Climate Change is Not an Opportunity

 Climate change does not create refuge, it destroys the very concept. A response to Chad Livengood.

The halls of power in Michigan seem to be echoing with the concerns about the state's population loss. Personally, I feel it's a lot of hand-wringing over a little less than thirty thousand people, but if it becomes a trend it could definitely be a problem for the state in the long run. 

This sets off the domino of punditry trying to talk about what could reverse the potential issue. Economic opportunity, property tax reform, reducing access to abortion, increasing access to abortion, the list goes on and on. The discourse that gives me the most trouble has to be the strategy to market Michigan as a refuge as the climate crisis ravages particularly western states. 

There are many examples of people who make this case, but Chad Livengood, Politics Editor and Columnist with the Detroit News has recently made, I felt, the most cogent and assertive case for doing so in a June 5th column titled "Climate migration can be Michigan's growth strategy if state embraces it".

Livengood puts aside the accusations of cynicism to focus on the truth of the matter. He quotes Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer as saying such a strategy is cynical. Though I'm inclined to agree with her since acknowledging climate devastation as a strategy for population poaching seems to be consigning oneself to the inevitabilities of the crisis rather than devoting oneself to fixing it, I also don't want to focus on the cynical nature of the claim. I actually have an issue with what Livengood refers to multiple times as "the truth".

To be clear, Livengood's assessment of the climate models in other states isn't at all inaccurate. He is right to say they will "face a reckoning on water" in the decade or so to come, he's right to say hurricanes will have larger impacts on coastal cities, forest fires will be more prevalent in high desert areas, states like Florida are literally being subsumed by the sea. He mentions State Farm's decision to stop offering homeowners insurance to homes in California due to climate-related damages expected to become impossible to cover profitably and Arizona's decision to halt new home builds because of a lack of foreseeable water sources to accommodate them. Things are bad and will certainly become worse, this is true!

Assume that it isn't cynical to answer these crises by hanging up a giant banner that says "MOVE TO MICHIGAN". Is it really true that Michigan will be a climate refuge? Livengood and others seem to think that our unique position to fresh water while being far from the coasts and having temperate weather makes it so.

It seems unfair though, to trace your finger down the climate model timelines for other states and not Michigan when you're making this assessment. Michigan does not have a freshwater accessibility problem and it sits safely away from the coasts, but that doesn't mean we won't face similar issues to other states in the years to come. While we don't have to worry about coastal hurricanes, Michigan is likely to see more frequent and more severe storms, in fact, we already are. These storms do damage to critical infrastructure, leaving people without power in increasingly common extreme weather events (heat waves, cold snaps etc). Destructive tornadoes are going to become a more common occurrence in the state. 

More frequent severe storms can also be a detriment to our water quality, as the EPA has noted; "Severe rainstorms can also cause sewers to overflow into lakes and rivers, which can threaten beach safety and drinking water supplies". The warming climate also raises concerns over toxic algae blooms in Lake Michigan and Lake Eerie. Changes in precipitation patterns, such as reduced snowfall and earlier spring snowmelt, can affect the recharge of groundwater and the availability of surface water. This can lead to decreased water availability in streams, rivers, and aquifers, affecting both human and ecological water needs.

In some very severe cases with increased temperature and higher evaporation rates, we could experience a smaller-scale battle for water between agricultural, commercial, and residential entities that western states are experiencing, though not as bad it's hardly going to be a welcome sight to the newcomers. 

While this all seems extreme, it's all as likely as the problems western states are looking to face.

The other point to consider is that climate change creates externalities; Michigan does not exist as a standalone nation. Look at the drastic effect on Michigan's air quality because of forest fires in Canada for an example of why no one is really safe from climate change. Further, if Livengood's take on states like, say, Arizona, is that they are going to be uninhabitable, there are obviously very severe ramifications to the nation as a whole. Arizona is one of the nation's agricultural powerhouses, if the state became uninhabitable, it's hard to imagine what life in any other state would look like as a result. 

At the end of the day, I believe climate change is a problem to solve not an opportunity to leverage. We should be challenging our leaders to take drastic, even controversial actions rather than craft controversial messages.