Ten Across Conversations

In the hottest year in recorded history, extreme heat corresponded to several notable weather events and ongoing public health impacts in the Ten Across geography. Evidence shows warming ocean temperatures were behind an especially destructive Atlantic hurricane season for the Gulf. Nearly all states along this transect saw their rates of private insurance nonrenewal increase among the most at-ris...

The events of the past year have reinforced the logic of the Ten Across initiative. In the context of the hottest year in recorded history , the Ten Across geography witnessed ongoing drought, a supercharged Atlantic hurricane season , devastating wildfires, and a significant loss of homeownership or insurance safety nets for its residents.   As we enter 2025, with staggering urban wildfires still...

On January 10, a sudden urban fire began in Los Angeles’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood, immediately scorching 200 acres. Two hours later, evacuations were ordered for the 23,000 people in the community. By morning, all Los Angeles firefighters were called to duty, prepared for the worst as 50 to 80-mph winds began to pick up and carry embers from the fire for miles.   Then the worst happened—fir...

"It’s not just trust, it’s agency. Going back to this election—that anger is so often connected to people who feel like they are at the mercy of forces they cannot control." —Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America As we enter 2025, perspectives increasingly diverge on issues of the economy, national and international politics, energy and artificial intelligence, and management of the environment...

Louisiana’s coast sits at the mouth of the Mississippi River. The largest discharge basin in the United States, the Mississippi collects runoff from 41% of the nation’s rivers and delivers it into the Gulf of Mexico. Where this freshwater meets the ocean, randomly deposited mounds of river sediment form a large, well-inhabited delta that is constantly reordering itself.    To assert permanence upo...

The U.S. Atlantic hurricane season has changed. A recent study by Climate Central found that over the last six years, manmade warming amplified the average Atlantic hurricane’s strength by as much as 18 miles per hour. For context: it only takes an increase of 16 miles per hour to advance a hurricane from "minimal" Category 1 to "major" Category 3 — but the difference in damage is 140 times greate...

Extreme heat, when compared to other natural disasters, can be slow-moving and hard to observe. There aren’t homes to repair or debris to clear following a heat wave, but the devastation is revealed in the rising number of heat-related fatalities and declining public health measures across many vulnerable populations within Ten Across communities like Phoenix, Los Angeles, Tucson and San Antonio....

The cost of housing has risen nationwide, but this change has been particularly acute in the Ten Across geography. With the exception of California, the Sun Belt has been known for decades to offer abundant and affordable housing, attracting young families and retirees alike.   However, development of new single-family housing has shown more hesitancy since the 2008 housing bubble collapse , and p...

On October 10th —25 days ahead of the 2024 presidential election—Ten Across founder Duke Reiter and veteran political correspondent James Fallows sat down to discuss journalism’s role in American democracy today. Fallows has been a notable observer of this dynamic since at least 1996, when he published Breaking the News, a book which described the origins of the public’s mistrust of the news media...

In the last month, the Ten Across Conversations podcast has explored a variety of influences on modern U.S.-Mexico relations, including a lack of cooperation on immigration policy , climate change impacts on transboundary water-sharing and the outsized role Mexico plays in the recent revitalization of North American manufacturing. For the final episode of this limited series on the border, we’ll e...

Culture, finances and people have always moved with fluidity across boundaries within the binational, three-state metropolitan region known as ‘the Borderplex.’ Together, Las Cruces, El Paso, and Ciudad Juarez are an economic powerhouse with a combined population of 2.7 million and the largest bilingual and binational workforce in the Western Hemisphere.   After the North American Free Trade Agree...

Alongside immigration, there is another issue testing diplomacy between the U.S. and Mexico in 2024. Increasingly unpredictable weather patterns in combination with growth in both population and industrial demand have made it difficult, if not impossible, for the two nations to meet the obligations defined by their 1944 U.S.-Mexico Water Treaty.   The Tijuana, Rio Grande, and Colorado Rivers have...

For more than a decade, the topic of immigration has remained at the center of national debate in the U.S. and has become an unfortunate source of rancor between the two major political parties. As a result, efforts to reform an aging and ineffective immigration system have been largely unsuccessful. Meanwhile, pressures on the U.S.-Mexican border continue to grow.   A convergence of factors, incl...

Whether humid or arid, summer heat indexes from Southern California to Florida have become increasingly fatal when people lack access to air conditioning or some form of cooling. Last year in Arizona's Maricopa County, alone, almost 25% of the more than 600 heat-related deaths were people who had been sheltered indoors, but with broken or insufficient air conditioning .     Most AC units are still...

Many scholars, energy experts, and federal politicians agree the U.S. electric grid is antiquated and increasingly ineffective at meeting the demands of the 21st century. Power demand over time, or “load growth,” has reached historic heights with the expansion of artificial intelligence, electric vehicle ownership, and American manufacturing. As a result, utilities like Arizona Public Service have...

In this episode, Ten Across Conversations revisits a 2022 interview with Arizona State University Professor of Practice David Orr to coincide with the release of Orr’s new book Democracy in a Hotter Time: Climate Change and Democratic Transformation and his recent two-day symposium at ASU covering related topics. Ten Across founder and executive director Duke Reiter helped author this book along w...

Extreme heat poses the greatest risk of all climate hazards in the Ten Across region today. Heat is estimated by the National Weather Service to be two times deadlier than hurricanes and tornadoes combined.   New research published this week based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows a 117% increase in U.S. heat-related deaths over the last 24 years. Unprecedented heat conditio...

The role of mayor is uniquely important in U.S. government, as an elected arguably closest to the results of governance in the everyday lives of constituents. Considering the influential power of cities in innovation, economic growth and sustainable development, mayors are also often required to navigate politics and publicity at national and international levels—even as they rise above political...

In a hotter world, places like Phoenix, Arizona, will continue to present the rest of the nation with captivating examples of the potential—or limits—of human ingenuity, collaboration and political will. The Atlantic , with its July/August 2024 cover story , goes so far as to suggest that Phoenix provides a particularly important view of the future of American civilization.   In more than 20,000 w...

In the first days of his term, President Joe Biden signed Executive Order 14008 on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad , introducing the Justice40 initiative and setting important climate priorities for the nation. Built upon principals of the U.S. environmental justice movement begun by Dr. Robert Bullard four decades prior, Justice40 set a goal that 40% the overall benefits of federal...

Ten Across makes the future visible through examinations of communities in the southernmost U.S., which are often on the front lines of climate change. This applies especially to the engineering, design and politics surrounding intersections of our built and natural environments—where the development of more resilient and equitable infrastructure has proven to be an important theme.     Ten Across...

When Henry Ford streamlined vehicle manufacturing in the 1920s, he vaulted the U.S. to its status as a global economic leader. Soon after, the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 and its establishment of the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) affirmed private automobiles as Americans’ preferred method of travel. Federal and state departments of transportation have since dedicated vast sums of mon...

The administrative and financial costs of disaster recovery have increased in recent years, exacerbated by the changing climate. The 122 separate billion-dollar disasters occurring between 2016 and 2022 in the U.S. represented more than $1 trillion in damages and claimed 5,000 lives. A significant portion of that expense was incurred by seven Category 4 and 5 hurricanes that made landfall in the T...

Insurer vacancies resulting from recurring natural losses in California, Florida, and Louisiana point to the fact that climate change is among the greatest threats to companies’ bottom lines within the coming years and decades. As a result, investors want greater transparency when it comes to the environmental risks of publicly-traded organizations.   A recent decision from the Securities and Exch...

The Ten Across geography reveals many aspects of the entire nation’s future, particularly the ways climate change will reshape where we choose to live and why. This southernmost tier of the country is a natural focus for examinations of climate trendlines and the tipping points for human habitability. The residents of Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles are often cited as the first community in the n...