Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (31 page)

Dircke’s proposal for the Narrows was a beautiful design—“An extra landmark for New York,” said a colleague—that combined the Maeslantkering with two other famous barriers in the Dutch Delta Works, the Hartel and the Eastern Scheldt. It would allow passage of the biggest ship in the world, the 1,300-foot-long, 185-foot-wide
Emma Maersk,
while also protecting the most moneyed place in the world, Wall Street, from a twenty-two-foot surge. Not including the other three barriers the city would need to be fully sealed off, the design would cost a very roughly estimated $6.5 billion, more than double the price of the Netherlands’ Room for the River project. The Arcadis presentation featured spinning animations of the gate action and an aerial glamour shot of the New York Harbor of the future, safe behind its floodgates and beneath a sunny sky. When it was over, the assembled engineers gave a rare applause.

There was one downside to any design that used the Narrows to protect Manhattan from storm surges—a necessary evil—and Dircke was straightforward about it. As everyone knows, when water is blocked, it doesn’t just disappear. It flows elsewhere. If a surge came barreling toward a Verrazano barrier, it would do the hydrological equivalent of a bounce, and it would land somewhere else. Arrochar and Midland Beach on Staten Island, Bath Beach and Gravesend in Brooklyn—these and other immigrant-heavy neighborhoods were just outside the Narrows, poorer than the core, just above sea level, and slated for an even bigger surge. Manhattan would be saved, and they would likely be underwater.

When Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in late October 2012, there was not yet a barrier, just a hint of what could come. On Staten Island, a sixteen-foot storm surge swamped Midland Beach and Ocean Breeze and Oakwood Beach, and twenty-three people died, more than in any other borough—the vast majority of them south of the Narrows, the vast majority of them by drowning. In lower Manhattan, water flooded subway tunnels and power stations, and the cityscape went dark, with one exception: At 200 West Street, close to the island’s southernmost tip, Goldman Sachs headquarters was ringed with a massive wall of sandbags, and backup generators kept the lights on all night. Across the stormy Atlantic, in the Netherlands, Arcadis’s stock jumped 5.6 percent, capping a 43 percent rise for the year.

ELEVEN

BETTER THINGS FOR BETTER LIVING

CLIMATE GENETICS

T
he yellow-fever mosquito,
Aedes aegypti,
better known today as the primary carrier of dengue fever, is a container breeder. It lays its eggs in the pools of rainwater left in the things we leave outside our homes: buckets, vases, cups, yard ornaments, clogged gutters. The most proven way to eradicate the disease is to clean up those things or to constantly dump out their water, which for public health authorities is a grueling, house-to-house, yard-to-yard fight. And the more plastic human life becomes, the more our detritus becomes mosquitoes’ habitat, the harder dengue is to control. There is still no vaccine for it, and
Aedes aegypti
bite mostly by day, making bed nets largely useless. Urbanization, globalized trade, and increasing air travel have also helped grow dengue into a global epidemic three thousand times more prevalent than it was in the 1960s: every year, as many as a hundred million infections and twenty-two thousand deaths in more than a hundred countries.
Aedes
like it hot, and they prefer humans to any other animal. They are attracted by the CO
₂
we exhale with every breath, and their potential range expands, many scientists believe, with every ton of CO
₂
our industries emit.

Aedes aegypti
is originally from Africa, and
Aedes albopictus,
the other species that can transmit dengue, is from Asia. One or both are now found in twenty-eight U.S. states, Florida chief among them: In 2009, the first American dengue outbreak in seventy-five years took place in Jimmy Buffett’s and Ernest Hemingway’s paradisal Key West, the southernmost and hottest city in the Lower 48. A tourist had returned sick to New York, and soon the disease was tracked to a quiet street in Old Town. There were twenty-seven confirmed cases that year, sixty-six the next. A CDC team took random blood samples and estimated that 5 percent of Key West’s population—more than a thousand people, many of them asymptomatic—had been exposed to dengue. In its mild form, the disease causes headaches, fevers, rashes, bleeding gums, and intense joint and muscle pain. Its more severe form, known as dengue hemorrhagic fever, brings nosebleeds, purple splotches under the skin, and possibly death.

Pending regulatory approval, Key West would soon also be the site of the United States’ first release of genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes. The flagship product of a British company called Oxitec, the patent-protected
Aedes aegypti
OX513A was a kind of Trojan horse. Sent out by the millions to breed with native
Aedes,
the modded mosquitoes carried a suicide gene that would theoretically doom the next generation to an early death, making dengue transmission impossible. Genetic modification was the logic of climate adaptation taken one step further: Instead of changing how and where life was lived, it would change, however modestly, what life was.

I visited Key West in August, when the weather is at its stickiest. With the air-conditioning on max, the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District inspector John Snell drove me one morning to the highest point in Old Town, elevation eighteen feet above sea level, and parked his pickup. Nearby was the city’s historic cemetery: nineteen palm-dotted acres where tourists came to see the grave of the forty-inch-tall midget “General” Abe Sawyer, who was buried in a full-size plot; the headstone of a hypochondriac waitress named B. Pearl Roberts, which read, “I told you I was sick”; and the resting place of the nurse Ellen Mallory, who treated yellow fever victims in the early nineteenth century, decades before anyone connected the disease to mosquitoes. While not the island’s original cemetery—that one was destroyed by a colossal 1846 hurricane, its bodies left strewn in trees—it was old enough to be the most difficult part of Snell’s beat. The graves of nearly 100,000 people, four times the island’s living population, translated to lots of fresh flowers. “Some of the vases are just a constant, constant battle,” Snell said. “The ones I can tell have been there a long time, I’ll just go ahead and dump them out. But fresh ones I treat, half a larvicide tablet in every vase.” He went through two hundred tablets a month.

Snell was one of eight home inspectors in Key West—twice as many as the city had before the dengue outbreak. He wore wraparound sunglasses and a white collared shirt, and when we left the truck, he was carrying a jury-rigged ski pole–water scooper in his hand, larvicide and a turkey baster in his black fanny pack. He was tasked with ridding some forty blocks and eleven hundred homes of
Aedes,
and his workload ebbed and flowed with the seasons. Warmer temperatures accelerate not only mosquito development but the incubation period of the dengue virus; inspectors have a shorter window to stamp out both host and disease. “In winter, in the dry season, it’s not that bad,” Snell said. There were two weeks to catch mosquito larvae before it was too late. But in the hot, humid summer, he had only four days.

“This is the big problem right now,” he said as we approached a dilapidated fence. “There are a lot of foreclosures. And once a house goes into foreclosure, the bank shuts down the pool service and the landscaping and whatever else they have going on, and things just go bad.” A trashed-out yard was ideal for breeding
Aedes,
and Florida vied with other Sunbelt states—Nevada, Arizona, California, Georgia—for the highest foreclosure rate nationwide. Even wealthy Key West had its share. Meanwhile, homeowners’ insurance rates, higher than in any state but Katrina-walloped Louisiana, were only rising as insurers pulled back from the coastline or exited the state entirely. You could not buy a home without additional windstorm and FEMA flood insurance, which often cost more than the main policy. You could not buy windstorm insurance except through the much-reviled, state-backed Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, the onetime insurer of last resort that was now Florida’s largest as it absorbed policies from private firms that had fled the state. The Caribbean is expanding only slightly less rapidly than other seas, and Key West—which has the longest sea-level record in the Western Hemisphere—was overdue for another 1846-style hurricane.

Snell placed his hands atop a locked gate and jumped over in one easy motion. On the other side were a wooden deck, a palm tree, a small swimming pool, and a Jacuzzi. The heat was suddenly stifling. “There could be a twenty-knot wind, and it’s completely still in these yards,” he said. He had appropriated the Jacuzzi to raise fish for his fight against dengue: small, larvae-eating gambusia, which he would release in water cisterns and bird feeders as he traipsed through the backyards of paradise. Keys residents had historically kept cisterns—ideal
Aedes
breeding sites—under their homes, and more than 350 of them remained, along with nearly 250 wells. Scientists had determined that if less than 2 percent of homes contained
Aedes,
that was good enough: There could be no dengue transmission. But that summer, two Key West neighborhoods had indexes approaching 50 percent. Snell looked around the yard for signs of mosquitoes, and finding none, we jumped back over the fence. In the street, lined with pastel homes with their shades drawn, their owners gone for the summer, we saw not a soul.

It was extremely difficult to model dengue’s spread, Snell’s boss at the Mosquito Control District, Michael Doyle, told me. There were too many factors. This was especially true when gauging the effects of climate change. Big storms could lead to breeding sites in the rain-soaked debris—witness the
Aedes aegypti
explosion in the Cayman Islands after 2004’s Hurricane Ivan—but droughts could be equally dangerous if people began storing extra water in open containers. “It’s not the simple connection that if it gets warmer, this mosquito will be everywhere, that it will just move north,” he said. “It’s also how weather affects humans, you know? If it’s really hot, people may spend more time inside, where there’s more air-conditioning going on, so there’s less contact with mosquitoes.” Doyle and his extended family had just moved here from Colorado, where he had battled West Nile virus, another mosquito-borne disease linked to climate change. Already his mother-in-law was complaining about the mosquitoes at their Keys rental house, so his new employees were preparing a special strike team to stamp out the problem.

Until federal regulators decided the dengue threat was severe enough to let in Oxitec’s
Aedes aegypti
OX513A, the Mosquito Control District would have to back up inspectors like Snell with another kind of air support: a sprayer-equipped Bell 206 helicopter that hovered fifty to sixty feet above Old Town twice a month, raining insecticide onto rooftops and tourists’ rental cars. The insecticide, VectoBac, was based on a strain of the natural bacteria
Bacillus thuringiensis
(Bt) and, explained Doyle, killed mosquito larvae but little else. On a newly waxed car, its droplets looked like dried milk.

I had timed my visit to watch the helicopter spray. Doyle and I met at dawn the next day to follow twin contrails of insecticide through Old Town. The helicopter had to cover an area of 950 acres, and its hundred-gallon tank could do just 200 before a refill. The pilot rushed through five sorties as quickly as possible, lest his work be ruined if the wind picked up or the humidity dropped, lest the district be billed more helicopter time than it could already barely afford. Our SUV drove slowly through the backstreets, catching glimpses of contrails partly obscured by telephone poles, roofs, and wires. Only when we steered to an open patch of scrub alongside a busy road, across from a Lutheran church, did we have a clear view of it racing to and fro. We stepped out into the sun, and Doyle began telling war stories, like the one about the suppression campaign in Colorado when they’d carried their insecticide in backpacks and hand sprayed an entire forest. “Thirteen guys with thirteen backpacks,” he said. “All scratched up, all dirty. And we did 56 acres!” The helicopter made a beautiful, wide-arced turn above the church and barreled back toward us. We retreated into the SUV. On the street, a homeless man walked by pushing a bicycle. He peered into the sky, covered his mouth and nose with an old T-shirt, and kept walking.

Dengue had hit Key West just as the conservative Florida legislature had limited local governments’ taxing authority. The Mosquito Control District would spend almost $12 million in the 2011–2012 fiscal year but take in less than $10 million. It was burning through its cash reserves. And as aerial combat went, helicopters were much more expensive than transgenic mosquitoes—another reason the district really wanted them to be approved. Oxitec really wanted approval, too: It had already paid $130,000 in lobbying fees to the Washington, D.C.–based McKenna Long & Aldridge—Monsanto’s sometime law firm—but had yet to see results. How the public would react seemed scarcely considered. When I arrived in Florida, outreach about the impending cloud of OX513As had so far consisted of a single presentation to the local gay business alliance. (Soon, after attacks by Friends of the Earth and other anti-GM campaigners, the news was splashed across the front page of the Mosquito Control District Web site: “Special Notice. Genetically Modified Male Release Trials.”) In her presentation, the district’s representative had explained that hundreds of thousands of “sterile” Oxitec mosquitoes would be released every week for six months. Only female mosquitoes bite; these would be males. A cocktail of inspections, insecticides, and OX513As would reduce the native
Aedes aegypti
population “to zero or near zero.” Sustained, low-level releases would keep it down thereafter for a fee of $200,000 to $400,000 a year. Of course district staff would remain out in force, but to truly beat dengue, they would have to harness nature itself, at least a kind of nature. As she awkwardly explained to the gay business owners, male mosquitoes “are more effective than humans at finding females.”