Sometimes the human trauma of the climate crisis is too painful to recite, and this is one of those times: the busiest hurricane season ever recorded is continuing on into the late fall, with consequences so horrifying one can hardly stand to look. Right now, Hurricane Iota is mashing Central America; it will likely be a few days before we know the precise results. So let’s talk about what has already happened in Honduras, when Hurricane Eta dropped torrential rains on the city of San Pedro Sula, triggering floods that have caused more than sixty deaths (the toll is still rising), destroyed twenty-three bridges and “partially ruined” forty-three more, and wrecked a hundred and forty-three highways. Three million people—a third of the country’s population—were “seriously affected.” As of the weekend, authorities said that they had no contact with sixty-nine towns, home to a hundred thousand people. And Hurricane Iota has just crashed into the same terrain, dropping yet more torrents on the saturated country, which was already dealing not just with COVID-19 but with a bad dengue outbreak. Here’s the bottomest of bottom lines: Eta alone, in a few days, cost Honduras the equivalent of around twenty per cent of its gross domestic product. (Hurricane Katrina, among the worst recorded in American history, cost the U.S. about one per cent of its G.D.P.) Needless to say, the President of the United States did not bother even to tweet about the disaster; the U.S. Agency for International Development offered a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
Again, let’s keep to numbers, the clinical (very nearly cynical) calculation of dollars and cents that hide both broken bodies and the basic immorality of the crisis. (Honduras, it almost need not be said, has done next to nothing to cause global warming.) Dollars and cents may be our best chance to attack the underlying cause of climate change in the years ahead—the Biden Administration, absent a Democratic-controlled Senate, will struggle to pass straightforward climate legislation, but it should be able to put new pressure on Wall Street that could begin to starve the fossil-fuel industry and bankroll the desperately needed conversion to clean energy. Less than a week after the election, the Federal Reserve started catching up to where European regulators have been for years, Politico reports, encouraging “financial firms to provide more information about how their investments could be affected by frequent and severe weather and could improve the pricing of climate risks, ‘thereby reducing the probability of sudden changes in asset prices.’ ” The next day, the Fed requested to join other central bankers in the international Network for Greening the Financial System. That pressure will likely intensify, as new regulators take over in January. “Leading Democrats,” according to Politico, “want to go even further by forcing lenders to abide by disclosure rules and stress tests to make sure they aren’t the source of a new crisis. The fear is that destructive climate events—as well as a costly transition to a lower-carbon economy—will wreak havoc on the banks’ portfolios and destabilize the financial system.”
The extent of that pressure will likely depend on how interested key personnel turn out to be. The Sunrise Movement, for instance, supports Elizabeth Warren for Treasury Secretary, a move that may be less likely since the Massachusetts House of Representatives last week rejected an amendment insuring that, if she joined the Cabinet, the person appointed to fill out her Senate term would be a Democrat. The movement’s second choice, Sarah Bloom Raskin, has impeccable credentials as an Obama-era Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, and has long been outspoken about climate change. The Federal Reserve Board member Lael Brainard, cited by pundits as another top candidate for Treasury Secretary, has been talking about the issue for at least a year.
It’s clear, however, that merely asking banks and other financial institutions to think more seriously about global warming will not suffice. The Financial Times reports that, in the United Kingdom, which has encouraged climate-risk disclosures for several years, “investors have shown more muted interest in the data that is generated, according to people who have gone through the process. An HSBC survey of 2,000 investors found that just 10 per cent viewed the disclosures as a relevant source of information.” On Monday, a group of academics told the British government that self-regulation would not get the job done: here, too, new rule-making will be required, which is why, according to Politico, “banks are accelerating efforts to get ahead of the issue and make clear to Biden’s team that they want a place at the table when decisions are made.” It will be a fierce fight to force rapid change, but it’s undeniably a shift from the status quo: in anticipation, the U.S. National Economic Council director, Larry Kudlow, has said that oil companies have complained that banks might be discriminating against them.
That we have to fight this fight on Wall Street is a sad reality; we also have to fight it on the ground, offering relief and refuge to people who through no fault of their own are suffering an impossible fate. Lay aside the numbers now. In the Guardian, Jeff Ernst, one of the few reporters getting out the story from Central America after Eta, described “Dantesque scenes of human and animal remains half-buried in mud.” He quotes a local man, Marvin Argueta, whose house on the bank of the Chamelecón River was swept away in the floods. Argueta said, “When we first came back to see our home we cried because everything was buried in mud.” He recently lost his job in construction and is now living underneath a nearby bridge with about a hundred other families, because, he said, “we didn’t have anywhere else to go.” God only knows what it’s like under that bridge today, as the next in this endless train of storms pounds down.
Passing the Mic
Emily Sanders writes the weekly EXXONKNEWS update distributed by the Center for Climate Integrity, which works to “make Big Oil and Gas pay their fair share of the damages their products helped cause.” The larger #ExxonKnew campaign began after reporters for InsideClimate News, the Los Angeles Times, and other outlets used archival research and whistle-blower testimony to show that the big oil companies, led by Exxon, knew all about climate change as far back as the nineteen-eighties, but, instead of telling the world, they helped orchestrate a massive campaign of denial. Sanders, twenty-six, has been, among other things, an assistant fourth-grade teacher in Long Island City, where the Ravenswood Generating Station—an archaic gas-fired power plant—loomed over the playground. Her newsletter is a year old as of last week. This interview has been edited for length.
The ExxonKnew campaign of which your newsletter is a part began as a reaction to great investigative reporting showing that the oil giant had foreknowledge of the climate crisis, but it’s turned into something much larger. Explain the mission of your work.
As you say, the story wasn’t over when we learned that the fossil-fuel industry knew and lied about how their products would destroy the climate. Big Oil got us here, and eroding their social license and holding them accountable in court are crucial to any meaningful climate solution. We still have a long way to go—people worry more about their carbon footprint than Exxon’s misdeeds. That said, there’s been so much momentum: twenty-four communities are suing oil majors for deceiving the public and, in many cases, to make them pay their fair share for the costs of adapting to this crisis. Last year, Congress held its first-ever hearing on Big Oil’s disinformation campaigns. Both Biden and Harris went on the record in prime time in support of suing oil companies—“just like we did with the tobacco companies,” as Biden has said.
As for EXXONKNEWS, I want readers to know that Big Oil’s climate denial, and their efforts to pass off the resulting damages, hasn’t come to an end. These companies are polluting more than ever while claiming that they’re part of the solution—and the situation on the ground is untenable. So I chronicle the ways communities are fighting back.
You spend every day deep in the trenches, reading about everything Big Oil is up to. Was this election a major loss for them? What’s the mood in Houston?
Trump was a boon to fossil-fuel executives, because he let them run the show. His Department of Justice sided with the industry in climate-liability lawsuits. There’s a reason he boasted that he could “hypothetically” call up the head of Exxon for campaign donations in exchange for political favors. So, yes, I’d think that, especially considering the sinkhole of debt these companies are in, and how their star has faded over the past year at least, this election was a major loss.
Those of us invested in the climate-accountability movement are feeling cautiously optimistic. President-elect Biden has pledged to direct his D.O.J. to “strategically support” litigation by communities and states against climate polluters, and holding fossil-fuel companies accountable is part of the Biden-Harris climate-justice-policy platform. There’s a lot of work to be done, and we’ll have to hold him to his word, but this is hopefully a huge step in the right direction.
BP seems like it’s the first company to make something that sounds like a semi-serious noise about changing its business model—how seriously do you take this, and what should we be watching for to see if it’s real?
It’s because of their deception and the years of potential climate action it derailed that we are at this tipping point. So I would think twice (thrice, even) about taking any kind of commitments seriously from a company that has historically lied. That’s why they’re a named defendant in so many of these climate lawsuits.
BP was the architect of the personal “carbon footprint,” an idea that may have done more to deflect responsibility away from the oil industry and disarm the public than any other single industry P.R. move. We need to watch what they do, not what they say. Even if they put twenty-five per cent of their portfolio into renewables, they’ll still be seventy-five per cent fossil fuels, which just isn’t good enough.
That being said, if they would be willing to take responsibility for their actions and help people on the ground start to adapt and build communities that can survive the crisis they caused, that’s a start. But we haven’t seen that yet.
Climate School
An official “State of the Climate” report from Australia showed just how out of control the heating has become down under. One remarkable stat: “In the 58 years from 1960 to 2018, there were only 24 days where the average maximum temperature across the whole continent hit 39C or higher. In 2019 alone, there were 33 days.”
In New Delhi, the surge in COVID-19 cases is complicated by hideous pollution levels—this month, the city was reporting that dangerous airborne particulates were fourteen times the safe level. Ashish Narang, a civil servant, told the Guardian that he has not ventured outside in a week: “We were already confined indoors because of the pandemic but we could at least go for a walk with a mask but now we can’t do that either. How can our lungs stand a chance against the virus if they are already blackened and damaged by pollution?”
The longtime environmental reporter Justin Gillis, and Michael O’Boyle, the director of electricity policy at the Energy Innovation think tank, do a fine job of explaining why utilities should stop building natural-gas power plants immediately. (Renewables are far cleaner and make far more economic sense.) They write in an Op-Ed for the Times, “We also think the companies lack a sense of urgency about the climate crisis, a problem compounded by their poverty of imagination. Technologies are available now that would allow them to go much faster on energy transition, yet they are stuck in an antiquated mind-set: the best way to make electricity is to burn something. That era will end. The sooner the companies come to grips with that, the sooner they can build the clean, affordable power grid the American people need.”
Scoreboard
Governor Gretchen Whitmer, of Michigan, gave Great Lakes activists a massive win last week when she announced that the state will revoke an easement that allows Enbridge Inc.’s Line 5 pipeline to travel beneath the Straits of Mackinac. The pipeline, which crosses what researchers have called “the worst possible place for an oil spill” in the Great Lakes, should close in May, after more than fifty years of use.
