The Inevitable Climate Exodus from the American South

The Sun Belt’s best days are behind it

Decades of Disaster

To anyone with even one eye open, the climate crisis is an existential threat to the current world order. As recently as a few years ago, the prospect of environmental collapse tearing civilization to smithereens seemed like sensationalist cynicism. Now, however, with worsening climatic disasters — gigantic hurricanes, unprecedented flooding, wildfires bigger than some states — and with Democrats holding both chambers of Congress and the Presidency and still not raising a finger against the madness, Americans’ outlooks have changed.

Disaster has been America’s default state since, at the very latest, March 2020. November 2021 will see cumulative COVID-related deaths hit 750,000. Our infrastructure crumbles ever quicker because of a government unable to effectively pass anything. Every crisis simply worsens social divisions and cripples legislatures evermore. It’s become a meme at this point that headlines declare “once-in-a-lifetime” weather event every year or two, and that trend is only accelerating in the future.

Coastal cities like New York are having to face a future where flooding, once an occasional issue, becomes a constant threat to hundreds of thousands more people than before. Humidity grips the South and the Mississippi River Basin. Wildfires grip the West. Extreme heat and desertification grip the Southwest. The depletion of the Rio…