Climate Resilience and Economic Inequality

            I’ve spent an awful lot of time over the last few years studying economic inequality.  Economic inequality provides the polluted soil out of which a lot of unpleasant things grow.  Aside from the obvious problems of creating more housing and food insecurity, economic inequality decreases the social trust required for needed collective action.  It ratchets up social stress and may well have played an important role in the protests we’ve seen in places like Baltimore over the last several months.  The Tragic Commons itself grows out of economic inequality.

            But one thing I hadn’t focused on is the interaction between economic inequality and climate change.  As anyone who tends a garden like the Tragic Commons knows, climate change is real.  It is the mother of all collective action problems.

            One of the reasons it’s so hard to deal with climate change is that it does not affect everyone equally.  Internationally, countries with large expanses of territory that can’t be easily developed or exploited due to the cold—think Russian Siberia or the remote parts of Alaska—will be climate winners while coastal countries like Bangladesh or island nations like Palau will be climate losers.

            In the U.S., we’ll also have climate winners and losers.  The American south and the current Midwestern breadbasket states are likely to be losers as sea levels swamp coastal areas, rising temperatures disrupt agriculture, water becomes scarce and storms intensify.  The Northern Midwest—Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota—are likely to be climate winners.

            This trajectory is more or less obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to the climate scientists.  But a program yesterday at the Center for American Progress took my understanding of the issues to a whole new level.

            Within states, and even within communities, the impact of climate change will not affect everyone equally.  Poor folks are likely to be affected more severely than anyone else.

            Let’s start with the basics.  Carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere will stay there for about 200 years. The amount of carbon dioxide we’re currently putting into the atmosphere is greater than the amount natural processes are removing.  We are already experiencing many of the predicted effects of climate change. We would be likely to continue to experience those effects well into the future even in the unlikely event that we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow.  We cannot quickly reverse what we have already done to the atmosphere.

            That means that regardless of all of our efforts to reduce the size of our carbon footprint, we need to spend a serious amount of time and money thinking about ways that we can cope with the coming environmental catastrophe.

            Poor people tend to live in places that others distain.  Their homes are old and not likely to have been designed to address the kinds of conditions scientists predict climate change will bring.  Their neighborhoods tend not to have the kind of infrastructures that can handle a mass exodus or good places to buy food and other supplies needed in an emergency.   

            Just think of what happened to the poor people of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.  Scientists predict that as the climate warms, there will be more severe weather events just like that.

            Addressing the impact of climate change, said keynote speaker and Director of the Office of Management and Budget Shaun Donovan, “belongs in the national conversation we’re engaging in across the country" about economic inequality.

            “Why do those who have the least stand to lose the most when the next storm comes through? ” he asked.

            That’s a fair question. 

            Donovan pointed to a number of initiatives the Obama administration has just announced to address that question.

            But Obama only has millions of dollars to spend, much of it being contributed by private entities such as the Rockefeller Foundation.  Preparing for climate change is a problem that requires billions of dollars, and that means Congress has to get serious about it.

            According to Donovan, that’s unlikely. “Republicans [in Congress] are showing a remarkable degree of shortsightedness.”

            Economic inequality tends to distort democracy.  Politicians generally see to the needs of the wealthy before they focus on the needs of anyone else.  That’s just a fact in the Tragic Commons.  And that’s why I’m not hopeful about the prospects for poor communities to be resilient in the face of the coming storms.