Earlier this year, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, a graveyard was spared by the fire that sent thousands of Los Angeles residents fleeing into the coal-black night. Here, in Mountain View Cemetery, lie the bones of Octavia Butler, the famed science-fiction writer who spent her life in Pasadena and Altadena, both of which had burned. Trinkets offered by fans often decorate Butler’s unassuming grave. A footstone is inscribed with a quotation from her Parable of the Sower : ALL THAT YOU TOUCH, YOU CHANGE. ALL THAT YOU CHANGE, CHANGES YOU.In that dystopian novel, published in 1993 and set in the mid-2020s, the United States still exists but has been warped by global warming, and its authoritarian government has ceded most of the administration of day-to-day matters to corrupt companies. In Butler’s neo-feudal vision, states and cities erect strict borders to deter migrants, the gap between rich and poor has widened, and massive wildfires in Southern California drive the state’s decline.It has become commonplace to label Butler a prophet. She didn’t get everything right about the United States today. But even in the things that haven’t happened, exactly, one can see analogs to real life.Butler, however, considered herself merely an analyst—a “histofuturist.” She often said that her primary skill was simply learning from the past. In her research for Parable, she studied times of rising political strife and demagoguery, along with America’s history of class and racial inequality. She studied what was at the time an emerging scientific consensus regarding global warming, a body of research that even then predicted fires and floods, and warned of political instability.“I didn’t make up the problems,” Butler wrote in an essay for Essence in 2000. “All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.” That same year, she said in an interview that she dearly hoped she was not prophesying anything at all; that among other social ills, climate change would become a disaster only if it was allowed to fester. “I hope, of course, that we will be smarter than that,” Butler said six years before her death, in 2006.What will our “full-fledged disasters” be in three decades, as the planet continues to warm? The year 2024 was the hottest on record. Yet 2025 has been perhaps the single most devastating year in the fight for a livable planet. An authoritarian American president has pressed what can only be described as a policy of climate-change acceleration—destroying commitments to clean energy and pushing for more oil production. It doesn’t require an oracle to see where this trajectory might lead.[From the July/August 2024 issue: George Packer on how Phoenix is a vision of America’s future]Taking our cue from Butler, we would do well today to study the ways that climate change has already reshaped the American landscape, and how disasters are hollowing out neighborhoods like the one where Butler is buried. We should understand how catastrophe works in a landscape of inequality.Over the next 30 years or so, the changes to American life might be short of apocalyptic. But miles of heartbreak lie between here and the apocalypse, and the future toward which we are heading will mean heartbreak for millions. Many people will go in search of new homes in cooler, more predictable places. Those travelers will leave behind growing portions of America where services and comforts will be in short supply—let’s call them “dead zones.” Should the demolition of America’s rule of law continue, authoritarianism and climate change will reinforce each other, a vicious spiral from which it will be difficult to exit.How do we know this? As ever, all it takes is looking around.In August, as the setting sun sent a red glow up the San Gabriel Valley, I surveyed a stretch of western Altadena, just blocks from Butler’s grave. The better part of a year had passed since the Eaton Fire—which destroyed some 9,400 buildings here and in Pasadena while the Palisades Fire raged simultaneously to the west. Still, the moonscape in front of me was unsettling. Much of the debris had been cleared, which made the houseless lots seem even more eerie. Here and there, a brick fireplace stood watch over an otherwise empty lot.In January, when the Santa Ana winds came, Altadenans weren’t too worried. In this part of California, small fires were just part of life. “We always think it’s going to be an earthquake that takes us out,” Veronica Jones, the president of the Altadena Historical Society and a resident for six decades, told me. For many Altadena lifers, the memory of the 1993 Kinneloa Fire, which destroyed almost 200 buildings and burned for five days, was the guide for what to expect in the worst case.But 1993 was billions and billions of tons of carbon pollution ago. This time around, the physics of the planet were different. In 2023, high temperatures in the Pacific had helped incubate Hurricane Hilary, which led to the first-ever tropical-storm warning in Southern California. The storm dumped buckets of rain on the region, helping spur rapid plant growth over the next several months. But then the rain dried up completely. In the second half of 2024, Los Angeles County received only 0.3 inches of precipitation—the lowest amount on record. The drought and near-record temperatures dried out the lush scrub, turning it to kindling. In just 16 months, multiple supposedly once-a-century weather events had worked in concert to make the hills perhaps more combustible than they’d ever been.When the winds blew in, bringing dry, warm air from inland over Southern California, they were unusually strong, approaching hurricane strength. Strong winds can damage power lines, and evidence now suggests that a malfunctioning power line helped spark the Eaton Fire. Early in the morning on January 8, Jones was startled when her husband told her they needed to go because embers—“big chunks of fire,” as Jones put it—were falling into their yard.The story of the Eaton Fire itself is tragic, and an omen: In ways that are straightforward and in ways that were largely unanticipated, global warming is quickly expanding the potential for large fires. But catastrophes also tend to reveal deficits in society, and the patterns of destruction and abandonment that followed the fire—which have roots in America’s past and its present—tell us something about the country’s future, too.[From the July/August 2024 issue: What America owes the planet]Many of the people escaping the fire had originally come to Altadena in flight: In the 20th century, Black folks seeking refuge from the Jim Crow South moved to California en masse, among them Butler’s grandmother from Louisiana. Redlining and restrictive covenants kept them from buying homes in Los Angeles and Pasadena, leaving unincorporated Altadena as a favored destination, particularly its western half.For many of those who’d been part of the migration, or who’d heard the stories, the fire felt like the return of an old menace. The Eaton and Palisades Fires afflicted every class and demographic group. But the first response appeared much worse on the west side of Altadena, where the Black population was centered, than anywhere else. Of the more than 100 L.A. County fire trucks that went out to neighborhoods affected, only a single one entered West Altadena within the first 12 hours. According to an after-action report commissioned by the county, the homes there were older and more flammable, and—perhaps owing to power outages or weather interference with cell towers—–residents throughout Altadena said that they hadn’t received evacuation orders. All but one of the 19 reported deaths in Altadena occurred on the west side, which suffered the most catastrophic damage. Nearly half of all Black families in Altadena lost their home or sustained extensive damage.Just as fire victims began the process of trying to recover, Donald Trump came back into power. Deep cuts at FEMA and other agencies targeted much of the federal machinery and sources of money that were supposed to help. AmeriCorps volunteers who’d staffed recovery programs were sent home, and residents reportedly had difficulty reaching FEMA agents on the phone. Six months after the fires, the federal aid received by victims, relative to their property damage, was less than a third of that provided after previous fires in California and Hawaii. FEMA declined to perform its customary soil testing after cleanups, and now independent tests indicate high levels of lead in several lots. Darlene Greene, a member of the town council representing a tract in West Altadena, told me that the ordeal of rebuilding had driven some of her constituents into mental-health crises.Months passed and empty lots languished. Many residents, having purchased homes years ago, were severely underinsured, owing to increased building costs. As of early October, fewer than 500 rebuilding permits had been issued within the Eaton Fire perimeter.Those who couldn’t abide all the delays and red tape have sold, in many cases for a fraction of what the land was worth, and in many cases to corporate entities. More sales might still be on the horizon. With much of their surroundings still burned out and with friends and families scattered, even people who didn’t lose their home in the fire might feel inclined to move away. “When you leave your house,” Jones told me, “you have to look up at the street sign because there’s no landmarks anymore.”[Read: Who wants to live in the Palisades now?]Greene said the setbacks that families have faced have been their own kind of disaster. In the first weeks after the fire, “I was very optimistic,” Greene told me, “and thinking that, Hey, you know, people will be able to come back and rebuild.” Now, she said, she doesn’t know about that.Who needs imagination when the dystopia is right in front of you? During the Palisades and Eaton Fires, scenes played out that could have appeared in Butler’s Parable. Private firefighting outfits defended companies, utilities, and ultrarich enclaves while other parts of the city burned. The county’s defenses were overmatched. Its fleet of fire trucks was hobbled by ongoing consolidation in the fire-engine industry, where giant companies have been delaying maintenance orders and raising prices for new trucks. Hundreds of incarcerated people, making at most $10 a day, worked as firefighters for the state. All of these things at least partly reflect the increasing regularity, intensity, and cost of fires. They preview the kinds of problems that climate change will bring to our local governments and economies, manifesting most severely in poor and minority communities, but affecting us all.One problem is who will underwrite disaster risks as they grow. Seven of the 12 largest home insurers in California—including State Farm, the very largest—have already limited their coverage or stopped taking new policies there. After the fires, State Farm proposed increasing its homeowner premiums by 22 percent statewide, and warned that it would need to “consider its options,” seeming to imply that it might unwind even its existing policies, if the state didn’t allow the increase (the two sides ultimately agreed on a 17 percent rate hike). The specter of huge future premium increases or whole-state withdrawals by insurers adds a new level of risk for every homeowner. Other insurers are also reconsidering their long-term positions, and asking to raise rates sharply.There are parallels to the 2008 financial crisis, when entire communities were built over the rotten plank of subprime mortgages. Insurers lost more than $100 billion in underwriting in 2024, and “insurance deserts,” where policies are becoming impossible to find or prohibitively expensive, are growing in the South and the West—more than half a million Florida residents are down to just one state-established “insurer of last resort,” for example. Last year, a report from the Senate Budget Committee found that the withdrawal of insurers from many markets threatens “a collapse in property values with the potential to trigger a full-scale financial crisis similar to what occurred in 2008.” But it’s six one way, half a dozen the other: Insurers that stay in risky markets will be imperiled by unexpected disaster payouts, and might be destabilized if multiple disasters happen in different parts of the country at once.[Read: Climate collapse could happen fast]Even if climate change does not trigger a full-fledged economic panic, whole regions will be thinned out and impoverished. Residential areas are the centerpiece of local economies, yet without insurance, people cannot get mortgages, and so most cannot buy houses. The mere prospect of that makes business investment riskier. Jesse Keenan, a professor at Tulane University who studies climate change and real estate, told me that some places are already becoming economic “no-go” zones.Keenan is not some lonely Cassandra. In February, in a report to the Senate Banking Committee, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned of exactly the same thing. “You know, if you fast-forward 10 or 15 years, there are going to be regions of the country where you can’t get a mortgage,” he said. “There won’t be ATMs. You know, the banks won’t have branches and things like that.” Leave it to the banker to think about the banks, but the same logic applies to everything else. In places that suffer an increasing number of climate disasters and don’t receive commensurate assistance, we should expect more food deserts, fewer libraries, and fewer small businesses. We should expect that, with a larger share of municipal budgets going to disaster mitigation and repair, city and county services will suffer or disappear. Even as local taxes rise, “service deserts” will spread, leaving the remaining populations with only shells of local government. These are the dead zones.A flooded street in Miami in June 2022 (Joe Raedle / Getty)In Butler’s Parable, corporations use global warming to their advantage, taking over distressed governments, buying up devastated lands, and providing housing to residents in exchange for cheap labor. Parts of this vision are manifesting in real life. Private-equity firms are deeply embedded in the disaster-recovery industry, sometimes relying on the low-wage labor of immigrants and incarcerated people in order to provide reconstruction services at cut rates. Investors often come into distressed real-estate markets and transform them, buying up land on the cheap and flipping residential homes into rental units. Essential services such as firefighting, disaster response, and cleanup are being slowly ceded by the public to the private sector in places under climate stress. Life in these places won’t be like life in the company towns of the 19th century, not exactly. But if you squint, it may not look that different, either.These glimpses into tomorrow would warrant consternation under any administration. The United States cannot control global warming on its own, but it can exert a significant influence, directly and by example. President Joe Biden’s climate agenda was the most robust ever attempted in this country, but even he did not sign enough laws to produce the fair share of decarbonization that America would need to deliver in order to avert 2 degrees Celsius of warming—a threshold whose crossing would likely spur a mass drought in the Southwest and West, disrupt agriculture in the South, and bring deluges to Miami, Sacramento, and New York City. But our present government is actively working to worsen global warming and make communities less resilient to its effects. It is working to make the darkest futures more likely.It is possible, even considering the hatchet blows that Donald Trump has delivered to the federal bureaucracy, public institutions, and the Constitution, that his legacy will be most felt in our climate. On his first day back in office, the president signed executive orders that will withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement—his second time pulling the country out of the global climate-change accord—and expand fossil-fuel production. In March, the Department of the Interior took steps to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a vanishing sliver of pristine wilderness whose climate is already rapidly warming.Even while justifying the expansion of oil and gas production as “energy independence,” Trump has attacked renewable energy. In January, he suspended all new leasing of federal lands for wind-power production. In July, he signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which accelerated the phaseout of wind- and solar-power tax credits, ended the tax credit for consumers who purchase electric vehicles, and zeroed out penalties for automakers that don’t abide by fuel-economy standards. He has suggested that wind farms threaten American health, and has said he wants to ban new facilities outright.Trump’s EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, came into office with the intent, he said, of “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” He has since moved to slash the staff of the EPA’s emission-enforcement office. Zeldin is now leading an effort to kill the EPA’s “endangerment finding,” a 2009 declaration that greenhouse gases are harmful to human health. Without that finding, the federal government would no longer have the authority to regulate carbon pollution.The Trump administration’s fixation on ending that “climate-change religion” fits the president’s general view that everything is a zero-sum struggle between two sides, and that he wins only when his opponents lose. By this standard, Trump is winning: According to an analysis from the Princeton-affiliated REPEAT Project, his administration’s actions have already erased all the future emission declines set in motion during Biden’s term.Trump has even thrown wrenches into the energy-transition plans of other countries. In a trade deal with the European Union, the administration agreed to lower punitive tariffs in exchange for European companies’ purchase of $750 billion of American energy over the next three years, mostly oil and gas, a move that—if the EU enforces it—would throw Europe off its decarbonization targets. In August, U.S. officials released a statement pledging that the United States would “not hesitate to retaliate” against countries that voted in favor of a global agreement to lower emissions in international shipping.As the administration accelerates climate change, it has also moved to weaken the country’s infrastructure for dealing with climate disruptions. Trump scrapped a program dedicated to funding flood mitigation in low-income communities. He axed rules that required public housing and critical infrastructure rebuilt with federal money to be elevated in order to account for new flood risks. The National Weather Service is a shadow of its former self, and the forecasters who help people make evacuation decisions are working double shifts just to keep offices open.Even if Trump were to make a miraculous conversion to that climate-change religion today, some effects of these changes will be essentially irreversible. Once dismantled, bureaucracies are not so easy to replace. New wind farms won’t just pop up overnight. It would take time and investment merely to get back to our pre-Trump emissions baseline, let alone hit our national targets for averting a 2-degrees-hotter world.This reality is so sobering that even staunch climate optimists have had to adjust. Since 2012, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, one of the Democrats’ leaders on climate, has delivered more than 300 “Time to Wake Up” speeches about global warming on the floor. Earlier this year, Whitehouse acknowledged for the first time that it may actually be “too late to wake up.”In search of more windows into our climate future, I traveled to a place where water is the agent of change. The first preview came as soon as I left my hotel. As I drove through Miami, a light rainstorm flooded the streets, sending water sloshing around my car’s tires and then over my shoes when I got out.On the street during a heat wave in Miami in June 2023 (Giorgio Viera / AFP / Getty)There are few places in America where climate change is made more obvious to the senses than in Miami. On some eroded beaches, you can wade or even swim out to where the land once reached. The seawalls along Biscayne Bay have gotten higher, and flooding from rainfall has become more and more of a problem. Crucial areas of Miami-Dade County are at or near sea level. And the sea level, as glaciers melt, is rising. A 2016 county report estimated that from 1992 to 2030, sea levels there would rise by up to 10 inches.Somewhere between the inconvenience of wet feet and a potential Atlantis-style submergence are plenty of climate issues that make life more difficult. Weather patterns in South Florida have changed, and extreme rainfall has become more frequent, exacerbating the rising sea level. Last year, a “rain bomb” system dumped more than a foot of water on Miami in just two days. Until very recently, that was considered a once-in-200-years (or rarer)event—but it has now happened in the city four times in as many years. Salt water from the encroaching ocean threatens the drinking-water supply.[From the March 2021 issue: The terrifying warning lurking in the earth’s ancient rock record]And at the risk of stating the obvious, global warming is supercharging the city’s already daunting heat. In 2024, Miami-Dade County experienced 60 full days with heat indexes greater than 105 degrees Fahrenheit. The most dangerous change might be the spike in overnight temperatures, which robs resting bodies of the chance to recover from daytime heat, thus contributing to as many as 600 excess deaths from heat each year. The county is the epicenter of an incipient “extreme heat belt” that is reshaping concepts of seasonality and livability in the United States.In Miami, denying climate change would be like denying the nose on one’s face. Even so, even knowing what’s coming, the city and surrounding county have struggled to protect themselves—and especially their most vulnerable residents. This was evident in the community where I was headed, Liberty City.The water receded as the land sloped upward on my drive to the old site of Liberty Square, the second segregated housing project in the country built for Black residents. I passed buildings adorned with Technicolor murals of civil-rights icons. And I found the remnants of the old “race wall” that had been erected to separate Black residents from white.In Miami, places known as “heat islands,” with little shade and lots of asphalt, are disproportionately inhabited by poor and working-class residents, and these can be 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than wealthy residential areas. Heat-related deaths and illnesses are concentrated among Black and Latino outdoor laborers. One of the worst such heat islands is Liberty City.The neighborhood does, however, have one thing going for it, albeit one that may not benefit its current residents much longer. Historically, some of Miami’s most desirable real estate has been crowded along the beachfronts of the metropolitan area, with businesses and wealthy white residential enclaves prizing shore views and beach access. Meanwhile, neighborhoods farther inland—Liberty City, along with Overtown and Little Haiti—were designated for Black folks. They sit several feet higher above the ocean than the city’s prime real estate.In 2018, a group of researchers led by Jesse Keenan found that property values in these higher-elevation areas were increasing relative to the city average. Theorizing that these price increases were driven by demand from developers and buyers fleeing inward from sinking coastal neighborhoods—and were displacing people already in the communities farther inland—Keenan and his colleagues coined the term climate gentrification.Liberty City, a “heat island” that can be 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than more affluent parts of Miami, is nonetheless now in demand because it sits on high ground. (Kofi Oliver / Getty)In Liberty City, climate gentrification gave Black residents a new way to think about a process that, until that point, had seemed like regular old gentrification. Rents for existing residents had been rising faster than the city average, and an upsurge in evictions followed. Homeowners—many facing a budget crunch from rising property-tax bills—had grown accustomed to getting offers to buy their homes for cash. Developers had plans to demolish Liberty Square and replace it with a kind of mixed-use Chipotleville, and there wasn’t much political will to stop displacement. Miami “was built upon inequity,” Kilan Ashad-Bishop, a professor at the University of Miami and a former member of the city’s Climate Resilience Committee, told me—“but this felt a little different.” Activism against climate gentrification and national attention grew such that Miami passed a resolution requiring a study on climate gentrification—although so far, that hasn’t accomplished much.If the architectural renderings of trees, umbrellas, and awnings come to pass, some families of color might be able to hang on and enjoy the new amenities. But many who are displaced will find it difficult to rent or buy anywhere else in the city with similar elevation. Even if they buy farther inland, climate change will still hang over their finances. Home-insurance premiums are soaring in South Florida towns that aren’t beach-adjacent, too—the whole area is hurricane-prone. And the number of insurance nonrenewals is actually highest inland, where many lower-middle-class homeowners have had to drop policies they can no longer afford. The geography of real climate risk—which includes not just the effects of weather and disasters, but also the ability of communities to withstand them—looks roughly similar to the geographies of poverty and race.The same holds true across the hottest, most volatile regions of America. In Houston, homeowners in minority communities damaged by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 were the least likely to receive loans and federal grants for rebuilding. In Chicago, the inland American city with the greatest number of properties at substantial risk of flooding, communities of color have been immensely overrepresented among flood victims. In Alabama, which is now part of America’s Tornado Alley because of the changing climate, the people least able to rebuild (and who live in shoddier homes that tend to sustain more damage) are likely to be poor and Black.The climate itself does not discriminate; climate catastrophe will distress the middle class and inevitably sweep away even mansions in gated neighborhoods. But in the next 30 years, the people who will bear the brunt of that catastrophe—who will be dispossessed, uprooted, and exposed to the worst of the elements—will be those who are already on the other side of society’s walls.In the 1930s, rolling black dust storms blanketed America’s Great Plains, uprooting topsoil and crops across 100 million acres of land. The clouds billowed as far east as New York, choking farm economies in the middle of the country and sending millions of people on the move. The black blizzards seemed to many like divine judgment; actually, they had their origins at least partly in human action. Years of deep plowing and overgrazing had eroded the earth, priming the Plains to become what we know now as the Dust Bowl.As these storms darkened the prairies, farmers and laborers alike sought refuge. Many of them traveled hundreds of miles to California and other havens. Despite the passage of New Deal programs to aid these “Okies,” many did not receive a warm welcome in their new homes, because some saw them as interlopers competing for housing and jobs. In one ugly episode, Los Angeles Police Department Chief James Edgar Davis stationed more than 100 officers along the California border to enforce a “bum blockade” against migrants. California had made it a misdemeanor for any citizen to transport an “indigent” person into the state, a law that was later overturned by the Supreme Court. The Court’s decision became part of the established basis for a right that many Americans take for granted—the ability to travel freely across state lines.As Octavia Butler believed, America’s past is a good place to start when trying to predict how climate change will reconfigure its society in the future. The country has already seen large, sudden movements of people driven by disaster and local changes in climate. These upheavals have always caused tensions, and those tensions have shaped the American social order in many ways.Within the U.S. today, people are again moving because of disasters, and because of the slow-grind attrition of heat, flooding, and rising insurance rates. Earlier this year, the nonprofit Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre found that disasters had caused 11 million evacuations or relocations in the previous 12 months. These numbers will climb. Without interstate coordination and federal relief funding, workers and politicians in receiving zones may try to keep out newcomers—especially poor ones, arriving en masse on the heels of a particular disaster—as they did during the Dust Bowl.In his forthcoming book, aptly titled North, Keenan anticipates a major climate migration—out of the South to cooler, less volatile climes—driven partly by disaster but also by a simple preference for milder weather. Over the past half century, one of the fundamentals of American life has been the steady relocation of people—and of the country’s center of gravity—to the Sun Belt. Southern metropolises such as Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, and Charlotte expanded rapidly. But, according to Keenan, climate change has essentially stopped growth in southward movement, and northern cities are seeing fewer outflows and greater influxes of people.Keenan’s observation aligns with a recent study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which found that for decades, hotter places tended to grow faster than colder ones. But from 2010 to 2020, that pattern ceased. And for elderly people, whose long-term comfort is a big part of the choice of destination, it had outright reversed.In the next 30 years, climate disruptions won’t make whole states unlivable, and demographic shifts might not reach full exodus levels. But in America, small change is often deeply felt, and bit by bit, the American economy and culture will likely be transformed by climate attrition and the redistribution of people. Southern states will lose residents and dynamism. Bad weather and ruined infrastructure will sap productivity and leave behind thousands of acres of abandoned farmland after crop failures. Houston faces potentially extreme damage if struck by a Category 4 or 5 hurricane, and might struggle to rebuild without substantial federal aid. Even absent another disaster, New Orleans has been the fastest-shrinking major metro area in the country in recent years, as more people have sought high ground or been priced out of the market by rising insurance rates. The populations of several cities and counties in California’s fire country are shrinking, and domestic migration to Miami is now outpaced by people leaving (though international arrivals have so far kept the city’s population from declining).The worst climate disruptions will happen beyond U.S. borders, but they will put pressure on American society nonetheless. Migration to the southern border, perhaps the most powerful current in American politics today, is already being driven partly by ecological collapses in Central American farm economies. International monitors expect these pressures to grow over the next several years. If the country’s policy today is at all indicative, detention camps for immigrants will proliferate, often in climate dead zones, and the southern border will become even more militarized.This would not be an America where the founding ideals hold much sway. The movement of people might even set states against one another. Tensions in receiving zones will—without strong, growing economies—create more opportunities for demagoguery. In dead zones, the dearth of public services and the fading imprimatur of the state will naturally erode local participatory democracy.All of this could create even better conditions than those today for the kind of transactional authoritarian government that Trump is trying to establish. Xenophobia and racism are already pillars of this movement, and they would be strengthened by mass migration. State and local leaders affected by disasters might supplicate themselves to the president in order to receive the patronage of disaster aid. A hurricane or megafire during election season might be a convenient excuse for federal intervention.The emerging Trump doctrine views empathy as a weakness and public welfare as a usurpation of the natural hierarchy. His authoritarianism is perfectly suited to an era of climate strife.At the end of August, almost 20 years to the day after Hurricane Katrina, I drove across the Claiborne Avenue Bridge to New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. The neighborhood was mostly obliterated in 2005, after the levees that were supposed to protect it failed. Today it is still in rough shape. Inhabited homes are sparsely distributed, and grassy lots fill many of the spaces where houses previously stood. There are few businesses to speak of. Before Katrina, 15,000 people lived here. Now that number is closer to 5,000. A casualty of what is often considered America’s first great climate disaster, the Lower Ninth Ward also has an antecedent in Butler’s work. In Parable of the Sower, a hurricane devastates the Gulf region, and most of its victims are poor folks “who don’t hear the warnings until it’s too late for their feet to take them to safety.”Steps remain where a house once stood in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, 20 years after Hurricane Katrina. The community has never fully recovered. (Brandon Bell / Getty)The Lower Ninth Ward was a harbinger of what climate change might do to our most vulnerable places. But it has also been a place of reverence for people who wish to fight climate change. At the TEP Center, a museum and community center there, I met former Vice President Al Gore, at ease in an oxford shirt and a magnificent pair of cowboy boots. He and the Climate Reality Project, the nonprofit he founded, were in the middle of a tour through Louisiana, holding listening sessions and dialogues with climate-justice advocates to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Katrina.I was seeking assurances—any science I hadn’t seen, any hope Gore had on hand—that the Earth might be able to avoid the worst of climate change, even with America now accelerating warming. I was not encouraged by the news that global temperatures last year had already risen above the 1.5-degree warming ceiling that the Paris Agreement had established as a goal in 2015, and looked to be staying above it this year. Gore has been the world’s biggest cheerleader for that target. If there was a silver lining to be had, he would know what it was.[Al Gore: America is close to a ‘political tipping point’ on climate change]But Gore was more measured—or, as he called it, “textured”—in his assessment than I’d expected, at least initially. After all, he followed the data. “I am not willing to call it now and say, ‘No, we’ve crossed 1.5,’ because the scientists are not willing to say that now,” he told me, cautioning that the actual threshold uses an average calculated over several years, not just one or even two. “As a practical matter, we can see the writing on the wall. However, calling it would also have some consequences.”Still, he said, even if that call is soon made, climate action will remain just as urgent. Each bit of global warming that is averted beyond that matters—1.6 is better than 1.7. And for what it’s worth, he told me, other countries do grasp that. “In focusing on what Trump and his gang are doing, I think we miss the changes that are under way in the rest of the world,” Gore said, “and in many places, it’s moving more quickly in the right direction.” If anything, the United States’ retreat from climate leadership has encouraged countries such as Brazil to provide it.Possible futures may be narrowing, but they are narrowing from both directions: Globally, future emissions have already been slashed enough to make the worst-case scenarios projected a decade ago—4 or more degrees Celsius of warming by 2100—unlikely, even as the best case moves out of reach. And Gore believes that the now-obvious progression of climate change—the heat waves, floods, fires, and other disasters—is itself becoming a kind of asset in the fight to stop it. “Mother Nature is the most powerful advocate that has a voice on this matter,” he said. “And I do believe that she is winning the argument.”Gore was buoyed by the grassroots energy that global climate activism has cultivated. “This has now become”—with relatively little fanfare—“the largest political movement in the history of the world,” he told me. And neither markets nor investors can afford to wholly deny the environmental physics in front of them. Even in the U.S., share prices for green energy continue to increase as renewables become cheaper—and as sustainability becomes less of a watchword and more of a meat-and-potatoes consideration for businesses hoping to preserve future profits.The previous day, Gore had spoken at a “climate revival” at a church in St. James Parish, in what’s known as “Cancer Alley,” a set of communities upriver from New Orleans that struggle not only with climate risks but also with a long legacy of industrial pollution and governmental neglect. The stories of many residents had stayed with him. “I think that the sacrifice zones—I hate to endorse that phrase by using it, but the people who live there often do,” Gore began. “I think they may, in political terms, represent a stone that the builder refused.” He was referring to the biblical passage about a cast-off object becoming the cornerstone of a new edifice, which later became a parable for the faith built on Christ’s resurrection.Al Gore during Climate Week in New York in September. The former vice president remains optimistic that the darkest futures can still be avoided. (LeMar Charles / Beyond Petrochemicals)It was the morsel of hope that I was perhaps most prepared to receive. Our country’s “sacrifice zones” are both illustrations of our hotter future and indictments of our democracy’s faults. They are perfect avatars for the kind of project that climate action now needs: one that links our climate to our freedom.I am personally not optimistic about the chances of averting significant climatic chaos. America has shown that it has not absorbed the fundamental lessons that Katrina previewed 20 years ago. The first and worst effects of the climate crisis have so far been mostly in places that—like the Lower Ninth Ward—are not high on many policy makers’ priority lists. Because of that fact, it has always been difficult to prompt preemptive action to save everyone else.All of that said, perhaps Trump, through his very extremity, has provided a galvanizing opportunity. In his reflexive culture-warrior rejection of climate change, he has backed into a climate policy of his own, and has linked that policy to his power. With his single-minded, bullying determination to reverse course on renewables—which are part of life now for many people of all political stripes—and to dismantle programs people rely on, Trump has essentially taken ownership of any future climate disruptions, and has more firmly connected them to oil and gas. In advancing this climate-accelerationist policy alongside an antidemocratic agenda, he has sealed off fantasies of compromise and raised the political salience of dead zones, where devastation and exclusion go hand in hand. Trump’s intertwining of climate policy and authoritarianism may beget its own countermovement: climate democracy.Climate democracy would be aided by the gift of simplicity. At present, the only way to ensure that America avoids the future outlined here will be to win back power from its strongman leader, or possibly his successors. The places facing existential climate risks—especially those in the Deep South—are mostly in states that have long been considered politically uncompetitive, where neither party expends much effort or money to gain votes. But they could form a natural climate constituency, outside the normal partisan axis. Poor and middle-class white communities in coastal Alabama, Mexican American neighborhoods in Phoenix, and Black towns in the Mississippi Delta might soon come to regard climate catastrophe as the greatest risk they face, not by way of scientific persuasion, but by way of hard-earned experience. Some of them might form the cornerstone of a new movement.With the right message, plenty of other people may be persuadable: those upset by higher electric bills, or poorer storm forecasts, or the coziness of Trump with the oil and gas industry, or weather-related disruptions in everyday life. To paraphrase Theodore Roosevelt, Americans learn best from catastrophe, and they will learn that the help they once took for granted after disasters might now be harder to come by. Autocracy takes time to solidify, and building popular support in opposition to it takes time as well. But in the reaction needed to build climate democracy, perhaps heat is a catalyst.I realized that, in visiting sites of catastrophe and upheaval, I’d also visited epicenters of climate democracy. In Altadena, Darlene Greene still did yeoman’s work to support her struggling constituents, and—in the absence of help from above—residents became the leaders their community needed. In Miami, groups of homeowners and tenants were united in fighting climate gentrification, and in trying to keep their homes. In the Lower Ninth Ward, people from across the country who’d been moved to climate action by Katrina convened with Al Gore and strategized.It isn’t really a coincidence that these places, and the places where America’s climate retreat will begin, roughly overlap with the geography of historic conflicts over civil rights and democracy. Where risk and disinvestment come together in America, democracy has always suffered. In many ways, crisis is revelatory, and we know that disasters expose cracks in society. If there is a sliver of a chance of averting the scenarios I’ve laid out, it will have to come by the hands of a movement that finally repairs those cracks.It is easiest, as I have done, to imagine those faults persisting and widening, in which case the worst conclusions about our future physical and political climates are likely to hold true. But the last of Octavia Butler’s rules for predicting the future should also guide our imagination, and our hopes. She instructed students to “count on the surprises,” and even when making grounded predictions to allow for the possibility of genuine inspiration and rupture. After all, Butler’s own success—as a child of a Black family that moved West from Jim Crow Louisiana during the Great Migration—would have been considered very unlikely at the moment of her birth. None of the great movements that shaped this country was preordained.This article appears in the December 2025 print edition with the headline “The Dead Zones.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.