Woah. Or Woe, as the Case May Be

The other week, I wrote the following:

Vermont is mostly under water. Parts of the Southwest are way too hot, day after day. Last I heard, Canada was still on fire. The planet as a whole has apparently been hotter this week than at any time is the past several thousand years.

Since then, the list of woe has not gotten any shorter.

One Thing Puzzling Me

Why am I not hearing more about head-related deaths in Arizona? After all, the city of Phoenix is not just breaking records for high heat (reaching closer and closer to 120 degrees Fahrenheit), but also the heat is going on and on–28 consecutive days with highs over 110 degrees. Now, heat injury is cumulative. The longer a person is exposed, the higher their risk of heat stroke gets. So why hasn’t this story been being covered as a major disaster?

Today, I looked up some figures, and it’s not as bad as it could be, but it’s not good, either. As of eight days ago, 18 people in the Phoenix area were confirmed dead from heat. 69 more deaths are under investigation, meaning it’s not yet clear whether those people died from heat-related causes or not. That means that the death toll stands at somewhere between 18 and 87 people–and that was six days ago. Doubtless, more have died since then. And more will die; those who survive the initial crisis of heat stroke remain at greater risk of death from various causes for years.

Of the confirmed dead, a third were homeless. Another third were elderly. Heat is not an equal-opportunity killer.

And this isn’t counting people hospitalized with severe burns from touching hot pavement. It’s easy to say “don’t touch pavement,” but these are people sitting or lying down from exhaustion or even collapsing. Last year, there were people who died from their burns.

These figures also don’t include deaths in other parts of the region.

They also don’t include information on how these numbers compare to other years, because a typical year’s heat death figure is not zero. So do this year’s tragedies count as a disaster or, so far, a bullet dodged?

How Long Have We Got?

What I really want to know, though, is how long until the United States loses its ability to keep up with the disasters? I’m asking about the United States because I live here, but the same question applies anywhere.

The thing is, we in the US are used to being able to help disaster-impacted areas recover without really having to make any sacrifices or suffer any collective losses. An injury to a part does not threaten the whole. That might not last much longer. At the number and severity of disasters increase, eventually that won’t be true anymore. We will start losing ground.

When?

There are signs that it may be soon. Allstate and State Farm both announced they would no longer write new policies in California, for multiple reasons including the greater frequency of disaster. It’s part of a trend across the country, where insurance companies are either raising premiums or pulling out of specific markets because of the increasing cost of doing business. At the same time, FEMA is in serious danger of exhausting its budget well before the end of hurricane season. Of course, the insurance industry and FEMA have budgets set by profit motives and politics, respectively–they aren’t absolutely measures of how much the US can actually afford. But it’s still startling.

How long does it take a place to recover, if it recovers?

Housing

One of the most obvious problems in the wake of a natural disaster is that the physical structure of a human community is damaged or destroyed. Businesses may be temporarily or permanently closed. People may be living in shelters or tents, or they may be staying elsewhere as temporary or permanent refugees. For how long?

Rebuilding housing typically takes about four to six years until it is 90% complete. My source did not include figures for 100% completion, probably because some rebuilds drag out for reasons that have little to do with the disaster itself–but that missing 10% represents housing that existed before the disaster that doesn’t exist even the better part of a decade afterwards. And none of this counts people who had to sell out and move away during the rebuilding process–FEMA payments run out after 18 months, and while there is another program that can sometimes offer further assistance, it does not start paying out until twenty months after the disaster. Two months is a long time to go without help. Plus, these figures only apply to the construction of housing–people who didn’t own their homes, or didn’t have homes to begin with do not necessarily get housed because a building is reconstructed.

Renters do not fair well in disasters. Details vary from state to state and from one rental agreement to another, but even the total destruction of your apartment building doesn’t automatically void your lease or suspend your rental payments. Ideally, landlords will either substantially reduce rent until repairs can be made or terminate the lease and return the security deposit, but they’re not actually required to do that. It’s entirely possible that after a major disaster there are newly-homeless people trying to figure out how to sue their landlord to get the lease terminated while racking up debt for unpaid rent on an apartment that no longer exists. Probably these renters’ place of employment doesn’t exist anymore, either. This is the sort of set-back that people don’t necessarily come back from.

And none of that counts homeless people.

Economic Recovery

Of course a major disaster causes generalized economic problems, too–workers may be injured, dead, or no longer in the area, businesses are damaged, and so forth. How long does that last? One source I found said that short-term recovery takes six months to a year, while long-term recovery is tracked for three years. What does that mean? I suspect it means that whichever agency is doing the tracking thinks that by the end of three years most of the economic recovery that is going to happen has happened. Certainly it doesn’t always happen at all–a big disaster can send some communities into a decline they can’t recover from. The article does not that rebuilding sometimes takes more than three years.

It may be reasonable to conclude that during the first year after a big disaster, a community is still severely damaged, economically, and during the first three years economic impacts are still likely significant.

Human Recovery

What about direct injury to humans?

In the United States, human deaths during disasters are usually few–tens of people might die, possibly even a few hundred, rather than the thousands of deaths in some poorer countries. But obviously, dead people, however many people they are, don’t recover–their survivors can recover from their loss to some extent, but that’s hard to quantify and I’m not going to try. I’m also not going to try to assess how long it takes people to recover from physical injuries as there are just too many variables.

But after a major disaster, mental/emotional trauma is widespread and can impact a community’s ability to function. How long does that last?

According to the American Psychological Association, most people will recover enough to function normally again within a few months. That “most” implies that there are people who don’t recover so quickly, and of course being able to function normally is not necessarily the same thing as feeling alright, but that does give us a timeline for how long a community is likely to remain “walking wounded.”

Combined Timeline

So, it looks like after a major disaster, for the first several months the affected area is likely to be severely impacted. That is, it’s not in the news anymore, for the general public in the rest of the country, the disaster is over, but the community that lived through it is not functioning well, needs a lot of help, and is really wholly occupied with just trying to get things back together.

After the first year, most people are back on their feet again psychologically, and the local economy is functioning again, but many people are still dependent on outside assistance of various kinds, and the physical recovery of the community has barely begun.

After the first three years, the community is well on its way to full economic recovery if the needed interventions have been successful. If not….. And in any case, although physical recovery is proceeding, rebuilding is well underway, there are still people living in various forms of temporary accommodation, and there are people falling through the cracks or simply moving away.

After six years, the vast majority of the rebuilding is complete, and it’s no longer obvious there even was a disaster, but there are people who have slipped through the cracks, people who are still hurting, and people who are just gone. Recovery continues, but more slowly.

All this depends on the disaster in question, of course, but it seems reasonable to me to consider disasters in general as five-year events. So the question is how many disasters are occurring in the same five-year period? And how many recoveries can we afford to assist with at the same time?

I don’t have an answer. I wonder if anyone does.

Under a White Sky

I really need to write about all the issues I mentioned last week, but this week I’m running behind, so I’ll write a quick book review instead.

My climate book club just read Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, by Elizabeth Kolbert. Somewhat atypically for a book about climate change (and other topics, in this case), I have no bone to pick with the author. She did a fine job. Now, it’s true that the book was a difficult read–not that the reading itself was hard, it’s a perfectly accessible and engaging text, but it offers no hope nor any suggestion as to what to do. But Ms. Kolbert is a journalist. Her job is to provide information, not to tell her readers how to feel or what to do. She did her job quite well.

Anyway, the climate authors who have told me to keep my chin up have mostly failed to cheer me as I don’t believe their sources of hope.

I hope, when I hope, for other reasons.

Ms. Kolbert’s premise here is that the distinction between nature and humanity has blurred and will continue to do so. She takes as her topic various people attempting to control natural processes on a large scale in order to fix problems caused by other people attempting to control natural processes–whether such attempts can do anything other than create larger problems yet is a question she asks but does not answer. She does interview several people who argue that at this point we have a moral obligation to try. I’m not sure that’s right. Neither is she.

To be clear, the nature/humanity split has always been fuzzy at best–the idea that humans are not natural or outside nature has always been an illusion. We are no more outside nature than we are outside physics. But it is true that we are changing things that we didn’t used to be able to change. There is nowhere in our biosphere now that is not being influenced or altered by humans to some degree, and that degree is growing all the time. We are at a point where we must acknowledge our collective power and make decisions about it–if Ms. Kolbert has a message beyond the purely informational, that is it.

Years ago, my dad remarked to me that when he first became a home-owner, he found himself in the position of, every day, having to decide whether or not to kill trees. Not that he thought daily about whether to kill them–most days, of course, the possibility of killing trees didn’t enter his mind. But every day he did have the option to call up a tree service and have any of the trees on his property cut down, so that every day he did not do so was an act of mercy on his part, whether the decision was conscious on his part or not.

Once you have the power to do a thing, not deciding ceases to be an option.

(Of course, my dad co-owned the property with my mom, so the image of Dad-as-sole-arbiter-of-tree-life is a bit inaccurate, but that wasn’t his point then, and it’s not my point now)

We, or at least some subsections of we, can now do things like fill the stratosphere with reflective particulates so as to cool the planet by dimming the sun. Whether we should do that, and other things like that, is no longer an avoidable question.

Each chapter of Under a White Sky takes as its topic a different attempt to fix a human mistake at large scales. The first involves invasive Asian carp and the various attempts to prevent their spread and to remove them from where they already are. The story gets pretty weird in places (did you know there are canals that have been electrified as a barrier to fish? There is lots of interesting detail and vivid scenes, much for various species of geek to enjoy. But the scale of the stories covered increases, chapter by chapter, always aiming for the biggie: climate change and the possibility of geoengineering.

Were enough particulates sprayed into the stratosphere to cool the planet, the sky would turn white.

Personally, I think some of Ms. Kolbert’s interviewees may be correct in that the political will to radically reduce emissions doesn’t exist, and that sooner or later geoengineering is likely to become politically unavoidable. Unless the emissions stop, though, that won’t be a solution.

The idea that geoengineering will be part of the solution in any scenario, instead of just another, even bigger, problem, depends on a lot of very optimistic assumptions for which we don’t have good evidence. Of the proponents of geoengineering I would ask why are you picking those optimistic assumptions rather than a different set? As long as we are assuming things….

Ms. Kolbert quotes some people as stating that the emissions just won’t stop, so we’ve got to find other solutions. But that’s not quite right–the only barrier to stopping the emissions tomorrow is political–it is technically feasible. The technical challenge is to stop the emissions without causing disaster, but that’s probably doable. It keeps not getting done because of a lack of political will. It’s important to remember that. There are literally people who would rather the rest of the world burn if it means keeping what they have. It’s important to remember that.

To those who think we can’t reduce emissions without causing widespread human suffering, I say that if we don’t reduce emissions steeply and fast there will be (with or without geoengineering) widespread human suffering. They may be, in some cases, different humans.

I suggest being very careful about making optimistic assumptions that have the effect of deciding which humans get to be collateral damage.

FYI

Vermont is mostly under water. Parts of the Southwest are way too hot, day after day. Last I heard, Canada was still on fire. The planet as a whole has apparently been hotter this week than at any time is the past several thousand years.

It’s gonna take me way more than a day to come up with a suitable blog post about all this.

In the meantime, DO SOMETHING!

Independence

Happy American Independence Day.

The following post is a slightly edited re-post from some years ago. Donald Trump is no longer president, and some of his policies have been reversed, but the movement he represents has not been fully repudiated–and is, in fact, still capable of winning elections. And Mr. Trump himself has not yet been convicted of anything. So while some of the details of the following are no longer current, the overall thrust of my warning still stands.

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The best of America has always been an ideal to which reality aspires in an irregular and sometimes ambivalent way. Our principle of equality has always been marred by racism, sexism, and various other interrelated isms, and yet the principle itself is valuable as a stated goal—and for much of our history, we have enjoyed a more egalitarian, and more participatory political and legal system than much of the rest of the world. It is not true that anyone can be anything if only they work hard, but hard-working people do have more latitude here than they might, as the flow of economic refuges to our borders attests. We are not the bastion of democracy that we should be, but we are the imperfect bastion that we are.

Anyone who thinks that the United States is the greatest and most perfect country on Earth has not been paying attention. But anyone who cannot tell the difference between the US and a third-world dictatorship hasn’t been paying attention either.

So, with that caveat, I’ll get to my point: the US is not currently independent.

Russia did try to get Donald Trump elected. Whether their involvement was decisive is debatable—it’s possible he would have been elected anyway. That Candidate Trump himself actually cooperated with Russian interference on his behalf has not been proved and might not be true. Yes, his public joking, during the campaign, to the effect that Russian hackers should help him is not, by itself, a smoking gun that he actually expected him to do so, or that any quid pro quo arrangement was made between the American oligarch and any Russian counterpart. That other people connected to the campaign were actively working for, or trying to work with, foreign entities during the campaign is also not proof, nor is the fact that President Trump has some odd financial ties to foreign entities (the extent of which we don’t know because he won’t release his taxes) proof. The whole thing is suspicious as all get-out, but we don’t actually know.

But the fact remains that by attempting to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement, President Trump is acting in the interests of Russia (and Saudi Arabia) and not those of the United States. Maybe he’s doing it out of the “goodness” of his own heart, a spontaneous volunteerism with no prior planning or thought of reward, but he is acting in the interests of a foreign power.

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I’ve argued previously that pulling out of Paris, and otherwise minimizing or reversing American action on climate, is the primary reason for Mr. Trump’s presidency, the true central plank of his personal platform. His rhetoric on the subject of the economy and American security, his dog-whistles to white nationalists, his consistent vocal abuse of women both individually and collectively, all of that can be chalked up to either personal proclivity or empty campaign promise. A wall on the border with Mexico would do nothing whatever to protect his constituents’ job prospects or personal safety, even if Mexico did pay to have it built. Getting out of Paris, though, is the one campaign promise he’s acted on and the only one that will actually help anyone.

It will help the owners of the fossil fuel industry.

I said that part already. What I did not point out before was the way in which acting on behalf of that industry constitutes selling out American interests in favor of those of other countries. It is true that Russia has powerful interests in oil, but so does the United States. While transnational corporations are, in some ways, independent of any country, Exxon, for example does have an American origin and the US still produces substantial amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas. It’s possible to tell this story as one of private, corporate interest, and many of the interested parties are Americans.

But the United States doesn’t need the fossil fuel industry. We have a fairly diversified economy, a highly diversified resource base, and we’re a net exporter of food. There is huge economic opportunity for us in a properly managed transition, and we’ll likely survive, or even come out ahead, as fossil fuel prices drop due to lessened demand. Russia is simply not as well prepared for the shift. Oil is its primary source of national wealth.

While I haven’t looked into what climate change will do for Russia, I don’t imagine that a rapidly warming planet is actually good for that country. And Russia did, in fact, sign the Paris Climate Agreement. But even if they don’t have less to lose that we do to a changing climate, certain elements within Russian society do have more to gain from hanging on to fossil fuel a little longer.

And we do have a lot to lose. Most of our major cities are coastal and thus vulnerable to sea level rise and a possible increase in hurricane activity. Much of our landmass is already capable of experiencing killer heat waves, and thanks to air conditioning, many of our most vulnerable citizens live in places that get dangerously hot (like Arizona and Southern Florida)—a problem that will only get worse. Increased drought and increased flooding will likely interfere with our agriculture. In many areas, our use of irrigation water is already unsustainable. The United States already gets more tornadoes than any other country on Earth, and while there is no way to tell whether climate change is increasing tornadic activity (there’s no reliable baseline data), it is a fair bet that it will. Political and economic instability in other countries caused by climate change represents a major threat to American security.

Mr. Trump is willing to risk all that for the sake of short-term economic gain—by people other than us.

I want to make very clear that I do not have anything against Russians as a people. Russia is not, at present, a free democracy, so I don’t hold its people accountable for what their leaders are doing. I also want to make clear that I’m not blaming Russia for America’s troubles. While it does seem clear we are under attack, our vulnerability to such attack is entirely home-grown. I’m only pointing out that our laws and government institutions are currently being used to protect a foreign government’s revenue stream at our expense.

247 years ago today, we told the world we weren’t going to let that happen anymore.