Gens to the grain vulnerable our cities to the weather extremes brought on by climate change to what extent are rising sea levels from what's called the heat island effect threaten urban areas and what does adaptation to global warming on the urban level look like and need to look like I'm c Yes song well represented a conversation with Ashley Dawson about his book Extreme city the peril and promise of urban life in the age of climate change after these news headlines with I mean. President Donald Trump today that the u.s. Would not become a migrant camp as he addressed the mounting outrage over his administration's policy of separating immigrant children and parents the United States will not be a migrant camp. And it will not be a refugee holding facility big you look at what's happening in Europe you look at what's happening in other places we can't allow that to happen to the United States not on my watch referred to say only separation as he called u.s. Immigration laws horrible and tough and the worst in the world but said it's the Democrats' fault Trump repeated his call to change u.s. Immigration laws so they favor skilled immigrants over the current policies that give preference to family reunification he'll meet with congressional Republicans tomorrow to discuss immigration legislation likely to come up for a vote later this week the outgoing United Nations human rights chief said Rod Hussein assailed the u.s. Policy of family separation the. United States armed deeply concerned by recently adopted policies which punish children for the parents' actions in the past 6 weeks nearly 2000 children have been forcibly separated from their parents the American their son Association of Pediatrics has called this cruel practice government sanctioned child abuse Corps repairable harm with my phone consequences on Father's Day Democratic lawmakers visited immigrant detention centers and denounced the trumpet ministration policy California Sen Komla Harris today called on Department of Homeland Security secretary Kirsten IOs and to resign Harris said Nielsen has refused repeated requests to clarify administration policies and provide key information about them the Northern California immigrant mother of 4 has a bond hearing in San Francisco immigration court this afternoon 33 year old cloudy or deal was born in El Salvador but has lived in this country since she was 7 most recently in Arcadia and Humboldt County her 4 children were all born in the u.s. Her supporters say that during a routine check an appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement last November agents unexpectedly detained and imprisoned her at a privately owned Mesa Verde ice processing facility and Bakersfield more than 500 miles away from her children a convoy of supporters from Humboldt del Norte counties was to rally at this hour outside San Francisco ice headquarters before her 1 pm hearing German Chancellor Angela Merkel has bowed to demands from a conservative party in her coalition government to reduce the number of refugees the country except Merkel's governing coalition was threatened with collapse over the issue her remarks appeared on all Jazeera pointed us to 0 if we are off the all . Pinioned the c.d.u. At c.s.u. Has to try to better direct migration and country and we do so number of people driving in the country so that we do not have a situation like we had 2000 and. Merkel said she would hold talks with other European Union countries on immigrants and refugees and report back on July 1st the country's interior minister has been demanding that Germany refuse entry to some immigrants at the border a new study says climate change will put more than $20000.00 homes along the California coast at risk of chronic and disruptive flooding within the next 30 years the Union of Concerned Scientists says the homes have been assessed value of more than $15000000000.00 although their market value is considerably higher by the year 2100 the number of California homes at risk from rising seas skyrockets to $100000.00 the California counties with the most homes at risk of chronic inundation by 2045 our Marine with 4400 San Mateo 4100 and Orange County with 3700 Californians will say Swiss likely to be a hard for rent control measure on the November ballot secretary of state Alex Vidia and down supporters surpass the number of valid signatures needed to qualify for the ballot tenants rights advocates decided to put the measure on the ballot after California state lawmakers repeated lete defeated similar measures despite a Democratic majority in both chambers at the ballot proposal would give California cities and other local jurisdictions the authority to set local rent control laws it would repeal a $995.00 state law the cost to Hawkins Act It prohibits California communities from limiting renting creases on single family homes condos and buildings built after 1905 I'm Eileen out in Derry News returns at 4 with headlines at 6 the Pacifica evening news. From the studios of the p.f.a. In Berkeley California this is against to the green on Pacifica Radio My name is c.s. Song. To monumental trends are converging one is the movement the massive migration of people to urban areas and the other is increasingly extreme forms of weather unleashed by climate change this convergence of an urbanizing humanity with intense climate disruptions is what spurred Ashley Dawson to write his new book Extreme cities in it he describes both the unique vulnerabilities of cities in both the global north and the global south and also how grassroots movements are acting to protect their communities and to remake their cities in a more just and equitable way actually Dawson is a visiting professor at the Princeton Environmental Institute and then English professor at the City University of New York his new book is extreme cities the peril and promise of urban life in the age of climate change when Ashley joined me recently from New York City he said this about the overall project of his book What I'm really trying to get at is the way in which cities are a real kind of key point for climate change and that's what the title is really gesturing towards the kind of conjunction of increasingly extreme forms of weather that are caused by climate change through burgeoning carbon emissions and then social extremes in contemporary cities which make them more vulnerable to climate change related natural disasters. So that you know thinking about that conjunction is at the center of what I try to do throughout the book so urban dwellers like me we like to think that you know we're in cities so we're kind of protected right we have a built environment around us so in some ways we're we're kind of protected from extremes I take it you you disagree with that yeah I really want to challenge that in my work so I want to talk about the ways in which actually through the creation of a huge amount of kind of elaborated infrastructure we've made ourselves far more vulnerable to natural disasters you know if you if you live in a rural area and you're used to having to get water from the local river or something like that a natural disaster could be decimating But nonetheless you have a sort of element of self provision in a lot of l. Parts of your life which in a city you don't you know when you turn the tap and no water comes out when you flick on the light switch and you don't have electricity you're suddenly incredibly vulnerable in the city so while there are aspects of urban life that I think can increase our ability to cope with natural disasters and that includes the people we find around us and I think it's important to talk about sort of social resiliency in cities and the way in which we can depend on our fellow urbanites in moments of disaster nonetheless Yeah I want to talk about the ways in which cities actually are highly vulnerable the Ses cities are as you point out in your book are vulnerable to sea level rise is what has the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the i.p.c.c. Projected in terms of sea level rise over the course of the 21st century Well it's projections are a fairly low ball you know they're telling us that it's going to be about 6 feet more or less but what I try and do in the book is talk about some of the problems in these projections I mean the. P.c.c. As its name suggests Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a kind of political body and so while the scientists who are part of it are you know a crack scientists doing great work nonetheless their publications have to be vetted and approved by government officials and so there's a lot of political pressure on them to get things right and one of the things I try and talk about in the book is the way in which projections about sea level rise that scientists have made when they're giving them to official bodies like the i.p.c.c. Haven't incorporated potential big changes like the melting of the glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland in the in past publications because of the uncertainty about not rates you know so scientists wanting to make sure they don't get criticized for their science being inaccurate have basically just in the past not included melting of Antarctica and Greenland in their projections and of course we know that those places are melting we just don't know exactly how fast although we're getting better and better science tells us understand that all the time how quickly could the glaciers melt such that we have what might be considered catastrophic sea level rise well one of the most alarming predictions came from James Hansen where he talked about really significant melting happening and it happening in a fairly quick order right so Hansen talked about melting over the course of 5250 years that is really really significant several several meters he described which you know this over 10 feet or so this is all. Been debated and he's been criticized by some but what I think is particularly interesting that I found as I spoke to scientists and read some of the debates going on in scientific circles about this is the idea that sea level rise isn't going to happen in some kind of smooth upward change like a kind of hockey stick graph or something like that but instead is going to happen through these kinds of fits and starts or punctuated rises followed by periods of relative equilibrium and the reason that that's significant is that in our contemporary world we tend to talk about risk based on projections into the future that come from experience in the past but what we're entering is this new world where the past is no gauge for the future and where these kinds of really rapid shifts in climate can take place that find us totally unprepared and that's one reason that it's so hard for scientists to really find any kind of agreement about exact predictions concerning sea level rise really i.p.c.c. In making predictions about greenhouse gas emissions what do they believe in terms of how quickly or determinedly economies will move toward a post carbon economy Well Mike Davis has a wonderful article where he talks about the Urban Future and a sniff section of that article which I cite in my book discusses the way in which I p c c s projections for medication of carbon emissions in other words cut the amount of carbon we're going to be a knitting really assume that we're going to be putting whatever kind of capital we generate back into. Green infrastructure rather than into luxury high rises and condominiums for the one percent and if you look at the way in which urban real estate has been going for the last 3040 years it's a huge economic sink for the elites and in fact we have this kind of irrational process of urbanization where we continue to develop coastal areas take Miami Beach for instance because they're great places for the wealthy to park their capital but of course they're absolutely insane places to be building houses to what extent Ashley is humanity urbanizing toward extend our people converging on cities around the globe this is been one of the huge shifts of the last half century in fact on air cops born the great materialist Psystar in in his history of the 20th century says that this is one is the huge transformations of human history which is all too little acknowledged you know we talk a lot about the fall of the Berlin Wall and that kind of triumph of the us is the sole superpower but we don't talk enough detail about the urbanization of humanity so from roughly the beginning of the 21st century and I think the official point was in 2750 percent of humanity was living in cities and as Mike Davis talks about wonderfully in his book Planet of slums it's important to keep in mind that a lot of the urbanization that has happened over the last 50 years and increasingly almost all of the urbanization that will happen in the future in the rest of this century is happening in developing countries in other words in the global south so that the kind of paradigms that we have in our mind and those of us living in cities like New York or Berkeley for what cities should look like. Are really not up to speed for the ways in which global urbanization planetary urbanization is playing out now and in the future and we've talked to various guests on this program about why people are moving to cities but can you share with us some of the factors maybe some of the major factors that inclined people or force people to move to urban areas Yeah well in my book I talk about the recent wave of urbanist who have celebrated the transformative power of the city and you know that's an old story the kind of idea of Bright Lights Big City of economic mobility of the kind of attraction of cultural connection and social propinquity which comes with living in cities you know there's there's nothing like the kind of bubble of urban life and you know I think that that's important and I think that it is true that people can to a certain extent Mealer at their economic circumstances by moving to cities but what often gets ignored in those kinds of celebrations of cities are the factors that are pushing people to move to cities often against their will and that to really talk about that adequately means one has to talk about the history of globalization and the a liberalism in other words one has to talk about the ways in which countries which had fought hard to achieve their independence from colonial powers and to begin to develop their economies in the period after World War 2 and from 1960 on increasingly when more and more countries became independent the way that countries had tariff barriers and the sort of mechanisms of internal development that they'd put in place battered down by free trade agreements and various other forms of neoliberal globalization and of course in. In the global south above all that means the ways in which the barriers that protected peasants who are based in the countryside where destroyed and demolished in various different ways I mean the classic instance of course is is NAFTA NAFTA was responsible for cutting the barriers that protected farmers in Mexico and that led to a huge influx of cheap corn produced in the United States and of course it was produced by farmers using intensive fossil fueled agriculture rather than small peasant agriculture and that led to a shift of about 2000000 people from Mexico's rural areas to cities like Mexico City in other regional cities and you know a certain number of those people also came to the United States and went to other developed economies so there's a whole history of urbanization which involves big mechanisms of contemporary capitalism and the kind of inequalities of contemporary capitalism that need to be taken into account when one talks about the contemporary city Ashley Dawson is a visiting professor in the environment in the humanities and a visiting professor of English at the Princeton Environmental Institute at Princeton University He's also professor of English at the City University of New York we are talking about his new book it's called Extreme cities the peril and promise of urban life in the age of climate change it's published by verse so I'm c.s. Song and this is against a big grin on Pacifica Radio. So what proportion of urban residents around the globe live in low elevation coastal zones I don't have the exact proportion on the tip of my tongue of people who live in coastal areas in the global south but 2 thirds of world cities are in. Coastal zones that are prone to floods so that's kind of across the global north club well south divide. And what I think reflects is some of the dynamics of globalization that we're talking about and in the developing world and developed world it also reflects the importance of port cities we often don't think about port cities and their importance to globalization you know we think about globalization in terms of airplanes often but. Without the container ship we wouldn't have the massive quantities of consumer goods being shipped from one part of the global economy to another and what that has meant is that massive port cities have grown up above all in East Asia which of course is the center for global commodity production but also in many other parts of the world and many of those cities are in low lying coastal zones that are highly prone to flooding What about in the u.s. Same thing in the u.s. All of the u.s. Is major cities lie in coastal zones New York all the way around cities on the West Coast and of course New Orleans which strikes us very much when we think about climate change others as a result of Hurricane Katrina so our wealthiest cities are in coastal areas that's not to say that there aren't threats which cities and other areas face you know the u.s. Is seeing a massive development of cities in the south and southwest of the country over the post-war period and particularly speeding up from 1960 onward and cities like Phoenix are very much very much threatened by drought and forms of heat that are coming with climate change so I think it's important to talk about phenomena not just flooding but also the forms of mortality related to the heat heat island effect in cities Reisa. These basically are about 30 percent warmer than the surrounding countryside and with that comes very elevated levels of mortality when the weather is extremely hot as well as you know quite spectacular disasters like brown outs and blackouts as a result of the grid not being able to handle all the electric consumption when people turn on their air conditioners trying to cope with elevated temperatures in the summer why are cities on average 30 percent hotter than the countryside and also to climate scientists pay enough attention to urban heat island phenomenon cities are a lot hotter because they have a lot more tarmac and you know bricks and other things in them that absorb heat and then radiate it into the surroundings related to that is the fact that when there is suburban sprawl it often means that a lot of. The natural greenery that was in the urban surroundings gets chopped down and that can lead to much higher temperatures and it can also lead to problems with flooding I mean that's very much what we saw when Hurricane Harvey hit Houston you know the city had spiraled massively as people moved to the ex-urban fringed looking for cheaper real estate you know in the absence of any kind of affordable housing policies in the city and in doing that developers kind of cut down a lot of the wetlands and that then led to led to massive flooding and you know in the book I point out that cities are in some strange way invisible to science because of the fact that our our measurements of temperatures tend to be adjusted to global norms so you know when we think about climate change we we talk about global statistics. And that's also reflected in terms of our accounting for increas