The effects of climate change
are already upon us. Here's what the 2020s and 2030s will look like if we fail
to change things.
The climate crisis is often
imagined as a sudden, all-encompassing, simultaneous collapse in which
agriculture fails, the seas flood in, disease spreads, and human civilization
crumbles into Hobbesian war of all against all. But in reality, some crises
will appear more immediately and others will take a long time to arrive, and if
we act with speed and purpose some can still be avoided.
In the near term, perhaps
starting in the 2020s or 2030s, the foremost problem will probably be a new
climate-driven urban crisis of disinvestment, abandonment, and depopulation
caused by rising sea levels and large inundating storms that will leave rotting
urban infrastructure. As the water rises and the floods increase in severity
and regularity, the once posh shoreline will be the new ghetto.
A new, climate-driven urban
crisis could have major negative impacts on other parts of the global economy.
The collapse of coastal real estate markets could trigger broader crises in
financial markets while loss of the communication and transportation links
provided by major cities could hurt the real economy. A climate-driven economic
depression is not out of the question.
Here Comes the Ocean
Even if we drastically cut
greenhouse gas emissions and stripped CO₂ from
the atmosphere so as to stabilize temperature increases at no more than 2°C
above the 1990 baseline, we are locked in for significantly higher sea levels.
Melting Greenland
and Antarctic ice sheets, mountain glacier loss, and the expansion of ocean
water volume due to its higher temperature are driving the sea level rise.
On the east coast of the US,
the ocean is rising three to four times faster than the global averages, which
are themselves rising at an accelerating rate. In 1993 the annual rate of sea
level rise was 2.2 millimeters a year; in 2014 it had reached
3.3 millimeters a year. By 2100, global average sea levels could be
2 meters to 2.7 meters, that’s 6 to almost 9 feet, higher. Since
1900, sea
levels on the East Coast have risen by about a foot, according to the
federally funded National Climate Assessment.
This is usually invoked in
threats that entire cities will be “underwater.” But in the meantime, the
rising oceans are slowly but steadily reshaping property values, urban
landscapes, and city dynamics.
Storms vs. Urban
Infrastructure
The real threat is not so much
the slow and steady increase of average sea levels but rather, the major
inundations caused by large storm surges. These floods damage the
infrastructure as a whole, not just its edges. During Hurricane Sandy the storm
surge that hit lower Manhattan was 9.23 feet higher than a typical high
tide.
When infrastructure gets
damaged, even unharmed properties that depend on the damaged electrical,
transportation, and water systems lose value.
A few inundations in quick
succession could start a process of combined physical and socioeconomic
decline. As the time and tremendous expense needed to repair water-damaged
underground electric and telecoms lines, subways and rail lines, drinking water
and wastewater treatment systems, and power stations becomes apparent, property
owners will start panic selling.
When it becomes clear that sea
walls were not constructed in time and vital infrastructure has started to
collapse, property values will follow, possibly triggering broader financial
panics
If properly planned for, one
can imagine how such problems could be managed. But if the current denial
continues until markets are caught unaware, there could be regional real estate
panics and, flowing from those, major financial losses.
New York City’s Department of
Finance recently estimated the total assessed
value of the city’s property for fiscal year 2017 at more than
$1 trillion. That is real money, enough to help trigger problems in
financial markets more broadly.
Collapsed property values
means a collapsed tax base, which means local government will be hard pressed
to make costly infrastructure repairs. And it is the infrastructure as a whole
that property values depend on.
Hurricane Katrina, which
famously hit New Orleans in 2005 and was quickly followed up by Hurricane Rita,
offers a hint of what to expect.
Professor Bernard Weinstein,
at the University of North Texas, has estimated
the cost of those combined storms as $250 billion in both direct and
indirect damage. Weinstein found: 113 offshore oil and gas platforms destroyed,
457 oil and gas pipelines damaged, and almost as much oil spilled as during the
Exxon Valdez disaster. Katrina destroyed almost half of New Orleans’s levies,
wiped out most of the sugar crop, and wreaked havoc on the oyster industry.
Insurance companies paid out $80 billion.
Most shockingly, Katrina
killed 1,836 people across the Gulf, most of them senior citizens who were
trapped in houses or abandoned in nursing homes.
We forget the magnitude of
this damage in part because the real estate and entertainment industries in New
Orleans embraced the rebuilding process with such gusto and denial. They were,
after all, thrilled that the storm did its worst damage to poor black
neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward.
Since Katrina, the Eastern
Seaboard has been lucky. An unusually high percentage of hurricanes have been
turning out to sea rather than making landfall. Ironically, recent research by
James P. Kossin suggests this might be a short-term side effect of global
warming. Just as a hotter sea surface temperature creates more hurricanes, a
hotter land mass creates more vigorous vertical wind shear, which acts to block
the arrival of hurricanes. That said, this natural protective pattern is not
perfect, storms do make landfall, and the pattern of wind shear blocking
hurricanes will likely change as other elements of the climate system are
transformed.
Regardless, with a rapidly
rising sea level, the near-future promises more metropolis-flooding mega
storms.
Defensive Preparations
The New York City tristate
area offers a glimpse into the possibilities and pathologies of planning for
sea-level rise. After 2012, when Hurricane Sandy did $50 billion in
economic damage, including destroying or damaging 650,000 homes, it was
clear something needed to be done. Eventually Congress allocated about
$60 billion in federal aid for recovery and resilience work in the
impacted area. But the pace of disbursement has been painfully slow.
One example is repairing the L
line’s Canarsie Tunnel, connecting northern Brooklyn to Manhattan. Flooded
during Sandy, the tunnel is now badly corroded and is set for a
$477 million, one-and-a-half-year closure for a vital overhaul. That’s
just one short tunnel.
The city is now building a
barrier around lower Manhattan, called the “Big
U.” Designed to be covered with grass and serve as public open space, the
wall will run from 42nd on the east side, along the shore, and up to 57th
street on the west side. Construction will take years and cost billions.
At this rate and in this
fashion, it is hard to imagine how the city’s entire 520-mile coastline could
be secured. Worse yet, half preparations are, in some ways, as bad as no
preparation. As the Rolling Stone’s Jeff Goodell said of New York City’s largely
symbolic efforts thus far, “Barriers, dikes and levees make people feel
safe, even when they are not.”
Meanwhile, in a clear subsidy
to unsustainable gentrification, the city is also planning to build a
$2.5 billion tramline along the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront, where old
industrial warehouses are giving way to luxury high-rises. Similar insanity is
found in New Jersey, where several groups of coastal homeowners, many of whom
have subsidized government-provided flood insurance, are suing to prevent
construction of protective sand dunes.
Eventually, cities that did
not build sea barriers soon enough and high enough will get hit. Inundated by
storms coming in close succession, some cities will find themselves too broke
to rebuild their infrastructure and a process of real and metaphoric rot will
set in. As public services decline, so will property values, each feeding the
other; the rotting and molding landscape will be the visual symptom of a
political-economic spiral of a shrinking tax base, disinvestment, and
abandonment.
Eventually, those who can will
leave the coast. A study by University of Georgia demographer Mathew Hauer
projects that 250,000 people in New Jersey will be forced to move by
rising seas by 2100. In Florida, Hauer projects that 2.5 million people
will have to leave their homes by that date.
Perhaps some of the ravaged
coastal cities will become sources of scrap. High-quality housing stock in
dying coastal cities might be worth disassembling by scavengers in search of
bricks, copper pipe, slate tiles, windows, doors, and old-growth hardwood
lumber to sell to inland construction markets. We’ve seen that pattern in the
Rust Belt: for much of the 1990s St. Louis’s top export was old bricks bound for
the booming Sunbelt where its rubble was repurposed as patios bought on credit.
What will happen in Dhaka,
Lagos, Karachi, or Rio? All are megacities situated on flat terrain close to
sea level in countries already in crisis, legendary for corruption and poor
planning. One has to assume that as the future impacts of climate change become
obvious, many more people will migrate inland or attempt to go abroad.
Infrastructural Choke Points
The geography of global
capitalism relies disproportionally on coastal cities as seats of commerce,
trade, research, transportation, and education. They are the nodes that link the
world economy together.
Much industrial production and
the global food system, for example, depends not only on what happens in
factories and fields but also on a small number of infrastructure bottlenecks
along international supply chains at key ports, airports, road and rail links,
and politically sensitive maritime straits like the Panama and Suez canals.
A recent study by the British
think tank Chatham House found that 55 percent of the global grain trade
passes through one of fourteen “chokepoints,” all of which are vulnerable to
extreme weather like local flooding, rising sea levels, and the associated
political and military conflict.
Shut enough of the chokepoints
and the global flow of food will be threatened. Chatham House found that about
20 percent of global wheat exports pass through the Turkish Straits.
Similarly, more than 25 percent of global soybean exports pass through the
Straits of Malacca, which run between Malaysia and Indonesian.
The world got a glimpse of how
local flooding can impact global supply chains in 2011 when flooding in
Thailand inundated much of Bangkok, including more than 1,000 industrial
facilities that made everything from cars and cameras to hard drives. The
United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction estimates the Thai floods reduced
global industrial production by 2.5 percent. The world’s top three
insurance companies paid out $5.3 billion in claims.
The Permanent Emergency
As coastal cities slide into
ruin and those who can migrate inland do so, inequality and relative
depravation will increase. Those left behind will be angry and have little
stake in maintaining a social order that leaves them in a sacrifice zone. Who
will be the last one out? If American history thus far offers answers, the
poorest of the poor, undocumented climate refugees, might be the scavengers and
squatters in the dead cities.
One can imagine left-wing
social movements emerging in these zones, or entirely reactionary millenarian
ones, or just widespread, apolitical criminality. Any and all of these will, in
lieu of radical social change, be met with an increasingly repressive
paramilitary state response — checkpoints, SWAT patrols, National Guard,
racist and rightist vigilantism.
We saw the patterns previewed
on the Gulf Coast after Katrina. When local governments offered help to New
Orleans, most of it came as heavily armed police. This was in large part
because after almost fifty years of federally subsidized law-and-order, most
cities and counties have a surplus of repressive capacity, yet almost nothing
in the way of disaster-oriented civil defense.
A permanent state of emergency
in the moldering, coastal, muck zones could become the norm. Thus the rising
waters of climate change threaten to erode not only beaches but also civil
liberties.
Mass migration and a racist
backlash to it are already hallmarks of the early climate crisis. By the 2030s
and 2040s, far more people will likely be on the move. Already, right-wing
demagogues from Arizona to Cote d’Ivoire, to Myanmar, to Paris have been raging
against the outsiders. Too often the demagogues successfully ride the fear and
rage to power, and once there, turn state repression against immigrants and
other poor people.
Thus, as drought,
neoliberalism, and militarism produce crises, warfare, and waves of refugees in
the Global South, in the North they produce a reactive, opportunistic,
authoritarian state hardening.
Solutions
The good news is we have all
the technologies we need to save civilization from climate collapse: solar and
wind electrical grids; electric vehicles; the ability to re-wild wetlands and
build artificial barriers to break and block the power of the sea. And we very
well can develop the political capabilities to win over a majority behind the
policies that will preserve the health and security of that majority.
Just as importantly, we
already have the technology to strip CO₂ from
the atmosphere. That technology is fairly simple and has been in submarines for
decades. The problem was always how to safely store the CO₂.
Now, scientists in Iceland
have recently created a process that strips CO₂ from the atmosphere and turns it into rock.
The process is called “enhanced weathering” because it mimics one of the
natural processes by which CO₂ is
washed out of the atmosphere and bound to rockworks by mixing carbon dioxide
and hydrogen sulfide with water, and injecting it underground into Basalt rock
formations. Within two years, the CO₂ in
the water mixture “precipitates” into a white, chalky solid, a carbonate rock
similar to limestone. Lucky for us, Basalt rock, the feedstock of this process,
is one of the most common rock types on Earth.
Already, in Reykjavik, a
geothermal power plant strips and stores 5,000 metric tons of CO₂ a year. That only equals the
annual emissions of about 2,000 cars. But the point is we have the
technical ability to strip atmospheric CO₂ and
safely store it.
However, like proper defense
of cities from the sea, there is no way the profit motive or market relations
can bring this technology to scale. The world economy is producing about
40 billion metric tons of carbon emissions a year. At current prices,
stripping out this much emissions would cost about 24 trillion dollars, a
sum equal to 133 percent of the annual US GDP.
Free-market boosters for
enhanced weathering technology push the idea of selling its artificially
created limestone as building material. The economics don’t make any sense. Why
buy expensive rock when cheaper natural rock is available?
Clearly the private sector and
the profit motive cannot deploy enhanced weathering technology at the scale
needed, nor push a rapid energy transition, nor build coastal protections at the
scale and speed necessary. But none of these tasks is technically or
economically impossible. The mechanism needed in each case is state action and
the public sector.
One more bit of good news. A
radical climate solution, counterintuitive perhaps, requires that we use more,
not less, energy. But energy, in the form of solar energy, is the one economic
input that is truly infinite.
Our mission as a species is
not to retreat from, or to preserve, something called “nature,” but rather to
become fully conscious environment makers. Extreme technology under public
ownership will be central to a socialist project of civilizational rescue, or
civilization will not last.
About the Author
Christian Parenti teaches in
Global Liberal Studies at New York University. His latest book is Tropic of
Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence.
No comments:
Post a Comment