Letter to the Sun Belt

Image by Kseniya Lapteva.

To my fellow Americans who moved South because you didn’t like winter: reality is coming.

The cold chilled your bones, I get it. You were sick of longjohns unwashed that became stinking fart sacks. The gray skies and long dark of the North hurt your fragile hearts, Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” was snobbery, and chopping wood and toughing out the warren of freezes and thaws and snow and rain and fog – no, it was all too much.

You wanted to be diapered for eternal summer sun, thinking you could soil yourself for the rest of your days in a lawn chair and not have to clean up. To this end, you in the South voted in vast majorities for an ecocidal maniac, raising a middle finger to the rest of the planet.

I happen to know personally one of these snowbird shitheads. Until a few months ago, I was renting an apartment from a landlord in the Catskill Mountains, in the little village of Pine Hill, NY. The landlord defrauded me of seventeen hundred dollars. His name is Mr. Gordon. He was a New York resident but recently moved to Florida. A newborn Southron and proud Trumpster, Mr. Gordon thinks Florida has a future.

But reality is coming. And reality is going to fuck Mr. Gordon hard, as he deserves to be fucked. (Being a fraudster and liar, he models himself, naturally, after his hero in the White House.)

Consider the air-conditioned nothingburger boxes that Mr. Gordon and his fellow Sun Belters call housing. The plastic crates, whatever the supersize, are not long for this world. They will burn and/or flood. They will become heat-death traps when the energy grid fails. The Southrons have bought cheap and will end up paying dear for their McMansions, with their livelihoods and, perhaps sooner than they think, their lives.

First sign of the coming doom? The insurance market is abandoning them. Oh, what’s that? Well, sunworms, it’s your beloved capitalist marketplace in action.

***

Last week, analysts at First Street, a financial research firm in Manhattan that models the future of property values in a climate-damaged world, issued a report suggesting that home values in the US will experience a catastrophic reversal over the next 30 years. The total projected loss: $1.47 trillion. Why? Planetary heating will shatter the housing market in the most vulnerable areas, mainly the Sun Belt, center of the congealed mass of Trump voters who don’t believe the warming regime is real. As First Street’s helpful maps of future destruction of property values make clear, the major losses will occur in Florida and Texas, with lesser but not to be discounted destruction of value in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada.

Unlike elected officials, government bureaucrats, too many NGOs that should know better, and most of the media, insurance companies are leading the way in establishing the new reality that climate, not Wall Street, not the speculative investor class, will dictate the value of real estate. Initially, housing in areas hit with planetary-heating-driven hurricanes, storm surge, and flooding will face enormous increases in the cost of insurance. According to First Street, the four largest metro areas expected to see the highest increases in insurance premiums over the next 30 years are Miami, with a 322% increase, followed by Jacksonville, (226%), Tampa (213%), and New Orleans (196%). Skyrocketing insurance premiums, coupled with repeated uninsurable losses due to storm damage, will drive people out of these cities. Second thing to consider: the market price of homes will plummet as insurance costs go up, and this will be followed by an increasing percentage of housing stock declared simply uninsurable.

Over time, due to these combined factors, there will be a regional exodus, according to the First Street analysis. The report describes “climate migration” that will drive “population redistribution,” with some 55 million Americans by 2055 voluntarily relocating within the U.S. to areas “less vulnerable to climate risks.”

That’s an astonishing figure, amounting to almost 17 percent of current US population. The percentage in 2055 will be slightly less with expected population growth, and probably only slightly less impactful. (Population growth is of course the key driver of the coming catastrophe – more people in untenable patterns of settlement means more suffering down the line – but can’t talk about that.) The last great in-country migration in the historical record of the United States occurred during the ecological catastrophe of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when some 2.5 million people fled the Plains states. At the time, US population was 130 million people.

If the First Street analysts are correct in their projections, we are looking at a population transfer never seen before in American history.

Will the most intelligent, most capable, most far-thinking and inventive people on earth, as Trump assures us about Americans, heed the message that the places seemingly most desirable for habitation today are to be mostly abandoned within a generation? Of course not.

According to a 2024 US Census Bureau report, the South “added more people than all other regions combined, making it both the fastest-growing and largest-gaining region in the country.” MSN.com reports that “the Southern region, already the nation’s most populous, has been the only area to sustain consistent population growth throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, largely due to domestic migration.” Within the South, it was Texas (at a gain of 562,941) and Florida (at a gain of 467,347) that had the largest numeric increases in 2024.

Put another way: The two states most likely to have uninsurable housing in the near future are the fastest-growing. In those states, as voting rolls attest, it’s the MAGAs who keep on coming to feed in the warmth. As with social media, the model of growth, it appears, is that the blind lead the blind. What a spectacle will be the future exodus of the tanned doofuses out of their idyll turned hellscape. And who knows the extent of the ramifying consequences of this colossal heat-driven migration? Look at the political transformation of Europe – toward xenophobia, nationalism, and, lately, fascism – in the wake of a mere four million refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war that began in 2011.

It may be that one of many ironies in the tragic course of the heating-driven crackup in American affairs is that the folks in the South will continue to labor under the delusion of being “real Americans,” salt o’ the earth, and so on, while we in the North are relegated to the status of arrogant airy-fairy intellectuals, the wine-bibbing liberals of Massachusetts who somehow enjoy shoveling snow. As Woody Allen put it in his description of his most beloved city of the East Coast, in Annie Hall, “Don’t you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we’re left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers?” (“I think of us that way sometimes,” goes the punchline.)

A must-read riposte to this prejudiced thinking (which is more common than Woody’s joke allows us to imagine) comes courtesy of my colleague I.P.U. Freely, a New England resident and author of what should be a widely-read vulgarian polemic on American regionalist antagonisms, Fuck the South:

How about this for arrogant: the South is the Real America? The Authentic America. Really?

‘Cause we fucking founded this country, assholes. Those Founding Fathers you keep going on and on about? All that bullshit about what you think they meant by the Second Amendment? Who do you think those wig-wearing, lacy-shirt-sporting revolutionaries were? They were fucking blue-staters, dickhead. Boston? Philadelphia? New York? Hello? [Eds. note: the writer is slightly out of his league here, given that Washington, Jefferson, and Mr. checks-and-balances himself, Madison, were Virginians – though Virginia, granted, is today an established blue state.]

No, No. Get the fuck out…We started this shit, so don’t get all uppity about how real you are, you Johnny-come-lately “Oooooh, I’ve been a state for almost a hundred years” dickheads…Take your liberal-bashing, federal-tax-leeching, Confederate-flag-waving, holier-than-thou, hypocritical bullshit and shove it up your ass.

The claim of real Americanism is especially hollow when one looks at the enormous tax parasitism of Republican-leaning states on the Northern states, an argument that I.P.U. Freely makes central to his polemic. If we were to follow truly the ingenious recommendations of Elon Musk, then all the non-performing worthless Southern states would be cut off completely from federal funding, given their disgustingly inefficient poverty-stricken populations.

***

Of course, none of this petty resentment will matter when the Southrons have been driven North under the pressure of climate chaos and broad Earth system collapse. Will we in the North welcome the migrants from the Trump-voting Sun Belt? Will we embrace with open arms the scientifically illiterate, borderline cretinous, closeted but more often openly fascist Christian nationalists?

Would we in the North prefer them all to be shipped to Mars with Musk to die there while we keep Earth?

Of course we’d prefer that. But it would be un-American.

One of the basic principles of the Founding Fathers is the recognition that people are not angels, but are characterized by ignorance, arrogance, self-regard, and fevers of idiocy, and therefore cannot be trusted with power of any kind. The morons (including me) should be given the chance to express stupid thoughts and politically degenerate tendencies in the freest manner possible, but only when facilitated by a system of checks and balances in which no one moron gets the upper hand.

What we are seeing in the first weeks of the Trump administration, unfortunately, is the morons getting the upper hand. There is little to no connection to biophysical reality — the one reality that matters in the long run. We are in Amerikkka Sunbelt Fantasylandistan, the one where we can all shit ourselves in self-cleaning lawn chairs in a paradise of endless perfect warmth. It will end badly, but how badly depends on how much compassion we can reserve for the idiots among us.

The post Letter to the Sun Belt appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Christopher Ketcham.

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