Climate Change and Social Inequality
By Brandon Keim
At some point in the not-so-distant future, fossil fuels will become anathema. The externalities, as economists like to call them — the acidified seas and extreme weather and all the ways that a hotter, weirder climate exacerbates our problems — will stop being external to economics. They’ll be factored into market decisions, as should have happened long ago, or become unavoidable as the next Superstorm Sandy.
If fossil fuel companies can’t find a better way of doing business, then, they’ll be in serious trouble. Which used to frighten me: the global economy is intertwined with these companies. If a mortgage bubble could shake the world, what civilization-quaking catastrophe might result from their implosion. Yet in the last five years, the American coal industry has cratered, and our economies have chugged along nicely.
Granted, coal was largely displaced by natural gas, which is yet another fossil fuel, but the lesson stands. It’s possible to disrupt the energy industry without disrupting society. There will be a post-fossil-fuel economy. And who will thrive in it? Companies that are able to adjust, to become sustainable — not only in terms of fuel, but all the natural resources they use, from water to wood and other raw materials.
Right now, the largest companies — Coke and Unilever and Google and so on — are best able to make these adjustments. They can afford to invest in the up-front costs of sustainability more easily than small- and medium-sized companies with tighter budgets. It’s a concern voiced privately in sustainable development circles: are smaller businesses being left behind? Could sustainable economies become dominated by a comparatively small number of large businesses?
That’s preferable to an equally top-heavy unsustainable economy, and perhaps sustainability is intrinsically more equitable. Systems that exploit resources also tend to exploit people. Still, it’s a discussion worth having now, a question worth asking: Might climate and resource resilience end up making the rich richer?
Of course, it’s not just companies adjusting to climate change, but governments and communities. One of the most heartening developments of the past decade has been how, even as international and national governments stalled, cities and regions took the lead in planning for climate change. Yet good intentions aren’t enough to forestall growing inequalities already seen in climate change’s impacts.
It’s already conventional wisdom that climate change hits poor people hardest, but usually that’s conceived in terms of refugees from drowning Pacific islands or the drought-stricken Horn of Africa. Yet it’s just as true in wealthy countries: witness the aftermaths of Hurricane Katrina or Superstorm Sandy, or the more subtle example of Phoenix, Arizona, where trees and their heat-mitigating effects are concentrated in wealthy neighborhoods. The rich don’t just get richer, but greener, too.
That seems to be a pattern in the United States, where high-profile green infrastructure — New York City’s High Line, for example, or the revitalization of the Los Angeles river — tends to be a benefit of gentrification rather than a community-building principle. Fixing this won’t be glamorous, but will involve a lot of mundane, foundational work.
Climate-sensible design, such as light-colored pavement or green roofs, needs to be written into engineering codes and mandated in municipal standards. At-risk communities should be given a greater voice in planning for climate disasters, rather than having plans imposed from bureaucratic distances. All this won’t just make for a safer society, but a more equitable one. Otherwise climate change could be a magnifier, exacerbating and increasing existing social tensions.
Will the impacts of climate change be slow enough to manage these tensions democratically, or so rapid that social fault lines could rupture and provoke a social collapse in the wealthy world? The former, I hope. Or rather — as rapidly as climate change’s impacts are being felt, our society should be, for all its problems and faults, healthy enough to handle it democratically.
We’re quite fortunate that way. We’ve spent the last several hundred years developing systems of government and community that allow people to make decisions in sane, equitable ways. Then we’ve spent the last century digging up fossilized sunlight and combusting it into cash. That’s caused enormous problems, but also produced a store of economic and social capital that can now be invested wisely.
Or so we should hope. As articulated so powerfully in the fiction of Paolo Bacigalupi and Margaret Atwood, collapse is a scary thing. It’s always the people with guns, money and ruthlessness who come out on top. That’s one possible climate-changed future — but certainly not the only one.
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