Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (25 page)

Pape soon appeared in his jeep, and he still seemed hopeful. When the tanker truck started up again, preparing to head deeper into the parcel, one of the boys, barely a teenager, rushed over to get a final drink. He grabbed a big red plastic cup and filled it to the brim, but he got only one sip before Pape yelled over at him. “Eh, eh,” said the colonel, and he pointed at a newly planted row of Great Green Wall. The boy didn’t protest. He dumped the rest of the water on an acacia seedling, silently watching it pool around the base of the tree and sink into the earth.

PART THREE

THE DELUGE

A blueprint for disaster in any society is when the elite are capable of insulating themselves.

—
Jared Diamond

NINE

GREAT WALL OF INDIA

WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE BANGLADESH PROBLEM

E
namul Hoque was an Assamese lord, albeit a minor one, and not long before we met, half his family’s land had been washed away when the Brahmaputra River changed course. In his lifetime, he had already been forced to move his home five times. He was thirty-seven. He had a mustache and a slight overbite, and at night, when he lit candles to deal with the frequent power outages, he showed a fondness for whiskey and cigarettes. He was soon to marry a beautiful young girl, a Muslim like him. Until then, he rented a small house near the law college in the northeastern Indian city of Dhubri, where he had a bathroom filled with enormous spiders, a servant with whom he proudly spoke the indigenous Goalpariya language, and a set of maps showing border emplacements, fences, boundary roads, and guard outposts. His life was dedicated to sealing off Dhubri and the rest of his home state of Assam from the people everyone here called “infiltrators”: Bangladeshis who snuck across the border for economic opportunity or to escape their own country’s host of natural and social disasters, including cyclones, overpopulation, seasonal famines, and especially rising waters that ate away at land and crops.

By the time it crashes into India’s restive northeast, the Brahmaputra has cascaded almost seventeen thousand feet from its Himalayan headwaters. From Dhubri, it has just a hundred more feet to lose before reaching sea level—but it has to snake four hundred miles through neighboring Bangladesh before actually reaching the sea. This cannot be done quickly or directly. The formerly steep, clear river is at Dhubri flatter and broader and browner than ever before, and it carries more sediment than almost any other on the planet. It is five miles wide, and it is constantly jumping its banks. Considering its former location, Enamul’s ancestral land was surely carried downstream across the border, where it might well have become part of a new riverine island and been claimed by Bangladeshi farmers who had lost their own land—an irony he chose not to focus on.

Enamul had lately become chief of the International Border Affairs Committee for the powerful All-Assam Students Union (AASU), which for three decades had campaigned to save ethnically distinct Assam from what it called “a silent invasion” of Bangladeshis. India, after a big push from AASU, was quietly constructing a $1.2 billion fence around Bangladesh, and Enamul spent his days driving alongside it and taking boats along it and walking it with binoculars, looking for gaps. “I ask, ‘What are the lacunas?’” he told me. “What are the plans? And what is the real picture?” When he saw infiltrators, he reported them. When he saw problems with fence construction, he reported them. Once, he walked so many days on the border’s sand and loose dirt that his left knee swelled up dramatically. “Like this,” he said, and he cradled an imaginary basketball in his hands. Another time, he heard there was a firefight between Indian and Bangladeshi border posts, so he rushed to the Indian side, borrowed a gun from a dead guard, and began shooting. Often, he bragged, he was in such remote border areas that he had to skip his lunch. He was a patriot. He was like one of the activists from America’s Minuteman Project, only he was fond of yoga.

At more than 2,100 miles, the new border fence—flanked by new roads, illuminated with floodlights, soon to be electrified—would be the longest in the world. It would be so long not because Bangladesh, with its 164 million people, is large—it’s smaller than Iowa—but because Bangladesh is surrounded: The predominantly Muslim country, which in 1947 broke off together with Pakistan from predominantly Hindu India, remains encircled by India on three sides. (Bangladesh’s only other land border, 120 miles fronting Burma, is in the process of getting its own barbed-wire fence, and its south is bounded by the ever expanding Bay of Bengal.) When Bangladeshis sneak west into the Indian state of West Bengal, where the people are ethnically and linguistically indistinguishable, they blend in. When they sneak north across a much shorter section of border with Assam, the locals notice an influx of darker-skinned people who speak a different language. This was one reason that the first and loudest calls to seal the border had come from here.

What Enamul wanted was a perfect fence, something that could keep the Bangladeshis out no matter how unlivable Bangladesh became. He had been a communications student when he first joined AASU, but like many people today he now approached social problems with the mentality of an engineer. The question was not what we could do but what we could build, and India’s razor-wire-and-steel response to migration—much blunter than Europe’s varied responses to its African migrants—seemed to me even more representative of what was beginning to happen in this third stage of climate distortion, as the world faced up to rising seas in addition to melt and drought. Walls. From here on, in one sense or another, this is what those of us who could afford them were engineering against climate change. Those who could not afford them would be stuck on the other side.

India was a poor country, but Bangladesh was poorer. India emitted more carbon than Bangladesh, and perversely this signaled that it had more resources to deal with the effects. The first Bangladeshis had not come to Assam because of global warming, and AASU had not been worried about warming in the 1980s, when it first pushed for the fence. But it was worried now. “Global warming, if it happens, what will happen?” its leader had asked me. “Will there be war? Will Assam become part of Greater Bangladesh? Most of Bangladesh will be underwater, and where will they come?”

As the fence went up, it was the job of India’s paramilitary Border Security Force (BSF) to hold the line. Nearly a thousand people have been shot dead at the border since 2000—about one every four days. In a 2010 report,
Trigger Happy,
Human Rights Watch detailed a pattern of extrajudicial killings and torture: boys killed while fishing too close to the fence, men shot in the back as they tried to run away, criminals armed with sticks felled by border guards armed with rifles. Indian authorities claimed the border’s lawlessness—ethnic insurgent groups, smuggling of narcotics and rice, and especially the rustling of tens of thousands of cows that lost their holy status upon leaving Hindu India—justified any violence. In one widely publicized incident, a fifteen-year-old Bangladeshi girl named Felani was shot when she tried to cross back from India, where she was living illegally, into Bangladesh, where she was about to be married. Her purple
shalwar kameez
caught on the barbed wire, and for five hours her dead body hung upside down. “We fire at criminals who violate the border norms,” the BSF’s director general said during an official visit to Bangladesh. “The deaths have occurred in Indian territory and mostly during night, so how can they be innocent? We have made it clear that we have objection to the word ‘killing,’ as it suggests that we are intentionally killing people.”

I tried to get the BSF’s permission to visit the border well before flying to Assam. In Delhi, I called the force’s headquarters again and again until an officer relented, telling me I could expect to get my clearance when I showed up in Guwahati, Assam’s largest city. In sprawling Guwahati, I took a taxi to the local BSF camp, where they told me they could do nothing without Delhi’s okay in writing. In Shillong, in Assam’s neighboring state of Meghalaya, I secured a meeting with a deputy commandant, but when I got there after a three-hour jeep ride, he had been called away to a meeting. I finally took an overnight taxi ride toward Enamul’s hometown of Dhubri, and by dawn, as we passed through villages along the braided Brahmaputra, it already looked like Bangladesh: streets impossibly packed with cars and rickshaws and pedestrians. Dhubri District had one of the highest population densities in India: 1,492 people per square mile, about half that of Bangladesh. As I neared Dhubri city, I saw another BSF camp, and I decided to try to bluff my way in. I dropped the Shillong officer’s name, and a young soldier led me down a long corridor and into a sparsely furnished office, where he made a series of calls while I peered at a document on his desk titled “Unnatural Death.” He finally put down the phone and turned to me. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but the border area is closed to foreigners.” That was the point.

I was in the city scarcely twelve hours before the police showed up at my hotel. “Actually, we are protecting you,” said a man in a leather jacket, and I was led down the street to the station for questioning that became all the more polite once they were certain I was American. On the second floor, in a hall with a languid ceiling fan and teal green walls, an officer gently thumbed through my passport while others stared at an ancient television that was showing the movie
Titanic
. One wall had a hand-drawn crime map: recent petty thefts, cattle rustling, and banditry by armed dacoits. Bangladesh was ten miles away. The relaxed mood changed only after I was allowed to leave and the next interviewee was ushered in. She was a small woman in a beautiful orange
shalwar,
towing a young son. “Bangladesh?” the officer asked. She nodded. His smile faded.

 • • • 

LIKE ALL ELSE
related to climate change, sea-level rise is not the same across the globe—not uniform, certainly not equal. An extra inch in the North Sea does not necessarily translate to an extra inch in the South China Sea or Sea of Cortez or Bay of Bengal. Satellite measurements cited in the IPCC’s 2007 report show two parts of two oceans—the western Pacific and the eastern Indian—rising more quickly than any others, while measurements taken along the lengthy Indian coastline show that some areas, including West Bengal, adjacent to Bangladesh, are more quickly losing ground. The variability is attributed to tectonic movements, to changes in the distribution of heat and salt, which lead to changes in water circulation, and to the fact that surface winds can literally move oceans. The Hadley cell and another atmospheric circulation thought to be invigorated by climate change, the Walker cell, are pushing water from the Indian Ocean’s southern reaches north toward the Bangladeshi coast, according to a recent University of Colorado study. And there is another factor causing uneven sea-level rise, the subject of a flurry of recent research, that bodes especially ill for Bangladesh and many other places in the low-lying tropics: The thick ice sheets atop Greenland and Antarctica have a strong gravitational pull on surrounding waters, yet that force is diminished the more the ice sheets lose mass. More melt, less Greenland. Less Greenland, less gravitational pull. The perverse result of Greenland spilling at least fifty trillion gallons of water into the sea each year may be “a smaller sea level rise in the far North Atlantic,” explains John Church, the lead author of the sea-level chapter in the IPCC’s 2014 report. “Of course, a smaller rise in one place means a larger rise elsewhere.”

On average, global sea levels are rising at a rate of about three millimeters a year—twice the rate of the middle part of the last century but still mostly manageable, equivalent to adding little more than an inch every ten years. If the expansion remains linear, oceans will be roughly a foot higher in 2100. But few scientists believe it will stay linear. The summer I traveled with Minik around Greenland, the eight-nation Arctic Council began one of the most authoritative surveys yet of the island’s precipitous melt. The researchers found that the flow rate of Greenland’s largest glaciers had increased two- or threefold and that small earthquakes—the rumbles of calving glaciers as icebergs fell into the sea—were several times more frequent than in the early 1990s. Thermal expansion, the fact that when water heats up, it expands, is no longer the biggest contributor to sea-level rise, their report claimed. Instead, it’s melting ice. An average rise of three feet by 2100 is now considered a reasonable forecast; some experts believe six feet is within the range of possibility.

In the Bay of Bengal, the creep of the sea was like the migrants sneaking into India: silent, mostly invisible, just beginning. Even at six or eight millimeters a year—local scientists’ rough estimate—it was having an effect. In the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest and the last bastion of wild Bengal tigers, high tides and higher salinity were starting to kill the namesake sundari trees, which lost life, leaves, and color from the top down—“top-dying disease,” the locals called it. In the adjacent delta formed by the Brahmaputra and the two other great rivers of Bangladesh, the Meghna and the Ganges (known here as the Padma), seawater was not inundating the land so much as infecting it: There is a point in an estuary system where an inflowing river becomes subsumed by the sea, where freshwater becomes so intermixed with salt water that it can no longer be considered fresh. This point was moving inland year after year. Salt levels in the waterways of six southern districts have risen by 45 percent since 1948. The amount of damaged cropland increased from less than four million acres in 1973 to more than six million in 1997 to a projected eight million or more acres today. An Indian dam on the Ganges, the Farakka Barrage, completed in 1975 to divert freshwater to Kolkata, was blamed for worsening the problem—less freshwater down, more salt water up—and now more megadams, Chinese as well as Indian, were planned for the Brahmaputra. Bangladesh was being hit from both sides. In a country where small farmers make up half the population, fields and rice paddies that fed thousands, even millions of people were gradually becoming too salty to sustain crops.