Sierra - Jason Mark
Who should pay the costs for climate-change-related disasters?
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| Hurricane Sandy's aftermath on the Jersey Shore | Photo by Julie Dermansky |
THE FLAMES moved with a speed that no one had thought possible.
It
was a Sunday night, about 10:30 P.M., and Brad Sherwood was asleep when
the sound of the dog scratching at the back door woke him. He got out
of bed and went to let the dog out. When he opened the door, he caught
the scent of woodsmoke—not all that unusual for Larkfield Estates, a
Santa Rosa, California, subdivision where many of the 1960s-era
ranchettes had fireplaces. Then he noticed the ash falling onto the
pool.
Brad checked his iPhone for fire alerts. There was nothing,
just a few Facebook posts about a wildfire near Calistoga, more than 30
miles away. He went back inside, gently woke his wife, Brandy, and told
her that he was going to head up Mark West Road to see where the smoke
was coming from.
"OK, whatever," Brandy said. But she remembers thinking, as she fell back asleep,
Something is wrong.
Brad
drove up the twisting, two-lane road into the oak-dotted hillsides of
the Mayacamas Mountains, which separate the Santa Rosa suburbs from Napa
Valley. On the way, he passed a few fire engines, including crews from
distant places like Bodega Bay and Gold Ridge.
What the hell's Bodega Bay Fire doing all the way over here?
he wondered. There was still no sign of flames, just the smoke moving
on the winds. After about 10 miles, he decided to turn around.
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| The home of Brad and Brandy Sherwood and their children burned down in October 2017. | Photo by Darcy Padilla |
By the time Brad got back to his neighborhood, the Sonoma County
sheriffs had closed off the road; they were evacuating families from the
hills, they told him. Brad went home. He was standing in his driveway
when he saw one of his neighbors, a deputy sheriff, talking to another
neighbor, Sherry. The sheriff got in his car, flashed on his lights, and
tore off. Brad jogged over to Sherry's place and asked what she had
heard.
"Get out," she said. "The fire's coming."
Brad called Brandy. "Get the kids ready. We need to go."
He
and Sherry went door to door, warning their neighbors, while Brandy
woke up the kids—Grant, seven, and June, five—and told them they had to
leave. Grant helped his little sister get her shoes on while Brandy
grabbed the emergency go-bags plus five boxes of family keepsakes and
staged them all near the front door. Then they corralled all the pets:
the dog, two Himalayan cats, four parakeets. Brad let the two backyard
chickens go free into the night.
The kids were standing at the door in their pajamas when the electricity blinked out and the house went dark.
Oh my God, Brandy thought,
this is really happening.
Brad
drove his Jeep onto the front lawn and backed it toward the family's
front door, then did the same with the minivan. The family started
tossing everything into the cars. Across the street, Beverly, their
83-year-old neighbor, was calling for help. With the power out, she
couldn't figure out how to open her garage door. Brad sprinted across
the street to open the door for her.
By now, everyone could see
the fire. To the east, the whole hillside was a dark-orange glow moving
toward them. Blazing embers swept through the air.
Brad, an
employee of the Sonoma County Water Agency, made straight for the county
emergency-operations center. He saw flames jump over the six lanes of
Highway 101 near the Kmart. He saw the fire torch the hillside
neighborhood of Fountaingrove.
As they had prearranged in the
family emergency plan, Brandy drove separately with the kids toward her
parents' home in Sacramento. She didn't get far. They were heading
eastward when another huge fire seemingly came out of nowhere. She
called Brad. "The whole freeway is on fire," she said.
Brandy
flipped a U-turn. In the back of the van, the dog was throwing up. The
kids were in a panic. She drove all the way to San Francisco and
eventually on to Sacramento.
By the next morning, Larkfield Estates was gone.
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| Flames consume the Signorello Vinyards in Napa, California, in 2017. | Photo by Noah Berger |
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| Santa Rosa, October 2017 | Photo by Reuters/Dronebase |
Brad went back to the site of their home as soon as the emergency
workers began letting residents return. But he and Brandy waited a
couple of weeks before they took the kids.
Nothing
was left except for the chimney and the broad brick staircase leading
to where the front door had been. The pool was an inky black oval filled
with ash and trash. The front yard's big old walnut tree—a neighborhood
totem for generations of local kids—stood blackened and burned.
There
were no tears. Grant, an aspiring archaeologist, asked to pick through
the wreckage to see if he could find his rock collection. June stood
back near the minivan, silent, reluctant to approach the remains of the
house.
Finally, she said, "The fire took it all."
***
TWO
DAYS BEFORE the Sherwood children visited the remains of their house
for the first time, the U.S. Government Accountability Office released a
report stating that during the past decade, the government had spent
more than $350 billion in response to climate-change-related extreme
weather events. "Climate change impacts are already costing the federal
government money," the report said, "and these costs will likely
increase over time."
That's an understatement. In 2017,
extraordinary wildfires, floods, and storms pummeled large sections of
the United States and led to never-before-seen destruction. The complex
of fires that torched California's Napa, Sonoma, and Mendocino Counties
in October caused more than $10 billion in damages, making them the most
expensive wildfires in U.S. history. At least 44 people lost their
lives during the firestorm. The surreal Christmas-season fires near
Santa Barbara led to another $2.5 billion in destroyed property. In
August and September, widespread flooding during Hurricane Harvey caused
at least $125 billion in damages in the greater Houston area and
contributed to 93 deaths.
Hurricane Irma damaged $50 billion worth of
property in Florida, while Hurricane Maria's September scouring of
Puerto Rico caused another $90 billion in damages. At least 60 people in
Puerto Rico died as a direct result of the storm; as many as 1,000
lives may have been lost due to the long-running electricity blackout on
the island. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, 2017 was the most expensive year for natural disasters
in U.S. history, costing a total of $306 billion.
The mounting
price tag of extreme weather events and the prospect of greater
destruction to come have brought into focus a question that has been
lurking at the edges of climate change conversations: Who should pay the
costs of the death and destruction caused by human-driven global
warming?
The debate over climate accountability is not new. In the
late 1980s, when climatologists were still trying to determine the
magnitude of the risks from industrial greenhouse gas emissions,
academics and policy specialists began calling attention to the fact
that the alteration of the planet's atmosphere would lead to unequal
harms, and that basic principles of fairness would require that those
harms be compensated.
The issue of "loss and damage" entered into the
formal United Nations–sponsored climate negotiations in 2007, when the
Bali Action Plan suggested that wealthy nations take (unspecified) steps
to assist "particularly vulnerable" countries. The Bali Action Plan
established the idea—at least in theory—that the rich countries that
have built their wealth by burning fossil fuels should help the poorer
nations that are suffering disproportionate harms from a distorted
atmosphere.
"Climate change reparations" is the shorthand for this claim—
reparations meaning, basically, "a rectification of past and ongoing harms." A plainer word would be
justice.
But justice is elusive, difficult to calculate, and often impossible to
enforce. The notion of climate reparations, also referred to as
"climate restitution," has proved radioactive within international
climate change talks, as richer nations resist acknowledging the
responsibilities they may hold.
The
mounting price tag of extreme weather events and the prospect of greater
destruction to come have brought into focus a question that has been
lurking at the edges of climate change conversations: Who should pay the
costs of the death and destruction caused by human-driven global
warming?
Like other attempts to remedy historical wrongs (the
claim that African Americans should receive compensation for the plunder
of slavery is probably the best known), a viable approach to climate
reparations has been bedeviled by the immensity of the injustices
involved. "Just as the problems of climate change overwhelm our
cognitive and [emotional] systems . . . they also swamp the machinery of
morality," Dale Jamieson, a philosopher of environmental ethics, has
written.
Part of the problem is time—the weird weather we are
experiencing now is the result of emissions from decades ago. Even if we
stopped all emissions today, climate change would persist for
generations. Simply put, many of the perpetrators are dead, and the
majority of those who will suffer most aren't yet born. Then there's the
issue of space—the way in which a transatlantic flight from New York to
London contributes, in some small measure, to record-breaking
temperatures in Australia or a drought in the Amazon. So much distance
lies between causes and effects that it's hard to locate blame. Finally,
there's the complication of scope—we are all, each of us, complicit
every time we fire up the car's engine or jet off to a faraway place.
How
can any individual, any set of people, or even any nation be held
accountable for so vast a problem? Is it really fair, for example, to
ask a poor family in New Orleans to compensate a rich family in
Bangladesh for the harm done by rising sea levels?
The idea of climate reparations seems to lead to an ethical stalemate.
***
THESE
ETHICAL DILEMMAS are beginning to disentangle as the impacts of climate
change become immediate. Climate change is no longer a far-off threat
to be suffered by future generations. It is happening here and now, the
destruction in real time.
Meanwhile, new research is tightening
the chain of causality between fossil fuel consumption and extreme
weather disasters. After Superstorm Sandy walloped New York City in
2012, many people were careful not to attribute the storm's strength to
human actions. That uncertainty is evaporating under the glare of a hot
new sky. Climatologists report that record-breaking heat and strong
winds intensified the disastrous 2017 Northern California wildfires.
A
few weeks before, San Francisco had posted an unprecedented September
high of 106°F. On the first night of the fires, the Diablo winds were
clocked at a hurricane-force 79 miles per hour. The record rainfall
during Hurricane Harvey (one Texas community measured 51 inches) was
three times more likely to occur than it would have been during a storm a
century earlier. In December, the
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society issued a first-ever report linking extreme weather events to climate change.
This
contraction of cause and effect is sharpening the lines of
accountability, which now squarely point toward those actors who well
understood the threat long before the rest of us. It's a myth that we're
all equally liable for the disaster of climate change. There is one
group that, through its actions as well as its inaction, has perpetuated
one of the greatest crimes in the history of civilization: the knowing
destruction of Earth's essential life system.
The campaign for
climate restitution focuses on what the academic literature sometimes
refers to as the "carbon majors"—those corporate conglomerates that have
amassed colossal fortunes through the discovery, extraction, refining,
marketing, and sale of fossil fuel energy. These companies span the
globe, their networks of wellheads and pipelines and refineries
stretching across continents and beneath the seas. Measured by revenue
and size of workforce, they are larger than many governments.
The
term "carbon majors," however, is too polite. It elides the feudal
logic of these companies' business models and the raw power of their
political dominance. It doesn't capture these corporations' immense
sense of privilege, the audacity of their assertion that the rest of
us—families, communities, taxpayers—should cover all the costs of their
recklessness. Better to give them a more accurate name: the Carbon
Barons.
***
NO ONE EXCEPT for the oldest people in Adjuntas could remember such a storm.
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| Yesenia Ramos Cintrón and her family lived in a shelter while waiting for assistance from FEMA. | Photo by Joa Rodríguez |
As Hurricane Maria tore through the mountains of Puerto Rico, Yesenia
Ramos Cintrón was glad that she had moved her whole family to her
mother-in-law's house. Their home had made it through Hurricane Irma the
week before without any serious damage—just a few small leaks in the
roof. But everyone had said that this storm was going to be much worse,
so Yesenia had packed up everything she could: Luis Yade's PlayStation,
all of Nilkaely's favorite toys and clothes, the baby things for Dylan
Yael, plus her laptop, the kids' tablet, and the family's important
documents, including the diplomas for the nursing degrees she had just
completed.
When the storm began to hammer down, it seemed like leaving
had been a good idea. The hurricane sounded like there was a volcano
outside.
Once the storm cleared, Yesenia and her husband,
Eduardo, went back to their house to see how it had fared. The home they
had inherited from her father 13 years ago was destroyed. The hurricane
had lifted the roof clear off and smashed everything inside.
Staying
at her mother-in-law's two-bedroom house wasn't an option. It was
crowded and uncomfortable, what with her sister-in-law already living
there and Yesenia with three kids. She decided to take the family to the
government shelter that had opened at the high school up the hill from
the Burger King. It wouldn't be so bad, she figured. They wouldn't be
there long.
The kids didn't seem too bothered by living in the
shelter. She had salvaged all of their favorite things, which made it
feel a bit like home: Nilkaely's stuffed animals and her yellow Pooh
Bear sheets, now stretched over a cot, and many of Luis's things. Dylan
was only a baby, just five months old, and he didn't know any better.
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| Hurricane Maria's scouring of Puerto Rico left thousands of people homeless. | Photo by Steph Segarra |
But for Yesenia, being in the shelter felt like a heavy weight. It
was the worst: 21 people all living in a single classroom! No privacy,
no place to cook. Just four showers for everyone, and only with cold
water. She felt bad when Dylan got sick and cried and kept people awake.
But what could she do? He was just a baby. There were all kinds of
people there, some from different backgrounds than she and her children
were used to. One old man stayed up all night drinking. The shelter
finally kicked him out.
Yesenia had always thought of herself as a
strong person who found courage under pressure, but many days she felt
depressed. Sometimes, when the kids weren't around, she would cry. But
at least they were all alive. And some good things had come out of the
storm. With all of the road closures, she had quit her job at the senior
home in Manati. Then that state senator who had visited the shelter had
tried to help find her a new job in Ponce, which would be much closer.
The
only thing that made her mad was FEMA. She had filled out all of the
paperwork for storm-damage compensation, and an inspector had even come
by to look at the house. Then she was told that her application had been
sent to the fraud investigation unit. On one form, someone had spelled
her name with a
J instead of a
Y. The name didn't match her social security number. "Who wrote
J?" the FEMA people asked her. She didn't know. "How long will the fraud investigation last?" she asked. Four months, they said.
Four months!
"I am living in a
refugio,
a refuge," she told the people on the phone. But her English was no
good, and they didn't understand. "A chel-ter," she said. "I am living
in a chel-ter. With a ba-by." She asked to speak with someone who
understood Spanish. They said they didn't have anyone who spoke
Spanish.
Weeks turned into a month. One month turned into two
months. Dylan turned seven months old in the shelter. Thanksgiving and
Christmas were about to arrive, and things had gotten bad with Eduardo,
who hated being stuck there. They were arguing all the time. Many nights
he slept at his mother's house.
The government said that she
could move into one of Adjuntas's public housing complexes on the edge
of town. But she couldn't take her family to that kind of place. She
feared there would be drugs and prostitutes there.
Every day she
wondered, "What am I going to do?" For so many years she had worked
hard. She had done everything she could to raise up her family. And now
this. It felt like, because of the hurricane, she had taken three steps
backward in life.
***
ON
JANUARY 10, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio held a press conference
to announce that the largest city in the United States was moving to
divest its holdings in fossil fuel corporations and was filing a lawsuit
against five Carbon Barons—ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and
Royal Dutch Shell—seeking to recover damages from Hurricane Sandy as
well as the costs for sea level rise adaptation.
"For decades,
Big Oil ravaged the environment, and Big Oil copied Big Tobacco," the
mayor said. "They used a classic cynical playbook. They denied and
denied and denied that their product was lethal. Meanwhile, they spent a
lot of time hooking society on that lethal product. . . . It's time for
them to start paying for the damage they've done."
A
reckoning must be made. After all, we are not merely consumers seeking
compensation for a product defect. We are citizens insisting that
impunity is unacceptable in a republic governed by the rule of law.
The
New York suit made the city the eighth local government in the country
seeking to hold the Carbon Barons legally accountable for climate change
damages. In 2017, seven California communities—the cities of San
Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz, and Imperial Beach, along with Marin,
San Mateo, and Santa Cruz Counties—filed similar complaints against
those five oil giants as well as more than 20 other
coal-and-oil-services corporations.
Following the more polite standards
of Canadian politics, five towns and cities in British Columbia have
sent letters to 20 Carbon Barons asking them to begin paying some of the
costs connected to global warming. "In my opinion, the companies that
have profited greatly off of the destruction of our planet and the
coming climate catastrophe should be at the table to pay," a Victoria
city councilor said.
These are not the first attempts to hold
fossil fuel corporations responsible for losses and damages related to
industrial greenhouse gas emissions. In 2005, residents of Mississippi
sued an offshore-drilling company, Murphy Oil, under state law, claiming
that by fueling climate change the corporation had exacerbated
Hurricane Katrina. But the case was thrown into judicial limbo after a
majority of the judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recused
themselves, presumably because they had conflicts of interest with the
oil and gas industry.
In 2008, the residents of the Alaska Native
village of Kivalina filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking
compensation from ExxonMobil and other oil companies for the flooding in
their coastal town. A district court judge dismissed the case, and the
court of appeals upheld that decision, ruling that the Clean Air Act
displaced federal common-law claims seeking damages for injuries
resulting from greenhouse gas emissions.
The new climate
restitution lawsuits enjoy advantages their predecessors didn't.
Although the lawsuits are ambitious in their goals, they are relatively
modest in their tactics. The municipal and county lawsuits rest on
middle-of-the-road tort law surrounding product liability and the
"polluter pays" principle. The lawsuits claim that the Carbon Barons
caused public and private nuisances when they failed to disclose the
inherent dangers of fossil fuel combustion, dangers that they themselves
have been aware of for decades.
The opening line of the New York City
complaint reads, "This lawsuit is based upon the fundamental principle
that a corporation that makes a product causing severe harm when used
exactly as intended should shoulder the costs of abating that harm."
Mayor
de Blasio's comparison between his city's lawsuit and the historic
campaign to hold cigarette manufacturers liable for their decades of
deception is an often-used analogy, and it's spot-on. Like the 1990s-era
suits filed by state attorneys general against Big Tobacco, the new
cases against the Carbon Barons are taking advantage of recent
scientific findings and fresh revelations regarding what the defendants
knew and when they knew it.
Recent research has provided attorneys
with the ability to draw a direct line from fossil fuel business
operations to rising temperatures to consequences such as higher sea
levels. In the Kivalina case, the district court judge observed that it
would be difficult to determine any one company's contribution to
climate change harms. Since then, a 2013 peer-reviewed paper by Richard
Heede, published in the journal
Climatic Change, showed that it
is possible to do this.
Heede's research concluded that the 20 largest
investor-owned Carbon Barons have, over roughly the last 150 years,
extracted a volume of fossil fuels large enough to produce nearly 30
percent of global emissions. The oil and gas extracted by the five
companies named in the New York suit resulted in 181 gigatons of CO2
emitted into the atmosphere during the previous century and a half—or
12.5 percent of all human-caused greenhouse gases. Subsequent
peer-reviewed research by Heede and collaborators has concluded that the
collective business practices of some 90 fossil fuel corporations have
driven nearly two-thirds of the observed increases in global surface
temperatures. Although it can feel as if the invisible hand of the
marketplace is driving global climate change, the Carbon Barons'
fingerprints are unmistakable.
Most damning are the recent
revelations that, for nearly 40 years, the leaders of these companies
have been aware that their products were emitting dangerous greenhouse
gases. A series of exposes published in 2015 by the
Los Angeles Times and
Inside Climate News
showed that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the oil companies' own
in-house scientists had confirmed that CO2 from oil products was
contributing to the greenhouse effect. As early as 1977, scientists at
Exxon warned the company that the "use of fossil fuels . . . should not
be encouraged" because of the risk they posed.
In a 1980 presentation to
members of the American Petroleum Institute (API), a scientist warned
that a global temperature rise of 2.5°C would likely have "major
economic consequences" and that further rises would likely produce
"globally catastrophic effects." A year later, a director in Exxon's
research unit warned that the CO2 emissions modeled in the company's
50-year planning documents "will later produce effects which will indeed
be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the earth's
population)." There's the smoking gun, in the form of an engineer's
memo.
Yet instead of sharing their findings with the government
and the public (that is, their customers), the Carbon Barons began a
well-orchestrated and well-documented campaign of deception. Either
individually or through associations like the API, they gave money to
think tanks, individual researchers, and advertising firms to socially
engineer an atmosphere of uncertainty around climate science. Some of
the recipients of this largesse, such as the George C. Marshall
Institute, had honed their strategies of deceit years earlier while on
the payroll of tobacco companies. A 1998 memo circulated among API
members declared that "victory will be achieved when . . . average
citizens 'understand' (recognize) the uncertainties in climate science."
That was six years after the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
was adopted, based on scientists' certainty that human activities were
changing the atmosphere. In 2000, ExxonMobil paid for a series of
advertisements on the
New York Times's op-ed page with the
headline "Unsettled Science." One ad declared, "Scientists remain unable
to confirm" the hypothesis that "humans are causing global warming."
For
the Carbon Barons, everything went according to plan. Between 2006 and
2016, the percentage of Americans who believed that humans were
responsible for global warming went down, even as scientists' certainty
in their warnings increased. In the last 20 years, ExxonMobil has
routinely broken U.S. records for corporate earnings. In 2014, the
company posted its biggest annual profit ever: $32.5 billion.
***
NONE
OF THIS IS ANCIENT HISTORY. The Carbon Barons' offenses have occurred
within our lifetimes—within, in fact, the space of a single generation.
Longtime NASA climatologist James Hansen gave his famous congressional
testimony warning about the dangers of climate change 30 years ago, in
the summer of 1988. By 1988, the Carbon Barons understood that global
warming could be, in their own words, "catastrophic." Yet it was around
that same time that they launched their disinformation campaign. The
year 1988 provides another baseline: More than half of all industrial
CO2 emissions have occurred since then.
Case closed? Not
exactly. The Carbon Barons have no intention of conceding. Two days
before the New York City lawsuit was made public, ExxonMobil filed a
petition in Texas state court seeking to depose various lawyers and
government officials from the California cities and counties that are
suing the company. The petition claims that the local governments'
efforts amount to a conspiracy. The reigning Carbon Baron also argues—as
it has in other legal defenses—that the lawsuits are an attempt to
"suppress" the corporation's constitutional right to free speech.
Perhaps.
After all, the political realm is awfully accommodating when it comes
to alternative theories of reality. But fraud is not considered
protected speech. The Carbon Barons' long-running deception is the First
Amendment equivalent of yelling "There is no fire!" in a crowded
theater filling with smoke. The Carbon Barons may also want to remember
this: When speech moves into a courtroom, "alternative facts" are known
by a specific term of art—they are called perjury.
***
THE RAIN was like nothing anyone had ever seen.
As
Hurricane Harvey whipped toward Houston, the Saldivar brothers—Danny,
Ric, and Sammy—made a plan. Their parents—Manuel and Belia, both in
their 80s—were suffering from dementia, and the middle brother, Sammy,
had been living with them since the previous January. Mom and Dad's
house had flooded during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, when the
backyard bayou had busted its banks, and the brothers knew the house
could flood again. If the waters got high, it would be better to be at
Danny's house.
If the floods worsened, they would try to make it over to
Ric's.
Sammy watched the waters Saturday night as the rain poured
down on southeast Texas, but eventually nodded off to sleep. When he
woke sometime around 4 A.M., he could tell things were bad and he called
Ric. "I fell asleep, and the water is already coming up," he said. With
the rain still hammering, Sammy got Mom and Dad out to his Chevy Sierra
pickup, but it wouldn't start. So he walked them down Lake Forest
Boulevard until a stranger offered them a ride and dropped them off at
Danny's place.
 |
| Ric
Saldivar, center, at the funeral for his parents. The pair drowned
along with four great-grandchildren. | Photo by Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle/AP |
Danny
wasn't there. Turned out he was stuck across town at one of his sons'
houses. Sammy put Mom and Dad's clothes into the dryer and called both
of his brothers. Ric told him, "If you're going to get out of there, you
have to leave right now. And you have to get Danny's grandkids."
Danny
and his wife, Virginia, had been raising their grandchildren. Their son
was in prison, and their daughter-in-law, who lived across the street,
was often working. So their house had become a second home to Devy,
Dominic, Xavier, and Daisy.
Devy had turned 16 that July, and the
family had thrown her a big Sweet Sixteen party with a beautiful white
dress. When she and the other kids came over after school, Devy would do
the usual teen things: talk and text with friends, watch TV. Dominic,
14, would play video games. Sometimes he would practice his trombone,
having landed a spot in the high school marching band. Xavier, nine,
would climb around in the backyard or play with his action figures.
Superman was his favorite. Daisy was the baby—six years old and fond of
hanging out with her grandpa, whether that meant taking endless selfies
on his phone or going along on his handyman jobs. People liked calling
her "Daisy Donut" after the ladies at church noticed her sweet tooth.
She liked calling people "silly goose."
Sammy went across the
street, got all the kids, and ran with them back to Danny's house.
Then
all seven of them piled into Danny's white Ford cargo van, the one Danny
used for his handyman work and for ferrying karaoke and DJ equipment to
church functions. Sammy, Mom, and Dad got into the front seat. The four
kids got in the back, behind the black metal cage, and sat on the
floor. With water filling the street, they headed out.
Ric had
told Sammy that the freeway entrances had been closed, so Sammy took the
surface streets. Everywhere they went, the water was deep. Sammy was
driving east on Ley Road when he came to the bridge that crosses Greens
Bayou. He had driven by there a million times, and normally it was calm.
Now the water was high and wide and pulsing.
 |
| A flooded gas station in Texas after Hurricane Harvey | Photo by Julie Dermansky |
Sammy didn't want to cross, but Dad insisted, "It's not that deep."
Manuel Saldivar was a loving father, but he was also tough, and as his
dementia had deepened, he had gotten even
tougher. As the Saldivar brothers used to say, "When Dad tells you to do something, you do it." So Sammy hit the gas.
They
made it across the bridge OK, water sloshing around the tires. But as
they reached the far end of the bridge, the road dipped and the van hit
deep water. Sammy had driven about 20 feet past the bridge when the van
just stopped.
He told everyone to sit still and relax. If they
got out, he said, the water was too high and the current too strong, and
they would be washed away.
They waited. A long 10 minutes went
by. Water began to seep through the doors and fill up the van. Mom and
Dad's feet were getting wet. Dad started laughing.
Then the van
began to inch back toward the fast waters of the main current. The
vehicle slid sideways. It hit mud and stopped at the side of the bridge.
Water began gushing across the hood, and the van's nose dipped down
into the bayou. When water poured through the half-open driver's-side
window, some primal survival instinct kicked in, and Sammy slipped out
of his seat belt and through the opening.
The current pushed his
head underwater and drove him backward. He swam until he grabbed onto a
tree branch. The van was upstream from him, and there was no way to
reach it.
Sammy yelled for the kids to get out of the van.
The kids screamed that they couldn't.
Then the screaming stopped and the van went silent. Sammy watched it go under.
He
hung on in the water for nearly an hour, yelling for help. Finally
someone from the trailer park on the other side of Greens Bayou heard
his hollering and called the sheriff's department. An emergency rescue
crew arrived and pulled him from the water.
The funerals took
place at Brookside Memorial. Belia and Manuel's service was on the
second Saturday in September, the one for Devy, Dominic, Xavier, and
Daisy three days later. The caskets were closed. At the service for the
children, there were three regular-size coffins and a small one for
Daisy.
The Saldivar brothers are haunted by what happened.
Christmas was hard. So was December 14, the day Daisy would have turned
seven. When Danny is home alone in the afternoon, repairing his
flood-damaged house, and he hears a sound near the front door, he turns
around thinking it's Daisy coming home from school. She used to fill up
his days.
***
WHEN ASKED who,
if anyone, should be held responsible for the suffering they have
experienced, neither Brad nor Brandy Sherwood, nor Yesenia Ramos
Cintrón, nor any of the Saldivar brothers offered the fossil fuel
corporations as an answer. These were natural disasters, they said. They
were acts of God, some of them believe.
Yet someone should be
held accountable for these families' loss and suffering. These extreme
weather disasters are, at this point, as much unnatural as they are
natural. Human forces are at work, the same forces that are now busy
trying to avoid any responsibility for what they've wrought.
The
Carbon Barons seek to perpetuate the myth that because we are each, in
some tiny way, responsible for fueling climate change, no one should be
held liable for any damage and destruction. In response to the raft of
lawsuits, the CEO of BP, Bob Dudley, swatted away the Big Tobacco
analogies.
"People don't need to smoke cigarettes, but they have needed
energy for many decades," he said. "If you're asking me, can the legal
system do something like that, I don't know. But do I think it's right?
Absolutely not." The day after the New York City lawsuit was filed, the
New York Post's
editorial page harrumphed, "Why should the oil companies pay? They're
not actually burning the fuel—that's the world's utilities, motorists,
etc."
The blithe dismissals from the Carbon Barons and their
apologists are little more than sarcasm used to disguise fear. At some
level, they know a reckoning is coming. And so they seek to dilute
responsibility with every gallon of fuel they sell. Their claim of
blamelessness is the hollow innocence of the drug dealer: The customers
just wanted it.
This is not to say that the Carbon Barons alone
should bear the costs of climate-change-related disasters and
adaptation. There is no question that each of us, as individuals,
carries some blame. A fair reading of history would conclude that the
public at large has known about the dangers of our daily energy
consumption at least since 1994, when the UN Framework Convention on
Climate Change went into effect.
Commonsense morality demands that we do
what we can to reduce our individual emissions: take the train instead
of the plane, go by bike rather than by car, forgo the steak in favor of
the vegetarian option, have fewer children. If that sounds like
sacrifice, it is. Such sacrifices could also be viewed as virtues—the
old-fashioned values of temperance, frugality, and patience.
We
cannot, however, reasonably expect moral behavior from the Carbon
Barons, whose controlling ethic is meeting shareholder expectations. But
at the very least we must demand that they be held accountable. For
they, unlike us, are uniquely culpable.
The Carbon Barons are
guilty not only of fraud but also of reckless negligence, of failing to
use their early knowledge about climate change risks to shift the
direction of human affairs. You can decide not to indulge in luxury
emissions like a trip to Europe, but such abstinence will do almost
nothing to reduce global warming.
The Carbon Barons are in a different
position. When they learned that their products could be catastrophic,
they had the ability to intervene in the course of history. They
possessed the scientific awareness, the economic might, and the
political influence to have avoided climate chaos.
And they chose not to.
***
THE
LAW IS AN IMPERFECT extension of ethics. Tort law alone isn't going to
save the planet. Even if, after years of litigation, the pending cases
succeed, the question of climate restitution may well be too large for
the courtroom, the damages too vast for any single judge or jury to
decide. This century will witness trillions of dollars of infrastructure
and wealth destroyed in the course of unnatural disasters.
Millions of
human lives may be lost in heat waves, droughts, fires, and floods.
Beyond the losses for human civilization, there are the damages to wild
nature—the altered forests and the acidic seas. Is any settlement large
enough to remedy the extinction of a species? One stumbles in trying to
make such a reckoning.
Yet a reckoning must be made. While the
courts are, for now, the best and most likely venue for achieving some
amends, climate justice is ultimately a political problem. After all, we
are not merely consumers seeking compensation for a product defect. We
are citizens insisting that impunity is unacceptable in a republic
governed by the rule of law. The demand for climate change
reparations—that is to say, some redress for climate change's recent
past, present, and likely future damages—is the base minimum required
for any accounting of a crime as insidious as the profit-driven
alteration of Earth's atmosphere.
The urgency of this attempt
cannot be overstated. This effort to apportion responsibility is in a
race against time and the implacable physics of Earth's vast systems.
The longer the Carbon Barons are able to delay justice, the sooner a
worse judgment will come for all of us, the innocent as well as the
guilty.
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