HOW MANY OF US WILL BECOME CLIMATE REFUGEES?

Lori Rittel packed up and left her Montana home to live in the Florida Keys. Paradise found, right? Not exactly. Rittel, 60, may have escaped long winters, but two years ago climate change knocked at her door.

That’s when Hurricane Irma, packing winds of 130 miles per hour, hit the Keys. Afterwards, large portions of the Lower Keys “looked like a war zone,” The Miami Herald reported. More than 27,000 homes suffered some degree of damage, including 1,179 that were  destroyed.

Rittel cannot afford to rebuild or repair her bungalow. Her bedroom is too badly damaged for her to sleep in it, and her bathroom is missing a wall. Her best hope for escape is to sell it to the government to knock down. “I just want to sell this piece of junk and get the hell out,” she told Prashant Gopal of Bloomberg BusinessWeek. “This will happen again.”

Taxpayer buyouts for homeowners in flood-prone areas such as New Orleans, Houston, and Staten Island, New York, are enabling some Americans to get out of harm’s way. Florida, the state with the most people and real estate at risk, is just starting to buy homes, wrecked or not, and bulldoze them to clear a path for swelling seas before whole neighborhoods get wiped off the map, according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

By the end of the century, 13 million Americans will need to move just because of rising sea levels, at a cost of $1 million each, according to Florida State University demographer Mathew Haeur, who studies climate migration. Even in a “managed retreat,” coordinated and funded at the federal level, the economic disruption could resemble the housing crash of 2008.

Some small communities are moving lock, stock and barrel. In 2016, Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles became the first place to be given federal money to replant itself. The residents, situated on an island being eaten away by the sea, are headed for a former sugar cane farm 30 miles inland. “We are called climate refugees but I hate that term,” said Chantal Comardelle, who grew up there.

In Alaska, a dozen coastal towns, inhabited mostly by Inupiats and other Alaska Natives, are also planning to relocate. Diminishing sea ice is exposing them to storms, and rising temperatures are thawing the very ground beneath them. 

The migration from the nation’s coastal areas would be dramatic. The closest analogue could be the Great Migration, a period spanning a large chunk of the 20th century when about 6 million African Americans departed the Jim Crow South for cities in the North, Midwest and West, Oliver Milman wrote in The Guardian.

“I don’t see the slightest evidence that anyone is seriously thinking about what to do with the future climate refugee stream,” Orrin Pilkey, professor emeritus of coastal geology at Duke University, told Milman. “It boggles the mind to see crowds of climate refugees arriving in town and looking for work and food.”

Pilkey’s new book, written with his son Keith and titled Sea Level Rise: A Slow Tsunami on America’s Shores, envisions apocalyptic scenes where millions of people, largely from south Florida, will become “a stream of refugees moving to higher ground.”

It seems clear that the federal government will have to become more active in coordinating efforts to move Americans out of danger and to limit the financial toll on them--and on the country as a whole. “The scale of this is almost unfathomable,” Billy Fleming, a landscape architecture professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told Bloomberg BusinessWeek. “If we take any of the climate science seriously, we’re down to the last 10 to 12 years to mobilize the full force of the government and move on managed retreat. If we don’t, it won’t matter, because much of America will be underwater or on fire.”

Philip Stoddard is the mayor of Miami Beach, which is on the front lines, and he has been a forward-looking advocate of strong action to counter climate change. One point he makes is that our nation faces some difficult choices. “We need a plan as to what will be defended because at the moment the approach is that some kid in a garage will come up with a solution,” he said in an interview with The Guardian. “There isn’t going to be a mop and bucket big enough for this problem.”

GOP's Fitzpatrick Introduces Carbon Tax Bill

A Republican congressman from Pennsylvania is the latest lawmaker to author a bill to tax carbon emissions. While dozens of cities, from Alaska to Florida, were having their hottest Septembers on record, Brian Fitzpatrick, who represents a suburban district just east of Philadelphia, was trying to do something to combat the forces believed to be driving our temperatures ever higher. 

“The lion’s share of economists say that putting an honest price on carbon--one that includes the costs that burning carbon imposes on all of us--is the fastest and most efficient way to tackle climate change,” said George T. Frampton, co-founder of the Partnership for Responsible Growth (PRG). “We welcome any such legislation, but it’s especially exciting when a Republican is the lead sponsor. Our nation needs a bipartisan spirit to meet this enormous challenge.”

To improve his legislation’s prospects, Fitzpatrick, a former FBI agent and a leader of the House Climate Solutions Caucus, signed up two Democratic colleagues as co-sponsors: Representatives Salud Carbajal and Scott Peters, both of California.

Fitzpatrick’s Market Choice Act calls for a tax of $35 per metric ton of carbon dioxide emissions starting in 2021 with rates increasing cumulatively thereafter.

This measure is the eighth carbon tax bill introduced this year. The bills propose different rates that would increase at varying speeds, and they also differ in how the massive proceeds would be used. The Pennsylvania congressman calls for investing most of that money in the nation’s infrastructure. “With the American public overwhelmingly seeking fixes to our crumbling roads and bridges while searching for solutions to mitigate the dangerous effects of climate change, our bipartisan bill is a dynamic solution that seeks to tackle both problems,” Fitzpatrick said.  

Reporting on the introduction of this legislation, The Hill’s Miranda Green wrote, “The push to regulate greenhouse gas emissions comes as both Democrats and Republicans face pressure from their constituents, and in some cases the fossil fuel industry itself, to regulate carbon emissions that lead to climate change.”

Another Republican congressman who is out front in combating climate change is Francis Rooney of Florida. He has introduced two carbon tax bills this year. One would use most of the revenue to reduce payroll taxes, while the other would return the revenue to U.S. households as monthly rebate checks.

The “obvious, no-brainer tool for curbing carbon emissions,” wrote columnist Catherine Rampell, is “putting a price on carbon. A carbon tax (or its cousin, a cap-and-trade system) is almost universally embraced by economists on both the left and the right. With good reason, too. Taxing carbon means pricing in, upfront, the implicit costs that come from using fossil fuels — especially, though not exclusively, the cost of warming our planet.”

“With his leadership as the lead sponsor, Congressman Fitzpatrick has showed that he is a true conservative and patriot,” said The Rev. Mitchell C. Hescox, president and CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network.  

The bill was widely praised by leaders in the conservation community. “Increasingly severe storms, droughts, floods and megafires all make clear the urgent need for strong, bipartisan action to reduce carbon emissions and prepare our communities for unavoidable impacts,” said Shannon Heyck-Williams, director of climate and energy policy at the National Wildlife Federation. Fitzpatrick’s bill, she stated, would “increase investments in clean energy and natural climate solutions that will make communities and ecosystems more climate-resilient.”

Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, which has created a Carbon Tax Research Initiative, has produced an online guide titled “What You Need to Know About a Federal Carbon Tax in the United States.” It provides a high-level overview of carbon-pricing basics, the major decisions that policymakers confront when designing a carbon tax, the implications of those decisions, and the proposals in Congress today. In addition, Jason Ye of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions has analyzed such legislation.

WHY YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT PEAT FIRES IN SIBERIA

The fires in the Amazon have set off alarms around the world--and with good reason. But half a planet away, Eastern Siberia is also on fire, as are large parts of the Arctic Circle. The “unprecedented” Siberian blazes began in June after temperatures peaked at 8-10°C warmer than the average from 1981 to 2010. The heat dried out the landscape, producing tinder for natural forest fires that were probably ignited by lightning, The Economist explained.

But it is what is happening below ground that most worries ecologists and climate scientists, according to the magazine. Many of the Siberian and Alaskan fires are burning carbon-dense peat soils, which would normally be waterlogged. Peat fires produce much more carbon dioxide and methane from the combustion of carbon that has been locked in the ground for hundreds or thousands of years. Burning soil therefore eliminates important carbon sinks that cannot be replaced on any useful timescale.

This, in turn, generates feedback loops that are not accounted for in the climate projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). For example, The New York Times’ Kendra Pierre-Louis explained, the Arctic fires exacerbate global warming because of the soot produced by burning peat. When the soot settles on nearby glaciers, the ice absorbs the sun’s energy instead of reflecting it, speeding up the melting of the glacier.

The latest research indicates that Arctic permafrost is much richer in carbon than scientists believed. Researchers now suspect that for every one degree Celsius rise in Earth’s average temperature, permafrost may release the equivalent of four to six years’ worth of coal, oil, and natural gas emissions—double to triple what scientists thought a few years ago, according to a September National Geographic article by Craig Welch. 

And the rate of temperature increase in the Arctic is startling. Welch toured part of Siberia with ecologist Sergey Zimov, who has been studying the Arctic for decades. He and his son Nikita run the Northeast Science Station in Cherskiy. “Three years ago, the temperature in the ground above our permafrost was minus 3 degrees Celsius [27 degrees Fahrenheit],” Sergey Zimov said. “Then it was minus 2. Then it was minus one. This year, the temperature was plus 2 degrees.”

As a result, Arctic permafrost isn’t thawing gradually, as scientists once predicted. Geologically speaking, it’s thawing almost overnight. 

“What is scary about the Arctic fires is that they are driven by climate change, and as such, there’s very little you can do,” said Thomas Smith, who studies wildfires at the London School of Economics. “You can’t raise the water table for an area the scale of northern Alaska or Siberia,” he told The Economist.

Smoke from the wildfires has engulfed hundreds of villages in Siberia—and spread as far as Seattle and Vancouver, The Wall Street Journal’s Georgi Kantchev reported. Meantime, large-scale flooding, due mostly to heavy rain, has added to Russians’ misery. The twin threats are “injecting fresh urgency into rethinking the country’s usually skeptical stance toward the dangers posed by climate change.”

Every Friday for more than 20 weeks, 25-year-old violinist Arshak Makichyan stood at Moscow’s central Pushkin Square holding a placard warning of the dangers of global warming. Social media dubbed him the city’s only climate protester. But suddenly, the violinist is not so lonely: More than 1.2 million people have signed a petition for authorities to do more to counter the environmental problems in Siberia.

President Vladimir Putin is concerned, too. He warns that Russia is being hit hard, with temperatures in the country rising 2½ times as fast as the global average. “We take this matter very seriously,” he said. 

When will Congress and the White House catch up to Putin? Americans need to sound the alarm and push our elected officials into motion so we can counter this threat before it’s too late. The quickest remedy? Putting an honest price on carbon dioxide.

THE ECONOMIC PERIL OF FAILING TO TACKLE CLIMATE CHANGE

The UK recently had its hottest day on record. “Train tracks buckled, roads melted, and thousands were stranded because it was out of the norm,” said Kamiar Mohaddes, an economist at the University of Cambridge. “Such events take an economic toll, and will only become more frequent and severe without policies to address the threats of climate change.” 

He is a co-author of a study by researchers from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the University of Southern California, the University of Cambridge, and National Tsing Hua University. The Washington Post’s Andrew Freedman described it as “the latest in a string of reports from the United Nations and global financial institutions and others showing that climate change constitutes a looming financial risk.”

The researchers said climate effects across the U.S. economy were broad. Each of the 10 economic sectors studied, including agriculture, manufacturing, mining and trade, were affected by at least one climate variable, Politico reported. 

“The United States will be one of the countries that will suffer the most (reflecting sharp increases in U.S. average temperatures by 2100),” Mohaddes said. The researchers estimated that climate change would cost the U.S. economy 10.5 percent of GDP per capita and reduce global GDP per capita by 7.2 percent by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions remain unchecked.

Meeting the Paris climate accord's goals would blunt negative economic effects from climate change, the paper said. The U.S. economy would shed just 1.88 percent of its GDP by 2100 by reaching the Paris deal's target of curbing emissions 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, according to the researchers. Opponents of the Paris agreement, including the Trump administration, have argued the non-binding pact would wreck the economy.

Some politicians maintain that the United States can innovate and adapt its way to managing climate change. The researchers don’t see it that way. They said the speed at which countries adjust and adapt to shifting historical norms correlates to the size of income losses: "Overall, while climate change adaptation could reduce these negative long-run growth effects, it is highly unlikely to offset them entirely. ... The evidence appears to suggest that (at least for now) adaptation has had limited impact in dampening the negative effects of climate change in the United States."

And adaptation is not inexpensive. Consider this excerpt from a New York Times story by Christopher Flavelle: “After three years of brutal flooding and hurricanes in the United States, there is growing consensus among policymakers and scientists that coastal areas will require significant spending to ride out future storms and rising sea levels — not in decades, but now and in the very near future. There is also a growing realization that some communities, even sizable ones, will be left behind.”

Flavelle cited a report by the Center for Climate Integrity, an environmental advocacy group, which estimates that, by 2040, simply providing basic storm-surge protection in the form of sea walls for all coastal cities with more than 25,000 residents will require at least $42 billion. Expanding the list to include communities smaller than 25,000 people would increase that cost to more than $400 billion.

The three most expensive cities to protect with sea walls, the group says, would be Jacksonville, New York, and Virginia Beach. The Times’ article has the full top ten.

All of the above is more evidence that it makes economic sense to act more quickly to limit climate change. Most economists are convinced that putting an honest price on carbon pollution is our best option. It’s time for Congress to take that advice.

FLURRY OF CARBON FEE BILLS IN CONGRESS

As our planet neared the end of the hottest month ever recorded, several carbon-tax bills landed in the hopper on Capitol Hill. 

The push to regulate greenhouse gas emissions comes as both Democrats and Republicans face pressure from their constituents, and in some cases the fossil fuel industry itself, to regulate carbon emissions that lead to climate change. The influx of legislation is surprising some observers who have long called for action on climate change, wrote The Hill’s Miranda Green. “They say they wouldn't have believed a year ago that there would have been such a push.”

Young Republicans’ concern about the climate is one impetus for action. Kiera O'Brien, former president of the Harvard Republican Club and now vice president of Students for Carbon Dividends, testified, “[L]ike me, so many of my peers on both sides of the aisle are exhausted by the partisan bickering, the divisive entrenchment, and staunch unwillingness to compromise.” Appearing July 25 before the Senate Democrats' Special Committee on the Climate Crisis, she said, “The climate does not care who has scored the latest partisan shot. Neither does the economy, nor do the people whose lives have been and will be upended by climate uncertainty and instability.”

The “obvious, no-brainer tool for curbing carbon emissions,” wrote columnist Catherine Rampell, is “putting a price on carbon. A carbon tax (or its cousin, a cap-and-trade system) is almost universally embraced by economists on both the left and the right. With good reason, too. Taxing carbon means pricing in, upfront, the implicit costs that come from using fossil fuels — especially, though not exclusively, the cost of warming our planet.”

Republican Congressman Francis Rooney (FL) recently introduced a bill that would place a tax of $30 per metric ton of CO2 equivalent on fossil fuel producers and large industrial emitters. An automatic $2 per ton increase will occur every two years if emissions reduction goals are not met. Modeling by Resources for the Future suggests the tax would reduce energy-related carbon pollution by approximately 42 percent by 2030 against 2005 levels.

Other recent bills came from 1) Democratic Senators Chris Coons (DE) and Dianne Feinstein (CA); 2) Rep. Jimmy Panetta (D-CA); 3) Rep. Daniel Lipinski (D-IL); and 4) Rep. John Larson (D-CT). Coming soon, reportedly, is a measure from Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania.

These bills follow four offered earlier this year: 1) H.R. 763 [Rooney and Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL)]; 2) H.R. 1960 [Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA)], 3) S. 940 [Sen. Chris VanHollen (D-MD)], and 4) S. 1128 [Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Brian Schatz (D-HI), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)].

The measures differ in the initial fee, the rate of increase, the use of the resulting revenue stream, and in other ways. But all of them would use the free market to drive down greenhouse gases by putting a more honest price on carbon emissions.

“Even the least aggressive price path would significantly reduce U.S. emissions beyond the Paris agreement targets,” wrote Marc Hafstead of Resources for the Future. “In the current political climate, it is unlikely that any of these bills will become law. But the discussion they raise will hopefully help future policymakers find common ground and perhaps set the stage for future bipartisan action that confronts the climate challenge.”

“Given the unprecedented level of movement in Congress surrounding carbon tax legislation,” wrote Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy,” the Center’s Carbon Tax Research Initiative has produced an online guide: “What You Need to Know About a Federal Carbon Tax in the United States.” It provides a high-level overview of carbon-pricing basics, the major decisions that policymakers confront when designing a carbon tax, the implications of those decisions, and the proposals in Congress today. In addition, Jason Ye of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions has analyzed such legislation.

Another glimmer of hope on Capitol Hill came via the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Before Congress left for its August recess, the panel passed--unanimously--a five-year highway bill that contains a first-of-its-kind title dedicated to addressing climate change. It proposes raising spending levels by 27 percent in part to pay for $10 billion in climate-focused programs and policies. The measure would provide $4.9 billion over five years to help states improve the resiliency of their infrastructure to natural disasters and extreme weather.

Americans who believe that we need national action to counter the climate challenge should encourage their senators and representatives to support the bills that would put a price on carbon.