climate change refugee

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Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

If temperatures continue to increase, the overall net effects will be catastrophic.2 Based on current projections, by the end of this century the sea could be three feet higher. Large swathes of the globe will become uninhabitable. Extreme weather will be commonplace, as will food shortages and drought. Thousands of animal and plant species will become extinct. By 2050 as many as 250 million people could be climate-change refugees.3 According to Nature magazine, we’re rushing toward some awful mass extinction by 2200.4 While unanimous consensus is impossible, the vast majority of scientists agree we need to quickly limit the amount of fossil fuels we burn.* And although there has been progress—including an estimated $2 trillion invested in clean energy since 2004, and a recent slowdown in the growth of greenhouse gas emissions—every year brings more bad news.5 In 2015 we destroyed 20 million acres of tropical rainforest, which reduces the earth’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen.

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More people had turned up to an industrial park in rainy Birmingham three months earlier to listen to Tommy Robinson tell us—once again—that he didn’t want the United Kingdom run by Islamic fundamentalists. And he was slightly disappointed by the low turnout. As we trudged closer to the ridge of the hill, I was thinking about those statistics: three feet higher, 250 million climate-change refugees, and ‘mass extinction’. Why aren’t there more of us? All radical groups ask themselves how to go from a small band of motivated believers to one that millions of people get behind. But it’s most acute for the direct-action climate activists because climate change is a uniquely awkward problem.

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When everything in our house, our car and our workplace is connected to the internet, all collected, stored and used by mega-companies based in California? Or if, as predicted by the United Nations, by 2050 the population hits 10 billion, half of them facing extreme water shortages, and 250 million climate-change refugees are on the move looking for habitable places to live?4 If, as a growing number of scientists now believe, breakthroughs in gerontology mean life expectancy will significantly extend within a generation? Or when, within the next couple of decades, health services and pension plans become financially unsustainable, requiring dramatic tax increases, just as more and more people start using untraceable cryptocurrencies?

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Weston Phippen, “Australia’s Controversial Migration Policy,” The Atlantic, April 29, 2016, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/04/australia-immigration/480189/. 43.Refugee Council of Australia, “Offshore Processing Statistics,” October 27, 2019, www.refugeecouncil.org.au/operation-sovereign-borders-offshore-detention-statistics/2/. 44.Amy Nethery and Carly Gordyn, “Australia-Indonesia Cooperation on Asylum-Seekers: A Case of ‘Incentivised Policy Transfer’,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 68, no. 2 (2014): 177-93. 45.John Podesta, “The Climate Crisis, Migration, and Refugees,” Brookings, July 25, 2019, www.brookings.edu/research/the-climate-crisis-migration-and-refugees/. 46.“Defence Chief Sounds Warning on Surge of Climate Change Refugees,” SBS News, July 15, 2019, www.sbs.com.au/news/defence-chief-sounds-warning-on-surge-of-climate-change-refugees. 47.UN High Commissioner for Refugees, “UNHCR Chief Filippo Grandi Calls On Australia to End Harmful Practice of Offshore Processing,” July 24, 2017, www.unhcr.org/en-au/news/press/2017/7/597217484/unhcr-chief-filippo-grandi-calls-australia-end-harmful-practice-offshore.html. 48.Wazana, “Fear and Loathing,” 83-95. 49.Jo Chandler, “‘Designed to Torture’: Asylum Seeker Chooses Iranian Prison over PNG Detention Centre, Guardian, November 10, 2019, www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/10/designed-to-torture-asylum-seeker-chooses-iranian-prison-over-png-detention-centre. 50.Refugee Council of Australia, “Offshore Processing Statistics.” 51.Mark Isaacs, “There’s No Escape from Australia’s Refugee Gulag,” Foreign Policy, April 30, 2018, https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/04/30/theres-no-escape-from-australias-refugee-gulag/.

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Torelli, “Climate-Driven Migration in Africa,” European Council on Foreign Relations, December 20, 2017, www.ecfr.eu/article/commentary_climate_driven_migration_in_africa; Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “The Magnitude of the Problem,” www.fao.org/3/X5318E/x5318e02.htm; Robert Muggah and José Luengo Cabrera, “The Sahel Is Engulfed by Violence,” World Economic Forum, January 23, 2019, www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/all-the-warning-signs-are-showing-in-the-sahel-we-must-act-now/. 79.Tim McDonnell, “The Refugees the World Barely Pays Attention To,” NPR, June 20, 2018, www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/20/621782275/the-refugees-that-the-world-barely-pays-attention-to. 80.Ioane Teitiota quoted in Tim McDonald, “The Man Who Would Be the First Climate Change Refugee,” BBC News, November 5, 2015, www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34674374. Chapter 4 1.Perla Trevizo, “Tribes Seek to Join Immigration Reform Debate,” Arizona Daily Star, June 14, 2013, https://tucson.com/news/local/border/tribes-seek-to-join-immigration-reform-debate/article_d4fe1980-46d4-5e90-b690-ce78c5453bf1.html. 2.Michael Dear, Why Walls Won’t Work: Repairing the US–Mexico Divide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 158. 3.Will Parish, “The U.S.

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital by Kimberly Clausing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, climate change refugee, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, fake news, floating exchange rates, full employment, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, investor state dispute settlement, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, uber lyft, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, zero-sum game

We will also have fewer patriotic, hardworking new Americans grateful for their improved living standards. And the demographic pressures of our aging population will weigh more heavily as birthrates and population growth slow. A retreat from globalization also risks pitting nations against each other, making it more difficult to solve the problems that face humanity, such as climate change, refugees, world poverty, and international security. After World War II, world leaders worked to learn the lessons of two world wars and the Great Depression. They fostered international institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and an International Trade Organization to bring the world together, working toward peace and prosperity.4 These institutions set up an international trading system, an international financial system, and an international funding source for reconstruction and development.

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Jeff Goodell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Anthropocene, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, creative destruction, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, failed state, fixed income, Frank Gehry, global pandemic, Google Earth, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Large Hadron Collider, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, negative emissions, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

“Besieged by the Rising Tides of Climate Change, Kiribati Buys Land in Fiji.” The Guardian, June 30, 2014. 25. “Fiji will not turn…”: Shalveen Chand. “Kiribati’s Hope for Land.” Fiji Times, February 14, 2014. 26. “You can drastically…”: Quoted in Michael Gerrard. “America Is the Worst Polluter in the History of the World. We Should Let Climate Change Refugees Resettle Here.” Washington Post, June 25, 2015. 27. Gerrard argues: Ibid. 28. Runit Dome: Michael Gerrard. “A Pacific Isle, Radioactive and Forgotten.” New York Times, December 3, 2014. Chapter 9 1. $250 million: “On the Front Lines of Rising Seas: Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia.” Fact sheet, Union of Concerned Scientists.

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

But the river itself is under threat from climate change, as rising seas push salt water further upstream and inland.26 Saltwater intrusion is more difficult to predict than sea rise, and a prolonged drought (such as those that plagued the region in the 1990s and 2000s), or simply an overdraft of water for urban supply, could hasten its advance. It is by no means certain that the water supply of North Ranch will be secure by the end of the century, when its build-out is projected to be complete. Even if it is not a perfect sanctuary, North Ranch might still serve as a destination for Floridians displaced by climate change. Refugees, wherever they are, seldom move very far from their homes, even when the odds on their return are low. Affluent residents of South Florida’s threatened coastlines are already migrating to higher ground, where, historically, African Americans were consigned, through redlining and other kinds of racial zoning.27 The displacement of minority and lower-income residents from Miami neighborhoods like Little Haiti, Overtown, Liberty City, and Little Havana is well underway, as part of a pattern that has been termed “climate gentrification.”28 But relocating within the city will not be enough: sea levels for Miami-Dade County are projected to rise as much as seventeen inches by 2040 and fifty-four inches by 2070.29 Most estimates see the entire coastal urbanized area underwater by the end of the century.

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us by Diane Ackerman

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, airport security, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, dark matter, dematerialisation, digital divide, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Google Earth, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, Higgs boson, hindcast, Internet of things, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, Masdar, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, rewilding, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, skunkworks, Skype, space junk, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the High Line, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Any day now the whole village and many neighboring indigenous communities will sink into the melting permafrost, as if it were white quicksand, to join the realm of polar bears and narwhals in the rich seams of Eskimo lore. By 2017, if the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ predictions are right, numerous native villages along the northwestern coast and barrier islands will be in the same fix. As America’s first climate-change refugees, the Yup’ik have appealed to the state and federal government for help, but, according to international law, people only qualify as refugees if they’re fleeing violence, war, or persecution. And federal disaster relief laws only grant money to repair infrastructure and damage in place, not to help with relocation after slow-motion disaster.

The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth by Tim Flannery

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, climate change refugee, cross-subsidies, decarbonisation, Doomsday Clock, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Gregor Mendel, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, junk bonds, Medieval Warm Period, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, uranium enrichment, Y2K

The Alaskan village of Shishmaref is becoming uninhabitable due to rising temperatures that are reducing sea ice and thawing permafrost, making the shoreline vulnerable to erosion.2 Hundreds of square metres of land and over a dozen houses have already been lost to the sea, and there are plans to relocate the whole town—at a cost of over $100,000 per resident.3 Shishmaref’s plight is particularly poignant. Its population is only 600 strong, but it has persisted at least 4000 years, and its inhabitants look set to become the first climate change refugees. Where they will go remains uncertain, for as they see it: the Arctic is becoming an environment at risk in the sense that sea ice is less stable, unusual weather patterns are occurring, vegetation cover is changing, and particular animals are no longer found in traditional hunting areas during specific seasons.

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth by Chris Smaje

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, collaborative consumption, Corn Laws, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial independence, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, future of work, Gail Bradbrook, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, hive mind, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jevons paradox, land reform, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, post-industrial society, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Rutger Bregman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

And it’s hard to reimagine a local agriculture in this way with global data, or even for large single countries with multiple biomes such as the United States. The danger is that the results are unrepresentative of wider global trends, but I’d argue the British case isn’t so unrepresentative. I model for a considerably larger population than currently exists on the assumption that Britain will be hosting climate change refugees in multitudes, in a country that’s already quite densely populated (currently it’s ranked 128th out of 209 countries in per capita farmland availability75). And although Britain has some high-quality agricultural land with good grain yields, it’s also a high-latitude country with relatively challenging seasonality and a lot of low-quality grassland in its agricultural makeup.

The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle

augmented reality, clean water, climate anxiety, climate change refugee, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, decarbonisation, digital map, Donald Trump, energy transition, four colour theorem, gentrification, Google Earth, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, longitudinal study, McMansion, off-the-grid, oil shock, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, smart cities, tail risk, Tipper Gore, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, Yom Kippur War, young professional

The United Nations has already affirmed the inalienable rights of climate refugees to social and economic stability, whether they are displaced within their own countries or across national borders. The body’s high court ruled in 2020 on the case of Ioane Teitiota, a man from the sinking island nation of Kiribati who had applied for asylum in New Zealand, and found that climate change refugees cannot be returned to their country of origin; its earlier compact on refugees has affirmed the rights of internal and international migrants to shelter and dignity. As with most United Nations decisions, this ruling only has force to the extent that countries choose to follow it, and so far few countries have, but the outline for a more humane framework already exists.

The Next Great Migration by Sonia Shah

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, climate change refugee, colonial rule, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, GPS: selective availability, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Ken Thompson, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, open borders, out of africa, Scientific racism, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl

during periods of opportunity, not crisis Axel Timmermann and Tobias Friedrich, “Late Pleistocene Climate Drivers of Early Human Migration,” Nature 538, no. 7623 (2016): 92. only New Zealand has considered the idea Charlotte Edmond, “5 Places Relocating People Because of Climate Change,” World Economic Forum, June 29, 2017; Charles Anderson, “New Zealand Considers Creating Climate Change Refugee Visas,” Guardian, October 31, 2017. do not qualify Karen Musalo, “Systematic Plan to Narrow Humanitarian Protection: A New Era of US Asylum Policy,” 15th Annual Immigration Law and Policy Conference, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C., October 1, 2018. They’d be sent back Lauren Carasik, “Trump’s Safe Third Country Agreement with Guatemala Is a Lie,” Foreign Policy, July 30, 2019.

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future by Laurence C. Smith

Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, colonial rule, data science, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, electricity market, energy security, flex fuel, G4S, global supply chain, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, guest worker program, Hans Island, hydrogen economy, ice-free Arctic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, land tenure, Martin Wolf, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Y2K

It means faster shoreline erosion from pounding by the waves and storms of the open ocean. The Alaskan village of Shishmaref has lost this battle and will need to be relocated farther inland. But even in coastal towns, nearly everyone I meet bristles at the notion of being cast as a hapless climate-change refugee. Even as they express frustration at having their lives damaged by people living thousands of miles away—and think it only fair that those damages be repatriated—they also point to their long history of adaptation and resilience in one of the world’s most extreme environments. They are not sitting around idly in despair, or gazing forlornly out at the unfamiliar sea.

Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth by Mark Hertsgaard

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, business continuity plan, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, defense in depth, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, food miles, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, ocean acidification, peak oil, Port of Oakland, precautionary principle, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, urban planning

Partly as a result, commodity prices were now soaring the world over, spreading hunger and sparking food riots that in turn threatened political stability. The secretary-general said he was especially concerned about the migrations all of this extreme weather had triggered. Calling the millions of people on the move "climate change refugees," he said they presented a huge humanitarian challenge. They also threatened international security, he said, a diplomat's way of warning that they could cause wars—for example, by crossing borders of nations that did not welcome them. Suddenly, the year 2015 seemed very close—so close that I found myself hoping that the war game organizers had exaggerated the dangers for dramatic effect.

Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World by Simon Winchester

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, climate change refugee, colonial rule, Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jones Act, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Tragedy of the Commons, white flight, white picket fence

Coastlines will be nibbled away, not gnawed at greedily. Big cities farther inland—Kolkata, Dhaka, Nanjing, Rangoon, Lima—will, if reluctantly, receive most of the nearby displaced. New Zealand is alive to the local problem and has said formally that it will accept some Pacific Islanders as climate-change refugees. Other countries may follow suit. It will be some long while before the 37 billion acres of the world are diminished by any serious fraction. It will be very many decades at least before as much as a single billion acres, for instance, could be thought of as being at immediate risk of loss.

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, airport security, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, fiat currency, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mason jar, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, Minecraft, moral hazard, open borders, pattern recognition, place-making, plant based meat, post-truth, QAnon, QR code, remote working, RFID, risk tolerance, School Strike for Climate, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, stem cell, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator

., “Global, Regional, and National Burden of Mortality Associated with Non-Optimal Ambient Temperatures from 2000 to 2019: A Three-Stage Modelling Study,” Lancet Planetary Health 5, no. 7 (July 2021): e415–e425, https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(21)00081-4. 7 “Open Borders: The Case,” Open Borders, accessed August 27, 2021, https://openborders.info/; Zoey Poll, “The Case for Open Borders.” New Yorker, February 20, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-case-for-open-borders; Ben Ehrenreich, “Open Borders Must Be Part of Any Response to the Climate Crisis,” Nation, June 6, 2019, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/climate-change-refugees-open-borders/. 8 Adrian Raftery, “The Dip in the US Birthrate Isn’t a Crisis, but the Fall in Immigration May Be,” Conversation, June 21, 2021, https://theconversation.com/the-dip-in-the-us-birthrate-isnt-a-crisis-but-the-fall-in-immigration-may-be-161169; Damien Cave, Emma Bubola, and Choe Sang-Hun, “Long Slide Looms for World Population, with Sweeping Ramifications,” New York Times, May 22, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/world/global-population-shrinking.html. 9 “Why 100 Million?

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made by Gaia Vince

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, bank run, biodiversity loss, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, climate change refugee, congestion charging, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, driverless car, energy security, failed state, Google Earth, Haber-Bosch Process, hive mind, hobby farmer, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Late Heavy Bombardment, load shedding, M-Pesa, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, microdosing, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, supervolcano, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology

There is a small cluster of low, unheated stone hovels clinging to the mountainside and between them is the low dark entrance, stained black with llama blood, remnant of a sacrifice to the Tio (the Devil) made a couple of weeks ago. Miners are extremely superstitious creatures, the reality of their predicament making them desperate for hope of supernatural help. In the sunny outside, they are fervent Catholics; once in the underworld, it is the Tio who holds them in his hands. It is here that most of the climate-change refugees from Bolivia’s villages end up – making a pact with the Devil that few will survive. I’ve come to see what happens to these people once drought kills their crops and forces them from their country farms and homes – and it’s not pretty. At over 4,000 metres, dilapidated, poverty-stricken Potosí is one of the world’s highest cities but it is overshadowed by the rainbow-coloured Cerro Rico (Rich Hill), which looms above the citizens – an imposing reminder of the cause of the city’s splendour and horror.