But not really. Because anything could be targeted. So it was not really military-against-military, as Russia claimed, but anyone-against-anyone. If they could get hold of one of these assemblies.
A heat wave hit Arizona, then New Mexico and west Texas, then east Texas, then Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia and the Florida panhandle. For a week the temperature/humidity index hovered around wet-bulb 35, with temperatures around 110 F and humidity 60 percent. For the most part electrical power remained functioning, and people stayed inside air-conditioned buildings; if they didn’t have air conditioning themselves, or were nervous about losing it, they congregated in public buildings where it existed. All fine, but then the heat wave was met by a high-pressure cell coming up from the Caribbean, and the so-called double wave created wet-bulb 38s, seriously fatal. Demand for power grew until there were power failures and brownouts, and even though some of these were planned to avoid blackouts, and all of them eventually contained, and relatively brief, they still exposed millions to fatal levels of heat. Somewhere between two and three hundred thousand people died in a single day during that heat wave.
Later that figure was revised, as it was discovered over time that the previous decadal census had significantly undercounted the at-risk population. But no matter the exact number, it was huge. Not as large as the great Indian heat wave had been, but this time it was Americans, in America. That fact made a difference, especially to Americans.
Although still, in the months that followed, people’s biases emerged. It was the South where it had happened. It was mostly poor people, in particular poor people of color. It couldn’t happen in the North. It couldn’t happen to prosperous white people. And so on. Arizona’s part in it was forgotten, except in Arizona.
This was yet another manifestation of racism and contempt for the South, yes, but also of a universal cognitive disability, in that people had a very hard time imagining that catastrophe could happen to them, until it did. So until the climate was actually killing them, people had a tendency to deny it could happen. To others, yes; to them, no. This was a cognitive error that, like most cognitive errors, kept happening even when you knew of its existence and prevalence. It was some kind of evolutionary survival mechanism, some speculated, a way to help people carry on even when it was pointless to carry on. People living just twenty miles from a town flattened by a tornado in Ohio would claim that the flattened town was in the tornado track and they were not, so it would never happen to them. The following week they might get killed, in the event itself surprised and feeling that this was an unprecedented freak occurrence, but meanwhile, until then, they swore it couldn’t happen. That’s how people were, and even the torching of the South didn’t change it.
CO2 levels that year were around 470 parts per million.
They had gone from driving a car to hanging on to a tiger’s tail. Hanging on for dear life.
70
COP meetings of the Paris Climate Agreement kept happening every year, despite the increasing sense of irrelevance everyone in attendance felt in the face of the world’s ever-widening disasters. It was clear that the worsening situation vis-à-vis carbon in the atmosphere meant that many of the developing countries, those which could least afford to cope with climate catastrophes, were now being struck by weather disasters on a regular basis, and these were perhaps the prime drivers in the human conflicts now breaking out everywhere. For those who held to that perception of ultimate causes, the Paris Agreement remained something to hold on to, however weak it was beginning to look relative to the crisis.
The UN’s climate negotiations had always made a strong distinction between developed and developing nations, with lists of each specified, and repeated injunctions made that developed nations were to do more to mitigate climate problems than developing nations could. Much of this call for “climate equity” was spelled out in Article 2 of the Paris Agreement. Clause 2 of Article 2 states, “This Agreement will be implemented to reflect equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in light of different national circumstances.” Article 9’s clause 1 repeats this principle: developed nations are to assist developing nations, they can and should do more than developing nations.
These were crucial clauses in the Agreement. The text of these articles and their clauses had been fought over sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, word by word. The delegates who had pushed hardest for the inclusion of these articles had given their all, they had spent years of their lives working for them. On the subway rides during summit meetings they compared notes on divorces, bankruptcies, broken career paths, stress-related illnesses, and all the other personal costs accrued by throwing themselves so hard into this cause.
Were they fools to have tried so hard for words, in a world careening toward catastrophe? Were they fools to keep on trying? Words are gossamer in a world of granite. There weren’t even any mechanisms for enforcement of these so carefully worded injunctions; they were notional only, the international order of governance being a matter of nations volunteering to do things. And then when they didn’t do them, ignoring the existence of their own promises. There was no judge, no sheriff, no jail. No sanctions at all.
But what else did they have? The world runs by laws and treaties, or so it sometimes seems; so one can hope; the granite of the careening world, held in gossamer nets. And if one were to argue that the world actually runs by way of guns in your face, as Mao so trenchantly pointed out, still, the guns often get aimed by way of laws and treaties. If you give up on sentences you end up in a world
