This Changes Everything (18 page)

The word “apocalypse” derives from the Greek
apokalypsis
, which means “something uncovered” or revealed. Besides the need for a dramatically better health care system, there was much else uncovered and revealed when
the floodwaters retreated in New York that October. The disaster revealed how dangerous it is to be dependent on centralized forms of energy that can be knocked out in one blow. It revealed the life-and-death cost of social
isolation, since it was the people who did not know their neighbors, or who were frightened of them, who were most at risk. Meanwhile, it was the tightest-knit communities,
where neighbors took responsibility for one another’s safety, that were best able to literally weather the storm.

The disaster also revealed the huge risks that come with deep inequality, since the people who were already the most vulnerable—undocumented workers, the formerly incarcerated, people in public housing—suffered most and longest. In low-income neighborhoods, homes filled not only with
water but with heavy chemicals and detergents—the legacy of systemic environmental racism that allowed toxic industries to build in areas inhabited mostly by people of color. Public housing projects that had been left to decay—while the city bided its time before selling them off to developers—turned into death traps, their ancient plumbing and electrical systems giving way completely. As Aria
Doe, executive director of the Action Center for Education and Community Development in the Rockaways, put it, the peninsula’s poorest residents “were six feet under” before the storm even hit. “Right now, they’re seven or eight feet under.”
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All around the world, the hard realities of a warming world are crashing up against the brutal logic of austerity, revealing just how untenable it is
to starve the public sphere at the very moment we need it most. The floods that hit the U.K. in the winter of 2013–2014, for instance, would have been trying for any government: thousands of homes and workplaces were inundated, hundreds of thousands of houses and other buildings lost power, farmland was submerged, several rail lines were down for weeks, all combining to create what one top official
called an “almost unparalleled natural disaster.” This as the country was still reeling from a previous devastating storm that had struck just two months before.
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But the floods were particularly awkward for the coalition government led by Conservative prime minister David Cameron because, in the three years prior, it had gutted the Environment Agency (EA), which was responsible for dealing
with flooding. Since 2009, at least 1,150 jobs had been lost at the agency, with as many as 1,700 more on the chopping block, adding up
to approximately a quarter of its total workforce. In 2012
The Guardian
had revealed that “nearly 300 flood defence schemes across England [had] been left unbuilt due to government budget cuts.” The head of the Environment Agency had stated plainly during the
most recent round of cuts that “Flood risk maintenance will be impacted.”
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Cameron is no climate change denier, which is what made it all the more incredible that he had hobbled the agency responsible for protecting the public from rising waters and more ferocious storms, two well-understood impacts of climate change. And his praise of the good works of the staff that had survived his axe provided
cold comfort. “It is a disgrace that the Government is happy to put cost cutting before public safety and protecting family homes,” announced the trade union representing EA workers in a scathing statement. “They can’t have it both ways, praising the sterling work of members in the Agency in one breath, and in the next breath announcing further damaging cuts.”
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During good times, it’s easy to
deride “big government” and talk about the inevitability of cutbacks. But during disasters, most everyone loses their free market religion and wants to know that their government has their backs. And if there is one thing we can be sure of, it’s that extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and the British floods—disasters that, combined, pummeled coastlines
beyond recognition, ravaged millions of homes, and killed many thousands—are going to keep coming.

Over the course of the 1970s, there were 660 reported disasters around the world, including droughts, floods, extreme temperature events, wildfires, and storms. In the 2000s, there were 3,322—a fivefold boost. That is a staggering increase in just over thirty years, and clearly global warming cannot
be said to have “caused” all of it. But the climate signal is also clear. “There’s no question that climate change has increased the frequency of certain types of extreme weather events,” climate scientist Michael Mann told me in an interview, “including drought, intense hurricanes, and super typhoons, the frequency and intensity and duration of heat waves, and potentially other types of extreme
weather though the details are still being debated within the scientific community.”
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Yet these are the same three decades in which almost every government
in the world has been steadily chipping away at the health and resilience of the public sphere. And it is this neglect that, over and over again, turns natural disasters into unnatural catastrophes. Storms burst through neglected levees.
Heavy rain causes decrepit sewer systems to back up and overflow. Wildfires rage out of control for lack of workers and equipment to fight them (in Greece, fire departments can’t afford spare tires for their trucks driving into forest blazes). Emergency responders are missing in action for days after a major hurricane. Bridges and tunnels, left in a state of disrepair, collapse under the added pressure.

The costs of coping with increasing weather extremes are astronomical. In the United States, each major disaster seems to cost taxpayers upward of a billion dollars. The cost of Superstorm Sandy is estimated at $65 billion. And that was just one year after Hurricane Irene caused around $10 billion in damage, just one episode in a year that saw fourteen billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. alone.
Globally, 2011 holds the title as the costliest year ever for disasters, with total damages reaching at least $380 billion. And with policymakers still locked in the vise grip of austerity logic, these rising emergency expenditures are being offset with cuts to everyday public spending, which will make societies even more vulnerable during the next disaster—a classic vicious cycle.
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It was never
a good idea to neglect the foundations of our societies in this way. In the context of climate change, however, that decision looks suicidal. There are many important debates to be had about the best way to respond to climate change—storm walls or ecosystem restoration? Decentralized renewables, industrial scale wind power combined with natural gas, or nuclear power? Small-scale organic farms
or industrial food systems? There is, however,
no
scenario in which we can avoid wartime levels of spending in the public sector—not if we are serious about preventing catastrophic levels of warming, and minimizing the destructive potential of the coming storms.

It’s no mystery where that public money needs to be spent. Much of it should go to the kinds of ambitious emission-reducing projects
already discussed—the smart grids, the light rail, the citywide composting systems, the building retrofits, the visionary transit systems, the urban redesigns to keep us from spending half our lives in traffic jams. The private sector is
ill suited to taking on most of these large infrastructure investments: if the services are to be accessible, which they must be in order to be effective, the
profit margins that attract private players simply aren’t there.

Transit is a good example. In March 2014, when air pollution in French cities reached dangerously high levels, officials in Paris made a snap decision to discourage car use by making public transit free for three days. Obviously private operators would strenuously resist such measures. And yet by all rights, our transit systems
should be responding with the same kind of urgency to dangerously high levels of atmospheric carbon. Rather than allowing subway and bus fares to rise while service erodes, we need to be lowering prices and expanding services—regardless of the costs.

Public dollars also need to go to the equally important, though less glamorous projects and services that will help us prepare for the coming heavy
weather. That includes things like hiring more firefighters and improving storm barriers. And it means coming up with new, nonprofit disaster insurance programs so that people who have lost everything to a hurricane or a forest fire are not left at the mercy of a private insurance industry that is already adapting to climate change by avoiding payouts and slapping victims with massive rate increases.
According to Amy Bach, cofounder of the San Francisco–based advocacy group United Policyholders, disaster insurance is becoming “very much like health insurance. We’re going to have to increasingly take the profit motive out of the system so that it operates efficiently and effectively, but without generating obscene executive salaries and bonuses and shareholder returns. Because it’s not
going to be a sustainable model. A publicly traded insurance company in the face of climate change is not a sustainable business model for the end user, the consumer.”
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It’s that or a disaster capitalism free-for-all; those are the choices.

These types of improvements are of course in far greater demand in developing countries like the Philippines, Kenya, and Bangladesh that are already facing
some of the most severe climate impacts. Hundreds of billions of dollars are urgently needed to build seawalls; storage and distribution networks for food, water, and medicine; early warning systems and shelters for hurricanes, cyclones, and tsunamis—as well as public health systems able to cope with increases in climate-related diseases like malaria.
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Though mechanisms to protect against government
corruption are needed, these countries should not have to spend their health care and education budgets on costly disaster insurance plans purchased from transnational corporations, as is happening right now. Their people should be receiving direct compensation from the countries (and companies) most responsible for warming the planet.

About now a sensible reader would be asking:
how on earth are we going to pay for all this? It’s the essential question. A 2011 survey by the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs looked at how much it would cost for humanity to “overcome poverty, increase food production to eradicate hunger without degrading land and water resources, and avert the climate change catastrophe.” The price tag was $1.9 trillion a year for the next
forty years—and “at least one half of the required investments would have to be realized in developing countries.”
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As we all know, public spending is going in the opposite direction almost everywhere except for a handful of fast-growing so-called emerging economies. In North America and Europe, the economic crisis that began in 2008 is still being used as a pretext to slash aid abroad and cut
climate programs at home. All over Southern Europe, environmental policies and regulations have been clawed back, most tragically in Spain, which, facing fierce austerity pressure, drastically cut subsidies for renewables projects, sending solar projects and wind farms spiraling toward default and closure. The U.K. under David Cameron has also cut supports for renewable energy.

So if we accept
that governments are broke, and they’re not likely to introduce “quantitative easing” (aka printing money) for the climate system as they have for the banks, where is the money supposed to come from? Since we have only a few short years to dramatically lower our emissions, the only rational way forward is to fully embrace the principle already well established in Western law: the polluter pays.

The fossil fuel companies have known for decades that their core prod
uct was warming the planet, and yet they have not only failed to adapt to that reality, they have actively blocked progress at every turn. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies remain some of the most profitable corporations in history, with the top five oil companies pulling in $900 billion in profits from 2001 to 2010. ExxonMobil
still holds the record for the highest corporate profits ever reported in the United States, earning $41 billion in 2011 and $45 billion in 2012. These companies are rich, quite simply, because they have dumped the cost of cleaning up their mess onto regular people around the world. It is this situation that, most fundamentally, needs to change.
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And it will not change without strong action.
For well over a decade, several of the oil majors have claimed to be voluntarily using their profits to invest in a shift to renewable energy. In 2000, BP rebranded itself “Beyond Petroleum” and even changed its logo to a sunburst, called “the Helios mark after the sun god of ancient Greece.” (“We are not an oil company,” then–chief executive Sir John Browne said at the time, explaining that, “We
are aware the world wants less carbon-intensive fuels. What we want to do is create options.”) Chevron, for its part, ran a high-profile advertising campaign declaring, “It’s time oil companies get behind renewables. . . . We agree.” But according to a study by the Center for American Progress, just 4 percent of the Big Five’s $100 billion in combined profits in 2008 went to “renewable and alternative
energy ventures.” Instead, they continue to pour their profits into shareholder pockets, outrageous executive pay (Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson makes more than $100,000 a day), and new technologies designed to extract even dirtier and more dangerous fossil fuels.
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And even as the demand for renewables increases, the percentage the fossil fuel companies spend on them keeps shrinking—by 2011, most
of the majors were spending less than 1 percent of their overall expenditures on alternative energy, with Chevron and Shell spending a deeply unimpressive 2.5 percent. In 2014, Chevron pulled back even further. According to
Bloomberg Businessweek
, the staff of a renewables division that had almost doubled its target profits was told “that funding for the effort would dry up” and was urged “to
find jobs elsewhere.” Chevron also moved to sell off businesses that had developed green projects for governments and school dis
tricts. As oil industry watcher Antonia Juhasz has observed, “You wouldn’t know it from their advertising, but the world’s major oil companies have either entirely divested from alternative energy or significantly reduced their investments in favor of doubling down on
ever-more risky and destructive sources of oil and natural gas.”
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