Welcome to Planet Days, a green newsletter for a greenwashed Planet. Thank you to Sam Liptak for editing this morning’s post.
If you’re new to Planet Days, every other week I try to send out a three-minute read on what it means to go green — ranging from topics on air-conditioners and lawns to electric vehicles and trains.
🌤️ I spent last weekend in Boston, where the breezy weather was a welcome reprieve to the oppressive heat of summer. And that’s exactly what made it feel like a climate haven — the topic of this post.
Boston and surrounding New England cities feel like perfect “climate havens” — temperate, isolated cities far from the impacts of climate change that have swamped the globe this summer.
This idea has led thousands of people to move to places like Upstate New York or the Great Lakes, fleeing wildfires in California or hurricanes in the Gulf. It has also led people to Vermont, a small inland state nuzzled in the Appalachian mountains and supposedly far from sea level rise, tropical storms, and heatwaves — all of which are made worse by climate change.
Of course, that assumed safety was upended this year, as two months of rain fell in two days over parts of Vermont, leaving some streets of its capital, Montpelier, more navigable by boat than car.
As wildfires burn through the West, heat oppresses the South, and rainstorms batter the Northeast, we’re finding out that there is no safe place in a warming world.
But the biggest problem in a warming world is hardly people flocking to so-called havens like Pittsburgh or Ann Arbor (Go Blue). Instead, it’s those that ignore climate altogether, moving to cities on the front lines of climate change.
Queue my regular rant about the Sun Belt.
Despite hellish temperatures, the region — which stretches from Southern California to Florida — is home to the 10 fastest growing counties in the U.S., according to a new analysis.
The worst culprit is Maricopa County, which comprises Phoenix (whose July set the record for highest monthly average temperature of any U.S. city at 102.7 degrees F): For each of the last five years, Maricopa County gained more people than any other U.S. county.
Another recent analysis finds that more Americans are moving into rather than out of disaster-prone areas: In the past two years, the most flood-prone counties in the U.S. saw a 103% jump in population; the most fire-prone counties, a 51% jump; and the counties with the highest heat risk, a 17% jump.
Of course, finding a safe place to live is not always as obvious as avoiding the desert. Sometimes, disaster strikes places we’d least expect, and does so with little warning. In Maui, Hawaii, at least 114 people have died this summer from devastating wildfires.
“[Climate change is] leading to these unpredictable or unforeseen combinations that we’re seeing right now and that are fueling this extreme fire weather,” Kelsey Copes-Gerbitz, a researcher at the University of British Columbia, told The Associated Press. “What these... catastrophic wildfire disasters are revealing is that nowhere is immune to the issue.”
But even though all cities are vulnerable to climate impacts, we’re not helpless.
Homeowners can protect their properties by installing rain gutters to reduce flood risk, or adding metal roofs to protect against wildfires, or buying disaster insurance ( flood insurance is required from homes in high-risk flood areas, but many floods occur outside these limits).
Communities can make their cities and towns more resilient through policies that encourage elevated infrastructure, more efficient and safer buildings, and tree planting (which keep cities cool).
And at the state level, governments can invest in more reliable renewable power in the face of climate impacts. Solar and wind power, for example, helped keep Texas’s power grids running during its latest heatwave.
When it comes to climate change, it’s no longer enough to question our diets, modes of transportation, and even our choice to have children. We also must also ask ourselves, where should we live?
After this summer, the answer is far more complicated than we once thought.