Climate chaos is already making us poorer. We're just pretending it's not.
Playing make-believe is not a plan. It's time for real-world strategies.
My first powerful premonition of brittleness came to me on a levee in New Orleans.
This was back in 2002. A local friend had taken me there for an after-work outdoor cocktail. I had spent that morning interviewing academics and public officials about NOLA’s growing climate risks, which everyone knew then (even then, years before Katrina) had all the makings of a tragedy.
It was no secret at the time that climate-driven destruction had escalated, and much worse was on its way. Folks in my circle had been talking for years about how global heating was not only threatening worse disasters, but spawning new risks that themselves transformed the workings of society around us. As my colleague Bruce Sterling wrote in 1999, it was clear that “The world is becoming uninsurable.”
That hot, sunny afternoon, a freighter was passing by, and it seemed to float above the neighborhood below. I experienced a moment of instant clarity. Suddenly, the meaning of the concepts “below sea level” and “rising seas” hit home. Suddenly, the concept of “inevitable losses” no longer seemed abstract. Future loss haunted in the humid air. The hair on the back of my neck rose. I felt, deep in the core of my body, what was coming, not just to New Orleans, but to good people in every corner of the world.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Over the last 23 years, I’ve watched the threat level go up and up, from “what if” to “early signs it’s happening” to “the crisis is here and almost nothing’s being done about it.” All along the way, I was sure that even if people couldn’t be roused to save the planet’s natural wonders, they’d at least snap out of it once they realized their own ways of life were becoming endangered.
I was wrong. Now we face a brittleness bubble of inevitable-yet-still-unacknowledged loss. Now we live surrounded by a magnitude of risk that one insurance executive recently warned “threatens the very foundation of the financial sector.”
You know what else rests on that increasingly shaky foundation? Everything that makes life feel prosperous and secure. Because it’s not just the megafires, storm-force winds and surging seas we should be worried about. They’re terrible, they’ve already caused more than three trillion dollars in damages since 1980, and they’re worsening fast. But they are focused and short-lived. What we need to alert ourselves to is the danger of living in a world where —in some regions — those huge disasters, limited recoveries from disaster, widespread breakdown of local capacities and irreversible economic losses spiral communities down into places that trap their residents in poverty and ruin.
How big a deal is this, really?
Smart people are trying to make straight-forward estimates of the risks.
“About 26.1% of U.S. homes, with a combined value of $12.7 trillion, are exposed to at least one type of severe or extreme climate risk such as hurricanes, wildfires, or floods,” claims a new report by Realtor.com.
Similar reports and studies have been making the news in the last year. Check out, for instance, First Street Foundation’s work on climate risk and real estate, which is some of the best around.
I covered First Street’s most recent research in this podcast:
Focusing on insurability, First Street estimates a staggering $1.47 trillion dollars of lost real estate value (as opposed to the total value of homes at some risk cited above), over the next 30 years. They predict these losses will impact 84% of U.S. communities, but concentrate in 21,750 “climate abandonment neighborhoods.”
After all, if a house is too dangerous to insure at a reasonable price, it’s going to be pretty hard to sell at the price it was worth before. “You know, if you fast forward 10 or 15 years,” Jerome Powell, Chair of the Federal Reserve, said earlier this year, “there are going to be regions of the country where you can’t get a mortgage.” So drops in property values from loss of insurability represent a dire problem.
But the problem is bigger than just lost home values. When we pull out and focus on the whole picture, the numbers change. If we make that $1,470,000,000 a stand-in for the economic harm endangered regions face, we’re likely being way too conservative. Thirty years may also be an extremely cautious timeline for what may be far faster-moving impacts. The work behind these estimates is grounded in the best currently available evidence, limits considerations to a tightly-focused group of factors, and produces numbers in line with known, past trends. It’s solid.
But these and other estimates are in a way hampered by their own solidity.
Nonlinear processes are at work on our society now.
We are surrounded by discontinuity. All the systems we depend on to make modern life work smoothly and safely — whether we’re talking bridges, city budgets or grocery-store supply chains — are optimized to work within a certain band of tolerances. Exceed those tolerances and things are likely to start breaking down.
Here’s the crux of the crisis: All those tolerances were designed in a different time, for a different world, with a different climate, and very different assumptions about continuity and stability.
Some systems fail catastrophically, demanding serious resources and efforts to restore to function — and our capacity to fund and produce that restoration is already strained to the breaking point by rising demand.
We avoid that kind of failure in part by having those systems enmeshed in other systems we expect not to fail: if a bridge goes down, we expect there to be another way to get to work while it’s rebuilt. As the world around us becomes increasingly discontinuous with the past, not only does each system have a greater danger of profound failure in itself, but all the systems it depends on will see their functions degrading as well.
Danger at one point of failure is mitigated by interconnection; danger at many points of failure is magnified by that same interconnection; it piles up into a degree of brittleness that’s actually larger than the sum of parts, and it increases in a nonlinear way as more brittleness is introduced into the system.
Of course, brittleness impacts are not confined to property boundaries or halted at city limits. They spill over, slosh around and worsen each other across broad geographies. Mosquitos breeding in the standing waters of the recently-flooded neighborhood down the hill will be happy to pay you a house call.
But brittleness risks are not only nonlinear and interconnected, they also threaten to cascade through daily life in the communities these systems serve. As I’ve written about time and again, we can expect to see major erosion of local and state/provincial government tax bases, municipal and institutional bond ratings, regional abilities to attract investors, the availability of disaster response and recovery funding, social costs of unofficial abandonment, worsening local health outcomes... the list goes on. This is not something many places will come back from.
The interwoven, complex, multi-system nature of systems’ brittleness is one reason it’s so hard to get accurate assessments of the magnitude of economic risk we face, much less to systemically lower that risk (though obviously, headlong efforts to slash carbon emissions and limit ecological destruction would save us a great deal more, and more complex, harm).
Effective response at a national scale is a nontrivial problem. Forget for a moment the powerful forces of denial and predatory delay currently arrayed against any meaningful recognition of the scale of the problem, here. Even with political agreement, response would involve the development of new expertise across hundreds of fields and professions, and trans-disciplinary cooperation of a kind usually not seen except when a people are at war. We don’t have enough money to do most of what we should, so thorny triage and greatest-good problems will be at the heart of sensible planning.
I don’t think we’ll solve it before we smash into its brick-wall realities. I don’t think we’ll come up with anything resembling a comprehensive plan for societal risk management… at least not until it’s too late to use it. This is a epochal failure of leadership.
We can now worry that this out-of-control Brittleness Bubble is not in the range of a trillion dollars in the U.S., but in the tens of trillions. The Brittleness Bubble isn’t the Subprime Crisis: it’s likely both bigger, and something we’ll never recover from. It will permanently alter the fortunes of entire regions.
Of course, we will respond in some way to these risks. Defenses will be built. People will move out of harm’s way. Systems will be ruggedized. Not all potential losses will be allowed to become actual losses. Frantic adaptation is an industry with a future.
But the scale of the danger now means that a huge number of those losses will materialize. As I wrote last year about Hurricane Helene, “Even in the best scenarios—where humanity cuts emissions rapidly and mobilizes national-scale responses—we’ll start to see more and more places that no longer have it in them to recover and rebuild.”
The recognition that all this is true is still easing gradually into our consciousness. But a scary chasm still runs between how most of us think things work, and how they’re actually working now. As I wrote a few years back, “When assets remain stuck on the old side of the gap, they end up devalued; when institutions do, they become incapacitated; when people wind up there, they get displaced and impoverished.” Mind the gap.
Bubbles are primed to burst not when an overvalued practice can no longer continue, but when it becomes clear that its future growth in value is over; not when continuity becomes physically impossible, but when it becomes financially impractical. It is, in real terms, financially impractical to keep many of communities and business going the ways they have, given where they are, and how endangered they are.
These huge losses have effectively already happened, even if we’re still denying their effects. We live between the moment the shoe is dropped and the moment it bounces off the floor.
That doesn’t mean that we’ll see one big explosion of loss, and a clear financial crater. Value collapse doesn’t have to look like the Subprime Crisis or Black Friday. It doesn’t actually even have to be clear and identifiable to most of the people involved. Most of the people who are being made poorer by the planetary crisis, right now, don’t really understand what’s happening around them.
Largely, that’s because we have an actual, decades-old industry of people whose jobs it is to lie to the people about climate change. Here in the U.S. we have a political party completely committed to not only perpetuating that lie, but systematically (and often illegally) demolishing the nation’s capacity to study, understand, mitigate, predict, prepare for and recover from the climate crisis and its dangers. And through troll farms, influence campaigns and the funding of disinformation, foreign powers have helped to magnify these efforts. All of this is designed, intentionally, to make it harder to see how the world has changed.
But many are eager to be deceived. Many don’t want to feel threatened by planetary-scale forces they barely understand. Many don’t want to see their largest investments as vulnerable to sudden loss. Many don’t want to think of their home towns as increasingly maladapted to the real world. Many don’t want to think of their businesses, their credentials, their professional status, their legacies as being outdated by the pace of change. The rot runs deep.
So the present state may go on, where the repricing of Brittleness Bubble assets and places is more like a stuttering deflation than a loud pop — a wheezing loss of value many can continue to ignore. Until they can’t.
Make no mistake, though: in times of rapid change, living in the past will cost them (or their kids), perhaps more than they can pay.
So what should you do to avoid these losses? Here are three first steps.
Understand that readying yourself for the planetary crisis is your responsibility. No one is coming to save us. Don’t get caught up in doomer survival fantasies, but don’t expect this to be easy, either — especially if your budget is limited.
Get real about risk. Find out about not just your own risk, but your community’s risk and the extent of risk in the wider systems around you. Start learning how to spot at least the more obvious vulnerabilities. Connect with neighbors and local groups working to mitigate the problems.
Consider relocation. Unfair as it may be, there will be a large difference in the fates of the most-endangered places and the relatively safe ones. Get to relative safety if you can. Sooner would be better, all things considered. Ironically, the farther ahead you’re thinking — planning for kids and grandkids, for instance — the faster you’ll want to act.
Stay together, work fast.