Is Idaho prepared for climate refugees from California?

Wildfires in California are igniting more than chaparral and forest. They are firing up additional reasons Californians will seek safer, blackout-free homes in Idaho.

An Oct. 28 San Francisco Chronicle article sounded an ominous alarm: “fires intensified fears California has become almost too dangerous to inhabit.” This is exceedingly bad news for Idaho.

For our state to remain the place we love, Idahoans should be cheering for California to address its problems lest they soon become our own. We should acknowledge that the entire arid American West shares a common danger, and Idaho is not exempt.

It’s a favorite local sport to compare California unfavorably to Idaho. I am guilty as charged, notwithstanding many connections to California. We complainers are right on one count, however. While the largest source of new residents in the Treasure Valley come from within Idaho, it is Californians who have the wealth to snap up housing inventory and pay top dollar. Some Idaho realtors make all their money from “Come Up Here!” ads in Los Angeles. Predatory investors who buy local rentals and rapidly raising rents are frequently from the Golden State.

Migration to Idaho could quickly reach flood stage unless California retains most of its 40 million residents. Last year, growth was at the lowest level since the state’s founding and that was before another horrendous fire season. Outmigration is quickening.

When Idaho Gov. Brad Little sent four Idaho fire crews to fight fires in the Golden State on Oct. 27, he was honoring an inter-state agreement to help in emergencies, but we should consider it something greater: a gesture on our part to help Californians stay in California.

If California were a country, it would have the fifth-largest economy in the world, larger than Great Britain and not far behind Germany. Beginning in the 1970s, it prepared for a warming climate better than most countries, pioneering wind, geothermal and solar while enacting the nation’s highest auto efficiency standards, well ahead of the federal government.

The man we loved calling Governor Moonbeam, Jerry Brown, took over a state in trouble, brought it through and strengthened California significantly.

Yet while the average global temperature rose one degree in the last 100 years, it was up three degrees in Southern California. California’s success is overwhelming its natural resources, now made worse by rising temperatures. Continuing to grow the majority of the country’s fruit and vegetables will be enormously expensive given its water conditions. Same goes for the power grid of its electric utilities, the largest of which has filed for bankruptcy.

How much better off is Idaho? What is our state’s carrying capacity? Do we have enough water to support, say, another million people in Southern Idaho, just 1/40th the population of California, not to mention others fleeing heat from the Southwest? Are our rangelands and forests similarly vulnerable? Or is all of the American West under similar fire, water and smoke danger?

Like the rest of us, former Californians will complain when smoke fills the valley and traffic mimics the Santa Ana Freeway, but it will have been the American settlement story all over again: use up one place and move on to the next.

Idaho officials have sold California businesses on moving here for our water supply, easy regulation, low-cost electricity and cheap labor. California’s shortcomings will continue to present opportunities, and it’s a free country. But do we need to keep cutting deals?

Idaho has just begun studying what a warmer climate will mean for us, through a governor’s task force and studies by our universities, which is none too soon. Might this lead to better planning around water, air quality, traffic and infrastructure — precisely what California has been doing for decades? We may not have a lot of time before masses of climate refugees flee to higher ground.

Porfirio Diaz was Mexico’s president for 31 years but is perhaps more famous for a single phrase about Mexico’s relations with its neighbor to the north. “So far from God, so close to the United States,” he said.

God is near to all of us, everywhere, but California and Idaho are a little too close for comfort.