The water this time

MIAMI – In Miami, the water has arrived. The city is abuzz with talk about it.

For days last week, it seemed Miami Beach was returning to its natural, primeval, pre-drainage state:  swampland.

They say there are no atheists in a trench, and I doubt there were many climate-change deniers among the residents of coastal southeast Florida as the water rose, turning streets into streams, disabling cars, flooding homes, and turning motor scooters into junk.

In the early 1960s, the great African American novelist James Baldwin (1924-1987), published a book of essays, “The Fire Next Time“, in which he commented on the dismal state of race relations in the United States at the birth of the civil rights movement.

Baldwin related the way being “a Negro” in white America had affected his life, but also worried about the danger inherent in rage in the Black community. He once wrote that if it weren’t for drugs and alcohol, “blood would run in the streets of Harlem.”

But these substances will numb people into inaction only for so long. In retrospect, as American cities erupted into bloody and fiery racial riots–Watts, Detroit, Washington, DC in the wake of the murder of Martin Luther King, Miami several times culminating in the catastrophic 1980 riot, and the even the more destructive Los Angeles riot a dozen years later–Baldwin’s book reads like an omen, a cautionary tale

Ironically, the title of Baldwin’s book comes from a phrase in a Negro spiritual: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water but fire next time”.

Miami has had more than its share of fire and may have more in the future, but now for this city, it’s the water this time.

The “King Tide“, downpours typical of this time of the year, and the effect of the outer bands of Hurricane  Joaquin have taken most of the blame. But all that has happened before. No way I am buying the convenient lie. As a teenager I lived on Miami Beach and there was water like this only when a hurricane made a direct hit on the barrier island. There is something more ominous happening today: climate change.

On climate change there have been many warnings like Baldwin’s–former NASA scientist James Hansen’s as early as his1988 testimony in Congress; the increasingly urgent reports of the thousands of scientists who make up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; Al Gore’s much criticized but on-target book and film “An Inconvenient Truth”; Pope Francis’s recent encyclical…

These warnings have been largely ignored or ridiculed, at least in this country, although not so much in places like the Pacific islands and Bangladesh. One reason is that the water here is not as dire as there. Many parts of the country in fact are experiencing drought. Most people have a hard time connecting the dots between floods, drought, and climate change. But there is a connection.

An even more important factor than ignorance of the connection is something I learned in one of my earliest sociology courses. It came from a the writings of an anthropologist whose name I cannot recall (and not even Google could help me dig it up) who argued that there are two logics at work in American society.

One is the ordinary logic used, for instance, by scientists, mathematicians and most ordinary people, in which truth is based on facts and evidence.

The second logic he called “pecuniary logic.” That’s the logic of money, and in this logic what counts is whatever is most useful for the purposes of money making. Advertisers and used car salesmen are notorious for their employment of this kind of logic, but it’s also used frequently by plastic surgeons, funeral directors, and many others, notably politicians.

Money, especially in the United States, being the mother’s milk of politics, as a former Republican U.S Senator from Texas (Phil Gramm) once remarked–a comment typical of GOP thinking in its cynicism but rare  in its frankness and truth value–scientific logic has been politically trounced repeatedly by pecuniary logic when it comes to climate.

What is the disappearance of a few insignificant islands compared to the gargantuan profits of the fossil fuel companies and a declining but still significant number of jobs–including some of the last decent-paying working class jobs out there–in key electoral states?

Republicans are the main practitioners of pecuniary logic in general but in this case far too many Democrats from coal or oil states have joined in as well.

The rub for the climate change deniers in either party, however, is that the water this time is here, in our own backyards–and in our front yards too.

Indeed, the threat extends far beyond the Sunshine state, spanning the entire eastern seaboard. Residents up and down the coast were relatively lucky this time because hurricane Joaquin stayed far from shore. But they will be other hurricanes which will make a left rather than a right turn. What then?

The idea of reversing or even stopping climate change, or for that matter massive species extinction, the turning of much of Florida Bay into a dead zone, and all the other environmental damage done by the way our civilization works, is a non-starter. It’s far too late for that. Greenhouse gases have been increasing in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.

But there is still time and the means to slow down things from looming disaster to sad but somewhat manageable deterioration, a final chance. World leaders will meet in Paris in December to try to hammer out an agreement on how to deal with climate change.

That represents a glimmer of hope. Another is the fact that the world’s biggest polluters, China (in absolute terms) and the United States (in per capita terms), have been talking about substantially lowering their own emissions. The talks in Paris should conclude with an agreement for radical change. That is what this crisis requires. But, given the pull of pecuniary logic, they won’t.

At the very least the talks must produce a strong agreement with hard teeth. The citizens of this country must finally wake up and demand from its leaders that this nation lead rather than continue to act as the main brake in confronting climate change.

Undoubtedly, the usual suspects in corporate America and the Republican Congress will exert tough pressure to get the Obama administration to ensure any agreement is soft and full of loopholes. Obama must reject such pressures.

You can be sure, however, that whatever the agreement, Congress will try to block it or at least undermine it. Recent weather events should persuade Republicans and fossil fuel Democrats away from their knee-jerk rejectionism. For, in America, the water this time is here.

However, the next election is also almost here. I fear pecuniary logic could trump all reason in the best Congress money can buy.