Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (2 page)

This book is about how we’re preparing for the world we seem hell-bent on creating. It’s about climate change, but not about the science of it, nor the politics, nor directly about how we can or why we should stop it. Instead, it’s about bets being placed on a simple, cynical premise: that we won’t stop it anytime soon. It’s about people, and mostly it’s about people like me: northerners from the developed world—historically the emitter countries, as we’re called—who occupy the high, dry ground, whether real or metaphorical.

I’m interested in climate change as a driver of human behavior—as a case study, the ultimate case study, in how we confront crisis. Warming will reshape the planet, and in broad strokes we already know how: Hot places will get hotter. Wet places will get wetter. Ice will simply melt. Poor, mostly tropical countries, those least responsible for the consumption that fuels the factories that produce the emissions that cause the warming, will be hit hardest, but wealthier, higher-latitude regions—Europe, Canada, the United States—are not entirely immune. The change is so vast, so universal, that it seems to test the limits of human reason. So it should not be surprising that the ideologies that led us here, those that have guided the postindustrial age—techno-lust and hyper-individualism, conflation of growth with progress, unflagging faith in unfettered markets—are the same ones many now rely on as we try to find a way out. Nowhere is humankind’s mix of vision and tunnel vision more apparent than in how we’re planning for a warmed world.

The idea that people are irrational has lately been in vogue. We can thank the global financial crisis for that. Behavioral economists have reminded us that the market, far from being a collection of fully logical individuals, is hostage to Keynesian “animal spirits,” the emotions, prejudices, impulses, and shortcuts that are part of nearly every human decision and every financial bubble—and part, no doubt, of our apathy about reducing carbon emissions. In the United States, nearly 98 percent of the federal climate-research budget goes to the hard sciences, which have produced mounds of evidence for global warming—enough to make a believer of anyone who gives it an honest look—and produced increasingly refined computer models predicting an increasingly dire future. One recent prediction, from MIT, is of a median warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100 if we don’t curtail emissions—a temperature spike that campaigners believe could entirely melt the polar ice cap in summertime, turn parts of Central America and the southern United States into a dust bowl, and wipe island nations off the map. The remaining 2 percent of the federal research budget goes to social scientists, such as those with Columbia University’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, who probe what may now be the most important question: If we know the risks, why aren’t we doing anything? The center’s director, Elke Weber, suggests that at both levels where humans make their decisions—emotional and analytical—there are roadblocks. The emotional block: What we don’t see doesn’t scare us. “The time-delayed, abstract, and often statistical nature of the risks of global warming does not evoke strong visceral reactions,” Weber writes. At the analytical level, there is, along with the tension between individual and systemic risk—an apparent tragedy of the commons—something economists call hyperbolic discounting. It goes like this: Offer to give someone either $5 today or $10 next year, and he’ll probably take the $5.

Among many activists, politicians, and scientists, the assumption is that climate change now suffers mainly from a PR problem: If the proper nudges can be found or the reality of it finally made visceral, the public will take action. Unspoken and scarcely examined is a second, much bigger assumption: that “taking action” means trying to cut carbon emissions. That taking action will take a certain shape: Green roofs. Carbon caps. Green cars. Solar panels. Footpaths. Forests. Fluorescent bulbs. Bicycles. Insulation. Algae. Inflated tires. Showers. Clotheslines. Recycling. Locavorism. Light-rail. Wind farms. Vegetarianism. Heat pumps. Telecommuting. Smaller homes. Smaller families. Smaller lives. We hope our collective fear of global warming will push us inevitably toward collective behavior. But what if the world as we know it goes on even as the Earth as we know it begins to disappear? There’s another possible response to melting ice caps and rising sea levels, to the reality of climate change—a response that is tribal, primal, profit-driven, short-term, and not at all idealistic. Every man for himself. Every business for itself. Every city for itself. Every country for itself. There’s the possibility that we take the $5.

 • • • 

SPEND AN AFTERNOON
in the right part of the Arctic, perhaps in the company of a Russian or an Icelander or an oil executive, listen to the plans being hatched, and you can experience anew the carnival atmosphere of Deutsche Bank’s jungle tent. The Arctic was where I did the first reporting for this book, and it was where I caught my first whiff of giddiness about climate change, of opportunism amid environmental crisis. There was oil under the ice. There were new shipping lanes emerging over the pole. There were strawberries sprouting in Greenland. The high north was the first place where warming had become not an invisible menace but a daily reality, thus the first place where I could actually witness people’s reactions to it. I began traveling the rest of the globe with the same intent—to document present-day preparations for a warmer world, to observe what was happening rather than theorize about what could happen.

Global warming’s physical impacts, the impetus for the plans and projects I investigated, can be separated into three broad categories: melt, drought, and deluge. Accordingly, this is a book in three parts. Part One, “The Melt,” is set against the liquefaction of the world’s ice sheets and glaciers, a process that is only accelerating: In recorded history, the Northwest Passage and the Northeast Passage have never, until today, become ice-free and thus open to commercial shipping, and the Arctic ice cap has never been smaller than it was in the summers of 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and especially 2012, when 4.57 million square miles, an area larger than the United States, melted away. Part Two, “The Drought,” discusses the large-scale reordering of our planet’s hydrology such that rain falls at different times, in different places, and deserts appear where there were none. In some places, drought is a result of melt; mountain snowfields and glaciers are the planet’s best natural water reservoirs, and they are dramatically receding. That the drought is already beginning is evidenced not by specific events but by a pattern of them: wildfires in Colorado, water woes in northern China, desertification in Spain, food riots in Senegal, and the fact that to describe the recent state of Australia’s breadbasket, the Murray-Darling basin, the term “drought” was discarded in favor of the more permanent-sounding “dryness.” Part Three, “The Deluge,” addresses what is generally our most distant concern, decades if not centuries out—the rising seas, surging rivers, and superstorms that will threaten island nations and coastal cities. But it is hastened as parched cities drain their aquifers and begin to sink, accelerated as Greenland’s ice cap melts into the sea. And after Hurricane Sandy and Typhoon Bopha and failure after failure to cut global carbon emissions, it is not entirely distant.

To explore these changes in order—from melt to drought to deluge—as I broadly did, with some exceptions, in my travels around the globe, is to go from opportunism to wagon circling to open desperation. The expansionist exuberance of the Arctic petroleum rush, which has men running around like Elizabethan invaders, claiming virgin territory, fades into the grim free marketeering of a Malthusian world without enough water, then into the bunker mentality of sea-level rise and hurricanes, which could be what finally makes climate change personal for many Americans—and against which long-shot technology is viewed as our only escape hatch. There is no single response to the effects of global warming, even if we do seem to fall back on a finite set, but as I traveled, I found a consistent theme: I met hundreds of people who thought climate change would make them rich. In the six years I spent reporting this book, visiting twenty-four countries and more than a dozen U.S. states (and flying so often that I caused far, far more than my share of carbon emissions), I met profiteers, engineers, warlords, mercenaries, vigilantes, politicians, spies, entrepreneurs, and thieves—people seeking to come out ahead in a new, warmed world. They were universally kind and hospitable to me, and nearly all, driven by ideology, fear, or hard-nosed realism—or all three—thought they were doing the necessary thing. In six years, I never met a bad person.

When you’re on the high ground—wealthy enough, northerly enough, far enough above the sea—global warming is not yet the existential threat that it is for an Egyptian or a Marshall or Staten Islander. It’s a shorter ski season, a more expensive loaf of bread, a new business opportunity. We can afford the desalination plants; we can afford the seawalls. Many of the world’s existing imbalances seem only magnified by climate change, and they may be magnified all the more by how we respond to it. The technical term for trying to prepare for an altered planet is “adaptation.” (To try to cut emissions is known as mitigation.) One of the few tangible results of the 2009 and 2010 climate conferences in Copenhagen and Cancún was a pledge by emitter countries to help poorer countries adapt. But new climate funding is already falling short of the pledge: so far, $2 billion to save the rest of the world, which is at least $8 billion less than it could cost to build a proposed storm-surge barrier to protect New York City from the next Sandy.

It would be a mistake to suggest that every plan and project described in this book was born solely, or even principally, in response to climate change. Arctic oil is attractive for many reasons, not least because there’s less and less oil everywhere else, and what remains is often in hostile countries (Iran, Venezuela, Sudan) or recent conflict zones (Iraq, Nigeria, Libya). Water markets have boomed in Australia and California thanks in large part to the historic oddities of their water laws and the decision, whether foolish or brave, to turn emptiness into farmland, deserts into paradise. African refugees crowding southern Europe’s detention camps have often fled more immediate threats than the expanding Sahara. Genetic engineers racing to build supernaturally perfect corn see climate change as just one more excuse for their efforts. Weather modifiers have tried to make rain and tame hurricanes for a generation. The twenty-one-hundred-mile fence that India is building around Bangladesh is not all about sea-level rise, not hardly: India also doesn’t much like Bangladesh, and its emigrants have long been a source of irritation. It is as difficult to attribute human action to a single climatic cause as it is to attribute today’s weather report—or one bad wheat harvest—to long-term climatic shifts. But global warming is the thread that ties these stories together, and it’s a window into our collective state of mind. I’ve tried to keep rooted in the present, so if there’s a glimpse of the future in these pages, it’s only because we’re the ones making it. To the increasingly urgent question “What
are
we doing about climate change?” this book is meant to be an answer.

PART ONE

THE MELT

It is natural to expect that opinions were very varied when the news spread that the Arctic region was going to be sold at auction for the benefit of the highest and final bidder. . . .

To use the Arctic region? Why, such an idea could “only be found in the brain of a fool,” was the general verdict.

Nothing, however, was more serious than this project.

—
Jules Verne
, The Purchase of the North Pole,
1889

ONE

COLD RUSH

CANADA DEFENDS THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE

O
n the first full day of the sovereignty operation, the captain slowed the frigate and we took out the machine guns and sprayed the Northwest Passage with bullets. It felt pretty good. It was foggy out, and the unpolluted water boiled as we polluted it with lead. There was no life we could see and few waves. The wind was cold, the Arctic Ocean a drab green. There wasn’t any ice. But if there had been ice, we would have shot it, too.

The guns were C7s—American M16s but rechristened, like many Canadian weapons, with a patriotic
C
—and most of the shooters were camo-clad teenagers from Quebec’s celebrated 22
^e
Regiment, who are known as the Vandoos, from
vingt-deux
(twenty-two). The Vandoos lined up three in a row on the back deck, each of them held in place by a sturdy navy man, and fired away. They went from semiautomatic to fully automatic and shot more. They switched to pistols and then shotguns and shot until the deck was littered with shells. When they finished, they kicked the shells into the sea. There were journalists on board, and the Arctic was melting, and the Canadians—who now had a new, northern coastline to develop and defend—were trying their hardest to be fierce. The world had to understand that they were ready to fight for whatever riches the retreating ice revealed.

The frigate was named the
Montreal
. It was the length of two city blocks and painted warship gray, packed with two dozen torpedoes and nearly 250 people. There were sailors, Vandoos, and Mounties. There were Canadian wire-service reporters and photographers from at least two in-flight magazines. There were Inuit dignitaries and observers from Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated, the pseudo-governmental Inuit corporation that had negotiated the 1999 creation of its people’s own 800,000-square-mile territory, Nunavut. Our cruise speed was 15.5 knots. Our fuel stores were at 125 percent. With diesel taking the place of water in the auxiliary tanks, our showers were capped at two minutes. We were steaming north, farther north than the Royal Canadian Navy had gone in decades.