The Great Displacement: Jake Bittle

Jake Bittle, climate reporter and author of forthcoming book, The Great Displacement, on climate migration and how to keep living despite disaster.

Back to back new interviews this week, how nice. Today we're sharing a conversation we had recently with Jake Bittle. Jake's a reporter covering climate. To be honest, climate is not our primary lane, even though it should be everyone's primary lane.  

Jake Bittle @jake_bittle

I wrote a book about climate migration for Simon & Schuster. It won't be out until next year (thank you supply chain) but you can preorder it right now. I'm very proud of it and I can't wait for it to be out in the world.

simonandschuster.comThe Great DisplacementThe untold story of climate migration—the personal stories of those experiencing displacement, the portraits of communities being torn apart by dis...

When you find a climate reporter who writes something you understand and who is not entirely bleak – you see if they'll talk to you. Here's how it went. We learned a lot. 

This interview with Jake Bittle was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro for franknews.

My name is Jake. I'm a reporter. I mostly cover climate impact and climate adaptation. Rather than focus on the science or the politics of climate change, I tend to focus on the consequences of planetary warming and on what private and public interests are doing to address those consequences.

I spent most of the last two years working on a narrative non-fiction book about climate migration – meaning the housing displacement driven by climate change in the United States. I'm finished with that and I'm now focusing a lot on the consequences of the Western drought, which has really reached a fever pitch this year, as well as the insurance and financial issues related to hurricanes and wildfires, which are a little more abstract.

When you say Western drought, where exactly do you mean?

So basically the entire region from California to the continental divide, and I guess excluding the Pacific Northwest, is in an extreme variety of drought that's been going on for around 22 years at different levels. It could end up being the biggest drought in about 1200 years. It's not clear when it will end and whether it will end. I mean, at some point, it will rain more, but we don't know when that will be or what that will look like, and it may be that there's a permanent level of drought because of climate change across that entire region.

Ownership – especially private ownership of water is really crazy. 

There was a really significant drought in California between 2014 and 2016, which led the state to pass a bunch of different laws. But, I think now what's happening is that there's another drought just like that in California, and at the same time, there's a lot of the other major water systems, including and especially the Colorado River, which California also uses, that are also in severe drought. The entire water storage system for the whole West is in crisis – like, there's nowhere for agricultural interests or water users in California to turn to for alternative sources. That just sort of generally ratchets up the level of paranoia and desperation across the whole region. 

Is adaptation happening on, I guess, a policy level, but also at the personal level?

That's a really good question. So agriculture is adapting very fast, not by choice. They are the largest water users in all these states, and, in many places, they have the most junior water rights. The cities tend to get water even if there's not enough water to irrigate all the fields. In the Sacramento River Valley and in Central Arizona, this year, maybe 50% of the usual acreage will be planted. So agriculture is adapting involuntarily because they just aren't getting water.  Some farmers are trying innovative things; they'll laser level their crops to reduce water, or they'll try drip irrigation, or they'll plant different crops, which aren't as water-intensive.

On the city side, a lot of cities have really struggled to find ways to reduce household water usage. People aren't really very good at responding to PSAs to use less water. There are some places that have seen success. Las Vegas is the exemplar of this – they have a lot of really strong measures to limit non-essential watering of lawns or grass and outdoor spaces, and they have managed to reduce water usage by quite a bit. I am sure other cities will try to take after them, it's just really not easy to get public buy-in for those things.

Yeah. Vegas at least is like, aware that it's a desert.

Yeah. Most of their water comes from Lake Mead, which is the main reservoir on the Colorado River and it's in crisis. They could sort of see that coming for a long time that eventually this was going to be overtapped and they were very proactive about it. They're doing okay. They're still not in great shape, for reasons that are out of their control. 

I was interested in how you talked about incentivizing people – in particular incentivizing people to move. 

I do think that it's interesting, right? There are places that are under perennial threat from disasters, like Miami, where the sea level is gonna keep rising, and eventually, a lot of properties will be inundated all the time. It's really difficult to know when exactly that will happen. And in a lot of places, it may not be for decades. I think the market hasn't quite internalized how much risk there is in all these places.

On an individual level, I've spoken to many people for the book who are like, I've experienced a flood in Miami and I decided to leave, but most of the people who are doing that so far are people who have a psychological aversion to climate change, which makes sense. That's also true in California; most of the people who have left are people who have experienced a disaster.

But, there are millions of other people who are in these areas of perennial risk, who can't really find a buyer for their homes because the home is not worth that much anyway, and it's in an area of flood risk, or they just don't have the wherewithal to like get up and leave because their social life or their job is in this area. And I think that presents the bigger concern. This is where I think the government has to step in. They need to help people get out, if they want to, and right now that's not really happening.

How does the government do this right now?

Right now the main mechanism is that FEMA distributes grants that allow local governments to buy out homes. So, for example, Houston decided to do this about 20 years ago: they bought out several thousand homes. After a flood, they go in and say, look, do you really want to pay to rebuild this? We'll take it off your hands for market value, and we'll give you the money and you can go buy a home somewhere else. 

That's the main tool that we, as a country, have. In some communities, there have been more creative attempts to relocate entire communities en masse. Outside of special cases, the government really just tries to pay people to leave. And there's a lot of, sort of, creative rifts on that, but I think the main point with the buyouts is that they're funded at a small percentage of the overall need. I think FEMA has funded probably close to 50,000 buyouts and other federal agencies have also done a few thousand each.

But, you could have done this three times, four times as much over the past 20 years. There are a lot of people who, for various reasons, tried to get them and didn't get accepted or just didn't know about it or the local government didn't pursue it or they didn't have enough money to pursue it. There's a lot of need and the government greases the wheels to get people the equity they need to divorce themselves from their house, which most people can't afford to do because their home is the biggest asset that they have. 

It also feels very local and piecemeal – rather than an overarching national plan for climate adaptation. 

Right – so the money comes from the federal government, but really they just give it to the state, which then gives it to the locality, which then decides how to use it. And buyouts are one eligible use for that money. FEMA doesn't have a really strong role in the process, and I really do think that we need some kind of federal climate adaptation strategy, that would say, look, these are the policies.

I mean, we don't even know if this is a successful program. FEMA doesn't follow the people who leave these homes after they get bought out. We know it's successful getting people out of these areas because the homes get destroyed afterward. We don't really know whether it increases their overall economic or social welfare. And we don't know whether maybe there needs to be a larger stipend for people who leave their homes and go somewhere else. It's really understudied in general, and the federal government has a really hands-off role in coordinating how this works. Given the total number of people who are going to be eligible for these programs, you really do need some kind of stronger or more engaged federal partner that is more forward-thinking.

Sometimes I think too that the danger and risk is just part of living in certain areas – and it’s such a part of the narrative of the place that people don’t even consider it as a factor for leaving. 

When I started the book, I did a lot of reading on Hurricane Katrina and there's this tendency to gawk and say why would anyone want to live there? And, the more I read about it and the more reporting I did, and this is true not just in New Orleans, but everywhere, and the combination of a lot of history and a sense of belonging and prevailing economic realities have a strong influence over people's decisions to stay or leave. 

In my book, wanted to show the extent to which different kinds of communities in the United States are already experiencing the weight of these decisions, and how their choices are constrained by whether they can get insurance, or whether they can afford a new home in their area, or whether there is another safe home in their area or whether they have been unlucky enough to have their home or their neighbor's home burn.

I wanted to get at that, and I felt like the best way to do that was not to say, like in aggregate, you know, this many people did this, but just to follow a few families or a few towns, and show over long periods of time, before a disaster and after, what these decisions look like and what ends up happening and what's left.

In that vein do you feel like talking about events and solutions through a more narrative lens rather than a political one is helpful? I read what you wrote about the Army Corps of Engineers, and how there’s another way of discussing this. 

Yeah. I mean, I think that what this has shown me is that the government could be spending a lot more money and doing a lot more to make these places safer for people or to get people out of harm's way. You can't stop hurricanes from happening, but you can ensure that when the hurricane happens, people are able to recover faster, and they're able to find safer housing in the future.

New Orleans is a great example of this. After Hurricane Katrina, (the Army Corps spent billions of dollars on a wholesale renovation of the levee system that protects New Orleans. It worked last year. That's not to say that it will always work; there are definitely potential flaws in the new system, but they successfully did prevent a humanitarian disaster where, had they not done anything, Hurricane Ida would've probably killed thousands of people in New Orleans. That's great, and we could do that in more places.

I also don't really know that when somebody wants to stay in a place that they have a deep connection to – I don't know that there's a policy response to that besides giving people the option to leave and making that option feel fair and adequate. I'm skeptical that they can really make people change their minds, you know? And I don't know whether that's really the federal government's business to take somebody who's been in a place for generations and tell them that it is too risky. You need to leave. I think we definitely need to make it easy for them to claim the money that they would need and find a new property, but there's a limit to what you can do at the end of the day.

Do you see future planning within the infrastructure space for this?

Not really. Almost all the spending is reactive and happens right in the aftermath of a major disaster. When you're looking at a community that's 10 feet underwater, it's hard to design a great plan for that community's future. There's a lot of short term interest. Everyone just wants to get back in their houses and they're filling up hotels and they're going to stay with family. They're not doing well. The kids get pulled out of school. All the focus is on getting back to the easiest thing, which means getting back to the way it was before. It's a self-perpetuating cycle in a lot of ways, but I think there's been some movement to get better at that. I have reason to believe that Congress will continue to allocate more money and open up and allow more flexibility in spending on things like preparedness. It sounds a little dry when you say it that way, but really it is just climate adaptation. They just don't call it that.

There is a difference between mitigation and adaptation.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. We're not doing mitigation in Congress right now, but there's a big market for adaptation. A Republican Congressman in Louisiana can say, look, constituents, I just brought you back a billion-dollar levee, and the constituents, even if they don't believe in climate change, will say, well a levee seems like a good idea.

I’m sorry if this is corny – but do you feel like there is room for optimism in this conversation?

Yeah. This is the one question that I actually prepared to answer and it's definitely not too corny. I think that on the adaptation side, the process of reporting the book was in some ways less depressing than I thought. I talked to hundreds of people who experienced things that I couldn't even imagine experiencing. And for many of them, it was ruinous. And for many of them, it became the worst thing that had ever happened to them in their lives. But, then, their lives kept going. And they continued to live. And after five or six years, most of them told me that they felt like they were back on their feet. In some cases, people often talked about it as a blessing in disguise — like, because it allowed me to get out of there or find this new place.

I think when we talk about climate change, there's often this kind of Day after Tomorrow thing where people think the tidal wave is gonna come and just wipe out New York City and then everyone who's there will be dead. Disasters are much more dynamic and obviously really traumatic and devastating financially and emotionally, but they happen and people keep going and there's a lot of leeway for the government to make people's lives better in that time.

In terms of mitigation, I don't really know. It's really hard to say. I think the adoption of renewables has happened a lot faster than people thought. I think that there's been a lot more private money available for it than people probably thought. I don't think that there's going to be a button you can press to turn a machine on that will suck all of the carbon out of the air and put us into great shape. I don't know if that's going to happen, and I don't think that what we're doing is anywhere near fast enough. But, I don't know that it's completely out of control and that no one is doing anything. 

When you look at what's already happened with the consequences of 1.1 degrees of warming, you don't really wanna think about 1.5 or 2 degrees of warming. That's not gonna be pretty. But when you look at the papers and projections from the start of the century, people were considering 4.5, 6, or 8 degrees of warming. Most people I talk to, don't really think that those are likely outcomes anymore – and that is great because those outcomes would mean the death of human civilization.

I think it's hard to be optimistic, but when I talk to other people and they don't really know that much about the issue, they think that we are cooked and that we're gonna be cooked soon. I don't know that I would look at it that way. I don't know if that's all that productive of a framework.

Certainly not productive. It’s really human to want to assign a silver lining to something traumatic. I understand why that happens. It would be great if we could use the positive elements of change in a way that made people feel like changing. But you know, maybe you have to go through the breakup yourself to understand…

There is definitely a bright side ending to this. If we know that there are going to be tens of millions of people over the next several decades who are destined to lose their homes or be displaced or to be pushed around. And we say, okay, for one, what would it look like to ensure that they basically have a functional guarantee of safe housing once that happens. And then, two, what if we build places that are resilient to future disasters? And what does that look like? Does that look like putting Miami on stilts or does that look like giving people money to move to Cincinnati and making sure that Cincinnati looks like the city of the future? Those are really tough questions that I don’t think we necessarily need to have the answers to right now, but if you imagine a government that's even 10% more enlightened on this issue than our government is now, I think some good could come out of this. It's an opportunity to rethink how we provide shelter and housing and how we design the places where we live. That could be very productive. 

It is an opportunity but it also feels like a race to who will get that opportunity and who it will benefit.

There's a baseline level of financial loss and suffering that you can't really avoid once you've gotten to this point on the trajectory of warming, but there is still a huge range of possible outcomes, and I just don't believe that it's too late to shift the dial. People always talk about the Netherlands as a great example. They aren’t perfect, but they managed to figure out this system for managing water that is ingenious. It's allowed them to create a really, really beautiful thriving, urban society in what should be kind of a difficult place to live. There are examples of that within the United States too — there are definitely ways to make this work, but you can't deny that for a lot of people it's gonna look really ugly. 

People love the Dutch – they're always flying the Dutch in.

They do. Yeah. It’s like their number one export now, flood expertise. The Dutch Embassy has had the most incredible time, I think, over the last couple of years.

When you talk to a real hater, they're like, well, the Dutch haven't figured out what to do with the sea-level rise. They're going under too. 

No, they haven't, but I honestly believe that they will figure it out. I mean, they have so much less real estate that they have to worry about. Nobody could have made the United States flood resilient. It's kind of just too big. 

I was in Iceland, not to brag…and quickly realized like, oh, everyone’s whole world here is about climate — from the individual to the government. And their water is heated naturally. That's insane.

 Yeah. It's really cool that they have like a giant power plant naturally occurring underground. 

Obviously, they are lucky in some ways...

Right, but they have leveraged it in a really effective way. 

Yeah. I wonder if the US has that sort of leveraging capability.

Well, in Texas right now, the overall power demand hit an all-time high last weekend during the heatwave and an astonishing proportion of that came from wind and solar. There were no blackouts and that's because renewable energy really filled that gap. A ton of the gas and coal plants were offline for maintenance. People often call Texas the Saudi Arabia of wind – they just have so much wind power. There are huge domestic resources in the United States for renewable energy. There's definitely room for growth. That's kind of the final way of framing the upside of this — we have a lot of room to grow.