Cassandra's World V

The Overlook

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” appears every Thursday at tomclavin.substack.com. An overlook is a place from which one can see in several if not all directions, including where one has been and where one is going. If you enjoy the column, please "like" it and let me know what you think by commenting (check out previous ones while you're at it).  Likes, comments, and shares help with author “discoverability” on Substack.com, and all support is appreciated. Don't forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

            To the relief of some (all?) of you, this is the last installment in the “Cassandra’s World” series. It began several weeks ago as an attempt to envision what the world will be like when my about-to-be-born granddaughter, Cassandra May, turns 10, which will be in 2031. The focus has been on climate change and its probable consequences. The installments have covered the impacts of too much heat, the unhappy irony of floods for some and too little water for others, hunger and disease, and tens of millions of people becoming climate refugees.

          One might think that given that this is the last installments and after having offered a rather grim outlook, now is the time for some optimism. Or soften the blow, at least. Okay, I can try that. Reasons to be positive:

          Money: Ultimately, that is what most things boil down to. One reason why there will be more effort put into mitigating the affects of climate change is more people with money – and, thus, power – will recognize how much it is going to cost to do nothing or not enough. More and more billions of dollars will be spent on recovering from coast-killing storms and crop-killing droughts and home-killing wildfires. How many thousands upon thousands of homes are in coastal areas? These properties that were attractive and valuable in the past are vulnerable now to storms and flooding, and with prices plunging, owners will go deeper into debt. Inland, wildfires will eat up more acres, especially as our human and financial firefighting resources are depleted. More and substantial investment will need to be put into protecting and even preserving our utility systems. The collapse of the power grid in Texas after deadly winter storms early this year was, I hope, a big wake-up call.

Time Magazine reported in July, in the wake of the unprecedented Northwest heat wave, “As the planet continues to warm, business losses across the U.S. are also likely to mount. Up to 1.8 billion workforce hours could be lost annually within the next three decades because of extreme heat caused by climate change.” This means it will be harder to find unaffected occupations and fewer goods and services provided by workers. According to the World Bank, accelerating climate change “represents a systemic risk to the global economy that may trigger a cycle that depresses revenues, increases spending and exacerbates climate and nature vulnerabilities.”

So, pay now or pay infinitely more later. Simply put, as climate change forces major changes around us, we’ll have to spend more money to adapt, and for some people, to survive. Spending now will mean the bills may not be unmanageable later.

            Generation C: This is what I label the next generation whose lives and inevitably their future will be influenced more by Climate and Covid than any previous generation. The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg is just the tip of the (melting) iceberg. Around the world, teenagers and people in their 20s are witnessing the intensifying impacts of heat, fires, drought, flooding, hunger, disease, and other consequences of climate change coupled with the dismaying lack of cooperation among nations to adequately confront a global pandemic – and fear for the world that is being left to them.  I would like to think that we will see more activism from this young generation, perhaps matching that of the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. There needs to be upheaval in the status quo because it has failed us -- not just our quality of life but the very survival of life on Earth is imperiled.

          National Security: A report released by the Biden Administration in October warned of “worsening conflict within and between nations, increased dislocation and migration as people flee climate-fueled instability, heightened military tension and uncertainty, and financial hazards.” This is promising news? Yes, in that the intelligence community recognizes now the growing risks the U.S. faces and, we can hope, will influence leaders to be proactive about reducing those risks. Better to know now than to have these things sneak up on us.

          On the other hand, reasons why we should be very worried:

          Money: Who is going to pay for climate-change mitigation and how? The richer nations can – at least, for now – but not the poor ones and probably not most of the countries in between. Do you really think that as the costs mount the rich countries are going to care about the increasingly needy nations? It will be every country for itself, never a constructive scenario.

          Pandemic Response: I don’t want to be harsh because clearly Covid-19 and its ongoing mutations surprised and challenged all of us. But many of the over 700,000 who died in the U.S. (so far) did not have to die. Our government’s response to the spread of Covid-19 was both tardy and inadequate. Even when in spite of that we began to seek and find answers, a public health crisis became a political tennis match. Covid (and the viruses to come) doesn’t care who is Red or Blue or concerns about your civil rights. Our fractured response to the clear and present danger of Covid-19 and its mutations (the Greek alphabet better be pretty long) does not bode well for unified efforts against the destructive impacts of climate change.

          Politics: The power for power’s sake compulsion of many of our lawmakers means climate change won’t receive the attention it deserves because there is not enough power gain in it. With too many lawmakers still believing without any evidence that a presidential election was stolen, how can we expect any consensus on basic scientific facts?

Chain reaction: Each major impact of climate change is not an isolated case. They are already intertwined and will become more so, feeding off each other. Not enough people are willing to acknowledge that this huge and still growing wolf is already at the door. Back in September, the Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth Kolbert concluded an essay in The New Yorker about the upcoming COP26 conference: “The sad fact is that, when it comes to climate change, there’s no making up for lost time. Every month that carbon levels remain at current levels – they’re running at about 40 billion tons a year – adds to the eventual misery. Had the U.S. begun to lead by example three decades ago, the situation today would be very different. It’s still not too late to try – indeed, it's imperative to try – but, to quote Boris Johnson, ‘humanity has long since run down the clock on climate change.’”

          So what are our options? One: Do the minimum we can agree on and afford and hope today’s warnings turn out to be exaggerated.

          Two: Colonize another planet, such as depicted in The Martian Chronicles, published in 1951 when the greatest danger to Earth that Ray Bradbury foresaw was a nuclear holocaust. (It is almost amusing how no one envisions that happening anymore, even though just the press of a button could lead to the incineration the planet.) This would require a massive and extremely expensive effort to look for and select a new world and transport humans there, with the conflict-producing understanding that only a very small percentage of the population – mostly from countries that can afford it – will make it out alive. You can bet that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and other multi-billionaires have their personal rockets ready. But being smart people, more likely they have fully stocked and state-of-the-art bunkers prepared.

          Three: Each one of us makes behavioral changes that cumulatively slow the pace of climate change and we put pressure on politicians to tackle the big picture. Seriously, this can help. It makes a lot more sense than trying to survive years if not decades of interplanetary travel.

Four: We will build walls. Soon, perhaps very soon, the countries that can afford to build them will do so or at least some kind of enclosures around critical cities and perhaps small regions to protect them from destructive weather patterns. A very modest version of this is the proposal floated by the Army Corps of Engineers several years ago for a concrete and steel barrier to protect Manhattan from Sandy-like flooding. The impact of Ida was a more recent example and one that could be repeated annually.

And even without super storms, flooding is inevitable. According to an article in Time Magazine, “Antarctica is losing ice at a staggering rate, dumping about 2 billion tons of ice into the ocean every year, scientists found in a study published in the journal Nature. And it’s getting worse: of the nearly 3 trillion tons of ice loss since 1992, 40% occurred over the past five years.” So, enclosures will be constructed to save coastal cities and possibly immediate surroundings from violent weather-related attack. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has told Miami that the only way to save the city is to build a wall against storm surge, like the one produced by Hurricane Irma four years ago that left sections of the city underwater.

What is another reason for walls? The so-called caravans are telling us that with increasing frequency around the world countries will be subjected to larger and larger migration events. Unable to accommodate the mostly destitute participants, the destination nations will need to close their borders. As there becomes more of “them” than there are of “us” – as those more economically stable might think of it – these “safe” areas will have to become more condensed and enclosed to the point of being impenetrable. Many cities and areas of manageable size will become like Medieval castles surrounded by moats and walls or even domes.

Porous borders will be overrun by terrified and starving people. Human resources, including border agents, will not be enough to keep them out. An answer is to create sanctuary cities, but in the near future the “sanctuary” will not be for illegal immigrants arriving to be kept safe but those already in cities trying to stay safe and survive by keeping immigrants out.

The New York Times recently reported: “The thousands of Haitians who crossed the border into Texas were just the leading edge of a much larger movement of migrants heading for the jungle and then the United States. People who fled their troubled Caribbean nation for places as far south as Chile and Brazil began moving north months ago, hoping they would be welcomed” by the U.S.

In June, Texas officials announced that a wall would be built . . . not against Mexico but with Mexico. Think this is only a conservative idea? A few months ago, another Pulitzer Prize winner, Thomas Friedman, headlined his New York Times op-ed, “We Need a High Wall With a Big Gate on the Southern Border.” Another announcement by Texas officials floated the idea of completing the wall system begun during the Trump Administration and “crowdfunding” the cost.

There are a couple of other reasons for walled-off city-states. One is as quarantine centers. As stated last week, with populations soaring in areas with the most threadbare health care and with climate change events causing greater hunger and thirst, diseases will become more rampant and uncontrollable. The latest pandemic is an obvious example, as is some strains appearing and mutating faster than the research can discover and develop effective medicines. We can expect much higher infection rates and death tolls in areas where the health-care systems are overwhelmed or virtually non-existent. Climate change plays a role as warmer temperatures expand the range of disease-carrying animals and insects, like the mosquitoes that transmit Zika. Another problem: For every percent the earth’s temperature rises, crop loss will increase 10 to 25 percent, further reducing the ability to feed a growing population, resulting in weaker and more vulnerable people.

What about the COP26 conference in Glasgow last month? The good news is, as the New York Times reported, “diplomats from nearly 200 countries struck a major agreement aimed at intensifying global efforts to fight climate change by calling on governments to return next year with stronger plans to curb their planet-warming emissions.” In other words, they kicked the can down the road. Try again next year?

No wonder in his column about the result of the Glasgow conference Thomas Friedman wrote: “Now would be a good time to start praying. Pray that technology plus artificial intelligence can close that gap between what today’s Homo sapiens are actually willing to do to mitigate climate change and what is actually needed. And pray that Homo sapiens start to understand that preserving our future will require some pain. Because right now, without sacrifice, our only hope is to design and deploy technologies that allow ordinary people to do extraordinary things.”

That might happen. Fingers crossed. But I fear that when Cassandra May is 10, many people will be heading for the exits while those who can will be locking themselves into the equivalent of safe rooms. Given those two choices, I guess I’ll do what I can to give her the latter option.

I will end with a cartoon. Like many others who read The New Yorker, often the best part of any issue are the cartoons. There was an especially good one by Karl Stevens two months ago. Four children about 11 years old surround a cake with lit candles. They are wearing party hats and are gazing down at the cake, as one prepares to blow out the candles. Another one of the children says, “Don’t overthink it – any wish that’s not about reversing climate change is pretty pointless anyhow.”

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 18 books, including Tombstone, Blood and Treasure (with Bob Drury), and Lightning Down: A World War II Story of Survival, just published by St. Martin’s Press. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, or BN.com.