EP 410 What Happens When Some States Are No Longer Habitable?

Does the title sound like science fiction?  Then you haven’t been paying attention when heat besieged California this summer in ways unseen in generations.  Or that a surge in air-conditioning broke the state’s electrical grid.  Or that in Death Valley the 130 degree temperature was possibly the hottest ever measured on Earth.  Not to mention the wildfires, intense hurricanes, floods and drought impacting various areas of our country.  It’s the elixir of climate change meeting indifference on many levels in our society.  If it’s going to take more convincing on the part of many people that this phenomenon is real and helped along by our own actions, perhaps your inability to get a mortgage because banks won’t secure it or insurance companies not writing you a policy for your dream home that will convince you we have a serious problem. At the moment, people are still rushing toward the danger looking to re-locate to shoreline communities and hot zones, like Arizona and Florida.  Jesse Keenan is an urban planning and climate-change specialist who advises the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission on market hazards from climate change and is an associate professor of real estate at Tulane University  He joins us to discuss where to when where we are becomes uninhabitable.

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