We should be wary when our views on a fact-based question, like what kinds of places will fare better in the climate change era, end up aligning with our preexisting political and ideological commitments. For example, if someone a few years ago thought Tesla made high quality products and played an important role in accelerating electric car adoption, but now that Elon Musk has made a reactionary heel turn thinks Teslas are bad vehicles, that opinion may be based on vibes more than reality.
We’re all subject to subconscious mental pressures like confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, and to see the world clearly requires actively managing them. So it was with some trepidation that I reached the conclusion I will explain in this post. You can judge whether I’m seeing clearly or succumbing to wishful thinking.
Reminder: this is about making projections so we’re dealing in probabilities.
The most important climate change era decision most people will make is where to live. In addition to cost, proximity to family, space, community values, schools, arts and culture and the other criteria people have always used to decide where to live, everyone should be assessing two key climate change factors:
Climate vulnerability
Capacity to adapt
Places have vastly different degrees of vulnerability to climate change. Locations like Miami, southern Louisiana, and the heart of California wildfire country face existential risks in the medium- to long-term. There is real risk they won’t be able to support fully functioning communities within 50 years. Other places, like the Great Lakes region, are far less climate vulnerable. Most are somewhere in-between.
Regardless of the degree of climate vulnerability, though, the changes underway will be so large that every place will have to invest heavily in climate adaption. As I wrote in The climate crisis means destabilization, not doom (forgive the long self-excerpt):
[O]ur infrastructure and systems are increasingly inadequate and dangerously vulnerable to climate change-intensified extreme weather.
We live within a web of human systems and a built environment that enables the functioning of human civilization. Every day we rely on drinking water systems, food systems, electric grids, drainage systems, building codes/zoning rules/housing, internet networks, supply chains, trash disposal systems, transportation infrastructure, sewage systems, and more for nearly all aspects of our lives.
The vast majority of this infrastructure was built when the patterns of earth’s natural systems, including the outer limits of weather extremes, were fairly stable. Global warming has knocked those natural systems out of equilibrium, causing a steady stream of destructive weather events outside of historic ranges. The frequency and extremes of these storms, fires, and droughts will increase further in the near future.
In other words, the human systems and infrastructure we depend on were built for a world that no longer exists.
On a practical level this means to keep people safe, especially those in lower-income communities, we will need to reassess, redesign, and rebuild or reinforce most infrastructure and human systems on earth. It isn’t yet, but this has to be a top priority in the years and decades ahead.
In 1988, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) started giving infrastructure grades to all 50 states and the nation overall. The USA’s grade in 1988 was a C, by 2017 it had slipped to a D+, and by 2021 we pulled it up to a C-. The infrastructure building boom of the early and middle parts of the 20th century laid the foundation for decades of prosperity, but it has grown old and is beginning to break down.
ASCE quantifies the investment required to upgrade our infrastructure, as you can see in the bottom row of the below chart. This can be thought of as how much we “owe,” in the form of increased risk and decreased reliability of our built environment. It reached $4.59 trillion in 2017 (see chart)1 and swelled to 5.93 trillion by 2021.2 That’s trillion with a T, one-thousand billions.
Communities that adapt at the magnitude required will, in all but the most vulnerable places, have a good chance to thrive in the future. Those that don’t invest enough will be at much higher risk of incurring climate damage sufficiently severe that they can’t quite fully bounce back. Most of those places will begin a slow downward spiral driven by reverse network effects, in which people with resources leave the area, depleting the tax base, reducing the financial capacity to adapt, and leaving it exposed to further climate impacts, and so on.
It’s not an original observation to note that responses to climate change in the U.S. have been driven largely by politics. Democrats are the party that favors aggressive climate change mitigation, Republicans are opposed. The issue has been pulled into the ravenous maw of the culture wars, and Big Oil has become an increasingly significant player in the Republican coalition.
The large partisan divide on climate change creates two big obstacles for Republican states in adequately adapting to climate change.
First, Republican voters are skeptical of climate change. They don’t consider it a big problem, don’t think it’s relevant to their lives, and consequently oppose most of the things required to stop it.
Importantly, Republican base voters – those who are more likely to vote in primaries and therefore who Republican elected officials are more responsive to – hold views that are even more extreme and disconnected from climate reality.
This is unlikely to change dramatically anytime soon given the disproportionate trust Republicans have in Fox News and the information they get from the network.
In 2019, research by the nonprofit Public Citizen showed how trust in Fox News helps skew Republican views on climate change:
A review of Fox News programs for the first half of 2019 reveals that the network continues to give ample airtime to long-debunked climate myths and fringe deniers. Of Fox’s 247 segments that involved considerable discussion on the issue, 212 (86%) were dismissive of the climate crisis, cast warming and its consequences in doubt or employed fearmongering when discussing climate solutions.
That was in 2019, before Fox News’ Big Lie-fueled 2021 hard-right turn to keep up with their audience and avoid losing viewers to One America News (OAN) and other outlets. When it comes to Republican media diets and how they influence views on climate change, things are bad and getting worse.
That brings us to Republican states’ second problem when it comes to making needed infrastructure upgrades in response to climate change: it will be expensive and will therefore require raising taxes.
The Republican party has changed a lot since the late 1980s, but among the strongest threads of continuity connecting the two eras is complete devotion to lower taxes. Spurred by the Koch brothers, libertarian groups like Club for Growth, and activist Grover Norquist, who dreams of a federal government so small he can “drown it in a bathtub,” Republicans have been near-absolutist about not raising taxes.
Can Republicans come up with revenue without raising taxes? To a degree, but not at the scale needed. The federal government will provide some funding, but it won’t be nearly enough and, due to the shifting idiosyncrasies of the appropriation process, it won’t be reliable.
Some Republican officials already play language games in order to fund climate adaptation on the sly. They fund initiatives to prepare for “extreme weather” or to build resilience against “changing coastal conditions.” Under Republicans leadership, Texas has spent money studying how to protect Houston from future hurricanes, and Arizona has done long-term planning related to water resources.
Is it possible Republicans can ride this rhetorical tool all the way to a high-level of climate ruggedization? Well, anything is possible, but we’re assessing probabilities, and upgrading and building infrastructure will require significant sums of money. States will need to borrow via the bond market and raise taxes to service the debt over time (I’ll come back soon to the possibility of cities and counties funding their own infrastructure upgrades). Republican leaders will tend to resist this essential first step, believing as they do that “it’s your money, not the government’s money.”
If Republican-led states aren’t willing or able to raise the revenue required, they will struggle in the face of rising climate impacts.
A cold-eyed assessment of which places are most likely to thrive in the years and decades ahead leads to the hard-to-avoid conclusion that Republican-controlled states are a bad bet. No tax increases, no additional revenue, no infrastructure upgrades, no climate ruggedization.
Democratic states haven’t done nearly enough to-date to ruggedize against climate change so it feels odd to sing their praises. But the proper comparison for a potential place to live is not a hypothetical perfect place, it’s the other actual options. In that comparison, blue states have a higher likelihood than red states of delivering the infrastructure upgrades necessary to thrive in the future.
Notes
https://infrastructurereportcard.org/making-the-grade/report-card-history/
https://www.rff.org/publications/reports/climateinsights2020-partisan-divide/
https://www.citizen.org/news/climate-change-denial-dominates-86-of-fox-news-climate-segments/
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2020/01/24/democrats-report-much-higher-levels-of-trust-in-a-number-of-news-sources-than-republicans/
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/08/media/fox-news-hoax-paperback-book/index.html (Fox News hard right turn)
https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2021/11/23/adapting-to-climate-is-a-winning-issue-for-politicians-even-in-red-states-1394620
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/climate/climate-change-funding-states.html
The 2017 Report Card’s investment needs were calculated over 10 years. The 2013 Report was over just eight years, and for the 2001, 2005, and 2009 Report Cards the time period was five years. Therefore, the apparent growth in this number is exaggerated somewhat, though it is growing.