American snowballs and Philippine typhoons
In honor of Filipino-American History month, I’m writing one post every day for the month of October. Today is Day 11.
I try not to dwell on America’s denial of climate change, because I don’t have the fortitude to think it through without becoming extremely angry and upset.
It’s not an abstract idea to people who have lost their homes to stronger and stronger storms. And of the 19 typhoons that make their way to the Philippines every year, 6 to 9 make landfall. Academic studies have shown that Southeast Asia will be hit hardest by the continued effects of rising temperatures.
This feels especially relevant at this particular point in time, as the Haitian people are reeling from Hurricane Matthew. The UN estimates that nearly 1.4 million people need assistance.
I generally don’t like shooting from the hip when I draw direct causal links between one thing and another result. But I have a hard time maintaining my composure when I consider the fact that the head of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee does not believe in climate change, and throws a snowball on the floor of the Senate to make his point.
None of this is new, and I’ve probably exhausted my shallow well of new insight on this subject. Instead, I want you to watch a couple of videos while re-aligning your political center of gravity — because in many ways, climate change is not principally about the United States.
The simple truth about climate change is that isn’t new to the planet, but civilization is. And here’s what’s even newer: in the past 100 years, the number of people alive has quadrupled, and thus so has the capacity for suffering.
So slowing down climate change isn’t about saving the planet. It’s about us. About our vulnerability to a level of climate disruption that human civilization has simply never seen before.
This video doesn’t address how asymmetric that vulnerability really is. Portland has had a few very hot summers, and that has made life a little less convenient for me. But I shudder to think what it will mean for the places in which I grew up—hot, humid, dense cities where I was already used to seeing typhoons, even in the early 2000s.
Now, watch this. Here’s Yeb Sano in November 2013, speaking at at the UN’s climate meeting in Warsaw in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan. I’ve transcribed the entire video below, but you should watch it to hear the emotion in his voice:
Someday, another powerful typhoon will hit Manila — and will be far worse than any other. And I will feel uncontrollably angry, helpless, and indignant. And America may yet come to the rescue, once again. Gina Apostol wrote this in the New York Times during the aftermath of Haiyan, and I haven’t been able to get the quote out of my head:
On Red Beach, America will soon rumble onto Leyte’s shores with its ships, returning, like MacArthur, to Tacloban’s rescue, on the heels of a planetary emergency for which it feels no guilt or will to fix.
The last thought I have on this isn’t actually about the Philippines; it’s about the Marshall Islands. In December 2015, the New York Times published about climate change in the Marshall Islands, and I wish it was more widely shared. A central character is foreign minister Tony deBrum, who lobbies powerful representatives of large countries to please, please take action on climate change, because my country is vanishing. Here’s the last paragraph of the article:
At international gatherings, from the Major Economies Forum to the United Nations General Assembly, Mr. deBrum frequently speaks of his island’s dying breadfruit crop, to convey the surprising but concrete ways that rising sea levels are affecting lives and economic growth.
But for all his diplomatic acumen, Mr. deBrum’s advocacy for a small island nation being swallowed by a vast ocean does not always rise above the roar of the surf. At a recent conference convened to draft the Paris accord, Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar of India listened to his pleas, then responded brusquely, “So what?”
The Indian Environmental Minister’s reaction stands out not for its coldness, but for its candor. And this, in essence, is what I’m afraid of: that the greed, power, and short-term interest of large nation-states will win, and that my family—and all of the people who look like me—will lose.
