Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (27 page)

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IN FACT, SOME AMERICANS
—those in the defense establishment—did see what was being done to Bangladesh. In the years following Cyclone Sidr, Bangladesh was front and center in a series of war games and intelligence reports. One of the largest such games was held in July 2008 at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C. John Podesta, soon to be the head of Obama’s transition team, played the role of the UN secretary-general. The featured speaker was the Shell alumnus Peter Schwartz, who had just been running a closed-door scenario involving submarines and Arctic melt for an unnamed client. A separate study he had done on the future of maritime navigation in the high north had recently been featured on
The Colbert Report
. “For the first time, my seventeen-year-old son knew about what I was doing,” Schwartz joked at the podium. “[Colbert] made me a hero. But just as important, even Colbert is recognizing the threat of the melting Arctic.” He turned more serious. “We are already seeing signs of climate change,” he told the war gamers. “This is not a fifty-year issue. It’s not, in my view, even a twenty-year issue. It’s a today issue, whether it is flooding in Bangladesh, storms in Myanmar, or droughts in Australia.”

The script of the war game imagined water tensions between Mexico and the United States, an influx of refugees from the Sahel and North Africa to Europe, the construction of floodgates to protect New York City and Shanghai, mass crop failure followed by mass flooding in India, a category 5 cyclone that killed 200,000 people in Bangladesh, and 250,000 climate migrants camped out at the India-Bangladesh border. The game’s outcome, unlike the subsequent, actual events in Copenhagen, was a robust global climate treaty.

The following winter, the National Defense University ran its own version, describing what could happen if millions of flooded-out Bangladeshis streamed into India: Food and water shortages. Epidemics. Religious war. A 2010 exercise at the Naval War College determined that the U.S. Navy would be hard-pressed to respond to a major disaster in Bangladesh without mobile desalination plants and shipboard capacity for thousands upon thousands of flood victims.

The most robust look at the implications of climate change for Bangladesh, South Asia, and, by extension, the U.S. military was the classified work of the National Intelligence Council (NIC). After its initial, global climate-security analysis, the NIC had gathered more specific climate data for six countries and regions. Bangladesh appeared to be among them. “We take that data,” an official told me, “and give it to a group of political and social scientists—people who understand how humans react—and say if this is what happens, given the other things that are going on in the region, how will the people react? We never look at climate change by itself. I mean, you gotta look at it in the context of other issues. Will we see cooperation to solve problems? Will there be tension? Will there be migration? If they migrate, where will they move?”

The reports produced for the NIC by outside defense contractors gave clues that the intelligence community worried about the same things everyone else did. “Anticipated inundation and salt water intrusion in the Ganges delta may displace tens of millions more Bangladeshis,” read one prepared by Centra Technology and Scitor Corporation. “India would not have the resources to cope with Bangladeshi immigrants pushing into West Bengal, Orissa, and the Northeast . . . About half of Bangladesh’s population, unable to sustain themselves through agriculture, will migrate to cities by 2050, and most of this migration will probably be to India. In addition, major disruptive events such as cyclones may generate mass refugee movements into India on much shorter timescales than the overall shifts in climate.”

In India itself, such studies were far fewer. When I visited, there had been only one government report probing the links between Indian security and Bangladeshi demographics, climate change, and sea-level rise—and it was classified. “Apart from its high population growth rate, it’s very clear that Bangladesh is going to lose a very significant portion of its landmass,” the report’s author told me in Delhi. “It is a ticking time bomb.”

But India, which was climbing in the ranks of the world’s worst carbon emitters—per country, not per capita—was waking up. Forty percent of its GDP is dependent on rainfall, and precipitation, including the timing of the monsoon, was changing. NASA satellites showed groundwater levels in its north falling by as much as a foot a year as irrigation sucked aquifers dry. India was ranked the world’s twenty-eighth most vulnerable country on the Climate Change Vulnerability Index put out by the British risk consultancy Maplecroft—well below Bangladesh, which was second, but well above most of the rest. At climate-security conferences, a former commander in India’s air force, A. K. Singh, began warning of fights with Pakistan and Bangladesh if shrunken glaciers forced India to keep water from shared river systems on its side of the border. A flooded Bangladesh would further destabilize the subcontinent. “It will initially be people fighting for food and shelter,” he told NPR. “When the migration starts, every state would want to stop the migrations from happening. Eventually, it would have to become a military conflict. Which other means do you have to resolve your border issues?”

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ENAMUL HOQUE
did not dislike foreigners per se, and with me he showed himself to be nearly as gracious a host as Atique. Almost as soon as I had arrived in Dhubri, he came to welcome me at my hotel, which consisted of a few rooms above a clothing shop that were lately being overrun by a hatch of thumb-size grasshoppers. The hotel was “bad for his status,” he said, so we drove to his house in a white Tata hatchback he had borrowed from a friend. Along the way, he assured me that I was in good company. “I am a very popular man in Assam, all over India,” he said. “But I get phone calls. People threaten me—call me black sheep. I say back to them in Arabic: ‘The only God is the homeland. Do everything for your homeland. Otherwise, you are not a true Muslim.’ That is what I say to them.” The fact that the infiltrators and their apologists were usually Muslim and that he was also Muslim was not as important as the fact that he was Assamese and he was Indian and the infiltrators usually were not.

Inside his two-room house, he had his servant grab a roll of border maps for me, which we spread out on a desk next to the book
You Can Win,
by the motivational speaker Shiv Khera. (“Winners don’t do different things. They do things differently.”) On a wall was a
jaapi,
traditional Assamese headgear that looked like a mix between a Mexican sombrero and a conical Vietnamese
nón lá
. Enamul sat at the desk and began telling the story of immigration to Assam. The first wave entered as refugees in 1971, when Indian forces helped Bangladesh, then known as East Pakistan, gain independence from West Pakistan. (For two decades after the partition of India, the two were a single Muslim state.) By 1979, AASU’s leaders were so worried by the population boom that they launched what is known as the Assam Movement. The anti-immigrant campaign included mass student rallies, sit-ins, and the massacre of 2,191 illegals in one six-hour period. (Enamul didn’t mention this.) It so roiled the northeast that the government sat down with AASU and signed an accord in 1985, promising foremost to build the fence. “That is why the work started in 1987,” Enamul said, “and that is why out of all the states, the first part of the fence was in Assam.”

The maps Enamul showed me were living documents—constantly changing not just because new roads and fencing were still going in but because completed roads and fencing were sometimes consumed by erosion and because new areas of undefended land sometimes appeared in the middle of the river. “See here,” he said, pointing. “Once upon the time, miles of border fence were built here. Now it is all dismantled, so we have to rebuild.” He flipped to the next map. “This area is a very nice area for crossing,” he said. “It is very vulnerable.” He pointed to Bangladesh. “Chaos from global warming is starting from that side,” he said. “After ten years or twenty years, the Bangladeshi people, they are bound to migrate. Because after ten years or twenty years, Bangladesh is not fit for living for a human being. The situation is very alarming. Presently, they are coming by any means, and they are searching for their livelihood, and they are settling hither and thither. It is a silent invasion.”

Enamul did not dare take me on one of his border patrols without permission from the BSF, but he had an equally important tour in mind: He wanted to show me Dhubri as he knew it, what was at stake if it was overrun by Bangladeshis. The next day, he picked me up on his moped at 5:00 a.m., and we puttered past shuttered storefronts until we reached the Open Air Theatre Cultural Complex, where he regularly practiced yoga with his Hindu friends—more proof that his fight was not sectarian. Dozens of middle-aged people were sitting in auspicious pose in the dirt, women on the left, men on the right, legs crossed, fingers forming mudras, while three leaders chanted from an elevated stage. Enamul and I put down mats on the men’s side, and after an hour of my flailing while everyone stared at me, he was gracious enough not to comment on my flexibility—once declared “the worst I’ve ever seen” by a Manhattan physical therapist. His friend with the car soon came for us, and we drove out to a famous potters’ colony on a riverside spit of land, where we stood for hours under the beating sun, observing folk artists and their terra-cotta rhinos and elephants.

The tour’s most important stop was in the afternoon: a visit to a decaying wooden mansion that had been perched on one of Dhubri’s only hills for the last hundred years and to the blue-eyed raja who still lived in it. To meet him, we parked at the base of the hill and walked through uncut grass past an old cannon, then up a rickety staircase past his drying laundry, then into a second-floor study, where he sat surrounded by hundreds of photographs and oil paintings of his ancestors. For a few minutes, fans kept the room cool, and after the power went out, the soft-spoken raja offered us cans of Coca-Cola, which he somehow served with ice. “You should not drink the water here,” he warned me. He briefly showed us the armory downstairs, which had dusty trunks, mounted tiger heads, and an elephant gun, but mostly we sat in the sweltering study and talked about the old days. “We had seven hundred square miles,” he said. The system of lords and vassals had ended barely two decades earlier, after the government started collecting taxes directly rather than using the raja and lesser nobles like Enamul. The raja’s land, which had stretched across Assam and even into present-day Bangladesh, was gradually claimed by the government and distributed to the masses. This mansion was one of the few holdings left. He wanted to turn it into a museum.

The raja’s father, a member of the Assamese parliament, had been a great hunter. “He killed seventy-six tigers and eleven leopards,” he said, “and he caught more than a hundred elephants.” He pulled out an old hunting log, becoming increasingly nostalgic as we flipped through the ragged pages. “One tiger, two male rhinos, and one female,” he murmured. “From this, I think we can also make a list of extinct animals.” Over time, he said, his father noticed that the tigers were disappearing, and he became a great conservationist. The raja hovered over a photograph of his father’s favorite elephant, Pratap, who died in 1962. The animal’s grave was in the front yard, near the cannon. “My father was always telling me: Pratap is different. Pratap is unique. Every elephant has a breeding period, you know? At that time, every male elephant becomes very arrogant. But Pratap, he was very loyal, very calm. My father said: I will call him at the time of breeding with a female elephant and see if he comes over or not. My father called him. He came over.” Enamul, sipping on his Coke, took the moment to loudly belch.

The lords spoke to each other in Goalpariya for a moment, and I heard Enamul mention the BSF; he was telling the raja that I had been unable to get permission to visit the fence. The raja turned to me. “Do you want to see where Bangladeshis are living?” he asked. “It is very near.” We marched down the stairs and down the hill and into the car, the raja riding shotgun. A suspect cluster of eight huts soon appeared at our right, on a patch of land that once belonged to the raja. “Slow. Slow. Slow.” Enamul whispered. “Slow. Slow!” We craned our necks, but all there was to see was a woman in a sari who disappeared into one of the huts, carrying something. “You can’t say for certain that they are coming from Bangladesh,” Enamul said. A Bengali was a Bengali. “But you can’t say for certain that they are Indian.”

The land was low-lying, a dozen feet below the elevation of the road, and was interspersed with rice paddies. When it rained, it would be the first to flood. To my surprise, it was flanked by two BSF camps. “Actually, this is government land,” said Enamul. “When someone occupies it, the government does not inquire. Citizens do not inquire. You cannot. Bengali, Bangladeshi—the language is the same. It is difficult, because the physical and biological patterns of Bangladeshis, the characteristics . . .”

“Cannot be detected,” said the raja. “Cannot be detected!”

“You can’t detect them,” Enamul agreed.

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DHAKA, NOT DHUBRI,
was as far as most of Bangladesh’s migrants could go. As in Senegal, the poorest did not have the resources to go any farther than the capital. Dhaka’s metropolitan area had an estimated thirteen million people, and it swelled with half a million more
char
dwellers, cyclone refugees, and other newcomers each year—the highest growth rate on the planet. By 2025, it will be bigger than Mexico City or Beijing. New arrivals camped for days or weeks in rail yards and bus stations before moving into sprawling slums that did not appear on official maps. Men often found work as $2-a-day rickshaw drivers; the megacity was now thought to have as many as 800,000 rickshaws. The lucky ones got jobs in illegal, collapse-prone factories producing clothing for the rest of the world. In Old Dhaka after Atique and I returned from the south, I witnessed a traffic jam near a statue of a Kalashnikov rifle: rickshaw after rickshaw in a dead standstill that stretched for half a mile down a narrow street. The Dhaka sky was either smoggy or raining, and the city itself was putrid and strangely beautiful. “The capital of Bangladesh seems at times to be dissolving into its constituent elements,” wrote the journalist George Black, who visited a year before I did. “If it’s made of iron, it’s rusting; if it’s vegetable, it’s rotting; if it’s brick, it’s reverting to mud, to river sediment.”