In new book, CNN climate reporter tells stories of environmental hope in U.S., South Florida
CNN's Chief Climate Correspondent Bill Weir visited Barry University in Miami Shores late last month to talk about his new book and the hopeful stories of climate resiliency he's captured from across the country.
Weir sat down for an interview with WLRN's Julia Cooper to discuss the most pressing issues facing Florida. The following Q&A has been edited for brevity.
WLRN:
WEIR: I became a new, old dad in 2020. My little boy River was born. I have a daughter who's in college as well. It was at the height of the pandemic, the world was in lockdown, and I looked at this little bundle and realized he's going to live to see the 22nd century, and I had been covering climate full time for a couple of years and was just drinking from the fire hose of peer reviewed dread, and it scared me.
I just thought, 'what is he going to suffer?' And I started writing these Earth Day letters kind of as an apology, but also gratitude that he was with us and because we need all the help we can get when it comes to earth repair.
But then after a couple of years of working on this and really struggling and writing a very dark book, we were able to get The Inflation Reduction Act passed in the United States and all of the scientists and researchers and biologists and entrepreneurs were suddenly invigorated because the United States was taking this seriously now for the first time.
WLRN:
WEIR: Well, I use the example of Babcock Ranch in my book, this first solar village in America, which is exploding with popularity now because they've been through two direct hit hurricanes and never lost power. Syd Kitson, who created that community, is a former NFL player and an environmentalist who very consciously developed this village in concert with nature. Instead of fighting against flooding, he built in ways that natural water flow would happen and buried all the power lines and used all the available science to build really the most sustainable community. Now the waiting list to get in there is years long.
For most of my early career covering environmental issues, you had to ask people to imagine what a better future could look like. 'Just trust us on this.' But now it is because solar, wind and storage is so cheap and abundant, it's happening everywhere, and we don't have to imagine it anymore. You can see it. And these models around the world — if we draw from them, if we learn from them as we rebuild our cities — as we think about resilience will be hugely effective.
I was just in the Netherlands talking with architects who have been fighting water in a country that's been fighting water for 400 years. Now, there's a mind shift where they're saying, 'you know what, we're going to have to learn to build on top of water.' Floating apartment buildings, not just houseboat villas for the rich, but dense housing in places like Miami. That's where this is going to take off.
WLRN:
WEIR: It's pretty staggering when the Gulf of Mexico is hot enough that you're warning pregnant women not to go in the water. I mean, that is just jet fuel for a hurricane. Our water cycles seem to be completely drunk because at the same time you have mega droughts out west and the Mississippi River is too low to move barges, you're getting just completely inundated with these massive storms . What we're learning, I think, is Hurricane Milton especially, we were bracing for a storm surge punch, but instead got sucker punched with wind events and inland flooding, fresh water, intense rain and Hurricane Helene taking out the Carolinas. No one imagined Asheville, North Carolina would be susceptible.
And in some cases, by the time they made landfall, those were Category 2's or 3's. We think the bigger number means more destruction. We're learning as we go that's not always the case. How we build, how we plan, how we insure, property values, the taxes on those pay your cops and your teachers. And so we don't want people fleeing the coasts, but we do need some sort of managed, very clear-eyed cogent strategy on how to adapt while we try to stop the source of the problem at the same time. That's what the science is telling us.
WLRN:
WEIR: I went deep into home insulation, passive house construction out west in cold climates where you don't really need a furnace if you insulate properly, and just use the free sunlight.
And I got pretty wonky on the politics of climate legislation through the years and all of those fights, and, in the end, it just distracted from the real practical stories of 'here are these problems, I want you to understand the full scope of the problem.' I'm not trying to sugarcoat this. This is the hardest thing humanity will ever do.
And my son has a world of hurt built into his lifetime that I don't think we can fully appreciate yet. It's already changing immigrant streams around the world. When it gets into really tough resource fights over water and food, I think I found that when a disaster is sudden, it tends to bring people together because you all went through it together. You're going to rebuild together. You're on sort of going through the five stages of grief together, but it's the slow motion disasters, the chronic flooding or the chronic droughts and stuff that work where the fabric starts to fray, where you mistrust your neighbor because suddenly they have more water than they should or whatever. So, the communities that trust each other the most before disaster hits, who believe in each other and the science, are the ones that suffer the least. So, I had examples of those that felt dated by the time we went to publishing, but most of the good stuff's in there, I hope.
WLRN:
WEIR: I think it's here.
It's lost in the border debate, but I was down on the border years ago, covering those migrant caravans coming up, and I was one of the only reporters making the connection that many of them were driven by horrible growing seasons in Central America and big storms and if you're displaced by that, the motivation to come north is just all the greater, right?
It's happening internally in the country. After Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, thousands of folks from the island went to Buffalo, New York, which has a big Puerto Rican community and instead of resisting it, the leadership in Buffalo said, 'no, we're a climate haven. We've got the Great Lakes, plenty of fresh water. We've got all this clean power from hydroelectric. We have a hollowed out downtown because the industry has left. Come. Start your businesses here.' Same thing in Duluth, Minnesota. These places that are kind of in the sweet spot in the country.
That is only going to become more charged politically. I think as the numbers get bigger, you can do that to a point obviously, but what's the capacity of any. I think it's going to change our definition of neighbors and strangers and test our Christian values over welcoming the stranger.
But at the same time, Florida is still growing faster than most other states. A lot of those folks are coming in ignorant to the risk that they're taking and maybe not fully aware of the insurance crisis and all these sorts of things. And so the more we can talk about this regionally, at the county level, at the national level, it's the biggest story that we don't talk about enough.
WLRN:
WEIR: I think ultimately it's connecting the dots between these back-to-back hurricanes and a planet overheated by fossil fuels. It's just that simple.
But the messaging around it has confused people to the point where folks are theorizing it was some sort of government weather-machine that created the hurricane in order to steal the lithium and these wild conspiracies. But that's what happens in a society that decides that you can pick your own adventure when it comes to the truth and sort of partisan news and people don't know what to believe these days. So, I think what we're missing more than anything in this country is just the simple fact that on a planet overheated by fossil fuels, it becomes more flammable, the flash floods get flashier. The hurricanes — when they do come — they're more devastating, just that fundamental thing.
