on why climate upheaval is a global problem and needs
global solutions. If you've been enjoying this episode, please take
a moment to rate and review the show on Apple
(16:05):
Podcasts and Spotify. It helps other listeners find the show. Kaya,
Welcome to the show. Oh, it's such a pleasure to
be here Atala now. Both of us have been watching
the news from Los Angeles. The fires are still burning
as we record this, and there's a lot that we
(16:28):
aren't going to know about how communities in the Pacific
Palisades or other areas will recover. In the intro, we
heard from Paul who was living there. He has no
idea whether he's going to get a chance to go
back and move into the Pacific Palisades. What has surprised
you or perhaps confirmed conclusions from your own reporting as
(16:50):
you've watched the story.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Well, I mean, obviously I'm seeing it from London, so
I don't have that very first hand view. But it's
so photographed, isn't it. Because it is, and I think
what we're seeing here is perhaps the first example of
wealthy climate migration, right, because we're seeing some of the
richest people in the world having to move. But I
(17:13):
think it's a reminder that we are all at the
bottom of everything, a puny mammal that has certain needs.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Right.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
We can't live under certain temperatures. We can't live where
there's flames around our homes, you know, we can't breathe
air that is infused with smoke. We have to move.
And so for all our luxury mansions and our dreams
of paradise, we are actually an animal that needs to
find a safe home. And we are seeing the very
(17:44):
real dangers from these huge, huge earth systems, and we
can't just push them back, you know.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
So in the two books, out of the many books
you've written, in the Adventure in the Anthroposy, you documented
how people in different parts the world, especially in the
Global South, are starting to adapt to the warming that
exists already. But then in no matter century, you took
this one step forward to think about places which are
(18:11):
beyond adaptation. When did that hit you that these places
are there and they're growing in size.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
I think I took a two and a half year
journey around the world to research adventures in the anthroposcene,
and it slowly sort of crept up on me that
what I was seeing was enormous amounts of climate migration,
even though people themselves didn't recognize themselves as climate migrants.
They thought that they were perhaps you know, moving for
a better job, leaving rural areas because the economy wasn't
(18:42):
working there. But actually, when you dug into it, why
wasn't it working? It was because of persistent chronic drought
that had got worse over the last decade or so.
It was because of the encroachment of salt water from
rising sea levels into Agrica cultural fields. It was because
the coastline had completely eroded through you know, more vicious storms,
(19:07):
and that constant rising of sea levels, and all of
these things made me recognize that we don't have an
honest level of debate at all anywhere, certainly not from leadership.
We're not talking about the climate change that has already occurred.
We're not talking about what our cities will look like
over the coming decades. You know, what will la look
(19:28):
like in twenty forty, twenty sixty, What will London look like?
What will New York? What will Miami? Because we need
to adapt right now to those changes, and we need
to recognize that some of those places are just not
going to be livable. So we're not having that conversation
and people are going to have to move.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
What is the scale of migration that we're talking about.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
It's impossible to put a figure on that because it
depends on a lot of things. We've just had the
first full year where the average temperature was one point
six degrees above the pre and US average. You know,
temperatures may go down slightly, but they are on an
upward trajectory, and if we look ahead, it's quite likely
that we will end up by the end of the
(20:10):
century somewhere between three and four degrees above the pre
industrial average. We already have people living in unlivable zones,
some of them heavily adapted and some of them suffering horribly.
Places from Sudan to Malia have hunger because of drought
or floods. We have people in Asia farm workers who
are now working at night with head torches because it's
(20:32):
simply too hot during the day. We already have these
unlivable areas, but what will happen is they will increase
in severity and intensity and last for many months of
the year, if not throughout. Some studies have put the
zone of unlivability this kind of climate niche of humanity
sort of shifting up, and that area will encompass some
(20:57):
three billion people by twenty seventy according to one study.
That doesn't mean three billion people will have to move,
but it means that vast areas will have to be
adapted and people will have to be accommodated, either within
their own nation or increasingly across borders. But you know,
if we want fewer people to have to move to
(21:17):
be forced to move, we can do a lot in
terms of mitigating the temperature rise to come through decarbonization,
but also through adapting and making some of these desperately
difficult places more habitable longer term. But at the moment
we're really not doing any of that. We're not even
adapting places in the rich world, let alone the poor world.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
And these projections become more uncertain the further out in
time you go. But are there specific countries or regions
that you've looked at where we can definitively say that
climate change has caused or has been the primary reason
for people migrating away.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
Yeah. Absolutely, Like the majority of climate migration is occurring
within countries, and we see that in a lot of
the most hit places. Obviously, Bangladesh has huge amounts of
climate migration from the Bay of Bengal to other areas.
But you know, there was a really interesting study out
recently that showed that drought in the growing season in
(22:19):
meso America is directly correlated with the number of migrants
at the US border. So when it's particularly dry during
the growing season, it pushes up food prices across Central America,
and then we get this wave of increased migration towards
the US border. And that's perhaps the most kind of
(22:39):
beautiful correlation that I've seen. But we also see in
parts of Africa, we see a lot of climate migrants.
We just had a really horrific flooding in East Africa,
a place which is also suffering from chronic drought. What
we're seeing is these cascading effects of one impact then
leading to another impact. I mean, if we look back
(23:01):
to Pakistan a couple of years ago, they had months
of intense heat which was concurrent with extreme drought, which
hit food prices and caused harvest losses. And then they
got this terrible precipitation, this flash floods that caused thirty
three million people to be displaced within a week. And
(23:25):
then that's followed by landslides. Because the drought dries the
soils and pulls it away from infrastructure, from houses and
bridges and so on, making it much more susceptible. When
those floods come, you get the loss of the top soil,
which can take a decade sometimes to be replenished, so
terrible harvest problems. But also you get that loss of
(23:47):
huge amounts of erosion loss of the soil. And we
see that everywhere.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
These impacts are being felt very widely, are being talked
about at a level where there is awareness of the problem.
We also know there are potential solutions, but there aren't
that many places that are following through with those solutions.
We know the amount of adaptation funding is vastly smaller
(24:14):
than the funding that goes to reducing emissions. We need
to do both, but definitely there's a huge gap and adaptation.
So are there places that are starting to or perhaps
are already doing a good job that others can look
at and learn from.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
I think Bangladesh is a really great example actually of
how adaptation can work well. So they have cyclones in
the Bay of Bengal, and they have become progressively worse,
more intense, more frequent, more severe, and yet they've put
in place a brilliant adaptation strategy where everybody knows what
(24:54):
to do in the case of a cyclone. There are
early warning systems. People get alerts, they know where to go,
they know where to bring their animals, they know that
they will be allowed to return if they want. So
there is a lot of trust there in the institutions,
and that's one of the most fundamental things to adaptation. Now,
what's happened is, even though the severity and the frequency
(25:18):
of these cyclones have become far more intense in recent years,
the death toll has absolutely plummeted. Very few people die
comparatively to how many used to and we can all
learn from that. I mean, we should all be preparing
ourselves for an extreme event hitting us in our town.
You know, is your bag packed? Where would you go?
(25:41):
Where's the safe place that you would drive to or
walk to? Do you have your friend's numbers written down?
Do you have the numbers of relations? Do you have
enough food and fresh water to survive for a few days?
Do you have battery pack? All of these things are
conversations that we should be having, especially if we live
in places that are a bit further out, are a
(26:02):
bit more rural, as people in la are realizing today.
You never know when something can hit.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
There is this quote that crops up on social media
every so often, especially when there's a disaster unfolding from
scientists called John Holdron, who eventually became the science advisor
to Barack Obama, the former US president, and the quote said,
there are basically three choices, adaptation, mitigation, and suffering. We
(26:33):
are going to do a mix of all of that.
But the more we mitigate, the less we'll have to adapt,
and the less there will be suffering. Now, what we
are seeing in front of us is obviously a mix
of all that, but we are seeing not enough mitigation.
Definitely not enough adaptation and does more suffering, and that
(26:56):
causes or will cause in much larger numbers, migration that's
already become a hot button issue world over. Right, we've
seen politics turn to the right, turn to be anti
immigrant in most Western economies over the past few years.
How are we going to deal with the challenge of
(27:17):
migration if the politics is already so toxic.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
You know, we are living in this time when the
narrative around migration is truly toxic. We have leaders that
are far right, that are populists, that are slogan driven
rather than vision led leadership to try and bring us
together to solve these planetary scale crises. What we need
is honesty. We need honesty over the scale of the
(27:43):
climate disaster, but we also need honesty about migration. Right,
it's completely normal and natural people move. We need to
counter some of the toxic tropes that come out that
immigrants increase on employment. The opposite is true, that they
lower wages. Most economists would agree that immigration is absolutely
(28:05):
essential in order to keep productivity, especially at a time
when our birth rates are absolutely plummeting. You know, in
a few decades, if not just one decade, nations will
be competing for immigrants, and you know, those nations that
manage to endear themselves to people who want to move
there are going to be in the better position. But
(28:28):
ultimately we have to be pragmatic. You know, migration is inevitable,
it's already underway. It is only going to increase. What
we need to do is engage with the reality that
we have right in front of us and make it
work for us, because there are so many benefits to
it if we get it right.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
There are reason which you can get migration right, and
there are clearly reason which you can get migration wrong.
Are there any places where there are politicians that have
successfully made the economic case for migration, pulled it off
and actually won an election.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Well, so it's a kind of sort of the dog
chasing its tail in a way. So the reason quite
often that leaders are chasing the anti migrant vote is
because they themselves have made such an anti migrant case,
and they're sort of supporting media that is also making
the anti migrant case. So the public therefore think that
(29:26):
they want no migrants, and nobody really is making a
positive migrant case, so they're sort of like locked in
this ridiculous vicious circle, which is completely unproductive for anybody.
But I mean, if you look at Australia, for example,
I think it's like almost a third of Australians were
born out of the country and about half of Australians
(29:48):
have at least one parent that was born out of
the country. Now, Australia is quite a weird example because
on one side it's vehemently anti migrant and on the
other side it's incredibly pro migro, so they haven't quite
got that right. But there are definitely aspects which are
very pro migrant. And again the same situation with Canada.
(30:09):
I mean, you only have to spend two seconds in
Toronto to realize that this is an immigrant city, as.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
All cities are.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
You.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Yeah, I mean London has the same qualification of having
half the population actually not being born in the UK,
And yeah, that's true of most global cities around the world,
but it still doesn't quite translate into the politics of.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Actually but if you look at the politics of cities,
you will find that they are very pro migration. The
anti migrant sentiments are generally in the places which see
very very few migrants. But that's the world we're living
in now. And that's the great rift in the United States.
(30:52):
It's the great rift that we saw with Brexit and
that we're seeing actually across the European Union. And it
is very, very worrying. And so these are the challenges
that we need desperately, desperately to resolve and that takes
leadership ACTA. And this is the big problem that we
don't have the honesty from leadership. We don't have that
courageous visionary person in leadership really that I can see
(31:17):
Antonio Guterrez perhaps you know, but he's not the leader
of a country who is speaking honestly about the crises
we face in climate, in migration, in poverty. We don't
hear it.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Well, you've tried to make a case for a global
body that oversees immigration worldwide. You brought up Antonio Gute
as the Secretary General of the United Nations. Should the
United Nations be doing this? And how in the hell
isn't going to get the powers to actually do this
across nation states sovereign states that so fight to keep
(31:53):
that status of independence and spend so much money on
defense to ensure that stays.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
Yeah, Now, the United Nations, these bodies were set up
at a time of huge crisis, just after the Second
World War, when nations had been ripped apart, when millions
had been displaced, entire cities had been flattened. Leaders hated
each other, they'd literally just been at war with each other,
and yet they came together to produce these international bodies
(32:22):
that would eradicate the curse of smallpox and polio, that
would set out a declaration of human rights, all of
these things. They came together to do that, and that
was remarkable. And yes, you know that there are flaws
with that system. But where we are now, this planetary
(32:43):
scale of crises that cannot be solved by drawing imaginary
lines on maps. It needs a response that is also planetary,
and I think that we need a United Nations that
is a stepped up version. We are now our population
of more than eight billion people, resources are now more scarce,
(33:06):
and we're living in this extreme dangerous world of climate change.
And I think the only way we can deal with
planetary scale human mobility and climate crisis that's helping to
cause that is through a body that can help to
manage that.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Well, you joined the illustrious company of Kim Stanley Robinson,
who would also very much like the members of say,
the G twenty or the United Nations to actually act
like members of a body that has deeth to make
global policy work. Thank you, Gaya, Thank you, actually, it's
been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for
(33:51):
listening to Zero. And now for the sound of the week.
That's the sound of a Canadian firefighting aircraft scooping water
(34:13):
to fight the LA Fires. You can read more about
how those water bombing planes were quickly put into production
at bloomberg dot com slash Green. It's a fascinating piece.
We'll also put a link in the show notes. There's
also a lot more coverage of the LA Fires from
my colleagues.
Speaker 4 (34:29):
At Bloomberg Green.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
If you like this episode, please take a moment to
rate or review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Share this episode with a friend or with someone who
loves jackets. You can get in touch at zero board
at Bloomberg dot Net. Zero's producer is Mike lee Raw,
Bloomberg's Head a podcast is Sage Barman and Head of
Talk is Brendan newnam Our. Theme music is composed by
(34:51):
Wonderly Special. Thanks to Michelle ma Bryan Kahan, Sharon Chen,
and Jessica beck I am Akshaldrati back soon.
Welcome to zero. I am Akshatrati. This week climate migrants.
As the fires in Los Angeles continue to burn, displaced
(00:23):
residents are trying to pick up the pieces of their
lives in an evacuations shelter in Westwood, Bloomberg reporter Michelle
Ma spoke with a seventy two year old man named
Paul letter.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Where and can I ask where you live? Well?
Speaker 3 (00:38):
I used to live in the Palaceades.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
Okay?
Speaker 2 (00:40):
And do you know what the state of.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Your home is? Ninety nine percent.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Correct? I'm so sorry.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
I mean they called it a war zone, app apocalyptic,
it's you've seen the pictures. It's it's unbelievable. And when
did you leave?
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Paul had just enough time to grab his two cats,
a few sentimental items before he left, but not much else.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
I and two jackets, my jacket my father used to
wear a sports jacket and a fifty year old leather
jacket that I get complimented on.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Where will he go next? He does not know. Each year,
the number of people making decisions like the ones he's
facing grows. In the US alone, a Census Bureau survey
found that at least a million people were displaced by
climate catastrophes in twenty twenty two, and the International Organization
for Migration estimates that there might be as many as
(01:37):
a billion environmental migrants around the world within the next
thirty years. It's something Gaya Vince has written about in
two superb books. In her twenty fourteen book Adventures in
the Anthroposcene, she traveled the world to document what people
in places like Nepal and Bolivia are doing to deal
with a warming climate, and then in her twenty twenty
(01:58):
book No Matt Century, that thesis forward by talking about
places where people cannot adapt and will need to move
as these fires rage on. I wanted to talk to
her about what it will take for us to adjust
to this new reality.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
This is just more evidence that we are now living
in a different world. We're living in the post climate
change world.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Gaya, as you'll hear, thinks about global solutions to these
kinds of problems, but local solutions are needed to The
geography and politics of the Los Angeles area poses its
own challenges. So I also spoke with climate reporter Jake
Bittle about what California's government is doing when it comes
to the challenges of rebuilding. He's a staff writer for
Christ and the author of The Great Displacement about migration
(02:43):
in the uas Cheke, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
We're speaking as fires continue to burn in Los Angeles,
and one of the many questions that is on a
lot of people's mind is what happens after the disaster,
what gets rebuilt and what is not going to be built.
And you had a very interesting thread on X about
the economics of which neighborhoods get built after a fire
(03:28):
and why they might sometimes be surprising. So, given what
we know of LA right now, how do you think
this plays out.
Speaker 4 (03:35):
Yeah, it's difficult to tell for sure, because you know,
the housing market that burned, you know, in the Palisades
fire especially, is just one of the most valuable and
desirable in the world arguably. But I think that what
we've seen in the past in California is that some
of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the most complex terrain, not
(03:57):
only do they tend to be under insured because they're
so high value. Also, you know, the permitting and construction
process can be really difficult and take a really long
time because you're building just on really really difficult ground. Right, Like,
there's really steep slopes. Developing those canyons is really hard
to begin with, so redeveloping them is also going to
be hard and expensive.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
But is there an assumption that given how wealthy the
people were who could afford to live in the palisades
versus say, the people in the eating fire in places
like Alteradina aren't as wealthy. That is, the palaces that
get rebuilt and Alternina not.
Speaker 4 (04:36):
Yeah. Yeah, you might think right that, oh, well, the
rich people have more money, so they're going to be
able to rebuild faster. But very few people have enough
money on hand to just rebuild a home out of pocket.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
Right.
Speaker 4 (04:46):
You're talking about almost a million dollars of rebuilding costs
in some of these cases, right, So you know, it
really comes down to how much insurance you have, and
in particular, I think how much of the proportion of
the value of your home is insured. Right, So if
you're in a home that's maybe six hundred and seven
hundred thousand dollars, you can probably cover that with a
typical insurance policy. And the insurance situation in Altadena actually
(05:07):
turns out to have been better than in a lot
of other places in California, in part because the insurance
hadn't gotten around to dropping these people yet, because they
hadn't had a fire in a while, and the homes
weren't you know, super super high value. But then in
a place like the Palisades, right, Okay, these homes are
worth millions and millions of dollars, it's hard to find
market insurance coverage that covers that. So if you lose
(05:28):
your home and you didn't have insured the full value, okay,
what are you going to do? Either you dip into
your savings to just rebuild it out of pocket, which
I'm sure some people would do, right, like the wealthiest.
But if you are wealthy and you had a big home,
but not that wealthy to where you can just sport
you just build a new one with the money you
have in your you know, Merrilynch account, then you're really
(05:48):
in a pickle. And I saw this happen in Santa
Rosa after the twenty seventeen Tubs fire. There was a
hillside neighborhood with relatively wealthy homeowners and on complex terrain,
and they really struggled to rebuild.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
The other thing that is a wider problem, which is
just housing in general, and building new housing is now
competing with sort of rebuilding after a disaster. We heard
from Governor Gavin Newsom that he wants to see if
the legislature will suspend some of the Environmental Assessment Act
and the Coastal Planning Act. What do you think happens
(06:22):
in these situations where a government goes beyond in a
desire to want to rebuild, but in the process perhaps
encourage is building in the very same places that are
risky and vulnerable to these disasters in the future. Again.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
Yeah, yeah, it's really really hard. In the past couple
of years before this fire, California and Gavinism, they've been
trying to suspend SECO and the coastal like just to
build regular housing, right, just to build multi family housing.
And they've they've made some progress in getting some of
that permitting streamlined. I think it's a little rich for
the governor to say, oh, I'm going to suspend this stuff.
It turns out we can just do this the whole time.
(07:02):
You know, rebuilding after disasters is really complicated, and permitting
is one part of it. But the truth is it
takes a couple of years even in the best case scenario, right,
But I think that the conversation about whether to rebuild
or where we're going to rebuild is one that the
governor seems, you know, intent on sort of trying to
move past that as fast as possible, which is pretty typical.
(07:22):
But you know, in his defense, I guess it's a
pretty hard conversation to have, right, Like, the land is
still owned by the people who live on it. They
technically have a right to come back, right since they
own the property, And you know, saying let's not do
this is really tough, and very few places really try
to do it, especially in California where property values are
so high.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
And we should talk about insurance because there are two
layers to this, which is one, you cannot really rebuild
without insurance, but also the way insurance is playing out,
especially in California but a few other states in the US,
there is perhaps misbuilding happening because the insurance that is
being provided is not private, it's not really taking risk
into consideration, it's being backed by the state, and so
(08:04):
you're building in the very places that will burn again.
So talk goes through what the changes in the California
insurance system have been and whether you think they are
actually going to work in this hot world that we
are creating and caninue to heat up.
Speaker 4 (08:21):
Yeah, it's a really interesting situation in California and sort
of like a far more acute version of what other
states have experienced, where I think as the fire damage
has gotten worse, they've sort of encountered this trade off
between you know, price pressure and consumers and the availability
of coverage. And for a long time, California basically chose
to limit price pressure and consumers and then they're paying
(08:42):
the price with affordability where you know, tens or hundreds
of thousands of people have lost their coverage and the
state basically like two weeks before these fires finally finish
this failuatory process that Okay, insurers, you can charge more money,
you can you can account for the risk of climate change,
you can pass on your costs in an exchange, Please
stay in these areas. And so I think that you know,
(09:02):
it remains to be seen. And the big question I
think for the post La fires world is whether you know,
if insurers feel like they can set an adequate price,
whether that acts as an effective signal to the homeowners
that you know, from the perspective of fire risk. There
really shouldn't be living in these homes in these places
unless they take substantial mitigation action, right, because that's what
(09:22):
insurance is supposed to do. It's supposed to be a
signal about climate risk in the rational way of viewing it,
and it hasn't been in California effectively. And the question now,
I think is if you have people paying, you know,
upwards of five, six, seven, ten thousand dollars a year
for insurance and it won't go down unless they mitigate
or get out of the way, does that start to
change the building patterns? I'm not sure what the answer
(09:43):
would be, but that's sort of the big, big question
I think.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
So now we take a step back and just look
at the book that you've written on the Great Displacement.
You make the case that you're already starting to see
in some pockets real climate change driven migration within the US,
and that'll get super charged as extreme weather events get worse.
Could you talk us through what kind of notable stories
(10:09):
have stuck with you?
Speaker 4 (10:10):
Yeah, I think on the fires specifically, there's sort of
two big things that stuck with me.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Right.
Speaker 4 (10:16):
One is that for people at the lower end of
the income scale in really tough rental and housing markets.
A lot of times what happened is they either got
pushed out of home ownership and into a really chaotic
rental market where they're being price gouged, or they just
sort of bounced from apartment to apartment. You know, this
happened in Santa Rosa. It was almost impossible to get
an affordable apartment even before the fire. But then you
(10:37):
lose five thousand housing units in the night, and it's
just really really hard to find a place to settle.
The other thing that's really interesting, I think, and you
may see this happen too in La but maybe to
a lesser extent, just given the political geography of the place.
Because a lot of people in Northern California, in places
like Paradise, which are relatively conservative and compared to the
state as a whole, which is trending left, they took
(10:59):
them insurance payout that they got from the fire, and
they just made an elective move to a different part
of the country.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Right.
Speaker 4 (11:05):
So I think most notably, like a lot of people
from Paradise, I want to say it's in the dozens
ended up moving to Boise, Idaho, which is obviously more
conservative state. These people were not on the wealthy end
of the income scale in California, but in the Boise
housing market they were like titans. You know, they could
get huge houses in the suburbs of Boise, and you
know that they went through a lot. I'm not trying
(11:25):
to say that they made out great, but like you
can either for people who are maybe have less equity
in their home or they're renting to begin with, it
just ends up being this sort of scramble. You know,
a disaster could honestly be a sort of unsticking point
where it, you know, induces a move that they maybe
otherwise wouldn't have made.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
But there's also a sort of stunning admission in the
book where if you look at current migration patterns, yes,
California and perhaps Louisiana the two states from where people
are leaving, and some of that might be climate links,
some of that might be just affordability link, but more
to the migration is actually happening towards stages that are
(12:03):
being affected by climate change. So Florida is seeing a
lot of migration. State that gets hit by hurricanes all
the time. Arizona another state which gets hit by droughts
and heat. Is that just us seeing an old pattern
of economic migration, or are we going to start to
finally see a reversal because of climate change? Like how
(12:25):
do you square the circle here?
Speaker 4 (12:27):
Yeah, this was the most deviling question that still remains
with me from the book. You know, it's climate migration.
It's just people not liking the climate in Michigan and
deciding to move to Fort Lauderdale, you know. And that's
the median form of climate migration, even in just in
the twenty first century so far. I don't know at
(12:48):
what point that trend reverses itself, but I do think
a lot of the places that the post war housing
boom took place in the United States, where there was
a ton of cheap land, I think we've sort of
gotten to a point. This is true in Colorado too,
like at the Front Range. You've gut to a point
where we're just pushing out from what was the sort
of central cities at those times into really really risky land.
(13:10):
And in Arizona, of course, it's just very hot there.
I think insurance, you know, probably is the mechanism, at
least in the case of Florida, right, that would sort
of force like a slow down or a cessation of
this dynamic. I think like Florida is probably the place
to look for this, right because you also have to
pay for flood insurance and wind insurance there. And I've
spoken to people and these these rapidly developing metroplexes right
(13:32):
like Fort Myers or Tampa where I'm from, sometimes they
can pay upwards of twenty thousand dollars a year and
insurance costs combined between the two formats, and that is
just not sustainable for almost anybody. And then you know,
the rebuilding rules are really tough too. So I think
that it's possible that in the next couple of decades,
in a geographically specific way, you might sort of start
to see the housing market be unable to tolerate further
(13:55):
expansion into these areas. And then what comes out to
that is another big question.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
So most climate change link migration, as we know, happens
within countries. Obviously, you focused on the US with your book,
but are there lessons that the rest of the world
can take from it? Noting that, of course the US
is is, you know, the world's largest economy, one of
the richest countries in the world has a much more
(14:21):
developed and widespread insurance market. But still are there lessons
that others can take.
Speaker 4 (14:29):
Yeah? Absolutely. I think that the main lesson is that
for a lot of disasters, climate displacement just kind of
looks a lot like regular housing displacement does, right, And
so I think like La is a good example. Right,
this is like a giant housing market, and it's a
giant rental market. It's like one of the biggest in
(14:49):
the country. So you're not likely to see people get
up out of their house in Altadena and walk up
to North Dakota, right, or to Canada.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
Right.
Speaker 4 (14:59):
They can go to the suburb or the next suburb of,
or the next suburb of. And that's the way that
housing displacement works in LA generally, Like if you get evicted,
you're not going to go to North Dakota, right, So,
and I think that's probably true in other countries too, right,
Like people sort of move in ways that are typical
of those places. I think that the typical image in
the United States and other places of a climate migrant
is someone who you know, flees from one climate to another, right,
(15:22):
Like they want to make an elective move away from,
you know, one type of weather event, and I think
that it's probably better from a policymaking standpoint if we
just think about climate change as being kind of a
factor that exacerbates all the other weaknesses in the way
that we house people. In the United States, we have
specific weaknesses, as you know, and then in other countries
there are other weaknesses.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Thank you, Jake, No problem. After the break, Guy Evins
on why climate upheaval is a global problem and needs
global solutions. If you've been enjoying this episode, please take
a moment to rate and review the show on Apple
(16:05):
Podcasts and Spotify. It helps other listeners find the show. Kaya,
Welcome to the show. Oh, it's such a pleasure to
be here Atala now. Both of us have been watching
the news from Los Angeles. The fires are still burning
as we record this, and there's a lot that we
(16:28):
aren't going to know about how communities in the Pacific
Palisades or other areas will recover. In the intro, we
heard from Paul who was living there. He has no
idea whether he's going to get a chance to go
back and move into the Pacific Palisades. What has surprised
you or perhaps confirmed conclusions from your own reporting as
(16:50):
you've watched the story.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Well, I mean, obviously I'm seeing it from London, so
I don't have that very first hand view. But it's
so photographed, isn't it. Because it is, and I think
what we're seeing here is perhaps the first example of
wealthy climate migration, right, because we're seeing some of the
richest people in the world having to move. But I
(17:13):
think it's a reminder that we are all at the
bottom of everything, a puny mammal that has certain needs.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Right.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
We can't live under certain temperatures. We can't live where
there's flames around our homes, you know, we can't breathe
air that is infused with smoke. We have to move.
And so for all our luxury mansions and our dreams
of paradise, we are actually an animal that needs to
find a safe home. And we are seeing the very
(17:44):
real dangers from these huge, huge earth systems, and we
can't just push them back, you know.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
So in the two books, out of the many books
you've written, in the Adventure in the Anthroposy, you documented
how people in different parts the world, especially in the
Global South, are starting to adapt to the warming that
exists already. But then in no matter century, you took
this one step forward to think about places which are
(18:11):
beyond adaptation. When did that hit you that these places
are there and they're growing in size.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
I think I took a two and a half year
journey around the world to research adventures in the anthroposcene,
and it slowly sort of crept up on me that
what I was seeing was enormous amounts of climate migration,
even though people themselves didn't recognize themselves as climate migrants.
They thought that they were perhaps you know, moving for
a better job, leaving rural areas because the economy wasn't
(18:42):
working there. But actually, when you dug into it, why
wasn't it working? It was because of persistent chronic drought
that had got worse over the last decade or so.
It was because of the encroachment of salt water from
rising sea levels into Agrica cultural fields. It was because
the coastline had completely eroded through you know, more vicious storms,
(19:07):
and that constant rising of sea levels, and all of
these things made me recognize that we don't have an
honest level of debate at all anywhere, certainly not from leadership.
We're not talking about the climate change that has already occurred.
We're not talking about what our cities will look like
over the coming decades. You know, what will la look
(19:28):
like in twenty forty, twenty sixty, What will London look like?
What will New York? What will Miami? Because we need
to adapt right now to those changes, and we need
to recognize that some of those places are just not
going to be livable. So we're not having that conversation
and people are going to have to move.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
What is the scale of migration that we're talking about.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
It's impossible to put a figure on that because it
depends on a lot of things. We've just had the
first full year where the average temperature was one point
six degrees above the pre and US average. You know,
temperatures may go down slightly, but they are on an
upward trajectory, and if we look ahead, it's quite likely
that we will end up by the end of the
(20:10):
century somewhere between three and four degrees above the pre
industrial average. We already have people living in unlivable zones,
some of them heavily adapted and some of them suffering horribly.
Places from Sudan to Malia have hunger because of drought
or floods. We have people in Asia farm workers who
are now working at night with head torches because it's
(20:32):
simply too hot during the day. We already have these
unlivable areas, but what will happen is they will increase
in severity and intensity and last for many months of
the year, if not throughout. Some studies have put the
zone of unlivability this kind of climate niche of humanity
sort of shifting up, and that area will encompass some
(20:57):
three billion people by twenty seventy according to one study.
That doesn't mean three billion people will have to move,
but it means that vast areas will have to be
adapted and people will have to be accommodated, either within
their own nation or increasingly across borders. But you know,
if we want fewer people to have to move to
(21:17):
be forced to move, we can do a lot in
terms of mitigating the temperature rise to come through decarbonization,
but also through adapting and making some of these desperately
difficult places more habitable longer term. But at the moment
we're really not doing any of that. We're not even
adapting places in the rich world, let alone the poor world.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
And these projections become more uncertain the further out in
time you go. But are there specific countries or regions
that you've looked at where we can definitively say that
climate change has caused or has been the primary reason
for people migrating away.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
Yeah. Absolutely, Like the majority of climate migration is occurring
within countries, and we see that in a lot of
the most hit places. Obviously, Bangladesh has huge amounts of
climate migration from the Bay of Bengal to other areas.
But you know, there was a really interesting study out
recently that showed that drought in the growing season in
(22:19):
meso America is directly correlated with the number of migrants
at the US border. So when it's particularly dry during
the growing season, it pushes up food prices across Central America,
and then we get this wave of increased migration towards
the US border. And that's perhaps the most kind of
(22:39):
beautiful correlation that I've seen. But we also see in
parts of Africa, we see a lot of climate migrants.
We just had a really horrific flooding in East Africa,
a place which is also suffering from chronic drought. What
we're seeing is these cascading effects of one impact then
leading to another impact. I mean, if we look back
(23:01):
to Pakistan a couple of years ago, they had months
of intense heat which was concurrent with extreme drought, which
hit food prices and caused harvest losses. And then they
got this terrible precipitation, this flash floods that caused thirty
three million people to be displaced within a week. And
(23:25):
then that's followed by landslides. Because the drought dries the
soils and pulls it away from infrastructure, from houses and
bridges and so on, making it much more susceptible. When
those floods come, you get the loss of the top soil,
which can take a decade sometimes to be replenished, so
terrible harvest problems. But also you get that loss of
(23:47):
huge amounts of erosion loss of the soil. And we
see that everywhere.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
These impacts are being felt very widely, are being talked
about at a level where there is awareness of the problem.
We also know there are potential solutions, but there aren't
that many places that are following through with those solutions.
We know the amount of adaptation funding is vastly smaller
(24:14):
than the funding that goes to reducing emissions. We need
to do both, but definitely there's a huge gap and adaptation.
So are there places that are starting to or perhaps
are already doing a good job that others can look
at and learn from.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
I think Bangladesh is a really great example actually of
how adaptation can work well. So they have cyclones in
the Bay of Bengal, and they have become progressively worse,
more intense, more frequent, more severe, and yet they've put
in place a brilliant adaptation strategy where everybody knows what
(24:54):
to do in the case of a cyclone. There are
early warning systems. People get alerts, they know where to go,
they know where to bring their animals, they know that
they will be allowed to return if they want. So
there is a lot of trust there in the institutions,
and that's one of the most fundamental things to adaptation. Now,
what's happened is, even though the severity and the frequency
(25:18):
of these cyclones have become far more intense in recent years,
the death toll has absolutely plummeted. Very few people die
comparatively to how many used to and we can all
learn from that. I mean, we should all be preparing
ourselves for an extreme event hitting us in our town.
You know, is your bag packed? Where would you go?
(25:41):
Where's the safe place that you would drive to or
walk to? Do you have your friend's numbers written down?
Do you have the numbers of relations? Do you have
enough food and fresh water to survive for a few days?
Do you have battery pack? All of these things are
conversations that we should be having, especially if we live
in places that are a bit further out, are a
(26:02):
bit more rural, as people in la are realizing today.
You never know when something can hit.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
There is this quote that crops up on social media
every so often, especially when there's a disaster unfolding from
scientists called John Holdron, who eventually became the science advisor
to Barack Obama, the former US president, and the quote said,
there are basically three choices, adaptation, mitigation, and suffering. We
(26:33):
are going to do a mix of all of that.
But the more we mitigate, the less we'll have to adapt,
and the less there will be suffering. Now, what we
are seeing in front of us is obviously a mix
of all that, but we are seeing not enough mitigation.
Definitely not enough adaptation and does more suffering, and that
(26:56):
causes or will cause in much larger numbers, migration that's
already become a hot button issue world over. Right, we've
seen politics turn to the right, turn to be anti
immigrant in most Western economies over the past few years.
How are we going to deal with the challenge of
(27:17):
migration if the politics is already so toxic.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
You know, we are living in this time when the
narrative around migration is truly toxic. We have leaders that
are far right, that are populists, that are slogan driven
rather than vision led leadership to try and bring us
together to solve these planetary scale crises. What we need
is honesty. We need honesty over the scale of the
(27:43):
climate disaster, but we also need honesty about migration. Right,
it's completely normal and natural people move. We need to
counter some of the toxic tropes that come out that
immigrants increase on employment. The opposite is true, that they
lower wages. Most economists would agree that immigration is absolutely
(28:05):
essential in order to keep productivity, especially at a time
when our birth rates are absolutely plummeting. You know, in
a few decades, if not just one decade, nations will
be competing for immigrants, and you know, those nations that
manage to endear themselves to people who want to move
there are going to be in the better position. But
(28:28):
ultimately we have to be pragmatic. You know, migration is inevitable,
it's already underway. It is only going to increase. What
we need to do is engage with the reality that
we have right in front of us and make it
work for us, because there are so many benefits to
it if we get it right.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
There are reason which you can get migration right, and
there are clearly reason which you can get migration wrong.
Are there any places where there are politicians that have
successfully made the economic case for migration, pulled it off
and actually won an election.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Well, so it's a kind of sort of the dog
chasing its tail in a way. So the reason quite
often that leaders are chasing the anti migrant vote is
because they themselves have made such an anti migrant case,
and they're sort of supporting media that is also making
the anti migrant case. So the public therefore think that
(29:26):
they want no migrants, and nobody really is making a
positive migrant case, so they're sort of like locked in
this ridiculous vicious circle, which is completely unproductive for anybody.
But I mean, if you look at Australia, for example,
I think it's like almost a third of Australians were
born out of the country and about half of Australians
(29:48):
have at least one parent that was born out of
the country. Now, Australia is quite a weird example because
on one side it's vehemently anti migrant and on the
other side it's incredibly pro migro, so they haven't quite
got that right. But there are definitely aspects which are
very pro migrant. And again the same situation with Canada.
(30:09):
I mean, you only have to spend two seconds in
Toronto to realize that this is an immigrant city, as.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
All cities are.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
You.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Yeah, I mean London has the same qualification of having
half the population actually not being born in the UK,
And yeah, that's true of most global cities around the world,
but it still doesn't quite translate into the politics of.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Actually but if you look at the politics of cities,
you will find that they are very pro migration. The
anti migrant sentiments are generally in the places which see
very very few migrants. But that's the world we're living
in now. And that's the great rift in the United States.
(30:52):
It's the great rift that we saw with Brexit and
that we're seeing actually across the European Union. And it
is very, very worrying. And so these are the challenges
that we need desperately, desperately to resolve and that takes
leadership ACTA. And this is the big problem that we
don't have the honesty from leadership. We don't have that
courageous visionary person in leadership really that I can see
(31:17):
Antonio Guterrez perhaps you know, but he's not the leader
of a country who is speaking honestly about the crises
we face in climate, in migration, in poverty. We don't
hear it.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Well, you've tried to make a case for a global
body that oversees immigration worldwide. You brought up Antonio Gute
as the Secretary General of the United Nations. Should the
United Nations be doing this? And how in the hell
isn't going to get the powers to actually do this
across nation states sovereign states that so fight to keep
(31:53):
that status of independence and spend so much money on
defense to ensure that stays.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
Yeah, Now, the United Nations, these bodies were set up
at a time of huge crisis, just after the Second
World War, when nations had been ripped apart, when millions
had been displaced, entire cities had been flattened. Leaders hated
each other, they'd literally just been at war with each other,
and yet they came together to produce these international bodies
(32:22):
that would eradicate the curse of smallpox and polio, that
would set out a declaration of human rights, all of
these things. They came together to do that, and that
was remarkable. And yes, you know that there are flaws
with that system. But where we are now, this planetary
(32:43):
scale of crises that cannot be solved by drawing imaginary
lines on maps. It needs a response that is also planetary,
and I think that we need a United Nations that
is a stepped up version. We are now our population
of more than eight billion people, resources are now more scarce,
(33:06):
and we're living in this extreme dangerous world of climate change.
And I think the only way we can deal with
planetary scale human mobility and climate crisis that's helping to
cause that is through a body that can help to
manage that.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Well, you joined the illustrious company of Kim Stanley Robinson,
who would also very much like the members of say,
the G twenty or the United Nations to actually act
like members of a body that has deeth to make
global policy work. Thank you, Gaya, Thank you, actually, it's
been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for
(33:51):
listening to Zero. And now for the sound of the week.
That's the sound of a Canadian firefighting aircraft scooping water
(34:13):
to fight the LA Fires. You can read more about
how those water bombing planes were quickly put into production
at bloomberg dot com slash Green. It's a fascinating piece.
We'll also put a link in the show notes. There's
also a lot more coverage of the LA Fires from
my colleagues.
Speaker 4 (34:29):
At Bloomberg Green.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
If you like this episode, please take a moment to
rate or review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Share this episode with a friend or with someone who
loves jackets. You can get in touch at zero board
at Bloomberg dot Net. Zero's producer is Mike lee Raw,
Bloomberg's Head a podcast is Sage Barman and Head of
Talk is Brendan newnam Our. Theme music is composed by
(34:51):
Wonderly Special. Thanks to Michelle ma Bryan Kahan, Sharon Chen,
and Jessica beck I am Akshaldrati back soon.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com