The Real Estate Agent's Preferred Way of Thinking About Climate Change

“The answer is the Pacific Northwest, and probably especially west of the Cascades.”

“Actually, the strip of coastal land running from Canada down to the Bay Area is probably the best.”

“I predict we’re going to have millions of people moving to [the country’s midsection, like Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, Milwaukee and Detroit].”

“Alaska is going to be the next Florida by the end of the century.”

The grim parlor game that we’re playing here is “Where will people move when the now-inevitable environmental apocalypse that the human race could’ve averted but loved its SUVs and one-dollar hamburgers and air conditioning a little too much to do anything about finally arrives later this century and renders large tracts of this country uninhabitable because they will either be underwater or have no water at all?”

And who can be blamed for turning real doom scenarios into games or glib jokes (“Man, Alaska is going to be niiiiiice”)? People, as a whole, are clearly so bad at imagining future consequences that one of the only ways to get them to do it is to dress it up literally as an act of imagination — and who doesn’t love imagining Other Places where they would rather live? Except for roughly two weeks in the fall and two weeks in the spring, New Yorkers do it all year long: L.A. (all winter), Austin (in early spring), Portland (whenever work is annoying, if they are under forty years old).

So imagine away! Make a dim goal of it even — “I’m moving to Detroit in twenty years” — and buy a house now, for pennies on the dollar. I’m saving up to move to Montreal, because I figure all of the Canadian healthcare and French talk will keep most of the other Americans away and poutine still tastes good, even when it’s a hundred degrees outside.

Photo by Giampaolo Macorig