|
| Can global
warming be an important culprit in the formation of dangerous hurricanes? |
Hurricane Katrina, with its devastating consequences for
the south of the USA, is but the latest in a long line of hurricanes to hit the
area. What makes its impact even more horrific is the sheer ferocity of the
storm, the degree to which the region was unprepared for the event, and the
extraordinary slowness of the Bush administration to respond quickly and
effectively to its effects.
It should perhaps come as no surprise that New Orleans
and the surrounding areas were so ill equipped to deal with this catastrophe.
Downtown New Orleans is built on a flood plain, and as footage of the disaster
so graphically displayed, its inhabitants were almost all poor and black. With
enormous bites taken out of the federal budget to fund tax cuts for the rich and
the war in Iraq, the interests of these citizens are not a priority for the US
administration. Consequently, the US public sector infrastructure and capacity
to respond to what was a predicted natural disaster has been exposed as woefully
inadequate.
What We Do to Make Hurricanes Worse
But the effects of Katrina were exacerbated by a further
factor: the impact of global warming on the hurricane cycles of the Atlantic.
In
other words, across the world, we are not only failing to adequately prepare
for natural disasters, we are actively contributing to their severity and
impact.
Yet, if we want to trace those responsible for the
massive rise in carbon emissions in the last fifty years, we need look no
further than the citizens of New Orleans themselves—at least those who could
afford a car (many of the Downtown inhabitants were too poor to own cars, so had
no means of exiting the city). Built around freeways, many large US cities are
impossible to navigate without a car, and the alternative for the hapless
residents of downtown New Orleans is ghettoization. Elite and popular culture
valorize the car, and government encourages its unfettered use without any
attempt to think about the alternatives.
In the UK the situation is similar. Car use has risen by
an astonishing 70 percent in the last two decades, and is predicted to rise even
further.2 Yet most journeys are no more than a few miles, with up to a quarter
under two miles in length. This is in a country where almost all the population
(except for those in rural areas) have easy access to public transport and local
conveniences.
There have been some notable attempts to tackle car use
levels. In London for example, the imposition of the Congestion Charge has cut
congestion levels by 30 percent. But these are isolated efforts in an economic
culture still addicted to taking every single journey it is possible to take, by
car. Environmental campaigners argue this overweening dependence on car use has
contributed to the rising levels of obesity and related diseases such as
diabetes in the UK.3
As a result, the efforts of the Blair government to
fight global warming have come to nothing. Despite repeated claims that the UK
has met and even exceeded its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol, UK carbon
emissions are actually up4, and it is the rise in car use that is responsible.5
With such dependence on the car, it is perhaps not
surprising that political pressure to curb its use has been limited. The US
government has been notoriously opposed to acknowledging any link between carbon
emissions and global warming. Although Bush appeared to nod in the direction of
finally taking the idea seriously in Gleneagles this July, no tangible
agreements came out of the G8 meeting6. Two months later, Bush and Blair may be
regretting they didn’t do more on climate change as much of the coastal region
of southern America now lies in ruins.
Increasing Trends of Car Use
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| Increasing
numbers of cars may pose a serious threat to the environment |
The massive rise in car use in the West in the last
thirty years should be seen as part of a range of other economic trends. Since
around the beginning of the 1980s, inequalities between rich and poor, within
rich countries and between rich and poor countries have risen massively7. As with
earlier epochs, this has been based on making resources across the world
increasingly available to rich populations, and has been achieved in a variety
of ways. One has been the long-term neo liberal project of liberalizing
developed world economies and forcing developing world economies to do the same.
For many developing countries with weak infrastructure, the liberalization of
commodity markets has resulted in devastating effects on the subsistent base of
the poor who rely on small-scale agriculture to survive.
Oil is a key resource for the developed global economy.
How far the US and UK invasion of Iraq was driven by a desire to control the
region’s oil supply has been a matter of debate. But if it was, the invasion
has demonstrated that the West cannot use war to control a resource if the
resource itself is dwindling. Petrol prices continue to rise as global oil
production peaks. Given the finite nature of the world’s resources, war only
serves to deepen and entrench inequality. This is because the endemic problem
that only a tiny proportion of the world’s population can afford to consume at
Western levels remains unaddressed.
But the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina have
shown that the rich cannot protect themselves from natural disaster, including
those caused or exacerbated by global warming. While the poor suffer from the
Asian tsunami or Hurricane Katrina because they have been denied autonomy over
their own environments and are given no support to protect themselves, in the
US, in reality the entire region is a scene of colossal devastation. Clean up
costs are estimated at $150 billion, and some are saying the city of New Orleans
will have to be abandoned. This is an extraordinarily high price to pay for
failing to heed the power of our effects on nature, and one that the rich as
well as the poor will be unable to avoid.
The worst-case scenarios of the long-term effects of
global warming make Hurricane Katrina look like a walk in the park. If we are to
save ourselves from future disasters on this scale we have to act decisively.
This requires a massive scaling up in our commitment to cut carbon emissions,
and a concerted effort to find alternative sustainable energy sources and means
of transport. It also requires Western populations to abandon the pursuit of
endless enrichment at the cost of increasing poverty and squalor across the
world, and to account for the true costs of such practices. In short, we have to
build and nurture sustainable environments on a global scale, and cease to
conceive of the planet simply as a source of plunder for the wealthy.
This requires a political shift that Western electorates
seem unprepared to make. But until it occurs, Hurricane Katrina will be like the
sinking of the Titanic before the First World War: a tragic testimony to human
failure and a harbinger of far worse to come.
**
Kate Prendergast is
a British freelance researcher and journalist with a particular interest in
African politics and development. Your emails will be forwarded to her by
contacting the editor at: ScienceTech@islam-online.net
1- Is Global Warming Fueling Katrina? Time Magazine,
August 29 2005: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1099102,00.html
2- Car use rise causes UK pollution level failure, The
Sunday Herald, 18 July 2004: http://www.sundayherald.com/43457
3- New surge in UK diabetes above 2 million – addiction
to cars to blame, says Living Streets:
http://www.livingstreets.org.uk/page.php?pageid=471
4- Emissions Breach Kyoto Target, Friends of the Earth,
05 September 2005: http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/press_releases/
emissions_breach_kyoto_tar_02092005.html
5- Car use rise causes UK pollution level failure, The
Sunday Herald, 18 July 2004: http://www.sundayherald.com/43457
6-
Climate change
after Gleneagles, SciDev Net, 18 July 2005:
http://www.scidev.net/content/editorials/
eng/climate-change-after-gleneagles.cfm
7- Whose Trade Organisation? L Wallach and P Woodall:
http://www.citizen.org/print_article.cfm?ID=10447
