People are still flocking to Sunbelt regions where the housing is cheaper and plentiful — but climate change and extreme weather are worsening.
Even with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act — which, name aside, is the most ambitious piece of climate-related legislation ever passed by Congress — the US is locked into decades of rising temperatures and more extreme weather. Just how warm it will get will depend on how quickly we can reduce carbon emissions and how sensitive the climate proves to be, but average global temperature increases of between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial norms seem most likely, with some regions experiencing much worse extremes.
Nonetheless, Americans are responding to these forecasts by moving in large numbers to some of the hottest, driest, and most vulnerable parts of the country.
According to an analysis published earlier this month by the Economic Innovation Group, 10 of the 15 counties last year were in the water-strained Southwest. Since 2012, an additional 2.8 million people have moved to counties that spent the majority of the past decade under “severe” to “exceptional” drought conditions.
Leading the way in growth was Maricopa County in Arizona, home to Phoenix, a desert metropolis that receives more sunshine than any other major city on Earth — and averages more than 110 days with highs of at least 100°F. Average temperatures in Phoenix are already 2.5°F hotter than they were in the middle of the last century, which helps explain why there were 338 heat-associated deaths last year in Maricopa County.
Despite that — and despite worse to come — the population in Maricopa increased by 14 percent over the last decade, to nearly 4.5 million people. A similar pattern is at work in states like Florida and South Carolina that experience high storm and flood risk, or in states like Colorado and Idaho that face major wildfire risk. Altogether, according to an analysis from the real-estate site Redfin, the 50 US counties with the largest share of homes facing high climate and extreme weather risk all experienced positive net migration on average between 2016 and 2020.
On the flip side, the 50 US counties with the biggest share of homes facing the lowest climate and extreme weather risk, like Onondaga County in upstate New York, largely experienced net negative migration during the same years on average.
This bears repeating: Faced with growing costs from extreme weather disasters and the certain reality of a warmer and more disrupted future, Americans have been responding by not only moving toward riskier areas, but also moving away from safer ones.
Americans move for climate, not climate change
What should we take away from this?
One, while Americans do care about climate change, when it comes to the major decisions they make, it tends to rank far down on national priorities.
Gallup regularly polls Americans about what they consider to be the most important problem facing the country. In July, 3 percent of Americans polled said that “environment/pollution/climate change” was the most important problem, behind inflation, the government, abortion, immigration, racism, crime, and high oil/fuel prices, among other concerns. And while the most important issues tend to fluctuate based on what’s happening in the news, climate change has consistently ranked fairly low.
In other words, there’s a reason the Inflation Reduction Act was called the Inflation Reduction Act.
Two, given that economic concerns tend to rank so highly among Americans, it shouldn’t be surprising that cost of living is a much bigger driver of where people want to live than fear of climate change or disasters. Places like the Southwest and Texas aren’t just hot, dry, and vulnerable to climate change — they also tend to be much cheaper to live in than coastal cities in blue states.
According to Redfin’s data, of the 50 counties that had the largest share of homes facing high heat and storm risk, more than 50 percent had a median home sale price that was less than half the national average at the time. Williamson County in Texas, which includes parts of fast-growing Austin, has the highest heat risk in the US, yet it’s also the county that has seen the biggest population increase since 2016.
It’s not true that if you’re looking for a cheap place to live, your only choices are deserts and floodplains. Can I interest you in Syracuse, New York, or Cleveland, Ohio — two cities considered to be climate havens where housing is relatively cheap?
Probably not. Population in either city has dropped significantly from its earlier peak, which is also true for other northern climate havens like Buffalo. (Although Buffalo just recorded its first population increase since World War II — Josh Allen fever, maybe?)
What the fast-growing cities of the Southwest have going for them is just that: growth. That means more jobs and a better chance at economic mobility, all while paying much less for housing than in high-wage cities on the coast. For many Americans, that’s worth the trade-off of worsening heat waves and other extreme weather.
One last thing: Americans apparently just prefer it hot. A 2009 survey from Pew Research found that 57 percent of Americans preferred to live in a warmer climate, compared to 29 percent who preferred a colder one. And the rise of remote work is only likely to give more people the ability to pick where they want to live.
More housing or more climate migrants
I doubt we’re going to slake Americans’ apparent thirst for as much sunshine as possible. (Though, honestly, as someone who prefers it at least chilly, you can keep your Phoenix weather.) But unless we want a future where ever more people are in the path of ever greater climate change and weather disruptions, we’ll need to make it less expensive to live in places that aren’t subject to heat waves or droughts or wildfires.
California is one example. The state’s horrific wildfires have been producing climate migrants in recent years, in part because the fires can consume whole towns, and in part because there’s no real way to adapt to the constant threat of smoke and destruction.
Yet people keep moving to wildfire-prone areas of the state — and often staying even after a fire destroys their home — in part because the perennially restricted housing supply in the state makes it virtually impossible to live anywhere else. A report last year found that between 1990 and 2010, half of all new homes constructed in California were built in the wildland-urban interface, the zone most vulnerable to wildfire risk, in part because anti-development regulations elsewhere simply make it easier and cheaper to build there.
Fighting climate change first and foremost means reducing carbon emissions, but it will also require decades of adaptation — and that includes housing policies that can steer people away from those parts of the country that are already at risk by making it cheaper to live in safe areas.
This doesn’t mean that Americans can’t or shouldn’t ever move to hot, dry places in the country. In their own way, desert metropolises only exist because of technological adaptations to their extreme climates — population growth only truly took off in the Sunbelt after the advent of air conditioning in the second half of the 20th century. But continuing that growth in a hotter and drier 21st century will require much more than just massive AC units.
Cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas have taken major steps to get more use out of less water, banking aquifers, reducing waste, and recycling wastewater. In Phoenix, total water use is actually less than it was in the early 2000s, even as its population has continued to grow, and the average resident used 29 percent less water in 2019 than in 1990. Southern Nevada as well has reduced overall water use even while adding hundreds of thousands of people.
It won’t be easy, though, and the more extreme climate conditions become, the more difficult it is to adapt. Lake Powell and Lake Mead — the two biggest artificial reservoirs in the US, which help supply water to 40 million people — are now at just around 27 percent of capacity. Poorer residents are less able to afford the air conditioning that can make desert heat bearable, while agriculture — which accounts for the vast majority of water consumption in the American West — will keep draining dwindling supplies.
If we’re truly going to adapt to extreme weather, we’ll need to make climate havens cheaper and more attractive. And if you’re in the market for a move, give Buffalo a thought! It has new apartments, new jobs, even new people, along with something that will become increasingly rare in the future: snow.
A version of this story was initially published in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to subscribe!
The heavily redacted document reveals potential obstruction claims against Trump.
An affidavit released Friday presenting evidence for the FBI’s search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, while heavily redacted, indicates that Trump had highly protected information about human intelligence gathering — and that the agency had reason to believe that he was attempting to obstruct the investigation into the records.
The 38-page affidavit was written to support the government’s request for the search warrant executed August 8 and gives more insight into the timeline of events leading up to the search. The Justice Department made the search warrant public on August 12; that document indicated that the search was in support of an investigation into Trump under the Espionage Act, as well as two other federal statutes — obstruction of justice and destroying or concealing federal records.
Though the affidavit is heavily redacted in order to preserve the investigation and protect the identities of witnesses, it still provides new information. Crucially, the affidavit states that within the 15 boxes of documents returned to the National Archives in January of this year, there were “184 unique documents bearing classification markings, including 67 documents marked as CONFIDENTIAL, 92 documents marked as SECRET, and 25 documents marked as TOP SECRET.”
Some of those documents, the affidavit indicates, could contain extremely sensitive information about intelligence gathering activities, potentially compromising information about the identities of foreign nationals who spy for the US, and about information intercepted from foreign intelligence.
A memo justifying the redactions to the affidavit also indicates that “a significant number of civilian witnesses” are cooperating in the investigation; the redactions, according to the memo, protect their “safety and privacy” in addition to that of “law enforcement personnel, as well as to protect the integrity of the ongoing investigation.” In court proceedings to determine whether and how much of the affidavit to release, the court sided with the government, ruling that releasing significant portions of the affidavit would subject the investigation to possible obstruction and threats, citing probable cause to believe that obstruction had already occurred, as well as increased threats against FBI personnel since the August 8 search.
The burden of evidence for executing the warrant
An affidavit is not an indictment; its purpose is merely to establish probable cause to execute the search warrant. The affidavit itself makes that clear, saying, “it does not set forth each and every fact” that the investigation has uncovered in the investigation so far. The purpose of the affidavit is only to meet a reasonable threshold to justify the search of the former president’s home.
Much of that evidence is still under seal, but, as a letter dated May 10 from acting US archivist Debra Steidel Wall to Trump’s attorney Evan Corcoran indicates, the 15 boxes the government retrieved in January contained hundreds of pages of documents with classified markings, up to the level of Special Access Program (SAP) — security protocols which heavily restrict access to some of the government’s most sensitive information. Those documents were intermingled with “newspapers, magazines, printed news articles, photos, miscellaneous print-outs, notes, presidential correspondence, [and] personal and post-presidential records,” according to the affidavit.
Furthermore, the evidence presented in the affidavit indicates that at least some of those records discuss clandestine human intelligence operations — spying — as the New York Times’ Julian E. Barnes and Mark Mazzetti wrote Friday. Should information about those sources, the information they collect, and how they collect it get into unauthorized hands, not only could it jeopardize US intelligence gathering, but it puts the lives of people who spy on behalf of the US at risk.
Though Trump claimed he had a standing order to declassify information at Mar-a-Lago, documents of this sort would be marked HCS for Human Intelligence Control System; that system is tightly guarded to keep the information, techniques, and people used to gather it safe. “It would be reckless to declassify an HCS document without checking with the agency that collected the information to ensure that there would be no damage if the information were disclosed,” former legal adviser to the National Security Council John Bellinger III told the Times.
Though such documents can be general, sometimes they hold more specific information about human intelligence sources and the information they’re providing — increasing the possibility of identifying the human source. “The more sensitive the information, the fewer the suspects or technical vulnerabilities for the adversary to investigate,” former CIA officer and counter-terror official under Trump, Douglas London, told the Times.
The affidavit and DOJ memo also both raise the possibility that Trump and his associates tried to obstruct the government’s effort to retrieve the sensitive documents — and that they could try to similarly hamper the DOJ’s investigation. The statute that covers obstruction, Section 1519, could put Trump and his team in more danger, according to Georgetown Law professor Julie O’Sullivan. Since Trump has claimed that he already declassified the documents in his possession, O’Sullivan told the Times, “he is essentially conceding that he knew he had them” and has been “obstructing the return of these documents” by refusing to hand them over.
What’s next for Trump?
The FBI investigation into the records at Mar-a-Lago is just one of four major criminal investigations involving Trump at present, as Vox’s Ian Millhiser previously explained.
The DOJ’s investigation into the January 6, 2021 insurrection has resulted in federal charges against more than 830 participants; some defendants are facing extremely serious sentences. While, as Millhiser writes, it’s not clear whether the DOJ is investigating Trump for his role in the riot, “both congressional and judicial officials have indicated that Trump most likely violated at least two federal criminal statutes during his efforts to overturn the 2020 election — one protects Congress from interference, and the other prohibits conspiracies to defraud the nation.” That investigation, like the others, is ongoing, and no charges have been issued against Trump himself.
There is also an ongoing investigation into the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia — specifically the 16 fake electors the campaign recruited to falsely claim that Georgia’s electoral college votes went for Trump. Those 16 individuals could face criminal charges, as could another target of the investigation, former New York City Mayor and Trump insider Rudy Giuliani.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ office is also eyeing Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for his involvement in the attempts to overturn the Georgia election results. Graham has been issued a subpoena to testify regarding two phone calls with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Graham allegedly “questioned Secretary Raffensperger and his staff about reexamining certain absentee ballots cast in Georgia in order to explore the possibility of a more favorable outcome for former President Donald Trump,” according to a court document justifying the request for Graham’s testimony.
Again, while Trump is not yet facing charges in the Georgia case, he could under two Georgia laws. One statute makes it a crime to engage someone to willfully interfere with “any electors list, voter’s certificate, numbered list of voters, ballot box, voting machine, direct recording electronic (DRE) equipment, or tabulating machine.” Another Georgia statute outlaws “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud,” as Millhiser writes.
Trump’s businesses are also the subject of criminal probes in New York State, where Attorney General Letitia James is investigating whether the Trump Organization committed fraud by overstating the value of the businesses’ assets when seeking bank loans — or, alternately, claiming to tax officials that the company had a lower value to shirk its taxpaying duties. James’ office deposed Trump earlier in August, but he pled the Fifth Amendment — protecting himself from self-incrimination — more than 400 times during his deposition. James could choose to request that Trump’s business be essentially dissolved if the investigation finds it repeatedly committed fraud or other crimes, but it’s a civil case, not criminal — meaning it can’t end in a Trump indictment.
In the case of the Mar-a-Lago records, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines wrote in a letter to lawmakers Friday that her office is assessing “the potential risk to national security that would result from the disclosure of the relevant documents,” Politico’s Andrew Desiderio and Nicholas Wu reported Saturday. That investigation will likely determine, among other things, whether people without the proper authority to access highly sensitive documents could have done so while they were at Trump’s residence. That’s not impossible, given the DOJ’s concern about the lack of security at Mar-a-Lago, and reporting by the Pittsburgh Post and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) that a scammer posing as a member of the Rothschild banking family had gained access to Mar-a-Lago and to Trump himself last year.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner (D-VA) and Vice-Chair Marco Rubio (R-FL) have also requested to see the documents removed from Mar-a-Lago, indicating Congress’ interest in understanding the kind of information Trump was hoarding — and the effect that improper handling of such information could have on the intelligence community. Even if the FBI has now removed all federal records from Mar-a-Lago, the investigation is expected to be protracted and not likely to be settled soon.
Today, Explained to Kids explores the damage done by fossil fuels and why renewable energy might be the best way to power the future.
In each episode of the Vox podcast Today, Explained to Kids, a group of friends takes a journey to the Island of Explained. Kids (and adults) come along to explore the magical island and meet its whimsical inhabitants, all while tackling some of the biggest questions in the world. This summer, we’re answering questions about how to make the future better through the way we eat, protect species’ habitats, listen to each other, and more.
In Today, Explained to Kids: It’s electric!, a magical theme park ride on the Island of Explained demonstrates the damage done by fossil fuels and why renewable energy might be the best way to power the future.
Listen to the episode with the young people in your life — or just because — and then come back here to download our educational activities that build on what we learned in the episode. Thanks to early childhood education specialist Rachel Giannini for developing our learning materials!
You can also read the full transcript of this episode below:
And listen to more Today, Explained to Kids episodes:
For season two, Today, Explained to Kids is teaming up with KiwiCo to bring four new episodes to life with fun and enriching home-based activities to create a seamless listening and hands-on experience.