This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The term “climate haven” never made much sense. After Hurricane Helene dumped two feet of rain on western North Carolina, many major media outlets marveled at how Asheville, which had been celebrated as a climate haven, had been devastated by a climate-related disaster.

Some in the media later reported accurately that climate havens don’t actually exist. But that still raises the question: Where did this climate haven concept even come from?

Well before humans began putting billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, entire populations would migrate toward better conditions in search of a place with milder weather or more fertile soil or the absence of drought. Because of its speed and scale, however, human-caused climate change is especially extreme, and everywhere will be impacted by some degree of risk. There is no completely safe haven.

Which is part of how we ended up talking about the idea of climate havens. It’s wishful thinking. At least that’s what several experts told me after Helene laid a path of destruction across the Southeast and as Hurricane Milton barreled toward Florida. As the impacts of climate change became more real and apparent, the media, as well as local leaders, started looking for a better story to tell.

“People are desperate for optimism,” said Jesse Keenan, director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University, who described the concept of climate havens as a fiction. “It gives people hope.”

“The idea of a climate refuge itself is kind of an escapist fantasy. To the extent that it even exists… it’s social and economic.”

Keenan actually blames himself for helping to popularize the term. For a concept that feels so widespread now, it’s surprisingly hard to find much mention of climate havens in the media before 2018. That was when the Guardian quoted Keenan in a piece about where you should move to save yourself from climate change that used the phrase “safe havens.” Buffalo, New York, and Duluth, Minnesota, were Keenan’s suggestions.

The concept gained more traction a few months later, when Mayor Byron W. Brown referred to Buffalo as a “climate refuge” in his 2019 state of the city address, followed by outlets like Bloomberg and Quartz referring to Buffalo as a climate haven. The New York Times did a whole spread on “climate-proof Duluth,” a slogan Keenan wrote as part of an economic development package commissioned by the city. He told me it was just a joke that got pulled out of context.

It’s hard to know how responsible one professor with a knack for marketing was for the mainstreaming of the climate haven concept. But it’s easy to see why local governments would latch onto it.

The US Census Bureau estimates that as climate change warms the planet over the next several decades, 100 million people will migrate into and around the US. Increased flood risk may have already pushed several million out of coastal and low-lying areas across the US, as wildfires start to raise questions about migration in the West.

Inland cities, namely those along the Rust Belt that have been losing population for years, see an opportunity to pull those people in. “The idea of a climate refuge itself is kind of an escapist fantasy,” said Billy Fleming, director of the McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “To the extent that a climate refuge even exists, it’s not a particularly physical or geophysical phenomenon. It’s social and economic.”

Fleming added that, for these would-be climate havens, attracting new residents is a means to pull in more tax revenue and create wealth for the community. “It’s about keeping the real estate machine churning,” he added, “which is the thing that pays for everything else in the city.”

The real estate industry has taken notice. Quite coincidentally, as Hurricane Helene was bearing down on the Southeast last week, Zillow announced a new feature that displays climate risk scores on listing pages alongside interactive maps and insurance requirements. Now, you can look up an address and see, on a scale of one to 10, the risk of flooding, extreme temperatures, and wildfires for that property, based on data provided by the climate risk modeling firm First Street. Redfin, a Zillow competitor, launched its own climate risk index using First Street data earlier this year.

“The scale of these events that we’re seeing are so beyond what humans have ever seen.”

The new climate risk scores on Zillow and Redfin can’t tell you with any certainty whether you’ll be affected by a natural disaster if you move into any given house. But this is a tool that can help guide decisions about how you might want to insure your property and think about its long-term value.

It’s almost fitting that Zillow and Redfin, platforms designed to help people find the perfect home, are doing the work to show that climate risk is not binary. There are no homes completely free of risk for the same reasons that there’s no such thing as a perfect climate haven.

Climate risk is a complicated equation that complicates the already difficult and complex calculus of buying a home. Better access to data about risk can help, and a bit more transparency about the insurance aspect of homeownership is especially useful, as the industry struggles to adapt to our warming world and the disasters that come with it.

“As we start to see insurance costs increase, all that starts to impact that affordability question,” Skylar Olsen, Zillow’s chief economist, told me. “It’ll help the housing market move towards a much healthier place, where buyers and sellers understand these risks and then have options to meet them.”

That said, knowledge of risk isn’t keeping people from moving to disaster-prone parts of the country right now. People move to new parts of the country for countless different reasons, including the area’s natural beauty, job prospects, and affordable housing. Those are a few of the reasons why high-risk counties across the country are growing faster than low-risk counties, even in the face of future climate catastrophes, which are both unpredictable and inevitable. It’s almost unfathomable to know how to prepare ourselves properly for the worst-case scenario.

“The scale of these events that we’re seeing are so beyond what humans have ever seen,” said Vivek Shandas, an urban planning professor at Portland State University. “No matter what we think might be a manageable level of preparedness and infrastructure, we’re still going to see cracks, and we’re still going to see breakages.”

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t build sea walls or find new ways to fight wildfires. In a sense, we have the opportunity to create our own climate havens by making cities more resilient to the risks they face. We can be optimistic about that future.

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The term “climate haven” never made much sense. After Hurricane Helene dumped two feet of rain on western North Carolina, many major media outlets marveled at how Asheville, which had been celebrated as a climate haven, had been devastated by a climate-related disaster.

Some in the media later reported accurately that climate havens don’t actually exist. But that still raises the question: Where did this climate haven concept even come from?

Well before humans began putting billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, entire populations would migrate toward better conditions in search of a place with milder weather or more fertile soil or the absence of drought. Because of its speed and scale, however, human-caused climate change is especially extreme, and everywhere will be impacted by some degree of risk. There is no completely safe haven.

Which is part of how we ended up talking about the idea of climate havens. It’s wishful thinking. At least that’s what several experts told me after Helene laid a path of destruction across the Southeast and as Hurricane Milton barreled toward Florida. As the impacts of climate change became more real and apparent, the media, as well as local leaders, started looking for a better story to tell.

“People are desperate for optimism,” said Jesse Keenan, director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University, who described the concept of climate havens as a fiction. “It gives people hope.”

“The idea of a climate refuge itself is kind of an escapist fantasy. To the extent that it even exists… it’s social and economic.”

Keenan actually blames himself for helping to popularize the term. For a concept that feels so widespread now, it’s surprisingly hard to find much mention of climate havens in the media before 2018. That was when the Guardian quoted Keenan in a piece about where you should move to save yourself from climate change that used the phrase “safe havens.” Buffalo, New York, and Duluth, Minnesota, were Keenan’s suggestions.

The concept gained more traction a few months later, when Mayor Byron W. Brown referred to Buffalo as a “climate refuge” in his 2019 state of the city address, followed by outlets like Bloomberg and Quartz referring to Buffalo as a climate haven. The New York Times did a whole spread on “climate-proof Duluth,” a slogan Keenan wrote as part of an economic development package commissioned by the city. He told me it was just a joke that got pulled out of context.

It’s hard to know how responsible one professor with a knack for marketing was for the mainstreaming of the climate haven concept. But it’s easy to see why local governments would latch onto it.

The US Census Bureau estimates that as climate change warms the planet over the next several decades, 100 million people will migrate into and around the US. Increased flood risk may have already pushed several million out of coastal and low-lying areas across the US, as wildfires start to raise questions about migration in the West.

Inland cities, namely those along the Rust Belt that have been losing population for years, see an opportunity to pull those people in. “The idea of a climate refuge itself is kind of an escapist fantasy,” said Billy Fleming, director of the McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “To the extent that a climate refuge even exists, it’s not a particularly physical or geophysical phenomenon. It’s social and economic.”

Fleming added that, for these would-be climate havens, attracting new residents is a means to pull in more tax revenue and create wealth for the community. “It’s about keeping the real estate machine churning,” he added, “which is the thing that pays for everything else in the city.”

The real estate industry has taken notice. Quite coincidentally, as Hurricane Helene was bearing down on the Southeast last week, Zillow announced a new feature that displays climate risk scores on listing pages alongside interactive maps and insurance requirements. Now, you can look up an address and see, on a scale of one to 10, the risk of flooding, extreme temperatures, and wildfires for that property, based on data provided by the climate risk modeling firm First Street. Redfin, a Zillow competitor, launched its own climate risk index using First Street data earlier this year.

“The scale of these events that we’re seeing are so beyond what humans have ever seen.”

The new climate risk scores on Zillow and Redfin can’t tell you with any certainty whether you’ll be affected by a natural disaster if you move into any given house. But this is a tool that can help guide decisions about how you might want to insure your property and think about its long-term value.

It’s almost fitting that Zillow and Redfin, platforms designed to help people find the perfect home, are doing the work to show that climate risk is not binary. There are no homes completely free of risk for the same reasons that there’s no such thing as a perfect climate haven.

Climate risk is a complicated equation that complicates the already difficult and complex calculus of buying a home. Better access to data about risk can help, and a bit more transparency about the insurance aspect of homeownership is especially useful, as the industry struggles to adapt to our warming world and the disasters that come with it.

“As we start to see insurance costs increase, all that starts to impact that affordability question,” Skylar Olsen, Zillow’s chief economist, told me. “It’ll help the housing market move towards a much healthier place, where buyers and sellers understand these risks and then have options to meet them.”

That said, knowledge of risk isn’t keeping people from moving to disaster-prone parts of the country right now. People move to new parts of the country for countless different reasons, including the area’s natural beauty, job prospects, and affordable housing. Those are a few of the reasons why high-risk counties across the country are growing faster than low-risk counties, even in the face of future climate catastrophes, which are both unpredictable and inevitable. It’s almost unfathomable to know how to prepare ourselves properly for the worst-case scenario.

“The scale of these events that we’re seeing are so beyond what humans have ever seen,” said Vivek Shandas, an urban planning professor at Portland State University. “No matter what we think might be a manageable level of preparedness and infrastructure, we’re still going to see cracks, and we’re still going to see breakages.”

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t build sea walls or find new ways to fight wildfires. In a sense, we have the opportunity to create our own climate havens by making cities more resilient to the risks they face. We can be optimistic about that future.

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

You wouldn’t expect to find the linchpin of the global microchip industry tucked away in a Blue Ridge Mountains town, but it’s there. Scattered across the outskirts of Spruce Pine, a series of mines has been extracting some of the purest quartz on Earth for decades. The resource is so essential that almost every advanced microchip produced today touches it during the manufacturing process.

Those mines are now closed indefinitely, after Hurricane Helene dumped 2 feet of water on Spruce Pine, devastating the area. And with this singular supply of ultra-pure quartz cut off for the foreseeable future, the world’s supply of chips hangs in the balance.

To be clear, Spruce Pine is not the only place on the planet with high-purity quartz. Quartz, which is mostly made of crystallized silicon, is the second-most abundant mineral in Earth’s crust. But what’s beneath Spruce Pine is special.

Spruce Pine lies along a ridge of the Appalachian Mountains that were formed when two paleocontinents collided to create a single landmass, Pangea, some 380 million years ago. The precise conditions around that collision meant few impurities mixed into the molten minerals that swirled miles beneath the surface. Now cooled and worn, the rocks around Spruce Pine has the look of a dirty snowball thanks to a combination of feldspar, mica, and quartz. When ground up, it just looks like white sand, but when isolated, the quartz is perhaps the purest in the world.

“It’s not like the silicon that comes out of the ground in North Carolina then becomes part of a silicon chip,” said Ed Conway, author of Material World. “But you can’t make a silicon chip without it.”

Because it needs minimal refining after being pulled from the ground, Spruce Pine quartz is also cheaper than the competition. That doesn’t mean it’s cheap. High-purity Spruce Pine quartz can sell for up to $20,000 per ton, and the waste materials from mining are pristine enough that they’re even used to fill the bunkers at the Augusta National Golf Course, home of the Master’s tournament.

“Maybe this event gets people to think about alternatives, different crucibles, different ways to make silicon.”

The high-silicon, low-contaminant nature of Spruce Pine quartz makes it integral to advanced chip manufacturing, where even an atomic quantity of impurity can jam up the circuitry etched into a semiconductor. The chips themselves aren’t actually made of quartz. High-purity quartz crucibles are used to melt down polysilicon, the pure silicon needed to make computer chips and solar panels.

The crucibles only last a few weeks before they need to be replaced, and the need for advanced chips is increasing at a breakneck pace. A surge in AI-powered devices is expected to increase global demand for advanced chips by at least 30 percent by 2026, according to a recent Bain report that warned of an imminent shortage.

By some estimates, Spruce Pine accounted for 70 percent of the high-purity quartz needed to produce the pure silicon used to make most advanced chips, including those needed for AI. On top of that, a single company in Taiwan, TSMC, manufactures the majority of those chips. And now, the disaster in Spruce Pine is drawing attention to how fragile the global chip supply chain already is.

“Maybe this event gets people to think about alternatives, different crucibles, different ways to make silicon,” said Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San Jose State University who studies solar cell supply chains.

We don’t yet know how bad the damage is at the Spruce Pine mining facilities. The two companies that own most of the quartz mines, Sibelco and the Quartz Corp, both halted production on September 26, as the storm was moving through western North Carolina. Images of Spruce Pine show the downtown completely flooded and buildings washed out near the rail lines that connect the mines to the rest of the world.

Sibelco said in a statement that it was “actively collaborating with government agencies and third-party rescue and recovery operations to mitigate the impact of this event and to resume operations as soon as possible.” The Quartz Corp is similarly assessing the situation at its three mines in the area as well as the infrastructure around them, and “its US plants are stopped for an unknown duration,” the company’s spokesperson May Kristin Haugen said in an email.

As for how much this will upend the global chip supply chain, well, we’ll have to wait and see.

Even with the Spruce Pine mines offline, chipmakers should have stockpiles of polysilicon or the ultra-pure quartz they need to make it available for some amount of time. And if they run out of the Spruce Pine quartz, there are other sources of quartz in places like China and India that are viable but not as high quality or cost effective.

And, perhaps anticipating some future disaster, the mining companies in Spruce Pine don’t keep all their high-purity quartz on site. “Between our own safety stocks, which are built in different locations, and the ones down in the value chain, we are not concerned about shortages in the short or medium term,” said Haugen, who cited the pandemic as a teaching moment in supply chain resiliency.

What we might expect, however, is prices of some electronics to rise. If there’s not enough Spruce Pine quartz to go around, especially in the long term, the industry will have to come up with alternative sources of high-purity quartz. The methods for refining those minerals elsewhere are more resource intensive and potentially carry a heavier carbon footprint because the quartz used as a raw material doesn’t start out as pure as the quartz from Spruce Pine. As one expert told Wired magazine, the climate-fueled flooding in western North Carolina could lead to more negative consequences for the climate, contributing to more disasters in the future.

To many casual technology users, this all comes as a surprise. After all, we’re used to thinking about chips being designed in Silicon Valley and then made in Taiwan. Of course these places aren’t safe from shocks—earthquakes and wildfires are a threat in Southern California and Taiwan is prone to earthquakes and landslides. We don’t often think about the many raw materials needed to fill the supply chain and the globalized economy’s habit of always seeking out the cheapest available option, even if it comes from a single small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains that happens to be prone to floods.

“We just don’t pay much attention, or as much attention as we should, to the underbelly of our economy,” said Conway. “And this is part of the underbelly.”

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

You wouldn’t expect to find the linchpin of the global microchip industry tucked away in a Blue Ridge Mountains town, but it’s there. Scattered across the outskirts of Spruce Pine, a series of mines has been extracting some of the purest quartz on Earth for decades. The resource is so essential that almost every advanced microchip produced today touches it during the manufacturing process.

Those mines are now closed indefinitely, after Hurricane Helene dumped 2 feet of water on Spruce Pine, devastating the area. And with this singular supply of ultra-pure quartz cut off for the foreseeable future, the world’s supply of chips hangs in the balance.

To be clear, Spruce Pine is not the only place on the planet with high-purity quartz. Quartz, which is mostly made of crystallized silicon, is the second-most abundant mineral in Earth’s crust. But what’s beneath Spruce Pine is special.

Spruce Pine lies along a ridge of the Appalachian Mountains that were formed when two paleocontinents collided to create a single landmass, Pangea, some 380 million years ago. The precise conditions around that collision meant few impurities mixed into the molten minerals that swirled miles beneath the surface. Now cooled and worn, the rocks around Spruce Pine has the look of a dirty snowball thanks to a combination of feldspar, mica, and quartz. When ground up, it just looks like white sand, but when isolated, the quartz is perhaps the purest in the world.

“It’s not like the silicon that comes out of the ground in North Carolina then becomes part of a silicon chip,” said Ed Conway, author of Material World. “But you can’t make a silicon chip without it.”

Because it needs minimal refining after being pulled from the ground, Spruce Pine quartz is also cheaper than the competition. That doesn’t mean it’s cheap. High-purity Spruce Pine quartz can sell for up to $20,000 per ton, and the waste materials from mining are pristine enough that they’re even used to fill the bunkers at the Augusta National Golf Course, home of the Master’s tournament.

“Maybe this event gets people to think about alternatives, different crucibles, different ways to make silicon.”

The high-silicon, low-contaminant nature of Spruce Pine quartz makes it integral to advanced chip manufacturing, where even an atomic quantity of impurity can jam up the circuitry etched into a semiconductor. The chips themselves aren’t actually made of quartz. High-purity quartz crucibles are used to melt down polysilicon, the pure silicon needed to make computer chips and solar panels.

The crucibles only last a few weeks before they need to be replaced, and the need for advanced chips is increasing at a breakneck pace. A surge in AI-powered devices is expected to increase global demand for advanced chips by at least 30 percent by 2026, according to a recent Bain report that warned of an imminent shortage.

By some estimates, Spruce Pine accounted for 70 percent of the high-purity quartz needed to produce the pure silicon used to make most advanced chips, including those needed for AI. On top of that, a single company in Taiwan, TSMC, manufactures the majority of those chips. And now, the disaster in Spruce Pine is drawing attention to how fragile the global chip supply chain already is.

“Maybe this event gets people to think about alternatives, different crucibles, different ways to make silicon,” said Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San Jose State University who studies solar cell supply chains.

We don’t yet know how bad the damage is at the Spruce Pine mining facilities. The two companies that own most of the quartz mines, Sibelco and the Quartz Corp, both halted production on September 26, as the storm was moving through western North Carolina. Images of Spruce Pine show the downtown completely flooded and buildings washed out near the rail lines that connect the mines to the rest of the world.

Sibelco said in a statement that it was “actively collaborating with government agencies and third-party rescue and recovery operations to mitigate the impact of this event and to resume operations as soon as possible.” The Quartz Corp is similarly assessing the situation at its three mines in the area as well as the infrastructure around them, and “its US plants are stopped for an unknown duration,” the company’s spokesperson May Kristin Haugen said in an email.

As for how much this will upend the global chip supply chain, well, we’ll have to wait and see.

Even with the Spruce Pine mines offline, chipmakers should have stockpiles of polysilicon or the ultra-pure quartz they need to make it available for some amount of time. And if they run out of the Spruce Pine quartz, there are other sources of quartz in places like China and India that are viable but not as high quality or cost effective.

And, perhaps anticipating some future disaster, the mining companies in Spruce Pine don’t keep all their high-purity quartz on site. “Between our own safety stocks, which are built in different locations, and the ones down in the value chain, we are not concerned about shortages in the short or medium term,” said Haugen, who cited the pandemic as a teaching moment in supply chain resiliency.

What we might expect, however, is prices of some electronics to rise. If there’s not enough Spruce Pine quartz to go around, especially in the long term, the industry will have to come up with alternative sources of high-purity quartz. The methods for refining those minerals elsewhere are more resource intensive and potentially carry a heavier carbon footprint because the quartz used as a raw material doesn’t start out as pure as the quartz from Spruce Pine. As one expert told Wired magazine, the climate-fueled flooding in western North Carolina could lead to more negative consequences for the climate, contributing to more disasters in the future.

To many casual technology users, this all comes as a surprise. After all, we’re used to thinking about chips being designed in Silicon Valley and then made in Taiwan. Of course these places aren’t safe from shocks—earthquakes and wildfires are a threat in Southern California and Taiwan is prone to earthquakes and landslides. We don’t often think about the many raw materials needed to fill the supply chain and the globalized economy’s habit of always seeking out the cheapest available option, even if it comes from a single small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains that happens to be prone to floods.

“We just don’t pay much attention, or as much attention as we should, to the underbelly of our economy,” said Conway. “And this is part of the underbelly.”