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Comment by spenrose | Hacker News Reader

"the cost of doing this for all at-risk Americans would be eye-watering. Estimates range from $200,000 to $1m per person to undertake a relocation. If 13 million people do have to move, it seems fantastical to imagine $13tn, or even a significant fraction of this amount, being spent by governments to ease the way. “As a country we aren’t set up to deal with slow-moving disasters like this, so people around the country are on their own,” said Joel Clement, a former Department of the Interior official who worked on the relocation of Alaskan towns."

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This seems like an extremely expensive move. Reading TFA, it isn't clear whether these are the costs of moves or of home buyouts. If these estimates are for buyouts, they should be multiplying by the number of households, not the number of people. Also many of these properties are vacation homes or rentals. It's fine to help people whose primary residences are threatened, but we shouldn't subsidize poor investments.

They're also forgetting that, in some sense, the relocation effort will be a massive fiscal stimulus.

You want to create a whole shit ton of blue-collar US jobs? What better way than resettling entire cities?

Sometimes I wonder what in the world people are thinking. Does anybody actually find this a remotely reasonable estimate? Or even anything completely short of absolutely ridiculous? I moved, along with my wife, literally half way around the world for less than $5k. For $200k, you could spend a like 2% of that on moving costs and then practically retire in many parts of the world.

In the US the median personal income is around $35k. So you spend let's say $2000 moving and then you have $198k, or more than what most people will earn over the next 5 years for what?

The only reason you can move so cheaply is because someone else is going to move into your living space. Somebody with a mortgage can’t move for $2,000 unless they can find a buyer.

This is a process that will play out over 80 years. It's not like everybody will be trying to sell tomorrow. Values for affected properties will go down slowly over time.

I'm pretty skeptical of that. It seems like individual property values will hold steady, then drop suddenly once an event occurs that convinces people the property is no longer viable.

Things get pretty weird when you start contemplating doing things at this scale. My father likes to tell of how, supposedly, McDonalds was considering introducing a new menu item, let's say it was an eggplant burger (I forget). The first question they had to answer was does the entire world produce enough eggplant?

Also, critically, if due to catastrophe you abandon your $100k home and buy another $100k home in another place, your move cost $200k.

Your McDonalds example is a really good one. McDonalds, as of 2012, serves about 68 million people per day. In climate migrants/day we get an aggregate of 13 million over 82 years. That works out to 434 per day. And that's on the extreme negative end of outcomes for climate change.

To give some context to the numbers here [1] are states' net migration rates. So for instance Florida currently has a huge net migration rate of 16/1k. For a population of 21.3 million that means they're seeing 340,800 new residents per year. That's 933 per day. So the entire climate migration, in the worst case scenario, will involve the entirety of the US taking on half as many residents per year, as Florida alone already does. Of course it won't be entirely evenly spread out, but it also won't be jumping from e.g. 20 people/day to 20,000 people/day. It will mostly pass without major notice and, as the article mentions, is indeed already happening.

This makes for nice shocking headlines, but this entire article is extremely hyperbolic. At the same time I don't think anybody really cares. It seems like people want to be terrified, even when the numbers in no way justify the claims. We are increasingly indeed living in a post-facts world.

[1] - http://www.governing.com/gov-data/census/state-migration-rat...

> Also, critically, if due to catastrophe you abandon your $100k home and buy another $100k home in another place, your move cost $200k.

I don't think that's right. Let's say I "own" a $100k home, and have a $100k mortgage. I walk away from that house, buy another $100k house with another $100k mortgage. At the start, I have a $100k asset and a $100k liability, for a net of zero. After, I have a $100k asset and two $100k liabilities, so I have lost $100k.

Alternately, let's say I own my $100k house free and clear, and have another $100 in the bank, for total assets of $200k. I abandon my house (writing the value down to $0), and buy another house for $100k. Now I still have the $100k house, but nothing in the bank. My total assets are $100k, so I've lost $100k.

In no scenario have I lost $200k.

> I walk away from that house

The bank sues you for the 100k unless you live in a non recourse state. In that case, the feds consider that forgiven 100k income and you’ll owe taxes.

>In no scenario have I lost $200k

The median US house price is 200k not 100k.

> > I walk away from that house

> The bank sues you for the 100k unless you live in a non recourse state. In that case, the feds consider that forgiven 100k income and you’ll owe taxes.

My scenario assumed you still owed the $100k. If you live in a non-recourse state and just walk away, you're probably not going to be able to get a new mortgage.

> > In no scenario have I lost $200k

> The median US house price is 200k not 100k.

gascan's example was with $100k houses.

In one case you've spent $100K and have a house and in the other, you've spent $200K and have a house. That represents a difference of $100K.

The part you're missing is that the value of the houses being relocated away from is lost, as they've become uninhabitable due to rising seas.

So it's not the cost of the relocation here that's at issue; that's comparatively cheap. What's very expensive is the loss of all of that property and infrastructure that is left behind and will need to be rebuilt elsewhere.

I'm pretty sure the petroleum and coal industries could scrape together that kind of cash.

13 trillion? Probably not. That's on the order of magnitude of a full year of US GDP

Externalities are a bitch, eh?

Not if someone else pays for them.

Also energy companies don't keep that much cash on hand anyways. Even Exxon only has like $4B.

There is quite a bit of competition in those industries, so changes in cost get passed along quite quickly to consumers. For example, the price of crude oil has varied between $40 and $150 since 2008, but Exxon's profit margin has stayed pretty consistently between 7-10%. When costs go down, Exxon doesn't keep the surplus, it has to pass the savings onto consumers.

The implication of that is that consumers, not the oil and coal companies, were the primary beneficiaries of externalizing the costs of pollution over the past decades, in the form of having access to cheap fuel.

Put another way: Exxon last year had revenues of $240 billion, and profits of about $20 billion. If allowing pollution to be externalized means that gasoline costs half of what it should, that means Exxon's customers saved $240 billion by pollution the environment. That's more than Exxon's profits in an entire decade.

Thanks for the reasonable analysis.

Do you think that, if climate change research hadn't been actively suppressed by the petroleum industry, we would still be on our current usage trajectory, and Exxon still would have made their $20 bn profit this year?

Yes, absolutely. Whatever they attempted to do, the petroleum industry didn't do a good job suppressing research on climate change. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was ratified in 1992. Being a child of the 1990s, I grew up learning about anthropogenic climate. Yet, the 1990s were the era of cheap gas and SUVs. Indeed, SUV sales were completely unphased by all the additional information coming out on climate change in the 1990s and 2000s, dipping down temporarily only in response to the Great Recession, then quickly picking back up. People are completely unwilling to alter their lifestyles to reduce CO2 emissions, except in token ways. (Perhaps that's rational, because reducing carbon emissions isn't going to do squat to avert climate change in light of the rapid industrialization of the developing world.)

We can treat the petroleum industry as scapegoats, but at the end of the day we'd be trying to divert responsibility for their selling a product that we desperately wanted.

I don't buy this analysis. Surely you also remember how quickly people ditched their SUV infatuations as gas prices rose after Hurricane Katrina. And you must also remember strongly politicized and partisan climate change discussions were until about a year ago.

That said, my understanding of the fossil fuel industry is that consumer automobiles only make up some small fraction of carbon emissions. I don't have a source (and I would love to see one), but I was under the impression that the majority of carbon in missions were due to commercial shipping and electricity generation. Nobody was out in the streets demanding cheaper electricity and cheaper products on Walmart shelves. Industry simply provided those things. You basically can't blame consumers for shifting consumption towards cheaper goods, that is why externalities are externalities.

Also consider this erratum from my previous post: how much ExxonMobil shareholder equity and executive compensation over the last 20 years can be attributed to lack of political will to action on carbon emissions and climate change? Surely that number is big enough to at least make a dent in the relocation task at hand.

There was no particular dip in SUV sales after hurricane katrina (2005): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5d/SU.... The dip came in 2008, with the recession. Note that SUV sales skyrocketed starting in 2000, a year in which 80% of Democrats and more than 50% of Republicans believed anthropogenic climate change was real: https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Pro....

Personal vehicles make up 20% of CO2 emissions--a significant amount. More importantly, peoples' intense opposition to policies that would increase the price of gas are a reasonable indicator of how they'd vote on anything that would force internalization of the costs of CO2 emissions. Right now, even Democrats in California are bailing on a modest 12 cent per gallon hike on gas taxes: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/09/24/california-democr.... How do you think those same voters would react to policies that significantly raised the price of their electricity, their milk and eggs, etc.?

People are unwilling to make lifestyle changes in response to climate change. It's not because they don't know. The majority of people polled stated they were concerned about global warming back in 1990 (about the same as today): https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Pro.... They're just not willing to do anything about it. Which is why even Democrats won't propose a carbon tax.

Note that Prop 6 (the gas tax repeal) is not looking so good in the most recent poll, from August: https://www.probolskyresearch.com/2018/08/17/prop-6-results/

This follows the usual trends expected from California ballot propositions. The rule of thumb is that, once campaigning starts, ballot proposition support drops by about 10 points. So a proposition needs about 60% support to survive to election day. Prop 6 never had that support. (It could of course still pass: that rule is only a rule of thumb.)

> Whatever they attempted to do, the petroleum industry didn't do a good job suppressing research on climate change.

Didn't they? Only 1/3rd of Republicans believe in anthropomorphic climate change. Does misinformation from petro companies not factor into that?

It’s ranged from over 50% in 2000 to a low of about a third during Obama, then back up to 40% now. It seems more connected to political rhetoric than any changes in climate science.

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