Tag Archives: climate-change

Adapt or Die?

We know the devastation of the Los Angeles wildfires.  Some blame government agencies for insufficiently resourcing fire departments.  They are approaching the problem from the wrong perspective.  Yes, more money should have gone to fire departments because of climate change.  But how much money does any one municipality have to spend on “adaptation” or “mitigation” efforts?  LA has some of the best fire-fighting apparatuses in the world–with helicopters comparable to military aircraft and pilots with experience in night time combat flying.  The Santa Ana winds downed these elite helicopters, and even the most experienced pilots.  Without aircraft, firefighters tried to contain fires moving with hurricane force winds by hand.  The Santa Ana winds would have overrun the best resourced fire department.   When it came to the fires, there was no way to adapt to climate change.  People died. 

The risks of wildfire are well known to the people of the affected communities.  While many people have lost everything through no fault of their own, the environmental movement has been raising alarm bells about building in fire prone areas for decades.  Not all, but some of these homes, many of the very rich, should never have been built in the first place.   If the municipal fire departments resources are insufficient, they need to not spend them trying to save the homes of people who logically made poor choices–who knew the risk of building in a fire prone area in an era of climate change.  Although I feel for the people who have lost everything, this is a man-made, not “natural” disaster.  For years, we have known that climate change was coming, we knew it would bring wildfires, and we knew what places would be prone to wildfires.  People built anyways.

Rather than being able to adapt, communities like Altedena, and the people who live in them, may die.  The winter rains failing and the Santa Ana winds being stronger may become the new normal.  Exactly how often can this fire-prone area experience this kind of devastation?  Especially when we consider not only the homes lost and the incredible emotional and psychological toll taken, but the disruption of the economy: price gouging, looting, an exacerbation of a housing crisis, the many, mostly immigrant, businesses who relied on these communities as a market for services from house cleaning to lawn care.

And there is the most obvious long term disruption–the insurance market.  There seems to be no good way to stabilize the housing insurance market.  One way or another, whether through direct payments to their policyholders or an assessment from Cal-fire, insurance companies in California are facing huge financial losses, and are withdrawing from California.

Today, President Trump pulled America out of the Paris Climate Accords.  He says it will save $1 trillion dollars.   Also today, the National Weather Service again issued its highest alert for fire danger. In the end, we will not be able to adapt to climate change.  We will have to live with its destruction.   And people will die.

When Will Climate Change Hit Home?

We have all seen the devastation–in the same place twice in two weeks.  One member of a mobile home community–who is thinking of just picking up stakes and leaving–said it best, “Planet earth is really messed up right now.”   Home insurance has sky-rockted.  People who don’t live anywhere near a hurricane still have difficulty getting it at all, much less getting it at a price they can afford.  FEMA is beginning to be stretched thin.  It is having to pull people from other agencies because it doesn’t have enough people with the right expertise to handle not only back-to-back hurricanes but a host of climate related disasters.  

And, it is not as if we do not know it is climate related.  Scientist after scientist, climate model after climate model, not only predicted this would happen but can show how it is happening now.   

And it is not as if hurricanes are the only evidence.  I live in Iowa, quintessential rural Midwest, a place that is not supposed to be hit hard by climate change.  But climate change has reached here, too, far away from hurricanes.  My state has some of the most fertile soils in the world–and no rain to go with them.  

My mother is, in some sense, a climate refugee.  When my family moved into my childhood home in the very early 80’s there were some issues with flooding.  The entire neighborhood sat in a floodplain.  A dyke had been built.  Later a dam was added.  But over time flooding became a yearly or several times a year occurrence.   We were having once-in-50-year-events every other year.   The historic floods of 2008 were the last straw in what had been a series of catastrophic floods. Flood insurance simply no longer made sense.  FEMA bought everybody out. The houses were torn down and Mother Nature took back what was her’s.  It’s a green space now.  Ours wasn’t the only neighborhood in my home town to meet this fate.

We all need, the world over, to start facing economic facts.  It is estimated that the two recent hurricanes will cost $100 billion.  We can’t afford it.  Certainly we cannot afford it every other week.  Difficult decisions about who can keep their homes will have to be made.  Consequences will be felt.  We cannot continue to delude ourselves into believing that climate change will not change our lives.  

And, yet, in the middle of one of the tightest elections in recent memory, climate change is still not front and center.  Not even with the devastation of back to back hurricanes has climate change become a top issue.  Not that other issues are not important–reproductive rights, the war in Ukraine, the Middle East conflict.  But as significant as these issues are, none pose so much an existential threat to the world                                                                                                                             as a whole as climate change.

So where are the intense debates about what to do next?  Where are the prizes for scientific innovations that could get us to net zero faster?  Where is holding corporate America to account?  Where are the demands for systemic change?  All of these exist.  But they aren’t the first thing the candidates are talking about.  Why?

Denial is a funny thing.  Certainly there is the out and out denial that we are all used to.  When it comes to some people, It is hard to think of any facts that they will ever accept.  They are too fundamentally oriented to reject science.  But there is a different, more insidious kind of denial.  A belief that, “Yes, climate change may be important, but it is not as important as the cost of groceries and gas.”   

This kind of denial can be seen in Boston’s “Innovation District”, which is soon to be an “Inundation District.”  Boston has put $20 billion into seaport districts located on land built from landfill to just above high tide in the 19th century.  Despite repeated problems with historic tidal flooding and storm surges the development goes on.  More and more people are raising their voices, trying to convince their local government to accept the reality of climate change.  Still, the building continues without regard to sea level rise; even as many residents can see the effects of climate change directly in front of them on a daily basis.

There is really only one answer, and that is to convince people that global warming will raise the price of groceries and gas.  When worldwide food shortages spur inflation and the stores have no oranges because of climate-related citrus greening disease; when the cost of gas goes up because oil refineries flood during hurricanes even though they were built outside the 100-year floodplain–governments will be able to insulate the public from  the effects of climate change only so long.  Only by allowing people to feel the effects of climate change in their everyday lives can we make true progress.  Now is that moment for governments to tell their people to connect the dots, to tell them in stark terms how climate change will and is affecting them personally, and not to shield them from it.  It is a matter of there being a leader who has the moral courage to step forward and say it.   It is a matter of what it will take for climate change to really hit home.