Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (38 page)

One afternoon, after I watched the
Kulluk
get towed north, I went to the “prediction market” Web site Intrade and put a $100 wager down in its Climate and Weather category. I could have bet on global temperature anomalies or on Sandy being the last named storm of the 2012 hurricane season, but instead I chose the melting polar ice cap: “Arctic sea ice extent for Sep 2012 to be less than 3.7 million square kilometres.” It was all in good fun, just a stunt to prove that any one of us, especially those in a comfortable place, could idly bet on climate chaos. But I won handily.

There is something crass about profiting off disaster, certainly, but there is nothing fundamentally wrong with it. I did not write this book to take aim at honest businessmen like Mark Fulton, Phil Heilberg, and Luke Alphey or at good soldiers like Sergeant Strong and Minik Kleist. If they are vilified because readers have not fully grappled with the landscape in which they live, the landscape in which we all live, then I have failed to describe it well enough.

The hardest truth about climate change is that it is not equally bad for everyone. Some people—the rich, the northern—will find ways to thrive while others cannot, and many people will wall themselves off from the worst effects of warming while others remain on the wrong side. The problem with our profiting off this disaster is not that it is morally bankrupt to do so but that climate change, unlike some other disasters, is man-made. The people most responsible for historic greenhouse emissions are also the most likely to succeed in this new reality and the least likely to feel a mortal threat from continued warming. The imbalance between rich and north and poor and south—inherited from history and geography, accelerated by warming—is becoming even more entrenched.

Environmental campaigners shy away from the fact that some people will see upsides to climate change—more minerals for miners, more famines for food sellers—because any local gains muddy the otherwise catastrophic picture of a world without emissions cuts. I have not shied away, for the people described in these pages reveal something important: In an unfair world, rational self-interest is not always what we wish it would be. In economic terms, global warming is not merely an externality that we have failed to price in. The free market can only get us so far. This makes it a truly wicked problem, but it also gives us a more perfect moral clarity. We are not simply borrowing against our own future. For the most part, we are not our own victims. To rely on empathy to shape our response to climate change is often considered naive—the victims of warming are distant in space, distant in time, and the bullets are invisible—but I believe it is more naive to hope that we in the north will significantly cut emissions or consumption or give needed adaptation funding to distant countries because we personally feel threatened.

In the world ahead, the politics of anger are not likely to work without the corresponding empathy. It is not enough to get mad at the oil companies—though it might help a little bit. There have been various postmortems about why the U.S. Senate has not passed a climate bill, or why the UN cannot get a treaty, but the reason is fairly straightforward: In the wealthy north, where we still talk more about polar bears than about people, there is no true constituency. Hardly anyone cares that much. Not yet.

When I was halfway through this project, I was checking facts with a source, an investment banker in New York who had acquired some foreign farmland. We got into an argument. What had happened along the way to his getting his tracts—a series of swindles by middlemen, of small farmers bought out by forces much larger than they could imagine—was not his fault, he said. It happened before the bank was involved. “It’s like I bought some weed from a guy who bought it from another guy who bought it from another guy who bought it from a guy in Guatemala who killed someone for it,” he said. But you knew, I argued back. Before he bought it, he knew where it had come from. He knew what his boon had cost someone else.

Climate change is often framed as a scientific or economic or environmental issue, not often enough as an issue of human justice. This, too, needs to change. From this moment on, many of us could get rich. Many of us could get high. Life will go on. Before it does, we should all make sure we understand the reality of what we’re buying.

A Canadian soldier stands guard at the edge of the Northwest Passage, an emerging shipping lane as the Arctic melts.

Alaska’s shrinking Chukchi Sea, where Shell began drilling in 2012, could yield as many as twelve billion barrels of oil.

Norway’s Snøhvit, or Snow White, is the northernmost natural gas facility in the world—and some oil companies’ model for the future of the Arctic.

As Greenland’s glaciers recede, revealing mineral deposits, mines like Black Angel are expected to help fund its push for independence from Denmark.

Fjords in Greenland are melting earlier and freezing later, extending the season for shipping and icebergs.

On the hunt for potable water, the Israeli desalination engineer Avraham Ophir invented the world’s greatest snowmaker, a product now in use in the melting Alps.

Private firefighters working for private insurers race to protect a client’s home in Los Angeles.

During a historic drought in Southern California, the All-American Canal was reengineered so that less water would seep across the border to Mexico. San Diego gets the savings.