For the last year, I've seen, up close, how much those those hit by Superstorm Sandy have struggled to put their lives back together. For the past year, I've been doing reporting for a special series on Showtime called Years of Living Dangerously which will premiere next year, and it's about climate change and its impact, and I've reported two stories about the effects of Sandy on Staten Island and the Rockaways, and here's what I've learned: The people at the bottom of the social pyramid, the poor, those without assets, or no assets other than their home, with debts piled up and low-wage jobs, those people who are just struggling to hang on by their fingernails to something that looks like a middle class existence, those people, when the waters come in from the storm, those people are the first ones dragged out to sea, and the ones who take the longest amount of time to get back to shore.
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Climate change and inequality are two sides of the same coin - and they need to be addressed together. Joining me today is Nathalie Alegre from the Alliance for a Just Rebuilding [and ALIGN], climate scientist Riley Horton, he's a consultant for the new Showtime docu-series Years of Living Dangerously for which I'm a correspondent, and Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat from New York.
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