Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm

Susan Crawford

Charleston

Race, Water, and the Coming Storm

Foreword by Annette Gordon-Reed

For Mitchell, and for everyone who has looked at a coastline and wondered

Foreword

The first decades of the twenty-first century will likely be remembered as a time of extreme political divisiveness in the United States. Efforts to address major problems through concerted action by government and other entities have been hampered by a degree of social polarization that some historians suggest rivals the decade of the 1850s and the lead up to the American Civil War. The dream of effective—and bipartisan—efforts to address problems that touch people all along the political spectrum seems elusive.

Political polarization has spilled over into science, with people taking sides on scientific issues based upon their political views. This has profoundly shaped the discourse about one of the most serious issues facing not just the United States, but the entire world: climate change. The consensus among the vast majority of scientists who study the issue is that the Earth is undergoing, and will continue to undergo, changes in climate that will transform agriculture, spur emigration from areas burdened by higher temperatures, create recurring catastrophic weather events, and flood cities built along coasts as ocean levels rise. Some, usually considered to be on the right, see talk of climate change and exhortations to try to do something as overblown and anti-economic growth. The charge that human beings may be the cause of, or are in some ways exacerbating the problem, is especially anathema to many in this group. They strenuously object to efforts to change human behavior with the goal of slowing down or arresting climate change. On the other side are environmentalists and those who are often designated as part of the left. They believe that drastic steps should be taken immediately to deal with what they see as an existential crisis.

As Susan Crawford makes plain in Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm, planet Earth has experienced extreme changes in climate for many millennia—ice ages, changes in sea levels, land masses disappearing beneath oceans. But what is different about those situations and today is that we human beings have a greater awareness of what is happening, and actually have the chance to take measures to minimize the suffering that extreme conditions can cause. Our knowledge and predictive capacity allow for preparation. But how is this done in a society so riven by political partisanship and culture warring that people cannot, will not, agree on what constitutes knowledge. Moreover, efforts to prepare for the looming crisis are expensive. It is always difficult to get people to pay for future benefits at the expense of what they see as their current and immediate needs.

How does all of this play out in the context of America’s tortured racial history? Charleston raises this especially appropriate question because that history has been a significant source of the divisions that exist within American society today. The circumstances of Charleston, South Carolina are instructive on this point. Charleston was one of the major conduits for enslaved Africans brought to what would become the United States. It is estimated that nearly half of the captives passed through its historic port. Over the years, South Carolina became home to large numbers of African Americans. Indeed, by the time of the Civil War, there were three Black people for every one white person in the state. Of course, to protect the institution of racially based slavery, South Carolina led the Southern states out of the United States, precipitating the Civil War. After a brief period in Reconstruction when Black men participated in the government, the state’s legacy of resisting equal citizenship for Black people, through violence and legalized segregation, continued well into the twentieth century.

Now, as Charleston faces the prospects of sinking land and a rising sea level, Crawford’s Charleston shows how important it is to consider the ways in which the legacies of slavery and racism have shaped and continue to shape the city’s response (and nonresponse) to its precarious environmental position. For many white and well-off residents, Charleston’s predicament is a real estate investment problem: do they sell now or remain? The questions are different for residents who are poor and do not own their homes—renters and residents of public housing. The story that unfolds in these pages reveals a history of second-class treatment of Black residents who, for generations, have lived burdened by recurrent flooding with little significant help from the city. Who have struggled to be heard despite great efforts by their community. All available evidence indicates that the problem of flooding will grow worse and worse, and the most economically and socially vulnerable people will be in ever more dire straits. Will the government authorities be able to rise above historical patterns and take action on behalf of the marginalized people in the city? It is a question for the local, state, and the federal governments, and it is one that will be asked about other American coastal cities. The nation deserves a good and right answer.

Annette Gordon-Reed

Carl M. Loeb University Professor

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

1

Charleston and Its Global Cousins

We believe the map of the world’s coastlines is drawn by human occupation. In the mind’s eye, teeming masses of people stand on the edge of what they believe to be solid ground, gazing outward at the sea, their places taken seamlessly, endlessly, by younger versions of themselves. Some of those people, lucky and well-organized, supported by the societies in which they live, build structures whose windows look seaward as well, heaps of them, great clotted tangles of mud, steel, glass, and iron pressed, more or less, up against the water. From above, all these people and buildings together make up dark, comfortably solid shapes marking where land ends and liquid begins.

In reality, this map is not drawn by us. Over millions of years, sea levels have gone up and down. During the last ice age, tens of thousands of years ago, global shorelines extended miles beyond current land masses and sea levels were about 400 feet lower than they are now. ¹

About 20,000 years ago, much of the watery area we now know as the North Sea was dry land. Imagine a continuous mass about the size of Denmark, plunked down between Britain and Holland. Now add gentle hills, valleys, streams, lakes, fish, birds, and ample quiet. Humans, too; in fact, people had likely been living there for almost a million years at that point, as far as we can tell. It must have been delightful—there was beauty, and there was plenty to eat. Historians call this place Doggerland.

Then, about 8,500 years ago, ice lakes started to melt into the North Sea.²

The waters surrounding the residents of Doggerland began to rise. The richness of the land they lived on gradually started to change, as trees and vegetation were swallowed by wetlands, and as firm ground morphed from soil to sand to marsh. High places that had been linked by land became islands. New water channels gradually emerged. It was a slow process, but it was inexorable. The people of Doggerland would have had to change their ways over time, do things differently than their ancestors had done, in response to the rising waters.

We can’t tell much about the lives of the people who lived in this area because there is water there now.³

Sand carried by the rising waters across Doggerland, left behind on top of all those lovely hills and valleys when the inundation ended, reveals nothing, no human remains or artifacts. But archaeologists guess from evidence found on the still-dry margins of Doggerland—particularly in present-day England—that the Doggerlanders lived in society, in groups. They weren’t wandering around aimlessly. They weren’t hopelessly in transition on some kind of land bridge. They settled when and where they could. They must have been attached to Doggerland, with its waving grasses and abundant wildlife. But eventually, after a few generations of living in a gradually wetter place, they had to move away.

As an invitation to imagination, the story of the inundation of Doggerland is a treasure. It’s the last time that modern man experienced significant sea level rise. Vincent Gaffney, a professor of landscape archaeology at the University of Bradford, speaks with enormous warmth about the contours of Doggerland. He knows what it looked like because vast seismic data sets have been gathered by companies looking to extract oil and gas from beneath the North Sea. We are looking at totally unexplored countries, he says. Where else in the world could you find complete rivers, lakes, hills, and valleys, that’ve never been mapped before? That had human occupation. And what does it mean for us at the moment?

Gaffney is convinced that Doggerland was one of the most economically productive areas in Europe. When it went under, 20 percent of Europe’s land mass vanished. He told the BBC’s Melvyn Bragg in 2019 that a large Mesolithic house built in Howick, on the coast of Northumberland, had probably been put together by people coming off the North Sea Plain onto the still-solid ground—something like New York City retirees building a house in the Berkshires. Once those Mesolithic men and women walked away from their old, prosperous haunts, they settled firmly into a relocated residential life, bringing with them their sociable, comfortable existence. That Howick house was a substantial place. It was lived in for a hundred years and featured a number of hearths for nut roasting.⁴

The lesson from Doggerland is that beaches, wetlands, and marshes historically have moved with changing sea levels without difficulty and rewritten the boundaries of continents. We humans have adapted to this movement in the past, shifting location to keep our collective feet dry while continuing to live in friendly clumps. But this time there is an obstacle in the way: forgetting the power of oceans, and believing that we should by rights get to live wherever we want, forever, people have built up our global coastlines and plopped concrete in places where water would otherwise be going. This time the change, driven by human activity, is happening very quickly.⁵

Each coastal city has an origin story. A trading post, a landing point, or a fishing haven was established long ago, took root, and sprawled outward and upward. These stories feel both obvious and irrelevant to each city’s current occupants, if they know them at all. Each coastal native witnesses part of a century, notices decay and growth, and gives up his or her place to more recent arrivals. Those lucky few who build may imagine with some satisfaction that their imprints will remain beyond their lifetimes, if only for a while. Those who live in rooms that were built by generations before may imagine that generations to come will find their homes there, too.

The consequences of the rapidly accelerating sea level rise and other heat-related water woes the globe is now experiencing will abruptly change these patterns for the 800 million people who now live near water on coasts around the world.⁶

Someday, not too long from now, the stories of many current coastal and riverside cities will include sudden plot twists as well as new beginnings, as edges that had seemed solid liquify and become indistinguishable from the seas around them. Some coastal areas will have to be abandoned altogether. Water sources that few among us consider in our daily lives will suddenly become intensely interesting. There is water beneath our feet (groundwater) that is beginning to bubble upwards, pressed towards and then through the surface of streets as prolonged wet periods cause underground water tables to rise. At the same time, increasing human demands for fresh groundwater—for drinking water, irrigation, and the cooling of data centers—is causing those coastal aquifers to shrink, which gives salty water, pushed onward by rising seas, room to intrude. The withdrawal of huge quantities of fresh water for humans to drink also causes land to subside, increasing sea level rise (relatively speaking) further. It takes a tiny amount of salt to make water undrinkable.

There’s more: slower-moving heavily intense rainstorms (sometimes called rain bombs or, more colorfully, frog-drowners) are becoming more frequent, as ever-more water is soaked up by ever-warmer air and the strength of the winds that used to push those storms along their paths diminishes. Those winds are calming because the poles are warming much more quickly than the tropics. The differences between the two that used to generate those winds are shrinking. Increasingly intense hurricanes and extreme river flooding are being joined by daily high tides made higher by sea level rise, as increasingly warm ocean water is taking up more space and encroaching on land. All this will render many low-lying areas profoundly uncomfortable and eventually uninhabitable. In many places, these challenges will be piled on top of more frequent stretches of ever-more-extreme heat. For many people, there will not be enough water to drink.

The people of Doggerland had hundreds of years to get used to sea level rise as the globe warmed. Even then, those who didn’t move up to the highlands—present-day Britain—still had an island left to stand on. Until they didn’t. Several thousand years ago, a sudden underwater landslide off the coast of what is now Norway triggered a wall of water that flooded what remained of Doggerland.⁷

The place slumbered for eighty centuries beneath the North Sea until scientists began to explore its past.

Given the brittle instability of what we have created along global coastlines, we have far less time than the Doggerlanders did to adapt safely to the changes to come. Because of the level of carbon already in the atmosphere, beginning in the early 2030s, the rate at which the seas are rising will accelerate at a rapid pace.⁸

Between 2020 and 2050, we will see as much sea level rise as we did over the last century.⁹

Even if emissions decrease, sea level increases of as much as 8 feet between 2050 and 2100 cannot be ruled out.¹⁰

Then we are talking about situations that are not adaptable, says Dr. William Sweet of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).¹¹

Dr. Sweet means that many coastal residents will not be able to stay where they are.

It is not a question of whether these changes will happen, but when. There are strong indications that this transition is coming quickly for coastal cities around the globe: NASA’s satellite and buoy data show the Earth is heating at unprecedented speed;¹²

most of the last ten years have set records, one after the next, for the hottest ever, and the world will likely experience a 2° to 3°C increase over late-1800s temperatures by the end of the century.¹³

Several climate tipping points that will trigger additional nonlinear increases in sea level rise, including the melting of Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, are becoming likelier as emissions and temperatures continue to increase.¹⁴

Charleston, South Carolina is one of many cities around the globe that will be deeply affected by rising waters in the years to come. Its geography is that of a small New York City, with a central peninsula surrounded by outer boroughs. That peninsula, perched between the Ashley River on the west and the Cooper River on the east, has been the site of an important Atlantic port for nearly 350 years. The city also has a history of racial immorality, often ignored by its contemporary boosters. About 40 percent of all the enslaved people who were forcibly brought to America first stepped ashore there, and after the importation of enslaved people was banned by the nation in 1808, Charleston was a center of the country’s domestic slave market. Enslaved people were the basis of Charleston’s economy and development for two hundred years, planting and harvesting the rice and extracting the indigo that the region exported, filling the marshy margins of the peninsula with trash, rubble, and human waste. The city of Charleston took on the function of whipping enslaved people on behalf of their owners. It was the place where America’s Civil War, fought over the issue of slavery, began.

Today, its historic peninsula is a magnet for seven million mostly white tourists a year. For its visitors, the peninsula’s bars, restaurants, and luxury hotels are sites for care-free indulgence and relaxation, a chance to enjoy the feeling of well-attended wealth while forgetting all the tensions of everyday life. The place has an amnesiac, ahistorical quality that is highly attractive to white celebrants, who drowsily pad along its pretty streets before tucking into their next big meal; they are enjoying the suggestion of moneyed graciousness around them, not thinking too hard about where that money came from. Tourism, centered on Charleston, is one of South Carolina’s largest industries, contributing more than $10 billion annually to the region’s economy.¹⁵

But these visitors are spending and drinking and shopping in a place with a baleful past that, by most objective measures, is living on borrowed time.

In September 1989, midway through the forty-year incumbency of Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Hurricane Hugo made landfall up the Atlantic coast in McLellanville, South Carolina. Hugo’s winds did great damage to Charleston, but the storm also brought national attention to the city, and Mayor Riley was able to harness substantial public funding to develop and improve its historic peninsula. Over the next few decades, Charleston became the most rapidly gentrifying city in America and one of the most expensive in the southeast in which to live. It also spread outward across marshes and sea islands. A majority Black city in the 1970s, it has become majority white. Today it is a place of crushing traffic, suburban sprawl, astounding economic inequality, and ongoing racial discrimination as well as touristic charm; it is, in fact, an extreme example of these urban characteristics.

For all these reasons, the story of Charleston’s reaction to the rapidly increasing risks of sea level rise has global implications. Although Charleston’s role in American history is uniquely disturbing and its low-lying, sandy topography is particularly vulnerable to the ravages of sea level rise, its lack of planning for the involuntary displacement of its Black and low-income residents by rising sea levels is not unusual. Few global cities are doing enough to plan ahead for what is coming. What is special about Charleston is that its global reputation for charm and hospitality contrasts so vividly with the risks its poorest residents now face as the waters rise.

A good deal of change has already occurred, worldwide, because of climate change. Jakarta, Indonesia is swiftly sinking and almost the entirety of Bangladesh is in crisis. Heavy rains in Bangladesh and India in 2022 left two million people stranded and killed dozens.¹⁶

The eighty-mile-an-hour winds of Hurricane Ida in September 2021 were accompanied by three-and-a-half inches of rain that landed in one hour on New York City, drowning people living in illegal basement apartments when overloaded sewers backed up and overflowed.¹⁷

Some 1,700 people died in Pakistan from extreme flooding over the summer of 2022, and tens of millions were displaced.¹⁸

About half a million people live in the Maldives on 1,200 very low coral islands and their homes—along with those of anyone else living on a Pacific island—are already at great risk.¹⁹

Tens of millions of people in China live in risky coastal regions, and hundreds of people died in Henan province when more rain fell there over four days in July 2021 than usually falls in a year.²⁰

Ft. Myers, in southwest Florida, was devastated by Hurricane Ian in September 2022.

Hurricanes today are stronger, rainstorms are heavier, storms move more slowly, groundwater tables are rising rapidly, and rivers are overflowing in catastrophic ways. Hurricane Harvey was a rain bomb during which sixty inches of rain fell over four days in 2017 in southeast Texas.²¹

Heavy rain turned deadly in the Côte d’Ivoire in June 2020 when it triggered a landslide.²²

More than two million people in Lagos, Nigeria were affected by flooding during 2020.²³

Alexandria, Egypt, surrounded by water, has experienced intense rain and flooding each year since 2015.²⁴

During the summer of 2021, two months’ worth of rain fell over Western Europe in two days, causing death and destruction in Germany, Belgium, and several other countries.²⁵

Major flooding in Australia in March 2021 caused billions of dollars of damage over the wettest week coastal New South Wales had ever seen.²⁶

Western Canada, India, Japan, and Northern South America all experienced exceptional rainfall and flooding that year. Flash flooding struck Zion National Park and much of southern Utah during that same summer.

Predictions about how much water is coming, and when, vary greatly. In 2019, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced that Singapore would prepare for about thirteen feet of sea level rise by 2100.²⁷

Some scientists say we should be planning on three feet of rise by 2050, six feet by 2070, and ten feet by 2100.²⁸

The timing of sea level rise is uncertain because how and when ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland will melt is uncertain.²⁹

If the Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf in Antarctica fails, which may happen as soon as five or ten years from now, and the glacier it is holding back slides or calves into the ocean, sea levels will rise about two feet from that effect alone; if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapses, the world will see an increase of between ten and a half feet and fourteen feet; if all the ice on Antarctica and Greenland melts, sea levels will be more than two hundred feet higher than at present, drowning New York City, Shanghai, and Tokyo.³⁰

We know that the rate of this rise can accelerate very quickly; it did before, when great ice sheets collapsed thousands of years ago, even without human encouragement forcing the process along.³¹

We also know that beginning in about 2025 the moon’s 18.6-year cycle that is currently suppressing the rate of increase in global sea levels will go into its next phase, amplifying the rate of rise.³²

(This is called the moon wobble cycle.)³³

All told, given continued high emissions (which we hope will be mitigated somehow) and the already-observed melting of glaciers, it is beyond dispute that sea level rise is happening almost three times faster than scientists had thought it would as recently as 2011,³⁴

and that there is now a substantial chance that there will be more than six and a half feet of global sea level rise by 2100.³⁵

This amount of sea level rise is not spread evenly around the world: Charleston gets more than the global average.³⁶

We know that storms and floods in the United States and around the world disproportionately harm Black and low-income communities whose residents are involuntarily permanently displaced, rendered homeless, or ground more deeply into poverty.³⁷

Of the people who lived in the neighborhood in Houston that sustained the worst damage during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, nearly half were people of color.³⁸

Hurricane Katrina, in New Orleans in 2005, hurt Black neighborhoods the most.³⁹

Hurricane Ida in 2021 devastated low-income communities south of New Orleans.⁴⁰

Affordable housing in America, largely occupied by low-income Black people, is at very high risk of being damaged or destroyed by coastal flooding over the next few decades.⁴¹

These same patterns will play out in Charleston. The city is in the Lowcountry region in South Carolina, and it is very, very low: more than a third of the houses in the city are at ten feet above sea level or less.⁴²

It is a many-layered place whose history runs deep but where solid ground is scarce. The first settlers saw mostly marsh when they arrived in 1640, stepping gingerly over scores of muddy creeks. High ground is almost nonexistent in Charleston.⁴³

Much of the city was built on fill—trash, oyster shells, wooden pilings, human waste, loose dirt—over centuries, and now Nature wants her land back. Its residents have already become accustomed to frequent high-tide flooding on days when the sun is shining.

A hundred years ago, the city flooded less than once a year. Forty years ago, the city flooded ten times a year. The city flooded eighty-nine times in 2019, almost once every four days, sixty-eight times in 2020, and forty-six times in 2021.⁴⁴

Beginning in about 2032 the number of days a year Charleston floods will start climbing rapidly. By 2050, damaging flooding will be happening ten times more frequently than it did in 2020. In the chapters ahead, you will hear a great deal about what this will be like for the people who live there, and particularly for Charleston’s Black residents. There are large areas of damp, filled land within the city’s surprisingly far-flung limits, including chunks of suburban sprawl that tourists never see, that are suddenly at very high risk of chronic inundation over the next few decades.

Given that peoples’ safety is at issue and that scientists are becoming confident that a rise of about 3°C is likely by 2100, it seems reasonable that governments at all levels should be planning for the worst outcomes now. The message that climate change is happening, and happening quickly, is acknowledged by national governments around the world. But the translation of that message into action at the local level is not yet, really, happening.

The trouble is that sea level rise is taking place relatively slowly compared to the human attention span—which is, let’s face it, gnat-like, and made even shorter when other crises (a global pandemic, the threat of world war, domestic political instability, rising inflation) are on our minds. City leaders, occupied with running for reelection, prioritize continued growth and expanding the tax base over protecting against future doom. And, although each increasingly intense hurricane or rainstorm is terrifying taken alone, people often forget that fear with the passage of time. Awareness is smoothed over by the common cognitive bias toward believing that anything awful is anomalous. Humans are not by nature long-range planners, particularly when they are focused on simply surviving. Boosterism and denial are at work in Charleston, as they are everywhere.

Cities may also believe that their state or national governments will ride to their rescue should they suffer a cataclysmic storm or begin to experience unlivable levels of sea level rise. Spending money now on moving people or planning ahead for new, safe communities may feel imprudent when someone else is likely to pay to save you later, and so cities continue encouraging floodplain development near rivers and coasts. To the extent they do plan ahead, cities with scarce resources focus on protecting the highest-value properties first, reasoning that their limited money is best spent where it will have the highest payoff. This approach is not altogether their fault: In the US, a platoon of state and federal policies work the same way. This kind of analysis causes real cruelty to those not lucky enough to be wealthy. In Charleston, many of those less lucky residents are Black, and this cost-benefit optimization amplifies and entrenches historic patterns of racism and segregation.

There are cities facing similar risks in America that are farther along in planning for the changing world, but even those more advanced planning efforts suffer from the some of the same gaps when it comes to the risks of displacement for vulnerable residents. Boston, itself built half on landfill, has a Climate Ready Boston master plan that calls for elevating streets, building berms, turning parks into water storage receptacles, and adding watertight doors to subway entrances. But notwithstanding the city’s rhetorical focus on equity, it maintains its Coastal Resilience Solutions for Dorchester plan separately from its overall strategic plan for the city. The city’s primary focus is adapting to challenges that affect property values for downtown real estate and white Boston. More than two-thirds of Boston’s Black residents live in Dorchester and the nearby neighborhoods of Roxbury and Mattapan; the average white household’s wealth in Greater Boston is $247,500 while the average Black household’s wealth is $8. There are no sea walls where Boston’s poorest residents live, no plans to resettle them, and no clear source of funding to do so.

Similarly, the Commonwealth of Virginia has unveiled a sweeping plan called the Virginia Coastal Master Planning Framework that acknowledges the vulnerability of its low-income and minority coastal residents and recognizes that protecting every component of the built environment exactly where it stands today is not realistic and some homes, businesses, roads, and communities will become uninhabitable as sea level rises. But although the document does require that equity issues be taken into account by municipalities while those cities are seeking input from residents, it does not provide planning directions or resources for cities that want to assist those low-income and minority residents to move away from the rising waters. Miami is taking the same approach, claiming that protecting high-value coastal real estate is both possible and appropriate and refusing to plan for ceding land or paying low-income renters to move to higher, safer ground. Charleston’s story reveals a general blind spot that will become more visible as at least thirteen million people are expected to have to retreat from swamped American coastlines. Americans will learn, if they did not know already, that some lives count and some do not.

And so as the earth warms and the waters rise, coastal cities everywhere have an incentive to keep quiet about the range of accelerating risks confronting them and are paying little attention, most of the time, to the risks faced by their poorest residents. These risks are so sweeping, and the changes likely to come sooner rather than later will be so disruptive, that thinking broadly about what is owed to every city resident right now is beyond the capacity of most leaders, including those in Charleston.

Their plans may be changed for them by the insurance, banking, and real estate industries now propping up coastal land values, who are capable of long-term actuarial assessments. They will begin raising their prices, exit completely, or collapse quickly, and millions or billions of people will be in distress.

Insurance companies and teeming coastal megacities were not part of the picture when humans lived on Doggerland. This is why Rachel Bynoe, a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Southampton, thinks gradual adaptation might have been just fine with Doggerland’s residents. Where we see sea level rise as something that’s very negative and terrifying, because we’re very sedentary, and we have really high population densities—in the past, where those two things weren’t quite so strong… it could’ve been catastrophic at points, perhaps, but generally speaking, this would’ve been a slow process that would’ve just changed the affordances of these areas, she told the BBC in mid-2019. So it’s not necessarily something to be seen in a negative light. Affordances is a quilt of a word, covering a range of novel things to do that are made possible by a changing world.

There are things coastal city leaders could be doing now that would take advantage of new affordances made possible by our more advanced capacities to plan. Imagine gradually making it more expensive to live in dangerous places while simultaneously providing time-limited incentives and subsidies supporting moving away—a multidecade plan, for example, to gradually phase out the mortgages on properties that will be eventually returned to nature, and to subsidize future rent payments if made in higher, drier places. Imagine planning for a multidecade, gradual move, in consultation with each community, to new and welcoming locations well-connected to transit and jobs.⁴⁵

Imagine caring for the least well-off among us, ensuring that they have a voice in this planning and choices about whether, when, and how to leave, while firmly setting an endpoint on human habitation in the riskiest places, or, at least, making it clear that these places will be repurposed for other uses.

Without this kind of vision, the coming transition will be a cliff rather than a slope, casting millions into sudden misery.

Governments at all levels need to understand that the riskiest response of all would be to do nothing, or to act only incrementally, in the face of already accelerating threats that may at any moment abruptly begin accelerating even more quickly, robbing us of our ability to plan.⁴⁶

Would you get on an elevator if you knew there was a substantial chance of the cables holding the car snapping just before you reached your floor? Would you have your city’s residents collectively get on that elevator? I don’t think so. And if elevators don’t worry you, think airplanes.

Around the world, nations are spending tens of billions of dollars on coastal protection. In the United States, we spend it with almost no planning as to how it is prioritized or allocated. Congress gives money to the Army Corps of Engineers and essentially asks that the Corps come back and tell Congress later what it did. The $15 billion wall the Corps built after Hurricane Katrina has been hailed as a tremendous success, but the wall did not protect communities of people living south of New Orleans when Hurricane Ida hit in September 2021. The wall was not designed to reach them because their properties were not considered valuable enough by the Corps to merit protection.

There are substantial lessons here: There is no chance that we can afford to wall off the entire coast of the country or all populations living along rivers. It is also far from clear that the walls we are building now will be sufficient ten or twenty years from now.

More unplanned spending: On a somewhat random basis, the Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA) will buy out houses that chronically flood, but the payments are low, take years for suffering homeowners to access, and so far have addressed just 45,000 homes out of the millions that should probably be vacated.⁴⁷

We spend billions dumping sand on beaches that are shrinking or moving. The truth is we will never have enough sand or enough money to keep the status quo in place.

The reason some beachfront homeowners, but not all, get that sand dumped on their beaches, and the reason that some portions of cities, but not all, get federal funds for building walls, is that the one rule of thumb for all these expenditures is that they be made subject to a cost-benefit analysis. But that means the only thing that is valued is the price of the property being protected. Lower-income people, or renters, do not get protected or rescued. We are spending the money where we get the biggest bang for our buck, says James D’Ambrosio, a spokesman for the Army Corps in New York. It may sound hardhearted, but to be fiscally responsible and to be stewards of taxpayer money, we have to abide by the greater benefit of the public good.⁴⁸

Surely we have values that rise above mere dollars and cents. Surely we are interested in everyone thriving, not just those who have the highest land values.

Few are talking about how America is going to get through the rapid rise in sea level that is coming. Like most other countries, we have no national plan. There is an intuitive sense that building walls and pumping