South Florida is one of the first regions to suffer serious
damage from climate change. Miami is experiencing worsening flooding and, as
polar ice melts and the sea level rises, coastal areas of the low-lying
southern part of the state may become increasingly uninhabitable. Some
scientists calculate that the region has fifty years left, others warn that the
timeframe is even shorter – and that not taking into account potential extreme
weather events, such as hurricanes and severe storms – which could devastate
the region in the meantime.
At the United Nations summit on climate change in December, 195
nations reached a deal to limit the average temperature increase on the planet
to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels during the 21st
century. It was hailed as historic, raising hopes that victory over global
warming is now in sight.
Not so according to a chorus of critics, including James
Hansen, the former NASA scientist who drew international attention to climate
change back in 1988. He has called the agreement a fraud. Nothing will change,
he asserts, while fossil fuels are priced the way they currently are.
Practically speaking, only a protracted worldwide recession
similar to the Great Depression could reverse growth in carbon emissions.
Alternatively, if we try to stabilize emissions by pricing environmental damage
into the price of oil, natural gas and coal, we’ll have a major recession on
our hands.
Our civilization doesn’t seem to be able to get away from
burning fossil fuels. It’s almost as if Homo
sapiens evolved specifically to release carbon from organic compounds the
way cows evolved to eat grass and predators to feed on other animals. In the
course of evolution, humans conveniently lost body fur and learned to control
fire to keep warm during the Ice Age by burning first food and then fossil
fuels. In Greek mythology, acquiring the use of fire made humans equal to Gods.
In the course of civilization, humans have changed the planet
significantly, but in geological time most of the change has been ephemeral. If
we were to disappear suddenly, in a mere five thousand years Planet Earth would
largely revert to its pre-human state. The cities will fall into ruin and
become overgrown with vegetation, and animals will repopulate the forests. Our
presence will be detectable only by means of some very sophisticated
archeology.
Not so with carbon. In the past two hundred years we have
released millions of years’ worth of carbon that had been absorbed by land and
stored underground. In the past 400,000 years, the concentration of carbon
dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has been extremely stable, fluctuating in
100,000 year cycles between 200 parts per million (ppm) and 300 ppm. Since the
advent of industrial revolution, CO2 increased to a historically unprecedented
400 ppm. The natural balance of carbon exchange in the ecosystem has been
violated; the system has been strained and the ability of the land and the
ocean to absorb excess CO2 is declining. Meanwhile, we continue to increase CO2
emissions every year by around 2.5%, which means that emissions will roughly
double by 2050 when they are meant to stabilize. Meanwhile, This year’s Paris
Agreement may create a sense of complacency.
Тhere are still plenty of American politicians who deny that
climate change is taking place at all or, at least, that human activity makes a
substantial contribution to it. There is some disagreement among scientists, as
well, as to what direction climate change will move. What is clear, however, is
that the ecosystem, which makes life on this planet possible, is on the
threshold of major changes. The changes may benefit the ecosystem in the long
run, but most of us who inhabit the planet and are used to current conditions
will find it hard to survive the impending changes.
The threat the changing climate may make South Florida into a
modern-day Atlantis, but Miami remains one of the fastest growing cities in the
United States, with construction cranes dotting the coastal areas and new
condominiums selling for tens of millions of dollars.
The buyers pay cash and come from Venezuela, Argentina, China,
Russia and other countries where corruption is rampant. Over the past twenty
years, the United States has pursued the unsavory policy of providing an
international safe haven for the world’s scumbags. True, some people sheltering
their money in America are honest businessmen who are being harassed by their
domestic government, but a vast number are corrupt government officials, crony
capitalists and, in more cases than one, international criminals.
By turning
the blind eye to foreign buyers of premium real estate in Miami, New York, Los
Angeles, Chicago and other parts of the country through nontransparent offshore
shell companies, Washington has acted as a giant money laundering operation.
This development is closely related the end of the Cold War. In
the early post-World War II decades, the US government fought for the hearts
and minds of ordinary people around the world. It did support various
autocratic regimes as long as they were run by “our son of a bitch”, but
kleptocracies presented a genuine threat to US foreign policy, because their
pauperized populations might respond more readily to communist agitation.
Since the failure of communism and the collapse of the Soviet
Empire ideological considerations became irrelevant. The War on Poverty was
lost at home and never even attempted abroad. Global kleptocrats – and their
millions – were welcome in America with open arms. It helped cut the external
deficit, supported real estate values and created jobs. Downtown office
buildings in Miami are chock full of multilingual companies providing
investment, legal, immigration and other kinds of advice to the world’s
one-percenters.
We’ve been told that even though trickle-down economics has
failed to work in the United States, at least rapid worldwide growth has pulled
millions out abject poverty in emerging economies. Yet, it has been a fairly
precarious enrichment, as seen not only in Russia but also in Brazil and
Argentina. China’s government is desperately trying to avert a financial crisis
which could destroy the newly found well-being of tens of millions its
countrymen.
More to the point, Washington in its free-market ideological
zeal has completely missed a new international phenomenon – the rise of
kleptocracies. It has no idea how to deal with them. Russian government
officials, members of the Duma, assorted siloviki
and common thugs would have continued to be welcome on American shores had not
Putin gone mad and decided to play some kind of two-bit generalissimo. They
would have continued to pilfer their country’s wealth and America would have
provided a safe haven for their ill-gotten assets. It can still be seen in
Miami, where Russian is spoken almost as frequently as Spanish.
Putin is unusual among kleptocrats in that he and his immediate
entourage of former KGB officers somehow were not content to quietly enrich
themselves. In an inimitable Russian way, Putin manages to exemplify both
Russia’s disastrous decline under his kleptocratic rule and the reaction
against it by the angry and dispossessed population. But other countries around
the world are likely to rebel against this system sooner or later – and against
the parliaments, the courts and other institutions that serve this system. They
will no longer have a leftist ideology to turn to, but they will surely find
some other radical, populist and, ultimately, repressive creed to embrace.
Putin is unique in another respect. The kleptocracy he leads is
armed with nuclear weapons. The past year has shown that today’s Russia is far
more dangerous than the Soviet Union has been since the death of Stalin – in
other words, since the dawn of the nuclear age. The USSR may have been an Evil
Empire, but it had strong institutions. It was governed by the Politburo which,
in turn, was rooted in the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Brezhnev
had his finger on the nuclear button, but he could not start a war on a whim.
Not so in today’s Russia. Putin – with, at most, a small
coterie of his buddies – makes all the decisions. This year, he ratcheted up
and down military tensions in Ukraine, took Russia into a war in Syria and then
got it entangled in a military confrontation with Turkey. All his moves have
been rubber-stamped by his parliament and enthusiastically supported by the
populace. The media routinely accompanies all twists and turns of his whimsical
policies with a steady drumbeat of war.
Putin, they say, is too timid to press the nuclear button.
Let’s hope this is true. But in a landscape where no institutional checks and
balances exist, where is the guarantee that a crazier person won’t replace him
at any moment?
Just like the release of carbon, a large-scale nuclear exchange
involving Russia and the United States will have long-lasting consequences for
the planet. It will instantly alter life on earth and leave radioactive
contamination for thousands of years. And, just as was the case with global
warming, in the year that is about to end we may have passed the turning point.
