Today we want to give a working-class analysis of a recent major
natural disaster, Hurricane Sandy, and global warming. I will give a
brief talk and then open the floor for discussion.
I will go into some details about Hurricane Sandy in
a moment, but first a comment about its relation to global warming, to
tell you why we linked the two topics. While the capitalist
presidential candidates, Obama and Romney, had a tacit agreement not to
talk about global warming in their debates in the election campaign,
suddenly Hurricane Sandy loomed up right before the election and placed
the question of natural disasters square in front of the country and
stimulated a new wave of thinking about these disasters and their
relationship to global warming. Suddenly the potential danger of global
warming became real, devastatingly real. We will go into this later in
my talk.
Hurricane Sandy began developing in the Caribbean in
late October. It rushed through Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti, reaching wind
speeds of 115 mph and killing 38 people, 26 of them in Haiti, which was
already devastated by its 2010 earthquake and by imperialist
exploitation by the U.S. Sandy was a serious hurricane from the first.
As it moved northward parallel to the U.S. Coast it lost some speed but
gathered size, and predictions said that it would gather more strength
when it would merge with a Nor'easter bearing down from (where else?)
the northeast. As Sandy approached New Jersey and New York, the storm
turned left toward shore as it merged with the Nor'easter. Its wind
speeds reached 90 mph and it gained such massiveness that cold air and
high winds extended 820 miles wide (we felt them in Michigan) and Sandy
acquired the nickname "Frankenstorm."
A gradual rise in sea levels due
to global warming had already been challenging the New York-New Jersey
area. Sea levels were already being measured at about 8 inches above
the long-term trend, with 2 to 5 more inches expected by 2020. This had
already forced authorities to begin speculating on how to deal with the
rising sea, and insurance capitalists had begun figuring it into their
plans of how to rob the insured. The New York harbor was already
considered vulnerable to rising levels, although typically a class bias
permeated the discussions, as sea levels were usually compared to the
elevation of southern Manhattan and not with the more vulnerable areas
such as Far Rockaway, Breezy Point and Staten Island, where workers and
the poor were the residents. Even a slight rise in sea levels means
that a storm surge will reach much further inland than previously,
because the rise allows more water to pass inland without friction from
the shore underneath it.
Weather scientists predicted the immense strength of
the approaching Sandy well ahead of time. Various mobilizations and
evacuations were planned and held. But despite the predictions of
apocalypse, little real preparation was made, a government failure
reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina. The poor were not fully evacuated
from the most dangerous areas and little preparation was made to house
them after the storm was over and their housing was destroyed or
rendered unlivable. As it became clear after the storm, insufficient
supplies of gasoline and heating oil were acquired, nor were the
transformers at Con Ed, the electrical utility, prepared.
Sandy roared ashore with 80 mph winds five miles
south of Atlantic City, New Jersey, at 8 p.m. October 29. It hit New
Jersey and New York city heavily. Sandy simply pulverized the low-lying
areas within its reach. Sandy's pure kinetic energy for storm surge and
wave "destruction potential" reached a 5.8 on the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration's 0 to 6 scale, the highest ever measured.
Translated into life-and-death terms, 125 people died due to the
hurricane in the U.S. (71 in the Caribbean). 72,000 homes and
businesses were damaged or destroyed in New Jersey alone (and up to
200, 000 homes in Cuba). And even when houses near the coast remained
intact, electricity and heat were cut off and the population was
subjected to great suffering. Sandy was almost as costly in money terms
as the last great American disaster disgrace, Hurricane Katrina, and
the poor have been treated with equal disdain by the government.
The worst affected by Sandy's destruction were the
poor and working-class, often black and other minority, communities
such as Far Rockaway, Staten Island, Red Hook and Coney Island. An
immense fire broke out in flooded Breezy Point, Queens, and quickly
consumed 80 to 100 homes in that area. Not only the deaths and
injuries, but the complete destruction of housing or the rendering of
houses unlivable, plus the lack of electricity and heating oil for
houses that were still intact, created tremendous suffering and
destroyed the finances of thousands of workers and poor people.
The rich capitalists often forced workers into storm
danger, which cost at least one life. A Ghanaian immigrant was told by
his "big boss" (his words) to watch the expensive cars in the basement
of the Manhattan business; it was inundated with water and he did not
return. In another incident, a group of transit workers who had been
ordered to work in a dangerous area of Coney Island by their bosses
barely escaped with their lives.
Much of Manhattan, inhabited by Wall Street and many
rich capitalist businesses and upper-middle class flunkeys of the rich,
was brought back to a functioning state fairly quickly. The subways
were drained and power restored, mainly due to heroic efforts by
unionized transit and electrical workers working 16-hour shifts. But
still, lower Manhattan remains in trouble – in this case partly trouble
for its rich owners. Apparently 15 to 18 million square feet of office
space in the area is still unusable, due to lack of electrical and
phone service. This is an area equal to all the office space in Dallas
or Miami. Verizon, which provides phone service to the area, is having
to entirely replace both its copper-wire and fiber-optic conduits, a
job which may not be done for months.
Relief did not come quickly – or at all -- for the poor, for the
working class.
For workers who live in Manhattan, like those of
devastated outlying areas, conditions remained terrible. The Lower East
Side and Chinatown, both immigrant areas, experienced very serious
destruction. Lack of preparation by the authorities resulted in
immediate widespread shortages of gasoline and heating oil. New York
Mayor Bloomberg ordered city workers back to work within a few days of
the storm, so thousands of city and other workers were threatened with
loss of their jobs if they could not report for work, despite the
obvious excuse of the storm and lack of gasoline, while at home they
suffered from the fall cold. This was a big case of neglect of the
workers and poor by the city, state and federal governments. It is
inexcusable that insufficient supplies were on hand; there had been
plenty of warning. In addition, it turns out that Con Ed's transformers
had not been maintained properly; in a dramatic explosion over darkened
Manhattan one of them failed during the storm.
The rising waters also brought threats to nuclear
plants. Five plants in the New York area reported problems, and one in
New Jersey had to shut down.
Meanwhile, the outer communities near the ocean were
devastated. Far Rockaway, Red Hook, Staten Island and others were
nearly in ruins. Houses that remained standing were often filled with
water. Some of these areas are without power even today! The treatment
of the workers and poor during and after Sandy is a monstrous crime by
the rich!
Despite the massive destruction of the homes of the
poor and the workers, there was no big effort on the part of Obama and
the federal government to plan for the re-housing of these people. A
massive investment was needed, but at the time Obama preferred to have
a photo opportunity with Governor Cristie of New Jersey, an opportunity
to hug a Republican. In his tradition of giving nothing to the
foreclosees in the housing crisis while handing trillions to the banks,
Obama and the Democrats offered the Sandy victims honeyed words of
"sympathy" and little massive help.
Now, over a month later, Obama is reportedly asking
Congress for $50 billion in aid, $30 billion less than the governors of
New Jersey and New York had asked for. And why must Obama ask the
skinflint Congress for the money? In 2008 he gaily handed trillions
directly to the banks! Clearly the big bankers who reside in
Connecticut's Gold Shore are way more important to this buddy of Wall
Street than are the poor and minority workers of Far Rockaway or Breezy
Point!
But this indifference was not shared by nearby
workers and progressive activists, and residents themselves protested
in various ways. Residents of the Red Hook community held a mass
meeting in November 14 angrily demanding massive aid. Within days of
the storm large numbers of volunteers rushed to help the critical areas
and large amounts of material aid were donated. Thousands of people
devoted long hours to aid the poor. This was a very moving effort.
Occupy Wall Street leaped to help and wound up setting up the most
efficient organization of aid, so recognized that the National Guard
came to them for training. Occupy set up many relief collection centers
throughout the New York area; today they maintain two in Brooklyn and
one in Philadelphia and continue to supply the people, even though
Mayor Bloomberg ordered the closing of Occupy Sandy's open-air
distribution centers in Rockaway and elsewhere.
Now, over a month after the hurricane, poor workers
in the devastated areas are still without housing and even power in
many places. Occupy Wall Street reported Thursday: "A month after
Hurricane Sandy first hit many residents, homeowners and tenants alike
are still living without electricity, heat, and working appliances.
Black mold is taking hold of walls and other surfaces, and absentee
landlords refuse to fix their properties. Temporary housing is
desperately needed." Many landlords are refusing to fix their
properties as they wait in hopes that rich capitalist developers, who
have been eying these coastal properties for years, will buy them out.
I will end this section of my talk with a poem by a Facbook friend of mine in New York, Mark Naison:
Notorious Phd's
Sandy Jam
Bayonne, Red Hook, Lower East Side
Sandy crushed us while politicians lied
Millions flooded, Breezy's homes in flames
Casualties of Climate Change
Flooded, battered, frightened and cold
From Jersey to Connecticut whether young and old
We found homes and stores and restaurants gone
While fossil fuel giants still piled profits on
Beaten to our knees, we try to recover
We reach out in pain and find one another
Compassion and courage help us restore and rebuild
But if we don't change how we live it could get us all killed
Now Bloomberg wants to run his marathon
On Staten Island where homes are gone
Down Fourth Ave where people fight for gas
Half a mile from Red Hook where food goes fast
It's up to us to make things right
First help one another then carry the fight
To the Big Money people who run this town
Who enrich themselves while poor folks drown.
Hurricane Sandy was an immense disaster for the workers and the poor of the NY-NJ area and an exposure of the failures of the Obama administration in protection and relief for the masses.
But Hurricane Sandy was also a clarion
call to the
masses to take seriously the question of global warming and to debate
the methods of dealing with it. Over the past 3-5 years the U.S. has
seen mounting natural disasters: wildfires in the west due to the
dryness resulting from drought; massive and long-lasting drought
throughout the southwest and elsewhere; unprecedentedly powerful
tornadoes, and others. And all along, average temperatures have kept
rising; north pole ice has kept melting, causing dark, open water and
snowless land to absorb rather than reflect heat; and permafrost in the
near-polar northern regions has been melting, releasing the very
powerful greenhouse gas, methane. And sea levels and sea temperatures
keep creeping up.
Then came the disaster of Sandy. It
arrived right in
the middle of the presidential election campaign, while Obama and
Romney were avoiding mention of global warming in the presidential
debates. They might as well have agreed not to mention the elephant in
the room, because he was ignored until he roared through the East Coast
in the shape of Hurricane Sandy, Sandy demonstrated how serious the
stakes are in the global warming question. The accepted wisdom about
global warming had recently been that it might be causing some
disasters. Hurricane Sandy shifted that general viewpoint forward, to
the view that while global warming cannot be proven to directly cause
any individual disaster, it amplifies them and creates an environment
in which greater and greater disasters are inevitable. A parallel might
be that as a drought dries huge areas, you cannot say that the drought
itself lit this or that fire directly, but with the drought the
likelihood of fires and their intensity have both increased. The result
is more and more destructive fires. Warming conditions, in the case of
Sandy. can be said to have "raised the baseline" for further weather
turbulence.
For example, higher water temperatures
provide more
energy for hurricanes to feed on and intensify, and the temperatures in
the ocean off New York in September were 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit above
the long-term average. The higher sea levels, even of 8 inches, meant
that the storm would be far more destructive. Its destructiveness was
also increased by Sandy's merger with the Nor'easter, considered a
North Atlantic typhoon; this storm was forced south by changes in the
northern jet stream brought about by the melting of sea ice due to
warming.
The result is that, while Sandy cannot
be said to be
caused, as a storm, by global warming, its size and destructiveness
could only be caused by global warming. It was "Frankenstorm" because
of global warming, nothing else.
In a recent op-ed in the Washington
Post, James
Hansen at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York
clarified the relationship of warming to disasters. He blamed climate
change for excessive drought, based on six decades of measurements, not
computer models: "Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say
that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and
to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly
linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for
the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no
explanation other than climate change." He went on to write that the
Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and
Oklahoma in 2011 could each be attributed to climate change, concluding
that "the odds that natural variability created these extremes are
minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like
quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the
bills."
So it is with natural disasters like
hurricane
Sandy. Warmer ocean waters, due to global warming, cause more intense
hurricanes. Rising sea levels mean that they cause more damage to human
life and property. And when you look around and see greater and greater
droughts, more intense tornadoes, bigger wildfires and a whole list of
amplified natural disasters, you cannot help but be influenced to see
global warming as an underlying cause.
And the masses of working people in the
U.S. are
starting to see this; the attacks of the right-wing warming-deniers on
pointy-headed professors' "fantasies" about warming are wearing thin.
The handwriting is being seen on the wall further and further from the
scientific community.
Hurricane Sandy raises two questions:
how to defend
the masses of workers and poor in the face of increased dangers and how
to combat global warming.
And just this week a new, even more
deadly natural
disaster hit the world – Typhoon Bopha in the Philippines. ("Typhoon"
is the name for Asian hurricanes.) With raging winds at 150 miles an
hour, this savage storm has killed over 540 people, with 825 still
missing, including 200 fishermen. This total exceeds that of last
December's Typhoon Pablo, which killed over 400. The latest news is
that Typhoon Bopha has turned around and come back to the Philippines
(fortunately as a weakened storm), this time to northern rather than
southern Luzon, the biggest island in the archipelago. Add these
typhoons to Hurricane Sandy and an even stronger case is made for
global warming as an underlying cause of greatly intensified natural
disasters.
Plus, the threat Sandy offered to nuke
plants makes
that case even stronger, as it reminds us of the precarious nature of
the plants in the U.S., many of which antiquated and as dangerously
constructed as the Fukushima plants, are near rising waters, in flood
zones or are built upon earthquake faults. The ongoing crisis at the
Fukushima plants in Japan underlines how serious this threat is.
The capitalists and their governments
around the
world do not take global warming seriously. The U.S. Government refused
to sign the Kyoto agreement on global warming in 1997; today it and the
Chinese fake-communist government, which ludicrously claims that China
is just a poor developing country, are resisting most efforts against
global warming, not because they are insufficient but in order to
preserve capitalist profits. And the other capitalist governments
through most of the world are following suit. The program of Kyoto,
called "cap-and-trade," has been proven to be utterly ineffective. CO2
levels and temperatures have continued to rise and more rapidly than
predicted. The reason cap-and-trade has failed is that it is a
neoliberal market measure. That means that, instead of the governments
regulating and enforcing major cuts in CO2 emissions, an artificial
market in pollution permits was set up in the belief that price signals
would encourage the plutocrats to cut emissions efficiently simply as a
result of their drive for profits. A ridiculously complex system was
set up, but the capitalists were not to be lured away from their
polluting and emissions continued to rise.
As cap and trade flounders, the next
program in line
for trial, the carbon tax, is also a market measure in that it, too,
merely seeks to use price signals to encourage the capitalists to
cut their emissions. This, too, will fail, while it will alienate the
working people against environmentalism because the costs to the
capitalists of the carbon tax will just be passed along like any other
cost increase to them – onto the backs of the public, in other words,
largely on the working class majority of the country.
The only method that will stop the
growth of CO2
emissions is straight-up governmental regulation, as was done (not very
well) in 1978 when the chlorofluorocarbons threatened the ozone layer.
But that was a much smaller problem than the CO2 emissions of today. It
will take very vigorous government regulation of industry to cut
today's emissions sufficiently to slow global warming. The working
class must fight for serious environmental planning and strict
regulation of the capitalist polluters, and for enforcement of this
regulation. If any of this takes place before a socialist
revolution, it will be through a constant struggle against the repeated
attempts of the bourgeoisie to undermine and subvert environmental
regulation and against its attempts to carry regulation out in a way
that squeezes the masses; this may become one of the triggers for
a working-class socialist revolution.
Thank you.
With that, I open the discussion. Please
feel free
to get refreshments and to bring up any points or questions that you
wish. <>
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