Thread by @AlexSteffen

I'm skeptical that North American cities—the same cities that failed for decades to build enough housing for their own citizens, driving millions into poverty & homelessness—are going to undertake the massive transformations needed to welcome tens of millions of climate refugees.

Unless we're willing to welcome the tired, the poor, the tempest-tossed masses by building a nation that *can* welcome them, we will inevitably slide further towards oppressive measures to control mass population movements.

But please, tell me again how NIMBYs are progressives.

Our current urban planning, development and social service systems can't even handle thousands of domestic climate refugees from what are still comparatively small, localized, manageable catastrophes...

sacbee.com/news/state/cal…

Remember, too, that to varying degrees, all North American cities will be also dealing with massive infrastructure degradation caused by decades of neglect, sudden increases in climate brittleness (with attendant financial pull-backs) & unpredictable direct losses from disasters.

Gradual urbanism—involving long consultation periods, slow trickles of investment in needed new low-carbon infrastructure and climate ruggedization, and the occasional building of a small number of heavily-disincentivized homes—is immoral in a time of planetary emergency.

A giant building boom—involving by-right development, transformative scales of investment in zero-carbon infrastructure and ruggedization, and the building of millions more homes each year, to create compact/walkable communities—that's what genuine climate action looks like.

NIMBYs may be committed to fighting genuine action and housing justice, in order to extract the maximum possible rents from their predatory delay politics... but they don't get to call themselves climate advocates or social progressives while they do it, that's for damn sure.

The only thing I find more contemptible than the fucking weak-bully barbarism being inflicted on children and families by American immigration and border police is the soft denialism that makes today a taste of things to come, instead of the unacceptable racist cowardice it is.

Oops, sent that before I had a chance to edit it to make NIMBY reactionaries feel better about their arms-distance complicity in crimes against humanity.

Sorry.