California's Fires Show How Climate Will Destabilize Our Politics and Daily Life

The title and semi-tongue-in-cheek mission of this newsletter, “Doomsday Scenario,” is to explore whether things are really as bad as they seem. Today, I want to tackle an issue where the answer is actually: Things are worse than they appear. If you’re enjoying this newsletter—although I understand that “enjoy” might be the wrong emotion it provokes—I hope you’ll consider sharing it with a friend or colleague you think will find these political and geopolitical analyses useful:

A dozen times a year or so, I speak to one group or another about the state of our politics and geopolitics, and one of the things I always try to emphasize is that we spend most of our time as a culture and civilization looking in the rearview mirror — imagining that our experience now and past can inform us about our future. We tend to think things are more stable than they are and most predictions build off baselines and ranges that seem “reasonable.” Scientists even have a term for this phenomenon: “Erring on the side of least drama” or ESLD.

The challenge is that we’ve now entered a period where everything is changing faster than we’re ready. Across the first 25 years of the 21st century, in almost every case, the most alarmist among us have been right: On climate, on pandemics, on threats to our democracy and human rights, on geopolitical threats.

That’s not very comforting as we think about the years to come.

I’ve watched the California fires over the last few days with the same horror as everyone else; we’re watching major parts of one of the nation’s major cities burn in real-time, in an event that’s best described as a fire-hurricane, an event all-but unthinkable not that long ago but one that is increasingly common as decades of misguided fire-management policies collide with expanding population in the so-called “wildland–urban interface,” all accelerated by changing, hotter, drier climate conditions. It is a literal recipe for epic disaster.

Unfortunately, California’s fires are a harbinger of what’s to come in a world where we increasingly feel the effects of climate change—but it’s also a warning about HOW our world is going to change in the years and decades ahead. I don’t pretend to be a climate scientist or to understand the precise feedback loops that may, for instance, cause the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or the melting of Greenland. However, I have in recent years spent a lot of time thinking about climate as a political threat.

Over the past few decades, we’ve spent most of our national focus thinking about climate change as a technology and economic challenge. Can we move away from fossil fuels and adopt renewables at a fast enough pace to change the arc of warming? How can we use tax incentives and industrial policy to drive the adoption of electrical vehicles faster? How can we better create batteries and power storage solutions to smooth out the variability of solar and wind energy? How quickly will the cost of solar panels continue to fall? How do we impose more appropriate costs on carbon?

In that time tackling this as a tech and economic challenge, we’ve actually made substantial progress on a lot of these problems and have, so far, fundamentally altered the arc of our planet’s climate. As one leading climate thinker I spoke with last fall told me, “We were on a course to four-and-a-half to six degrees of warming. That is not a world that is livable. Today, maybe we’re on a path for two-and-a-half or three-and-a-half degrees of warming—still bad, but better. That trajectory is headed in the right direction.”

But the California fires underscore how, as we actually begin to live the effects of even that “better-than-it-could-have-been” era of warming, the tech and economic challenge is going to take a backseat to a bigger crisis.

We are unprepared for how climate is about to be the main driver of our politics, nationally and internationally.

Climate change isn't just one more political priority on our already over-crowded list of national to-dos. It is a threat multiplier that affects every single other priority already on it, from the air we breathe to the food we eat to how much we pay for a house.

So much of the world is about to either have too much water or not enough. And that’s going to change and destabilize everything in our political calculations.

The globe’s changing climate is about to put an enormous number of people in motion—people who find their homes increasingly unlivable, their local economies in collapse, or their houses simply destroyed.

Already, we’re seeing between 20 million and 30 million people a year displaced worldwide by climate disasters, from droughts and desertification to hurricanes and typhoons. In 2018, the World Bank estimated that just three regions — Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia — will generate 143 million more climate migrants by 2050. That’s an enormous number of people in motion in the world. Others have pegged that number even higher: A 2020 study by the Institute for Economics & Peace figured there might be 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050.

In many cases, those people and the affected countries and governments that will be destabilized are the ones already the worst off. Half of the countries that will be most affected by climate change and climate refugees around the world are already among the least stable and peaceful countries and regions—places like Chad, Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan.

We’re still watching how the refugee crisis that grew out of the Syrian war — a refugee crisis, by the way, not at all unrelated to looming climate disaster — continues to destabilize the politics of Europe and has encouraged the rise of the far-right in Germany, France, and elsewhere. Just imagine what will happen when the refugee pressure increases and numbers move from single-digit millions to double-digit millions across Europe.

But this is not just a foreign story.

It’s been easy to overlook how much of our current national angst over immigration and the border is a story of how climate change is already destabilizing Central America. While there’s been a lot of attention to how drugs and gang violence have driven much of the migration to the US southern border, that flow is also heavily affected by climate. “Farmers in Central America have experienced multiple droughts since 2014, resulting in crop losses of 70 percent or more during some harvests and often affecting consecutive growing seasons,” the US Institute of Peace wrote in 2022. “Droughts were likely a key driver of large increases in family migration from Honduras and Guatemala to the United States in 2018 and 2019.”

Similarly, a team of researchers at UT-Austin and the University of Utah found in 2023 found “climate change impacts, particularly on the agricultural sector, likely contributed to a surge in out-migration to the United States, including whole families.”

Think of our current immigration challenge.

Think of what happens when it gets worse — when living in parts of Central America becomes more undesirable or even impossible.

Moreover, this is not a problem that stops at our borders.

Here in the US, estimates hold some 13 million Americans are going to be forced from their homes in the years ahead because where they live now will be underwater. “That's the low end of the climate migration that we would expect might be driven from sea level rise alone,” says ProPublica reporter Abrahm Lustgarten, who wrote a book last year entitled “On The Move: The Overheating Earth And The Uprooting of America.”

Those 13 million — people in Louisiana, Florida, the Carolinas, and elsewhere — are just the start. Because much of the country is also going to be hit with the opposite problem: Not enough water.

Lake Mead is in crisis, as just one water system, threatening water supplies for places like Las Vegas.

The Great Salt Lake is drying up, threatening Salt Lake City with an “environmental nuclear bomb.”

Phoenix experienced a streak last year of 113 straight days over 100 degrees — that’s effectively a third of the entire year.

Texas gives us annual reminders of the fragility of its energy infrastructure and power grid, challenges compounded by rising temperatures and rising populations.

Think about how these climate change effects build and transform one another — how droughts fuel wildfires and then, in turn, wildfires fuel flash floods.

What happens when major cities and urban areas in the US simply become unlivable, too hot, too dry—or, even, entirely dry?

What about the taxes, infrastructure costs, and insurance premiums of the climate age? We’re already watching the start of insurance market collapses in places like Florida and California. For all the talk about housing and the affordability crisis, what about when large portions of the country simply become places where people live at their own risk? We’re watching heated political debates start about what role governments and agencies like FEMA have in enabling people to rebuild where they clearly shouldn’t be living in the first place.

Remember that when Superstorm Sandy hit New York City, it wasn’t even a hurricane, but it still required nearly $40 billion in repairs. A category 2 or 3 hurricane storm, meanwhile, submerges both of its airports, La Guardia and JFK, underwater, as well as half of Brooklyn, half of Queens, and half of Manhattan. We know this — you can look up the maps of the storm surge.

Nor is any of this only a story about the coastal or desert regions of the United States.

We’re already seeing less of the country is truly “safe” from climate change than we once hoped — my home state of Vermont, which has long topped lists of “safer for climate refugee lists” has experienced devastating hundred-year mountain floods on the literal same day, July 11th, in both 2023 and 2024. The devastation from Hurricane Helene in September came not on the coast but miles and miles inland, wiping entire North Carolina communities away.

But much of this will also play out in far more “mundane” climate-fueled and exacerbated disasters. Most people don’t realize that the top insurance risk in the United States is actually hailstorms and violent thunderstorms, a number that topped $60 billion in 2023. State Farm saw more thunderstorm damage in 2023 than the previous two years combined, and those payouts are getting larger as storms get more severe. Not much of the country is safe from severe thunderstorms.

Think of what all of this is going to mean for food supplies, for the insurance industry, for the mortgage industry.

Parts of the country — and parts of the world — that we rely on for corn are about to be unable to grow corn.

People have been warning of the coming debates and fears about water supply for years—and even this week, we’re already starting to see some of that play out, albeit in the dumbest possible ways. The acrimony (and desperation) is only going to get worse.

Think of what this means for internal migration, political representation, dysfunction, taxes. Think of what this means for workforce talent and economic development.

Individuals may very well make choices to live in uninsurable places — the lure of a beachfront house is strong! — but that’s going to be a much harder sell for companies.

Thirteen million people represent, in the roughest math, somewhere between 20 and 30 electoral votes and seats in the US House of Representatives that may shift in the years ahead simply because of shifting climates.

The looming impact of internal climate migration is very much a part of what I wrote about in November: How the United States may be on track to lurch this next decade more toward the model of Europe, a free trade and travel zone where citizens’ rights, equality, and freedoms vary widely state to state. Want affordable homeowners insurance? Live in New England or the Upper Midwest. Meanwhile, a whole bunch of red states in the Sun Belt may encounter huge new economic pressures: Florida’s low-tax government system may very well face enormous cost pressures as it becomes the home-insurer of last resort.

Moreover, as the California fires remind us this week, all of this isn’t going to happen in some gauzy future. It’s happening now. It’s all the more striking that it’s happening in January. As one meteorologist wrote this morning, “These fires are a watershed moment, not just for residents of LA, but emblematic of a new era of complex, compound climate disaster. Conditions for a January firestorm in Los Angeles have never existed in all of known history, until they now do.”

That’s about to be our new normal: Things we’ve never seen before, things that have never existed in all of known history, until they do now.

We don’t really know what will happen in the years ahead because we don’t understand what happens when you pile all these risks on top of one another. Climate scientists think their models — remember when I talked about Erring on the Least Side of Drama? — might under-predict the future. The drama might be 200 percent higher.

Look around at America’s political dysfunction today — and look at the priorities list of the Trump administration and the Republican Congress — and ask yourself: Are any of the looming crises and problems that I mention here likely to get BETTER in the next two to four years? Is our ability as a government and a society to respond to these challenges likely to improve?

In fact, almost all of the above will get worse — and if Trump/GOP agenda succeeds in a bunch of bone-headed moves like privatizing the National Weather Service, our country’s inability to respond and meet this moment will only accelerate. Add to it Donald Trump’s already-demonstrated proclivity to reward or punish states in terms of emergency-disaster relief based on his political whims, and you have a recipe for real problems. Does anyone think Donald Trump won’t try, for instance, to coerce “sanctuary cities” to cooperate with immigration raids in exchange for basic federal assistance in a disaster?

A huge part of day-to-day American life is stabilized and predicated on the assumption that, when bad stuff happens, the federal government will come to your aid. What if that’s no longer an automatic assumption for civilians, state governments, municipalities, or tribal leaders?

We’re entering some really rocky waters. As I quoted former US intelligence leader Sue Gordon saying a few weeks ago: “Our institutions are not keeping up with the turn of the Earth, and they’re being devalued in the moment,” she told me. “Society requires government, yet we’re running out of the structures that make it work.”

Thanks for reading!

GMG

PS: If you’re a regular reader, you’re surely noticing that this newsletter is coming out more consistently, to share history and context (and lots of book recommendations) about the time and challenge ahead. I hope you’ll consider sharing it with a couple people in your life who you think might find value in it: