Is There No Way Out of the Climate Crisis?
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The best of The Nations Books & the Arts, in your inbox biweekly. Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue  Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. Sign up for our Wine Club today. In San Francisco, were finally starting to put away our masks. With 74 percent of the citys residents over 12 fully vaccinated, for the first time in more than a year were enjoying walking, shopping, and eating out, our faces naked. So I was startled when my partner reminded me that we need to buy masks again very soonN95 masks, that is. The California wildfire season has already begun, earlier than ever, and well need to protect our lungs during the months to come from the fine particulates carried in the wildfire smoke thats been engulfing this city in recent years. I was in Reno last September, so I missed the morning when San Franciscans awoke to apocalyptic orange skies, the air freighted with smoke from burning forests elsewhere in the state. The air then was bad enough even in the high mountain valley of Reno. At that point, wed already experienced very unhealthy purple-zone air quality for days. Still, it was nothing like the photos that could have been from Mars then emerging from the Bay Area. I have a bad feeling that I may get my chance to experience the same phenomenon in 2021and, as the fires across California have started so much earlier, probably sooner than September. The situation is pretty dire: This statealong with our neighbors to the north and southeastis now living through an epic drought. After a dry winter and spring, the fuel-moisture content in our forests (the amount of water in vegetation, living and dead) is way below average. This April, the month when it is usually at its highest, San Jose State University scientists recorded levels a staggering 40 percent below average in the Santa Cruz Mountains, well below the lowest level ever before observed. In other words, we have never been this dry. Under the Heat Dome  When its hot in most of California, its often cold and foggy in San Francisco. Today is no exception. Despite the raging news about heat records, its not likely to reach 65 degrees here. So its a little surreal to consider what friends and family are going through in the Pacific Northwest under the once-in-thousands-of-years heat dome thats settled over the region. A heat dome is an area of high pressure surrounded by upper-atmosphere winds that essentially pin it in place. If you remember your high school physics, youll recall that when a gas (for example, the air over the Pacific Northwest) is contained, the ratio between pressure and temperature remains constant. If the temperature goes up, the pressure goes up. The converse is also true; as the pressure rises, so does the temperature. And thats whats been happening over Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia in normally chilly Canada. Mix in the fact that climate change has driven average temperatures in those areas up by three to four degrees since the Industrial Revolution, and you have a recipe for the disaster that struck the region recently. And it has indeed been a disaster. The temperature in the tiny town of Lytton, British Columbia, for instance, hit 121 degrees on June 29, breaking the Canadian heat record for the third time in as many days. (The previous record had stood since 1937.) That was Tuesday. On Wednesday night, the whole town was engulfed in the flames of multiple fires. The fires, in turn, generated huge pyrocumulus clouds that penetrated as high as the stratosphere (a rare event in itself), producing lightning strikes that ignited new fires in a vicious cycle that, in the end, simply destroyed the kilometer-long town. Heat records have been broken all over the Pacific Northwest. Portland topped records for three days running, culminating with a 116-degree day on June 28; Seattle hit a high of 108, which The Washington Post reported was 34 degrees above the normal high of 74 and higher than the all-time heat record in Washington, D.C., among many other cities much farther to its south. Current Issue View our current issue  With the heat comes a rise in sudden and unexpected deaths. Hundreds have died in Oregon and Washington and, according to the British Columbia coroner, at least 300 in her statealmost double the average number for that time period. Class, Race, and Hot Air  Its hardly a new observation that the people who have benefited least from the causes of climate changethe residents of less industrialized countries and poor people of all nationsare already suffering most from its results. Island nations like the Republic of Palau in the Western Pacific are a prime example. Palau faces a number of climate-change challenges, according to the United Nations Development Program, including rising sea levels that threaten to inundate some of its lowest-lying islands, which are just 10 meters above sea level. In addition, encroaching seawater is salinating some of its agricultural land, creating seaside strips that can now grow only salt-tolerant root crops. Meanwhile, despite substantial annual rainfall, saltwater inundation threatens the drinking water supply. And worse yet, Palau is vulnerable to ocean storms that, on our heating planet, are growing ever more frequent and severe. There are also subtle ways the rising temperatures that go with climate change have differential effects, even on people living in the same city. Take air-conditioning. One of the reasons people in the Pacific Northwest suffered so horrendously under the heat dome is that few homes in that region are air-conditioned. Until recently, people there had been able to weather the minimal number of very hot days each year without installing expensive cooling machinery. Obviously, people with more discretionary income will have an easier time investing in air-conditioning now that temperatures are rising. Whats less obvious, perhaps, is that its widespread use makes a city hottera burden that falls disproportionately on people who cant afford to install it in the first place. Air-conditioning works on a simple principle; it shifts heat from air inside an enclosed space to the outside world, which, in turn, makes that outside air hotter. A 2014 study of this effect in Phoenix, Ariz., showed that air-conditioning raised ambient temperatures by one to two degrees at nightan important finding, because one of the most dangerous aspects of the present heat waves is their lack of night-time cooling. As a result, each days heat builds on a higher base, while presenting a greater direct-health threat, since the bodies of those not in air-conditioning cant recover from the exhaustion of the days heat at night. In effect, air-conditioning not only heats the atmosphere further but shifts the burden of unhealthy heat from those who can afford it to those who cant. Just as the coronavirus has disproportionately ravaged Black and brown communities (as well as poor nations around the world), climate changedriven heat waves, according to a recent University of North Carolina study reported by the BBC, mean that black people living in most US cities are subject to double the level of heat stress as their white counterparts. This is the result of not just poverty but also residential segregation, which leaves urban BIPOC (Black, indigenous, and other people of color) communities in a citys worst heat islandsthe areas containing the most concrete, the most asphalt, and the least vegetationand which therefore attract and retain the most heat. Using satellite temperature data combined with demographic information from the US Census, the researchers found that the average person of color lives in an area with far higher summer daytime temperatures than non-Hispanic white people. They also discovered that in all but six of the 175 urban areas they studied in the continental United States, people of color endure much greater heat impacts in summer. Furthermore, for black people this was particularly stark. The researchers say they are exposed to an extra 3.12C [5.6F] of heating, on average, in urban neighborhoods, compared to an extra 1.47C [2.6F] for white people.  Thats a big difference. Food, Drink, and Firesthe View from California  Now, let me return to my own home state, California, where conditions remain all too dry and, apart from the coast right now, all too hot. Northern California gets most of its drinking water from the snowpack that builds each year in the Sierra Nevada mountains. In spring, those snows gradually melt, filling the rivers that fill our reservoirs. In May 2021, however, the Sierra snowpack was a devastating 6 percent of normal! Stop a moment and take that in, while you try to imagine the future of much of the stateand the crucial crops it grows. For my own hometown, San Francisco, things arent quite that dire. Water levels in Hetch Hetchy, our main reservoir, located in Yosemite National Park, are down from previous years, but not disastrously so. With voluntary water-use reduction, were likely to have enough to drink this year at least. Things are a lot less promising, however, in rural California, where towns tend to rely on groundwater for domestic use. Shrinking water supplies dont just affect individual consumers here in this state; they affect everyone in the United States who eats, because 13.5 percent of all our agricultural products, including meat and dairy, as well as fruits and vegetables, come from California. Growing food requires prodigious amounts of water. In fact, farmland irrigation accounts for roughly 80 percent of all water used by businesses and homes in the state. The answer, sadly, is not very well. State regulators have already cut distribution to about a quarter of Californias irrigated acreage (about 2 million acres) by a drastic 95 percent. Thats right. A full quarter of the states farmlands have access to just 5 percent of what they would ordinarily receive from rivers and aqueducts. As a result, some farmers are turning to groundwater, a more easily exhausted source, which also replenishes itself far more slowly than rivers and streams. Some are even choosing to sell their water to other farmers, rather than use it to grow crops at all, because that makes more economic sense for them. As smaller farms are likely to be the first to fold, the water crisis will only enhance the dominance of major corporations in food production. Meanwhile, well probably be breaking out our N95 masks soon. Wildfire season has already begunearlier than ever. On July 1, the then-still-uncontained Salt fire briefly closed a section of Interstate 5 near Redding in Northern California. (I-5 is the main north-south interstate along the West Coast.) And thats only one of the more than 4,500 fire incidents already recorded in the state this year. Last year, almost 10,000 fires burned more than 4 million acres here, and everything points to a similar or worse season in 2021. Unlike Donald Trump, who famously blamed Californias fires on a failure to properly rake our forests, President Biden is taking the threat seriously. On June 30, he convened Western state leaders to discuss the problem, acknowledging that we have to act and act fast. Were late in the game here. The president promised a number of measures: guaranteeing sufficient, and sufficiently trained, firefighters; raising their minimum pay to $15 per hour; and making grants to California counties under the Federal Emergency Management Agencys Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program. Such measures will help a little in the short term, but none of it will make a damn bit of difference in the longer run if the Biden administration and a politically divisive Congress dont begin to truly treat climate change as the immediate and desperately long-term emergency it is. Justice and Generations  In his famous A Theory of Justice, the great 20th-century liberal philosopher John Rawls proposed a procedural method for designing reasonable and fair principles and policies in a given society. His idea: that the people determining such basic policies should act as if they had stepped behind a veil of ignorance and had lost specific knowledge of their own place in society. Theyd be ignorant of their own class status, ethnicity, or even how lucky theyd been when nature was handing out gifts like intelligence, health, and physical strength. Once behind such a veil of personal ignorance, Rawls argued, people might make rules that would be as fair as possible, because they wouldnt know whether they themselves were rich or poor, black or white, old or youngor even which generation they belonged to. This last category was almost an afterthought, included, he wrote, in part because questions of social justice arise between generations as well as within them.  His point about justice between generations still seems not only valid to me but, in light of present-day circumstances, radically understated. I dont think Rawls ever envisioned a transgenerational injustice as great as the climate-change one were allowing to happen, not to say actively inducing, at this very moment. Human beings have a hard time recognizing looming but invisible dangers. In 1990, I spent a few months in South Africa providing some technical assistance to an anti-apartheid newspaper. When local health workers found out that I had worked (as a bookkeeper) for an agency in the United States trying to prevent the transmission of AIDS, they desperately wanted to talk to me. I had few good answers, and, almost 30 years later, South Africa has the largest HIV-positive population in the world. Of course, there are human beings whove known about the climate crisis for decadesand not just the scientists who wrote about it as early as the 1950s or the ones who gave an American president an all-too-accurate report on it in 1965. The fossil-fuel companies have, of course, known all alongand have focused their scientific efforts not on finding alternative energy sources but on creating doubt about the reality of human-caused climate change (just as, once upon a time, tobacco companies sowed doubt about the relationship between smoking and cancer). As early as 1979, The Guardian reports, an internal Exxon study concluded that the use of fossil fuels would certainly cause dramatic environmental effects in the decades ahead. The potential problem is great and urgent, the study concluded. A problem that was great and urgent in 1979 is now a full-blown existential crisis for human survival. Some friends and I were recently talking about how ominous the future must look to the younger people we know. They are really the first generation to confront an end to humanity in their own, or perhaps their childrens lifetimes, I said. But we had the Bomb, a friend reminded me. We grew up in the shadow of nuclear war. And she was right, of course. We children of the 1950s and 60s grew up knowing that someone could press the button at any time. But there was a difference. Horrifying as is the present retooling of our nuclear arsenal (going on right now, under President Biden), nuclear war nonetheless remains a question of if. Climate change is a matter of when and that when, as anyone living in the Northwest of the United States and Canada should know after these last weeks, is all too obviously now. Its impossible to overstate the urgency of the moment. And yet, as a species, were acting like the children of indulgent parents who provide multiple last chances to behave. Now, nature has run out of patience and were running out of chances. So much must be done globally, especially to control the giant fossil-fuel companies. We can only hope that real action will emerge from Novembers international climate conference. And here in the United States, unless congressional Democrats succeed in ramming through major action to stop climate change before the 2022 midterms, well have lost one more last, best chance for survival.