CC: Parts of US Getting Dangerously Hot, Yet Americans Moving The Wrong Way- To Coasts, The West
- 'Parts of the US are getting dangerously hot. Yet Americans are moving the wrong way,' David Sirota & Julia Rock, The Guardian, Aug. 16, 2021. - Ed. As the climate changes, census data shows that Americans are shifting from safer areas of the US to the regions most at risk of heating and flooding.
Science has provided America with a decent idea of which areas of our country will be most devastated by climate change, and which areas will be most insulated from the worst effects. Unfortunately, it seems that US population flows are going in the wrong direction – new census data shows a nation moving out of the safer areas and into some of the most dangerous places of all. To quote Planes, Trains and Automobiles: we’re going the wrong way.
The Census Bureau’s new map of the last decade’s population trends shows big growth in the west and on the coasts – and declines in the inland east coast and Great Lakes region. Now compare that map to *ProPublica maps (See Below) documenting the areas most at risk of extreme heat, wildfires and flooding, and you see the problem. While there has been some recent anecdotal evidence of pragmatic climate migration, overall the census data shows US population growth is shifting out of areas that may be the best refuges from the most extreme effects of climate change, and into many areas that are most at risk.
Put another way: if climate change were an enemy in a war, America is not fortifying our population in the safest places – the country’s population is moving into the areas most at risk of attack. Some of the examples are genuinely mind-boggling. Upstate New York is considered one of the US' most insulated regions in the climate crisis- yet almost all of upstate New York saw population either nearly flat or declining.
And big population increases in and around the Texas Gulf coast, which is threatened by extreme heat and coastal flooding. Philadelphia is comparatively well situated in the climate crisis- but it saw only modest population growth of 5%. It was surpassed on the list of biggest cities by Phoenix, which saw an 11% population growth, despite that city facing some of the worst forms of extreme heat & drought in the US. Then there is south Florida, and Vermont...
More,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/16/us-climate-change-americans-census-data
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* ProPublica: New Climate Maps Show A Transformed US, Sept. 15, 2020.
https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/
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