This is a tale of immigrant hate and the history of one man who influenced it.

It’s also about how climate change is amplifying environmental concerns that have always run through white supremacy movements.

Thread 🧵 In 2019 I was in Mexico reporting about migrants moving to the U.S. because of climate disasters, when a shooter targeting Hispanics killed 23 people in the U.S. border city of El Paso. 2/15

As a climate reporter, it’s been frustrating to watch the legislative debate. By focusing on $3.5T as a big number, it entirely misses the economic context of climate change.

The costs will be astronomical, the losses huge.

Old budgets are not a good baseline.

Here’s why: To start, the U.S. and the world are headed into an era of unpredictable but likely unprecedented expenses due to swift warming, disasters, energy costs, migration, industrial change

On our current trajectory, conservatively, climate-driven shifts could cost the U.S. 4% of GDP

In August, as a fire burned 12 miles from my home in Marin County, I watched smoke billow from the hills and air tankers crisscross the skies.

I had an unusual perspective: For two years, I’d been studying how climate change will influence global migration.

[a thread] Like the subjects of my reporting, climate change had found me, its indiscriminate forces erasing all semblance of normalcy.

Suddenly I had to ask myself the very question I’d been asking others: Was it time to move?

Soon, many Americans will face such questions.

When I started reporting about climate change driving migration nearly two years ago, I immediately arrived at an unsettling realization:

The research pointed to a likely mass migration that could dwarf anything we've seen in millennia.

But I wanted to know more. There was very little research on which people would move, from where, and in what numbers.

So we decided to do what we could to change that.

It turned out, of course, to be every bit as difficult as we were warned, and far more so than I imagined.

How we did it: