Fear

When It Helps, When It Hurts

Boarded-up 7-11 store in the path of Milton, but still offering water and sandbags

Since I couldn’t sleep, I figured I might as well write. I couldn’t sleep because of the picture in my mind—that tightly coiled ball of physics we’re calling Hurricane Milton as it tracks mercilessly across the Gulf of Mexico, headed toward a landfall tonight along the west coast of Florida. It scares me, for two reasons.

The first is the unrivaled speed with which it spun up, from tropical storm to Category 5 monster inside a day. This “rapid intensification” has become an increasingly common feature of hurricanes, because the heat content in the ocean is so high that the old models no longer suffice. We live, more and more, in a world of instant chaos: where wildfires can “blow up” in a matter of minutes because the fuels that feed them are so desiccated, where “flash” floods can, in minutes, turn a record rain into a street clogged with bobbing cars. These things have always been possible, but now they are common: we have in our minds the idea that the world changes at a geologic pace, moving in stately fashion through epochs and eras. But right now—as carbon dioxide accumulates more quickly in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 500 million years—”geologic pace” is measured in months. Hell, glaciers—our metaphor for moving slowly—disappear from one winter to the next.

And the second reason is: this speeded up physics is increasingly crashing into the heart of the civilizations that we’ve built. Given the size of the planet, it’s more likely than not that a disaster will happen in somewhere sparsely populated—the boreal forests of Canada burned last summer, displacing Indigenous people of the north but mostly avoiding cities. Even Hurricane Helene last week came ashore in the Big Bend country north of Cedar Key, where people are thin on the ground. But just as California’s wildfires eventually and inevitably started taking out whole towns, Milton is aimed at one of the most built-up and vulnerable landscapes on earth. I think—from this morning’s bearings—that the very worst outcome may be dodged: if the hurricane comes in just south of Tampa Bay, its counterclockwise winds will work to drive the storm surge off that body of water. But if so it will mean sheer agony for somewhere further south, somewhere almost as overbuilt. Sarasota? Port Charlotte? And in very short order that will mean deep trouble for the insurance industry, already tottering in Florida

(It’s worth noting, if only in passing, that the two places Americans of my age thought of as refuges, idylls, dreams of the easy life were California and Florida. No longer).

We’ve spent some time in recent years worrying that there was too much fear-mongering and doom-saying in the way we talked about climate change—that it was wearing people out. And indeed there’s truth there—if we’re going to do what we must, the story in the years ahead needs to be as much about the adventure of turning our planet solar as the dread that we’ll turn our planet Venus.

But there are important moments when fear is a crucial resource. A week ago, in the wake of Helene, the veteran climate activist and North Carolina native Anna Jane Joyner wrote this dispatch from New York’s “Climate Week”

There were fancy parties, cheerful sun imagery and giant signs reading “HOPE.” The dominant theme was: We can solve this! We need to tell hopeful climate stories! But there’s no “solving” a hurricane wiping out western North Carolina, hundreds of miles from the sea. Only focusing on optimism is like telling a cancer patient that everything will be OK if they just stay positive. At best, it comes across as out of touch; at worst, it feels callous. Yes, we can still prevent the worst impacts and must demand our governments scale solutions and act urgently, but we cannot minimize the horrors unfolding now, or that it will get worse in the coming years.

And yesterday, on air, the veteran Florida weatherman John Morales let his fear show through. As Cara Buckley recounted in the Times,

“It’s just an incredible, incredible, incredible hurricane,” Mr. Morales said of Milton, closing his eyes and slightly shaking his head. “It has dropped. …”

His voice faltered. He looked down, drew a shaky breath and continued, “… it has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours.” For viewers who didn’t understand the staggering implications of this barometric plunge, Mr. Morales’s choked delivery said enough. “I apologize,” he said in a quavering voice. “This is just horrific.”

This kind of fear is entirely useful—there are, I have no doubt, people who left their homes and drove north towards Georgia after hearing the break in Morales’ voice. He saved lives. And he did it entirely honestly. “You know what’s driving that,” he said to viewers. “I don’t need to tell you. Global warming. Climate change.” It’s honest fear, driven by deep understanding. As Morales wrote in an essay in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists last year

“As the temperature of the planet increases, my confidence in forecasting storm intensity is decreasing… Today I am no longer as comfortable in putting everyone at ease in regard to the strength of a storm. I am afraid of rapid intensification cycles happening at the drop of a hat.”

The fear of a planet where the old rules no longer hold is the ultimate fear—because then how do you even think about the future? And that’s as true as politics as it is in meteorology. The deep fear that wakes me up at night has only partly to do with the weather weather; it’s the political fronts moving through America that scare me just as much. In the wake of Helene, absurd lies about FEMA spread across social media, fueled of course by the GOP nominee. Josh Marshall, one of the finest trackers of political craziness in this country, reports this morning that the news currently circulating on the right is that Milton and Helene were the result of “weather manipulation” by Democrats designed to…something.

That, of course, is dishonest fear, driven by dishonest people. And those dishonest people may well end up in control of our country. We have 26 days left, and every one of them counts. We need to hold our nerve, do the work, and see if we can bring America safely through Hurricane Trump. That won’t deliver us to safety, but it’s a start.

In other energy and climate news:

A very useful essay from Hamilton Nolan on the emerging insurance crisis

What you are seeing here is the unfolding of a process that is as certain as the rising sun. Humans emit greenhouse gases that cause climate change. This generates a lot of short term wealth as well as problems that reveal themselves in the long term, incentivizing companies to keep snatching profits as long as possible despite exacerbating the eventual costs of the problem. Natural disasters, particularly storms and wildfires, grow more intense over time. Insurance rates for homeowners in areas prone to these disasters rise, quickly becoming unaffordable. Said homeowners panic and demand relief from their politicians. This is where we are now.

Instead of either letting the market brutally drive us away from the coasts, or empowering the government to manage our retreat in a sensible way, he predicts we’ll choose the worst of both worlds.

Due to the nature of our political system, which rewards cowardice and punishes anyone who might dare to tell coastal homeowners that they are fucked, we are going to get a blend of the worst aspects of both options. Politicians will demand federal bailouts of the costs associated with each disaster, and they will introduce various regulations and financial schemes to artificially hold down the price of insurance—well below its true price, meaning a price that would allow insurance companies to fully pay for all of the costs that climate change will impose. These costs will continually increase. Eventually, the costs to the nation of subsidizing the ability of people to live in unwise locations will be so enormous that all the rest of the citizens will revolt

Meanwhile, in the Atlantic, the ever-insightful Zoe Schlanger explains that America needs to get serious about the cost of these disasters. A good line: “Exceptional circumstances, too often repeated, cease to be exceptions.”

And at the New Republic, the invaluable Kate Aronoff has, as usual, some insights of her own, calling for Housing Resilience Authorities, or HRAs

Rather than continuing to leave critical planning decisions up to the insurance industry, HRAs would provide public disaster insurance—filling the considerable gaps in private-sector coverage—and coordinate comprehensive disaster risk-reduction activities, taking the burden off individuals to “harden” their homes against worsening extreme weather events. The idea is to “make sure we’re deploying resources to de-risk communities before storms. Prevention is the strongest way of getting ahead of this problem. Prevention can look like all sorts of different things: from building infrastructure to hardening assets,” including homes and businesses. “Maybe it means selective managed retreat. But it means really reducing the harm before it happens.” Supplemental public insurance would provide coverage to multifamily housing providers, mobile home dwellers, and other neglected sectors, with the aim of creating a more direct relationship between risk mitigation and insurance provision than what currently exists. That setup incentivizes the HRA to reduce risks across the state through public investment—i.e., strengthening bridges against severe flooding—rather than curating a more favorable risk pool by dropping customers, or whole geographic areas.

And just in case you had any doubts about the seriousness of this all, those radicals over at the Wall Street Journal had a long piece about how the climate crisis, even before Milton, was helping wreck the Florida real estate market

Florida’s population soared between 2021 and 2023, making it the fastest-growing state during much of that period. Remote work and other lifestyle changes that were spurred by the pandemic accelerated a migration trend to the Southeast, and the Sunshine State in particular. 

But surging insurance costs, high mortgage rates and high home prices have more people reassessing the Florida dream. Those who must sell their homes right now because of life changes are finding a frosty reception as demand dwindles.

After doubling between 2017 and 2024, home prices in most of the state have been mostly flat since March 2023. But with homes valued at all-time highs in many locations, analysts worry that a price correction might be just around the corner.

“It’s definitely been a sizable increase over the last couple of years in inventory, and that sets us apart from other states,” said Brad O’Connor, chief economist at Florida Realtors. “We could see some price deterioration in some areas.”

+Just as a reminder, on this storm-soaked day, the world’s deepest problem may be that we’re running short of water.

River flows around the world fell to all-time lows last year amid record heat, endangering water supplies in an era of growing demand, a U.N. weather agency report showed on Monday.

Prolonged droughts cut river flows in large parts of North, Central and South America with the Mississippi and Amazon River basins reporting record low water levels in 2023, according to the State of Global Water Resources report based on data going back 33 years.

+California governor Gavin Newsom vetoed bills that would have made it easier for schools and apartment buildings to use energy that they generate on their own roofs. Newsom is emerging as the champion less of renewable energy than of the incumbent utilities and the unions that work for them; it’s a strange twist to what should be one of the country’s great success stories.

Across the country in New York, Governor Kathy Hochul got a straight-up failing grade for her climate efforts or lack thereof this week. As the Climate Can’t Wait taskforce reported,

At almost every opportunity, the Governor has refused to take action to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, transition to new renewable energy projects built by union labor, phase out the use of dangerous fracked gas, and address racial and class inequities.

Governor Hochul’s climate grade for 2024 is a failing D-.  As the climate crisis worsens, threatening communities in New York and around the world, we need a climate leader, and four recent reports referenced below have documented that Hochul has failed in this role. Instead, Governor Hochul has ignored the most fundamental needs of New Yorkers and sided with fossil fuel interests and corporate utilities. 

There is one chance left for partial redemption—the Make Polluters Pay climate superfund bill is still sitting on her desk waiting for a signature.

+Meanwhile in New York, opponents of the Iroquois gas pipeline expansion project kayaked across the Hudson to draw attention to the fight.

And further east in New England climate activists are trying hard to focus public attention on a stealth pipeline expansion that travels under the name Project Maple. It’s a series of connected projects that will increase the carrying capacity for natural gas in the region, but apparently broken up into smaller pieces to avoid having to get federal approval. As the activists point out, all the states in the region have aggressive climate targets, so “any work done now will end up stranded assets at ratepayers’ expense as emissions reduction laws on the books take effect, and will contribute to the climate crisis until they are shut down.”

And as long as we’re on pipelines, Lisa Sorg in Inside Climate News is continuing her powerful series on the proposed Transco pipeline in North Carolina. This week she interviews beekeepers who will lose their hives. It’s a poignant story

+Remember the other half of the fossil fuel equation, the pollution it produces and the damage that does to lungs. Nevada pediatrician Debra Hendrickson has an important new book, The Air They Breathe

Medicine was my second career. I was an environmental studies major in college and then went to graduate school in forestry. After my kids were born I went to medical school to become a pediatrician.

The merging of my two careers happened during the Yosemite Rim fire in 2013, the first in a series of catastrophic smoke crises that would strike Reno in the following years because of the mega-fires in California. During that event, a 10-month-old was brought into my clinic wheezing and struggling to breathe. I was listening to her lungs, and she looked up at me with these big brown eyes, and it struck me like a blow to the chest because I knew that the size of this fire was indicative of the world we were creating for children. I felt this sense of guilt and anger that this little baby was suffering the consequences of decisions made by powerful people who would never have to look her in the face. My two worlds came together in that moment.

+A new report from Global Climate Legal Defense on the worldwide attack on climate activists, including many I’ve come to know over the years. It concludes

“In order to address climate change and climate injustice, we need to defend climate defenders. Defender protection and security support is a fundamental climate strategy, because defenders play a critical role in stopping fossil fuels and advancing the transition to sustainable energy sources. If we do not keep them safe and enable them to carry out their crucial work, we will not be able to limit greenhouse gas emissions and pave the way to a cleaner future.”

Along those lines: such thanks to all who helped get Hoang Hong out of a Vietnamese jail. A fitting ending for the distinguished career of May Boeve as the head of 350.org!

+A Heatmap interview with Hawaii senator Brian Schatz shows him enthusiastic about cutting a deal with the fossil fuel industry for permitting reform. It doesn’t explore directly whether he’d trade the expansion of the LNG export industry, but he does drop an interesting clue

The way I always analyze these bills — from the ITC and PTC extension that was paired with the lifting of the oil export ban [in 2015], to the IRA, to the [Bipartisan Infrastructure Law] — is I let the science and the analysis tell me whether it’s a net positive. And it is preliminary data now from these modeling shops, but it’s encouraging.

Lifting the oil export ban in 2015 led directly to America becoming the world’s largest exporter of hydrocarbons. It’s the most cautionary possible tale for the moment.

+According to the International Institute for Sustainable Development, the G-20 countries are still subsidizing fossil fuel at triple the rate they’re doing for renewables.

+Here’s an interesting model. Caleb Kenna is a remarkable photographer in Vermont, specializing in drone images of the state’s landscape. At the Sheldon Museum next week “participants will be guided through a close observation and reflection in response to” some of his images—the great writers Megan Mayhew Bergman, Cindy Hill, Liza Cochran and Jon Mingle will also be on hand

+I’m grateful to my colleagues at Third Act Faith, and especially Jessica McArdle, for a very fine essay on the moral obligation to vote (and by extension, I think, to campaign)

What makes voting a civic responsibility, a sacred right, and a holy obligation is what the writer and theologian Walter Wink wrote of when laying the groundwork for practical non-violence: voting involves neither passivity nor resorting to violence. It echoes the teaching and activism of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi, who sought the means for transforming relationships through the peaceful transfer of power.

Meanwhile, the Presbyterians are taking no guff from Rep Jim Jordan, who wrote demanding to know why the denomination was wary of investing in fossil fuel. As the Rev. Jihyun Oh said in the church’s official response

The General Assembly of the Church recognizes that climate change is undeniable and is one of the most pressing moral and theological problems of our time.  We come to this position as a theological matter and engage the public policy debate around this and other issues as faithful expression protected under the First Amendment for all religious traditions. As Christians who have covenanted in relationship with God, we are called by God to care and maintain the fragile order with which God has entrusted us (Gen. 2:15). The undeniable urgency of climate change that threatens the planet warrants a response at every religious, social, political, and economic level.

+Here’s a shocker. BP has announced it is reneging on its plan to cut oil output 25% by 2030 and instead will “target several new investments in the Middle East and the Gulf of Mexico to boost its oil and gas output.” For those keeping score, this is an almost exact replay of BP’s announcement in the 1990s that it was henceforth going to be “Beyond Petroleum.” That pledge lasted a few years until the company recanted and decided instead to pollute the Gulf of Mexico.