The Trillion-Dollar Brittleness Bubble

Hey folks,

How much will our refusal to acknowledge the climate crisis cost us?

One way to start answering that question is to talk about brittleness.

Brittleness is the quality of being subject to sudden, difficult-to-reverse failures.

Climate brittleness describes brittleness created by the gap between the conditions for which our systems were built, and the different, more-chaotic circumstances of the planetary crisis around us.

Places and systems which are brittle to climate impacts are vulnerable to loss. That vulnerability, in turn, makes them less valuable than they were previously. We are surrounded by lost value, a situation I call the brittleness bubble.

First Street Foundation has taken a new stab at estimating how much lost value we face here in the United States, in their new report, The 12th National Risk Assessment: Property Prices in Peril. (This article summarizes some of their findings.)

Their numbers are staggering: $1.47 trillion dollars of lost real estate value over the next 30 years, impacting 84% of U.S. communities, but concentrated in 21,750 “climate abandonment neighborhoods.”

This loss stems from the combination of worsening uninsurability (leading to escalating home insurance rates) and diminishing economic vitality (leading to out-migration — they predict 55 million Americans moving away from climate risks by 2055).

In this podcast, I explore the report’s findings, give my take on the situation, and explain some of what I think is still missing from our wider debate on the brittleness bubble, crisis migration and climate foresight in general.

Thanks for listening!

Alex

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- I have a recent piece in Mother Jones, Trump Won’t Confront the Climate Crisis. He’ll Feast Off It.

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- I’ve spoken with the media hundreds of times. I was featured in a NY Times Magazine piece, "This Isn't the California I Married" and My writing was the jumping-off point for an episode of This American Life titled Unprepared for What Has Already Happened, as well as the podcasts Without; The Big Story; Everybody In the Pool and 99% Invisible’s Not Built for This series. I also spoke recently with PBS News Hour about why there are no climate havens.