TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. Right now, crews in central Texas are wading through debris and on-and-off rain in the search for those still missing after catastrophic floods in the early morning hours of July 4. While the country was preparing to celebrate, the Guadalupe River rose in some places between 30 and 40 feet, killing more than 130 people, including dozens of children at a summer camp, with another hundred or more still missing. In the days that followed, FEMA reportedly failed to answer nearly two-thirds of the urgent calls for help. Local officials relied on spotty cellphone alerts that came too late, and now they're under intense scrutiny for those delays. Meanwhile, with the National Weather Service hit by budget cuts, there's real concern this disaster could have been better predicted and that more lives might have been saved.
My guest today is investigative journalist Abrahm Lustgarten. In his latest article for ProPublica, he writes about the horrifying details of this latest catastrophe and the broader story about America's shaky relationship with climate change, highlighting how unprepared we really are. He writes that the floodwaters didn't just wash away cabins and homes. They exposed dangerous gaps in our warning systems and local infrastructure and federal policy.
Over the weekend, President Trump visited Texas, offering condolences and praising first responders, but he deflected questions about local alert failures and the federal cuts to disaster response and climate research. Abrahm Lustgarten is an editor-at-large at ProPublica, where he leads their coverage of climate change. He also writes for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic and PBS "Frontline." And his latest book is "On the Move: The Overheating Earth And The Uprooting Of America." Abrahm Lustgarten, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN: It's great to be here. Thank you.
MOSLEY: Abrahm, first off, I want to acknowledge the tremendous loss of life and suffering in Texas. I was just thinking about this. This has to be one of the worst in recent history for Texas and the nation.
LUSTGARTEN: Yeah, absolutely. And it's particularly disturbing, heart-wrenching to read about so many children perishing in these disasters. It's certainly underscoring the intensification of the loss of human life as these disasters get more and more intense.
MOSLEY: There are several investigations that are underway right now, but I want to break down exactly what happened and what didn't so that we can understand this larger story that these floods are telling us about our changing climate and our ability to respond to those threats. So first off, the Guadalupe River. I was reading how it's known to flood, but this flood, in particular, is in line with what we're seeing with climate and human-caused warming. And I'd love if you could elaborate on the differences in weather patterns, not just in Texas, but really the severity overall of flash floods. We're seeing them in places like New York and other parts of the country as we speak.
LUSTGARTEN: Yeah. I mean, flooding is the deadliest of disasters in the United States, and floods are growing in intensity and in frequency, just like all climate disasters. And one of the main drivers of that is that warmer atmosphere holds greater amounts of moisture. And so as the climate changes, more water is being sucked out of bodies of water like the Gulf of Mexico, carried through the clouds and dropped in intense episodes of rainfall.
In the northern Midwest, they developed a phrase for this called mega-rain events, where parts of Wisconsin, a number of years ago, would see 16 inches of rainfall - then unheard of, now more common - happening all at once. And it was breaking dams and so forth. And it was sort of similar to what we saw during Superstorm Sandy in the New York area and what we saw in Hurricane Harvey in Texas in 2017 and now in Texas this past July Fourth weekend.
MOSLEY: This is a fact that I wasn't even aware of as someone who's a layman, of course. I mean, heat can actually, as you said, build up moisture and move as far as a place like Kansas all the way to the U.K. and cause flooding just around the world. Like, this is a really interesting development that gives us an understanding of the impacts of this climate warming.
LUSTGARTEN: Yeah. I mean, globally, what we're seeing is a total interruption of the systems that we probably all have grown accustomed to seeing as normal. And so moisture and the transit of moisture is one major facet of that. Last summer, we had those horrific floods and rainstorms in Spain that many people probably remember. And there was research at the time that connected the movement of that moisture to the loss of moisture in Kansas in the United States, which at the time was undergoing an extraordinary drought. And so that's an example of, you know, the pulling of moisture out of one place and the dropping of that moisture in another place.
And globally, the earth is getting drier. The extremes are intensifying. So we're seeing more rain in places that are wetter, but those wetter places are getting smaller, while larger parts of the planet's surface are generally getting drier and experiencing greater droughts and prolonged droughts. And this is all really an interrupted atmospheric cycle not transporting and delivering rain in the kind of steady and predictable way that it has for most of our lives.
MOSLEY: OK. I want to get into our ability to respond to these changes. A big question on all of our minds - did President Trump's cuts to FEMA or the National Weather Service affect our ability to respond in Texas?
LUSTGARTEN: I think that's an outstanding question we can't quite put our finger on yet. There's a lot of worrying signs. The National Weather Service, of course, is responsible for long-range and short-range forecasts in issuing these urgent flood warnings. There's a lot of indications that the local National Weather Service did its job before the floods in Texas, but there's been some substantial investigations, also, that more senior officials were understaffed, the big decision-makers, the - those plotting, the - you know, the science agenda for how that agency is - you know, is interpreting climate models and creating the big picture in places like Texas. So that's a worrying indication. And I think it's really unclear still how that affected the particular forecast for Texas and whether that would have had an impact on, you know, the speed of communication of the urgency of those floods to those people.
But I think what we can know for sure right now is that long term, the kind of changes that we're seeing to FEMA, to the National Weather Service, to the support for science and all of the policies and programs that are dependent on it will have an impact. So we can expect - you know, we could talk about the floods in Texas as being an early warning sign of policy degradation to come. And then we can expect to be more on our own and unsupported by those policies when these disasters continue to happen in the future.
MOSLEY: Can you break this down just a little bit more for us? Like, how worried should these cuts make us? Because I'm reading about a quarter of its full-time staff - FEMA's full-time staff - was cut, including, as you said, some of its most experienced staff. There were reports over the last few days that in the days after the flood, FEMA did not answer nearly two-thirds of calls to its disaster assistance line. How worried should this make us?
LUSTGARTEN: Oh, pretty worried, I think, from, you know, the perspective of the staff that I'm speaking with at these agencies, from the policy experts that I talked to. I mean, not to be overly apocalyptic about the circumstances, but we have a confluence of two very worrying trends. And the first, of course, is climate change, which is, you know, reaching a point of, you know, a loud enough signal that it's obvious to us. We're seeing it in daily disasters and in changing trends and in heat waves, and the urgency to deal with that is ever more apparent. And that's coinciding with a deliberate undermining of capability to address that other emergency. And so that is what the people I speak with now, you know, warn should be extraordinarily concerning. And that is coming in many forms, like an absolute undermining of the science and erasure of the science and an undermining of our ability to react to events when they happen.
And that's where FEMA comes in. And there's cuts across the board, and we could talk about any of them. But the cuts to FEMA - it serves a vital role in funding and supporting state and local disaster response, and also in preventing the scale of those disasters in localities across the country.
MOSLEY: Well, you know, one of the arguments that the Trump administration has made regarding these cuts in federal disaster response overall is that states and cities should handle disasters independently. The administration makes this point that FEMA's role in particular sometimes overlaps with state agencies, so there's redundancy. Is that true?
LUSTGARTEN: Well, it's partially true, but it's partially a misrepresentation of how this system works. I mean, FEMA, in many cases, provides funding to those local agencies to do the work that they do. So they might do it separately, but they depend on FEMA to be able to carry it out. And they depend on FEMA for a lot of the expert guidance, the scientific guidance, the management guidance and also the coordination across regions. I mean, you can't ask a - you know, a local municipality to coordinate a response across a state the size of Texas, for example, let alone across a region like the American Southwest or the entire country. And FEMA, just to, you know, remind people, is also responsible for emergencies like terrorism response. So there is a very broad role that FEMA plays that's being undermined.
Very few people, if any, that I talked to would deny that FEMA is in need of reform. You know, there are serious concerns about bureaucracy, about the way and efficiency that money is spent and about the direction that some of its programs have been going in. It is in need of reform, but it is not in need of eradication, and we are headed in the direction of absolutely getting rid of that agency in its entirety.
States like Texas depend on FEMA funding for upwards of 75% of their disaster response funding, other states as much as 90% or 100%. So I hear an argument sometimes that states do rely on the federal government too much for their disaster response, that perhaps if they weren't receiving such funding from FEMA, that they might develop and evolve over time a stronger internal or localized disaster response agency. And I think that that's true, and I think that's important. But it's not a light switch that you can just flip on and off. You can't remove FEMA funding one year, as disasters continue to mount annually, and expect those states to be able to protect and serve the people who live in them.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest today is Abrahm Lustgarten, a senior environmental reporter and editor-at-large for ProPublica. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. Today, we're talking to Abrahm Lustgarten, investigative reporter and editor-at-large for ProPublica. Today, we're discussing his latest article on the climate crisis and the recent tragedy in Central Texas, where more than 130 people were killed. He examines how this single night of devastation reflects the broader escalating risks communities face as the climate crisis intensifies.
Well, during his visit to Texas, President Trump actually did walk back slightly this idea of doing away completely with FEMA. I think he used the word remaking FEMA instead of getting rid of it altogether. How do you assess that move, that statement - that maybe he's walking back now that he's seen the damage that has happened in a place like Texas?
LUSTGARTEN: It's really difficult to interpret, you know, what President Trump means when he says that about FEMA or what you see from FEMA's leadership in Kristi Noem. Rhetorically, it sounds like the right thing. And again, it sounds like the kind of reform that, you know, FEMA's been in need of for a long time. But I'm not seeing yet that the money is there, for example.
I mean, one crucial role that FEMA has played since Congress mandated it in 2018 is the providing of grants, this program called Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program. It's shorthand for BRIC. And it's to build community resilience before these disasters happen, to install infrastructure and fund infrastructure that would prevent disastrous results from flooding like we saw in Texas or prevent wildfires in California or across the Southwest. So that program has been completely defunded. Something like $880 million are being returned to the Treasury. That is a core function that FEMA serves that will protect U.S. communities from the changes of climate change in the future, so that we're not always kind of on our heels and responding after the disaster happens but actually saving some lives and preventing communities from being destroyed before they happen. And I'm not hearing anything about the preservation of programs like that.
And there are others. There's extensive grant programs that FEMA provides and extensive funding for flood mitigation specifically, which appears to all be on hold and is not moving forward. So while we're hearing, on one hand, oh, we're just going to remake FEMA, or, we're going to reorganize it, you know, the legs that support the agency and the money that flows to make the functions it's supposed to provide reality are disappearing.
MOSLEY: You know, what happened in Texas - I mean, it's so catastrophic, so devastating. And local leaders and forecasters there - they're under fire right now for these delayed alerts and confusing warnings. I wanted to just talk with you for a moment about some of the reporting that's come out of there, that perhaps agencies have made cuts and what really happened on the ground. If everything had gone right, what should that response have looked like?
LUSTGARTEN: I mean, this is a hard question to answer. I think there's a lot of little components to this system that each have added up to - you know, to make a big difference, but alone might not have been foreseen to be as critical as they are. But it appears that there was not a cohesive warning system, especially along the Guadalupe River. There was not a heedance to the actual physical risk that is present on that river. The - you know, the children's camp that has been the site of so much loss was located inside a federal floodway designated by FEMA. And a floodway is not just a flood plain. It is not just, you know, a place where water may spread in the unusual event of a flood. It is the designated location where deep water moving at high velocity is projected to go. It is, like, the most critical, the most dangerous disaster zone.
And so I think there's a - you know, we're all asking really significant questions about why a camp is located there in the first place, why any structures or habitation are located within or near these floodways, let alone flood zones, what kind of warning systems, you know, would functionally protect people in those places? But they probably include better communications, like the presence of consistent, you know, cellphone and internet towers. At Camp Mystic, for example, I believe the power loss was one of the first effects of the rising floodwaters. So, you know, there's questions about if you are going to locate people and structures inside something as dangerous as a floodway, then why would you not at least, at a very minimum, you know, raise your electrical infrastructure to higher ground? The same way we had a conversation after Sandy in New York about infrastructure and buildings being located in the basement level, where they flood first. Right?
So there - that's, you know, one of dozens if not hundreds of examples of small steps that can be taken to both protect people, but also to make, you know, communities more resilient. There seems to have been an enormous amount of communication breakdown around the emergency unfolding in Texas. You know, local officials - the mayor of Kerrville - not being aware of the flooding that was happening. No middle-of-the-night wake-up calls, no middle-of-the-night warning sirens, no adequate, you know, cellphone communication or internet communication to move people out of harm's way.
So these are all systems that we now can see how clearly, how obviously important they are, and they're important in any disaster. And then you add the climate component on top of it, which we should say is an exacerbator, not a cause of this flood. Right? This is a place that has always flooded, and so there's a responsibility to be prepared for what has always happened there. And then there's an added responsibility to understand how it might be worse than can be forecasted or predicted or how limited our ability to understand how much worse it could be - you know, to even imagine that worst-case scenario is being enhanced by climate change. And so you pile all those things together, and I think there's a real added burden for having tight policies and procedures in place to respond as an emergency's unfolding.
MOSLEY: Abrahm, what has your reporting revealed to you about this tension between local budget priorities and the sheer cost of climate-related disasters for local officials?
LUSTGARTEN: There's a big-picture answer to that, which is that, you know, most of us remain in denial about the severity of climate change, which means that we're in denial about the potential for worst-case disaster, for the loss of lives in particular from a disaster. And that's coupled with a near-constant pressure in every place that I've reported across the country, not just in Texas, around, you know, budget priorities. So there's a reluctance to believe in the threat, and not just in a denialism kind of way but in a understanding-the-severity-of-the-risk kind of way. And there isn't a lot of money available to do the things that are necessary.
MOSLEY: Something I want to go back to that you mentioned about the tragedy at Camp Mystic, where those young girl campers were killed. You mentioned that the camp was located inside of a federal designated floodway. And I was wondering - how common is that for people all over the United States living in flood and hurricane and fire zones, which are expanding in real time?
LUSTGARTEN: I can't quantifiably answer that, but I think it's the right question for journalists to be asking and looking at right now across the country. What we know about FEMA and its flood plains in general over the last, you know, two decades is that it is an imperfect system and also deserving some reform. So generally, you know, I tend to think of FEMA's flood maps and their designation of flood risk areas across the country as an approximation of where, you know, flood risk is present. But it has routinely been influenced and, you know, corrupted in some ways by local interests and business interests across the country. So what you see, for example, is if a - you know, a flood plain designation is expanded, it can have an impact on commercial development in an area. It can increase insurance rates or it can lower property values.
And so there's always been pressure on FEMA to balance its flood designations with that economic interest of a local place. And what we know about the Guadalupe River and the region right around, you know, Camp Mystic is that FEMA was petitioned in recent years to exempt the locating of structures in that floodway and in that larger flood plain and that it granted those exemptions.
MOSLEY: Wow.
LUSTGARTEN: And the exempting of certain areas in itself is not as unusual as perhaps it sounds or as perhaps it should be. But because of the designation of a floodway in that Camp Mystic location, to me, you know, that says this is - this was an especially hazardous area and especially high-risk for people, let alone children, and let alone to be sleeping in. And many places, and perhaps Camp Mystic included, are grandfathered into these systems. So, you know, if the regulations or the understanding of flood risk improves over time but a business or a camp or a residence was located in the high-risk area, you know, historically and long before those policies evolved, they're often granted an exemption or grandfathered into an old system. And perhaps that's another loophole or point of vulnerability that needs to be really carefully examined at this point.
MOSLEY: Our guest today is investigative reporter and editor-at-large Abrahm Lustgarten, here to talk about his latest article for ProPublica, "The Texas Flash Flood Is A Preview Of The Chaos To Come." We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And my guest is ProPublica editor-at-large Abrahm Lustgarten. He spent years writing about climate change and the battles in America over increasingly scarce water. His latest article for ProPublica is titled "The Texas Flash Flood Is A Preview Of The Chaos To Come." In it, he writes that climate change is making disasters more common, more deadly and far more costly, even as the federal government pulls back from the very policies meant to protect us. Lustgarten's book published last year, "On The Move: The Overheating Earth And The Uprooting of America," explores the rise of climate migrants, people forced to flee rising seas, wildfires, extreme heat and drought, and warns that we could see tens of millions of climate refugees in the coming decades.
Abrahm, I want to talk to you about the Office of Global Change, which leads our country's participation in global climate negotiations. So most of that staff left voluntarily after Trump took office, but the rest of them, about a dozen or so, were fired this past Friday, and the office was closed. What does that mean for our country, to lose its core team of what were career climate diplomats?
LUSTGARTEN: It means that the United States is not participating in any aspect of global efforts to address climate change. It means that we're not going to be a negotiator or a player in making commitments to change the trajectory of that climate change, to lessen the severity of that climate change. It means that we're not going to be a significant player in global efforts to decide how to fund and support countries around the world as they face their own disasters or megadisasters. And it means that we're not going to play much of a role at all in preparing ourselves or the world for the change that's going to come.
And so it's delegating that responsibility to other parts of the world, which will surely continue it. And it is relegating the United States to the role of a bystander and probably, in the long term, to a role of follower. And I think my reporting suggests, you know, a role of being somewhat economically disadvantaged.
MOSLEY: Say more about that - the economic disadvantages.
LUSTGARTEN: Climate change, in one way or another, is stacking up to be the most expensive and the most economically significant challenge that humanity has faced. It will cost the United States, according to the experts and economists that I speak with, you know, upwards of 1- to 3% of its annual GDP per degree of Celsius of warming. And then there's the response and adaptation side that's so relevant to the flooding in Texas, which is really a question of how much is invested in things like flood protection, in coastal resilience, in raising the height of homes along coastal areas, in resettling communities, in building, you know, sewer and electrical systems that can adapt to high temperatures or wildfire risk or rising coastlines and all of these things. And they cost an incredible amount of money. And they cost an incredible amount of money globally.
So we're a wealthy country, and if we chose to invest that money, we could do that. And much of Europe and wealthier countries in Asia could also do that. But many countries cannot. And so, there is going to be, you know, sort of macro and micro effects of this. In the United States, the researchers that I talk to warn of really extraordinary economic impacts in the American states that are most - stand to be most affected by climate change, particularly in the South, where the costs of climate change are expected to outpace the economic growth in those places - in some places, substantially outpace that growth, so that, for example, you know, certain counties in Florida are projected by the Rhodium Group, an environmental and economic research firm, economically to be moving backwards within a couple of decades to be, you know, shrinking by 50% GDP annually.
Globally, there's going to be a weight on the global economy. It will ultimately affect, you know, the pace of trade, the cost of goods, the resiliency of governments, the security questions that result from governments becoming less resilient - right? - the growing conflict associated with instability in places that are struck by disaster. And all of those are threats to our global economy, to Western civilization, to the United States.
MOSLEY: One tangible impact I've heard you talk about is our food supply because so much of our food is exported. Can you talk a little bit about that? Where does this fit into not only our ability to grow and feed, but also export?
LUSTGARTEN: Yeah. I mean, the world's population has been substantially growing for a number of decades now, and it may plateau soon or is plateauing, but the demand for food globally is still forecast to increase substantially. And that forecast for increase is happening at the same time that, globally, the planet is becoming drier. Many places that grow food, whether in the United States, or in Russia or Eastern Europe or elsewhere are less and less able to produce large-scale crops the way they used to, or at least they'll be challenged to do so in the future. So there's - you know, it's a constricting environment where we're hoping, on one hand, that technology that improves yields will make up for the difference, but the availability of water is a real global constraint that I think we're just beginning to face in terms of producing enough food to support the global population.
In the United States, you can see that tension in a number of different ways. When we use, you know, the High Plains of the United States to produce large industrial crops that both are a huge engine of our economy - something like 35 or $40 billion a year in product - but also to export, you know, a lot of that grain, both for food and for energy to places like North Africa, which have traditionally been hugely reliant on American food production. So that's a part of the United States that faces great water pressures. It relies on the Ogallala Aquifer, which is being swiftly depleted. It has faced drought consistently over the past couple of years.
Kansas, for example, has been in, you know, a level of extreme drought for most of last year. Then there's a question of the food that we grow domestically for American consumption and the fact that much of that growth happens in the American Southwest and in California, which are also extraordinarily water-stressed. So most of the country's winter fruits and vegetables, carrots, lettuce, things like that, are grown in southern Arizona or the Imperial Valley in California. And they're dependent on the Colorado River. And the Colorado River's flow has decreased by 20% over the past couple of decades, and about 10% of that decrease is directly attributable to climate change, and very few, if any, of the people that I speak to expect it to get anything but worse. So that's a situation that's not going to improve and is going to force some really difficult decisions for food growth and distribution inside the United States.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest today is Abrahm Lustgarten, an editor-at-large and environmental reporter for ProPublica. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. Today, we're talking to Abrahm Lustgarten, an editor-at-large at ProPublica covering climate change, about his article on the climate crisis and the recent tragedy at Camp Mystic in Texas.
I want to delve a little bit deeper into the reasons that we're seeing such wild swings in weather. So in your writing, you use this word, discontinuity. Basically, climate change is in a straight line of warming days, but we're in an age of discontinuity with wild swings between extremes. What does that actually look like, for instance?
LUSTGARTEN: Yeah. I mean, it basically means that we don't know what's coming next. It means that the weather that we experience on a daily basis is erratic, and our seasons are erratic, and the scale and scope of our storms or droughts or heat waves are reaching unprecedented extremes. And because they're unprecedented, our past data, which includes our past modeling - climate modeling as well as, you know, weather forecast modeling - have a difficult time predicting what's happening. So we're kind of moving into an age of the unknown.
I live in Northern California, and throughout this spring, it was 50 degrees one day and 90 degrees the next. And I think that that's been a shared experience for a lot of people around the country. We're talking about flooding. We're talking about extreme rainfall driven by extraordinarily warm temperatures. And yet in parts of Mexico, the next day, they were experiencing snowfall and hailstorms so great, it was blanketing the streets in ice. And, you know, that is in roughly the same region, in the same part of the world, happening roughly at the same time.
And so that's what this sense of, you know, climate chaos might mean. It might mean that wintertime suddenly feels much, much warmer than it's supposed to for parts of the country that are accustomed to blowing snow and freezing cold. And then spring comes along, and all of a sudden, they find themselves in the deep freeze that they might have expected in February. And so the patterns that we're comfortable with, the patterns that - you know, not that seasons are going to change. But the patterns that we associate with, you know, our annual cycles are not reliable, and we're basically going off script.
MOSLEY: You know, in your book "On The Move" - you wrote this several years ago. It came out last year. But you write about Americans relocating because of all types of things - sea level rise, wildfires, extreme heat. I'm just wondering. When you look at the devastation in Texas, it feels like these internal migrations might accelerate even faster than we expect. I'm also thinking about the wildfires. I live in Los Angeles and just a few months ago, the devastating wildfires have completely changed the topography and where people are living.
LUSTGARTEN: So climate migration generally is, you know, logically supported by, you know, the association of discomfort and risk, like these disasters, and the opportunity to be in a safer place. And so the consensus is broadly that people will respond to these disasters, or they'll respond to extreme heat in Arizona or wildfires in Los Angeles, by moving away. But it turns out that there's a lot of very complicating factors that intermingle with that decision that make it really difficult to predict.
And so, you know, the short answer is anecdotally, we hear of more and more people moving and a demographic shift happening in the country. I hear anecdotal stories almost every day of somebody, you know, writing me and saying, I moved to Michigan, or, I moved to Wisconsin because I was just tired of the heat in Arizona. But from a broader data perspective or something that's sort of, you know, scientifically estimable, it's still very difficult, you know, to capture that demographic change because, you know, a decision to move is always intertwined with a family's sense of risk, for example, in a place like Texas, coupled with perhaps family ties in a different place or economic opportunity or a new job in a different place. And - you know, so there's no one clear signal. It's a whole bunch of signals.
But, you know, one philosophical premise that I've arrived at through a lot of reporting, you know, on this question is that Americans in particular, but I really think people around the world, will move - will undertake what, you know, we might be calling climate migration - in response to economic change, not just in response to these sort of physical, climatic changes. And so, you know, that's always been a driver of demographic change in the United States, and we can expect it to continue to be.
So it means that it's not the heat, unbearable heat in Phoenix, Arizona, that makes somebody move or the tragedy of a flood in Texas. But it's the compounding effect of that over time, when insurance rates rise or home electricity rates rise or electricity bills increase because it's higher temperature and air conditioners being run more often, or the local community experiences a - you know, an economic decline because it had to pass a bond measure to restore the places devastated by flooding. And that meant that there was less funding for the school system, and so the quality of education went down, and so some families moved away because of that. So there's these, like, you know, follow-on ripple effects that drive an economic shift. And that's what I believe will drive, you know, long-term demographic change in the United States in response to climate change.
MOSLEY: Anecdotally, are there places in our country that people are migrating to the most? So beyond Michigan, where you've heard from people saying, I've, like, moved from the West Coast to Michigan, are there other states that are considered maybe climate havens? Does that even exist in the United States - an ideal location that people are moving to?
LUSTGARTEN: Yeah, I mean, with a caveat that no place is perfect, right? Every single place, even a climate haven, will face climate risks, as we saw, you know, with the flooding, you know, in Vermont. I broke that question down into a data-based question, I mean, if you look at, you know, specific climate risks by county across the United States. And what that all suggests, to be, you know, very general about it, is that the north, and particularly the northeast, is an attractive place, you know, for potential climate migrants. And in reality, I'm hearing a lot of both analysis and anecdotal data that supports that idea of people moving to Minnesota and Wisconsin and every place around the Great Lakes. Which, by the way, is, you know, the world's largest remaining supply of fresh surface water, so has an incredible, like, bank of resiliency built in, as well as being somewhat insulated from direct climate impacts like sea level rise or hurricanes.
So there's really robust conversations in a lot of those communities, you know, at the official level, the policy level, in cities like Cincinnati or places like Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Buffalo, New York, about how to build that into their budgets - how to size, you know, a new water treatment or sewage treatment plant for projected future population instead of current population. So that's beginning to happen in places like Ann Arbor or across Michigan, and those places are responding to that change by planning for it and investing in it.
So there's certainly, you know, climate havens and places that people will go. But another fundamental aspect of, you know, this idea of climate migration is not necessarily that people will move across continents, but that people will move short distances - maybe the shortest distance that they possibly can to find the prosperity and safety that they need to continue. And so a lot of the projections that I see call for, you know, a rapid urbanization or a, you know - we've been urbanizing in the United States for a very long time, but that the pace of that urbanization will increase substantially.
MOSLEY: Are there any nations that are making encouraging or promising steps forward in tackling this issue of climate warming and keeping people safe?
LUSTGARTEN: I think you can answer that in a bunch of different ways. But if you slice it in all the ways, I'd say almost every other nation is making, you know, some forward strides in this direction. And so you can look at how countries in Europe - Norway, France - are recruiting American scientists and American academics and supporting their research or pledging new funding for climate research, or how their scientific institutions have really bolstered their own weather forecasting capabilities to exceed the capabilities that the United States had a year ago, and then certainly to carry the mantle as United States capabilities for weather forecasting wane. So those are really positive steps from a scientific perspective.
I think politically, there is generally more, you know, support for addressing climate change globally among, you know, the countries that participate in the Paris Accords or the annual COP meetings than there is resistance at this point. I mean, even Middle Eastern countries and the oil economies there are paying some form of lip service to the issue.
And then you can see leadership in different forms in places like China, which is, you know, ascending to be the global economic leader, is shifting rapidly. The amount of energy that it produces from renewable energy and the technologies that support that and the lifestyle changes, like electric vehicles, which are technologically advancing substantially, or even the deployment of nuclear technology and new nuclear reactors - really investing that money that we talked about being so important and seeing results from it, and seeing rapid technological change and a rapid shift in an economy that's towards a greener economy. That will have an important impact because the faster that global emissions are reduced, the slower and the less extreme and radical the actual climate change and the actual warming will be. So all of those are really solid examples of leadership that we're seeing around the world.
MOSLEY: Abrahm Lustgarten, thank you so much for your investigation, your reporting and for taking the time.
LUSTGARTEN: Thank you for giving so much consideration to these issues.
MOSLEY: Abrahm Lustgarten is an editor-at-large at ProPublica and covers climate change. Coming up, film critic Justin Chang reviews the new film "Sorry, Baby." This is FRESH AIR.
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