A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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A car drives through a flooded area of Fort Myers, Florida, in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian. Ricardo Arduengo/AFP/Getty |
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“Lake Charles Was Destroyed by Hurricane Laura. America Has Already Moved On.” Michael Patrick Welch wrote this piece on September 1, 2020, one week after Laura’s devastating landfall in southwest Louisiana. Despite the fact that Laura was, as Michael noted, “the biggest hurricane to hit Louisiana in 160 years,” the tremendous damage quickly fell off national headlines. “I remember how New Orleans struggled to keep the media interested in our years-long Katrina plight,” Michael wrote. “In these coming weeks, I’d guess Lake Charles will receive almost no coverage.” Michael was right: Southwest Louisiana still hasn’t recovered from Laura. Additional Federal Emergency Management Agency funding, in fact, was announced just a few weeks ago. But how many people outside the region are aware of the fact that Laura’s destruction is still ongoing? I find it hard not to think of Michael’s piece while following coverage of Hurricane Ian, which hit both Florida and South Carolina last week, with devastating consequences. Ian made the front page of Wednesday’s The New York Times. But how much longer will that hold? By noon, the story had vanished from the newspaper's home page, pushed down by stories of oil prices, inflammatory far-right rhetoric, Taiwan arms deals, and Elon Musk’s plans for Twitter. |
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The death toll from Hurricane Ian is still rising. As of Tuesday, it stood at 109, with 55 killed in Lee County, Florida, alone. The overwhelming majority of those Lee County deaths seem to have occurred by drowning. The sheer horror of those numbers, and why they are so high, deserves to be a topic of frenzied national conversation for months and years to come. Two researchers—Michael Wehner of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Kevin Reed of Stony Brook University—have already offered an preliminary and “conservative” estimate, using their prior peer-reviewed research on climate attribution, that climate change may be responsible for increasing Hurricane Ian’s deadly rainfall by up to 10 percent. Questions about the rising death count so far have focused on why Florida officials issued evacuation orders so late, given the chance of severe storm surge. Those are valid questions. But they’re only part of the story. The other has to do with the shambolic and tragically unequal way that any evacuation process plays out in the United States.
“Evacuation in this country remains a largely voluntary effort,” TNR’s Kate Aronoff noted last week:
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People generally have to foot the bill for getting out of harm’s way on their own. Especially when storms hit at the end of the month, it can be much more difficult for households living paycheck to paycheck, who need to find a place to go and the funds to get there. Federal disaster response in the U.S. leans heavily on local governments and nonprofits, whose capacity varies widely from place to place. Local emergency management departments are often chronically underfunded, as well. |
And that’s in addition to callous choices like refusing to evacuate people incarcerated in jails and prisons, as has happened in Lee County. Mariette Williams penned a heartbreaking personal essay about the wealth divide in hurricane evacuation back in 2020. “I was in college when I lived through my first hurricane,” she wrote. “Those of us who stayed, the leftovers, walked around the nearly empty campus with a sense of nervous dread…. What sticks out in my mind is what those who were able to leave as danger approached all had in common: money.” She lived through many more hurricanes: |
My friends and I were in our twenties, and we had just signed leases to our first apartments. Our furniture was handed down, and we had just started making payments on our student loans and second-hand cars. None of us had the reserves to cover an evacuation: Like many Floridians, leaving wasn’t an option for us. Leaving meant having a job flexible enough to give time off and either driving the eight-plus hours to the nearest state to book a hotel or buying airline tickets before prices tripled or quadrupled. Those who can afford to leave often take off a week before the hurricane hits, sheltering with family out of state, watching from afar. |
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Hurricane Maria in 2017, Mariette wrote, was her first evacuation. She and her husband were able to leave only because both of their workplaces closed, and they “drove out of the state to wait out the storm, a trip that cost us nearly $1,500.” In an era where hurricanes are increasingly displaying what’s known as “rapid intensification,” due to global warming, these massive storms will continue to be very hard to predict. That’s one of many reasons, as Kate pointed out last week, that “waiting until disaster has struck is too late.” Serious disaster preparedness in the U.S. would mean not just swift energy transition to limit climate change, but vastly better evacuation planning and funding, better insurance programs for when disaster does strike, and much, much more.
What it shouldn’t look like, regardless of when the evacuation order went out, is a spike in private jets flying out of Tampa while those without the means for rapid evacuation drown in their homes.
—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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Health workers in Canada are fighting back against bogus “clean” gas ads, and have launched a false advertising complaint against the Canadian Gas Association demanding that a $10 million fine be levied for ads calling gas “clean-burning” and a “smart choice” for people’s homes. |
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Drug cartels are getting more involved in environmental crime, and life is becoming more dangerous for environmental and indigenous right defenders in Latin America, Manuela Andreoni reports. |
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One Nordstream pipeline leak every 1.5 days |
The Nordstream pipeline rupture—whatever its cause—put an appalling quantity of methane into the atmosphere: an estimated 300,000 tons. (Some estimates say 500,000.) But as Bloomberg’s Aaron Clark sagely pointed out, that’s about how much the oil and gas industry leaks into the atmosphere during regular operations every 1.5 days.
(And as for spills specifically, I’m reminded of a stat Nick Martin quoted in this classic piece on the inevitability of pipeline accidents: “As of 2016, the United States was averaging one crude oil spill every other day, or 200 barrels every 24 hours.”)
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Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
Lung Cancer in Nonsmokers? Study Identifies Air Pollution as a Trigger |
New research has found that many nonsmokers possess cells with cancer mutations in otherwise normal lung tissue. Air pollution, however, seems to trigger these cells to turn into actual cancer. This is a pretty seismic finding in our understanding of lung cancer, Victoria St. Martin reports, as well as our understanding of the long-term effects of fossil fuel use: |
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“The same particles in the air that derive from the combustion of fossil fuels, exacerbating climate change, are directly impacting human health via an important and previously overlooked cancer-causing mechanism in lung cells,” said Charles Swanton, the lead researcher, in a news release. “The risk of lung cancer from air pollution is lower than from smoking, but we have no control over what we all breathe.” |
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What Subscribers Are Reading |
The president’s remarks undermined the campaign for the new booster shots. Nearly 4,000 people have since died of Covid-19 in the United States. |
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There’s a world of difference between acknowledging that climate change is real and doing anything to stop it. |
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