Thread by @doctorow

One million US homes are built on floodplains. It would cost $200B to relocate the people who live in them. If we do that, we will save $1T. Those homes are doomed. 1/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2022/07/29/man… 2/

When (not if) people leave them (either before or after floods come), they merely be arriving at a conclusion that is inevitable today.

prospect.org/environment/ho… 3/

There's a useful concept to think about here: "#Bezzle," JK Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." 4/

Some people call this the #anthropocene, but we could also call it the #bezzlepocene, the magic interval in which we can pretend that there is a chance that we'll return to "normal." 5/

We can therefore ignore the increasingly pressing need to get 1,000,000 American homeowners out of the path of the rising, violent waters coming their way.

pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bez… 6/

Here's another useful concept: #PeakIndifference. Peak Indifference is the point at which the number of people who admit that there is a problem begins an uninterrupted, continuous rise. Think of "medical radium" as a model for this. 7/

Back in the old days, people used to stuff radium - a deadly, poisonous radioactive substance - into every orifice, from asshole to appetite:

orau.org/health-physics… 8/

Eating radium, smearing it on your skin, rubbing it on your teeth and stuffing it up your asshole is a Really Bad Idea. Do it long enough and you will die, in a very horrible way indeed. But people took the radium cure for a long-ass time and swore it helped. 9/

Some of them weren't sick to begin with. Some got better on their own. Some experienced the placebo effect.

All of that meant that, while there were always doctors and scientists running around shouting, "Please, for the love of God, stop putting radium in your asshole!" 10/

There were also lots of people saying "Don't you *dare* tell me what to put in my asshole!" while others were getting rich hocking radioactive butt-plugs.

Eventually, we stopped putting radium in our assholes. 11/

Somewhere in the journey from the first ad for a radium suppository and the last one, people started to self-radicalize as radium deniers. They saw enough of their loved ones develop suppurating lesions and ghastly tumors that they no longer needed convincing. 12/

Once that happened, it was inevitable: America became a land of radium-free back passages.

If a problem is real, denial can only last so long. 13/

Eventually, the interest on policy debt you accumulate from inaction will overwhelm your ability to service it, and you will end up in policy bankruptcy. 14/

No matter how many people are shouting "Don't look up!" eventually, even the hardest-bitten ideologue will become a believer, even if only as he breathes his last breath:

15/

In an ideal world, the point of peak indifference will come before the point of no return. Otherwise, denial can easily become nihilism: "Yeah, I get it now, you were right, rhinos *are* endangered! 16/

But now that there's only one left, we might as well find out what he tastes like, right?"

doctorow.medium.com/what-is-peak-i… 17/

(Or, more prosaically, "Yeah, you were right, these cigarettes *were* gonna kill me, but now that I've got Stage Four lung cancer, why quit?")

doctorow.medium.com/i-quit-9ae7b60… 18/

There is a lot of housing stock that is in floodplains, and still more that is in urban/wilderness interfaces where wildfires are inevitable. We have to do something about that, and we're past the point where that something is "preventing floods and fires." 19/

The thing we have to do is #ManagedRetreat. As @gurleygg writes for @theprospect, managed retreat is "simple, if hard-to-accept." It's ending deference to developers who insist "beauty spots" on the coast or in the woods are safe for human habitation:

prospect.org/environment/ho… 20/

It's a lesson that California coastal towns are wrestling with. These are places where "managed retreat" is a curse-word. 21/

Where politicians who dare to whisper about the risks of literally building a house on an eroding cliff-face is a bad idea are recalled and replaced with politicians who swear that we're just not putting *enough* radium in our assholes:

latimes.com/california/sto… 22/

Swish resort towns where the residents wake up one morning to find that their driveway and front lawn have disappeared overnight, so their front door now opens onto a 200' plunge onto sharp rocks and surging seas are spectacular and cinematic, but they're not representative. 23/

As Gurley writes, the history of "managed buyouts" is typically American, riven by racism that further punishes poor and marginalized people who were shoved into unsafe housing on floodplains by denying them fair compensation for the homes they are forced out of. 24/

A @pewtrusts report details a plausible plan for creating a new agency to manage this:

pewtrusts.org/en/research-an… 25/

We're already living in the managed retreat. The 2018 California Camp Fire and the 2021 Lytton Creek fire in BC simply wiped away whole towns, poof, gone, literally up in smoke. 26/

But there are localized pockets of peak indifference, places taking action before the point of no return.

In Charleston, SC, they're buying and demolishing houses in the floodplain, and blocking developers from building in low-lying areas. 27/

Managed retreat is not defeat, it's victory. Managed retreat maintains our wild and beautiful places as buffer zones that are also recreation areas: campsites, public beaches, hiking trails. 28/

Just not places where you built a permanent structure that you fill with your every worldly good and everyone you love the most in this world.

During the lockdown, the World Economic Forum asked me to give a speech on AI and technological unemployment. 29/

They agreed that I could do a talk on why this was nonsense - not least because "AI unemployment" is a shell-game of bad statistics and hand-waving and sales literature masquerading as futurism. 30/

But more importantly, it's nonsense because we have full employment for every person alive today and yet to be born. We are going to spend the next century or more relocating every coastal human settlement inland and uphill. 31/

This isn't something that *will* happen - it's something that is already happening.

It's a bezzle. The con artist takes your money but you don't know it's a con, so you think you're rich. The therms we've sunk into our oceans are going to melt *a lot* of polar ice. 32/

If you think we can prevent it, you're proposing that we repeal the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It's fantasy, not sf.

When I turned in the text of my talk, the World Economic Forum uninvited me from their virtual event. I published it instead:

locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-d… 33/

The world I described in that speech is visible in @R_Emrys's stellar new novel *A Half-Built Garden*, where one sub-plot is when to stop taking ever-more-extreme measures to keep the Mississippi from bursting its banks and finding a new course, as it did for millennia. 34/

This is something that will happen inevitably, but moving all the people whose towns will drown is not a simple matter technical *or* social matter:

pluralistic.net/2022/07/26/ais… 35/

Fiction is one of the key ways to hasten the point of peak indifference: it's an appeal to our imaginations, one that warns about how bad the point of no return will be, and also what a victory addressing our problems will be. 36/

When the bus is barreling towards a cliff, swerving hard is a *happy* ending, even if the bus rolls:

locusmag.com/2022/07/cory-d… 37/

This is the premise behind my 2024 @TorBooks novel, *The Lost Cause,* which tells the story of truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias following a successful #GreenNewDeal transition. 38/

In the book's backstory, the GND is kickstarted by a series of (ultimately) fortuitous coincidences: first, a set of late-breaking electoral scandals results in Canada's @NDP winning a large parliamentary majority in a year that they had anticipated losing badly. 39/

The new Prime Minister is a Metis woman who had been picked by party grandees as a symbolic candidate in an election she was supposed to lose. 40/

Instead, she finds herself commanding a bulletproof majority just as floods wipe half of Calgary (a city where unregulated developers have built extensively on floodplains) off the map. 41/

Rather than continuing the cycle of rebuilding and reflooding, the new PM commands that the city of Calgary will be relocated off the floodplain altogether. 42/

This is the foundation of the "Canadian Miracle," which leads to the creation of national high-speed rail, renewable electrification, and, eventually, an international civilian conservation corps that travels the world, learning from and assisting in with projects everywhere. 43/

*Lost Cause* is a novel filled with wildfires, zoonotic plagues, internal refugee crises and flashfloods. But it's a utopian novel - because it's a novel where we got to the point of peak indifference before we crossed the point of no return. 44/

It's a novel about confronting problems, rather than ignoring them.

Because managed retreat is a victory, not a defeat. 45/

Image:
Bdelisle (modified)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Snoq…

CC BY 3.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.…

Rick Obst (modified)
flickr.com/photos/discove… 46/