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Overview
For twenty years, Mark Hertsgaard has investigated global warming for outlets including the New Yorker, NPR, Time, Vanity Fair, and the Nation. But the full truth did not hit home until he became a father and, soon thereafter, learned that climate change had already arrived―a century earlier than forecast―with impacts bound to worsen for decades to come. Hertsgaard's daughter Chiara, now five years old, is part of what he has dubbed "Generation Hot"--the two billion young people worldwide who will spend the rest of their lives coping with mounting climate disruption.
HOT is a father's cry against climate change, but most of the book focuses on solutions, offering a deeply reported blueprint for how all of us―as parents, communities, companies and countries―can navigate this unavoidable new era. Combining reporting from across the nation and around the world with personal reflections on his daughter’s future, Hertsgaard provides "pictures" of what is expected over the next fifty years: Chicago’s climate transformed to resemble Houston’s; dwindling water supplies and crop yields at home and abroad; the redesign of New York and other cities against mega-storms and sea-level rise. Above all, he shows who is taking wise, creative precautions. For in the end, HOT is a book about how we’ll survive.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547504445 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 894,878 |
| File size: | 589 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Living Through the Storm
The first thing that struck me ... was the magnitude of the risks and the potentially devastating effects on the lives of people across the world. We were gambling the planet.
— SIR NICHOLAS STERN, British economist, House of Lords
Chiara and I began reading fairy tales together long before she could understand the words or even focus her eyes on the pages. She was a week old, just released from her ordeal in intensive care, and normal things felt almost magical. It was bliss to sit in a rocking chair, cradle her tiny body against mine, and lull her to sleep with The Three Billy-Goats Gruff, The Adventures of Peter Pan, or The Hobbit. And so began our ritual. Chiara and I would read books together every night before bed and again the first thing the next morning, when we slipped downstairs early to give her mother some much-needed extra rest. We read fairy tales, nursery rhymes, picture books, Italian books, even adult nonfiction (the words didn't matter to Chiara at that point; it was enough for her to hear my voice). As the days became weeks and months, Chiara grew to adore books and the stories they contained. And her father came to understand that fairy tales offer valuable lessons to children and adults alike in the face of global warming.
Found in almost every culture, fairy tales are some of the oldest, best-loved stories on earth. They are passed down through generations not only because they amuse children (and help parents get them to sleep) but because they offer comfort and inspiration. In The Uses of Enchantment, psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim argued that fairy tales enable children to make sense of the world around them and to face the fact that "a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence." But, Bettelheim continues, "if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end emerges victorious."
The first fairy tale Chiara fell in love with was The Nutcracker. She was about eighteen months old when she developed an obsession (and believe me, obsession is the word) with Tchaikovsky's magnificent score of E. T. A. Hoffmann's Christmas tale. Though she had only just begun to talk in full sentences, she insisted on hearing the story and music again and again. The plot is simple: At a Christmas party, Clara is given a nutcracker by her godfather, an inventor with a hint of magic about him. Clara falls asleep under the Christmas tree, clutching the toy. She awakens at midnight to see that the nutcracker, now grown as large as she, has come under attack from an army of giant mice, led by a king with seven heads. Just as the king is about to slay the nutcracker, Clara leaps into the fray and kills the mouse with a well-aimed hurl of her shoe. Her gesture transforms the nutcracker into a handsome prince, who shows his gratitude by inviting her to his kingdom, the Land of Sweets, where they live happily ever after.
After seeing The Nutcracker ballet onstage, Chiara began acting out the story at home. She invariably cast herself as Clara; her mother or I was assigned to play the godfather, the prince, or both. One day, after she and I had played the game for about the three hundredth time, I got distracted. To my half-listening ears, the music seemed to indicate the start of the battle scene, so as the prince I began to brandish my sword. A puzzled look appeared on Chiara's face. It took her a moment to realize that her father was confused. She looked up and carefully explained, "No, Daddy. It is still the party. The danger is not here yet."
The party, so long and pleasurable, that gave rise to global warming is indeed still under way. Despite years of warnings about overheating the atmosphere, we humans are still merrily riding in cars and airplanes, building pipelines and power plants, gobbling meat, clearing forests, expanding our houses and suburbs, and doing a thousand other things that emit the greenhouse gases that cause the problem. There has been a lot of talk about going green, but the economies of most nations are still based on burning oil, coal, and other carbon-based fuels, so emissions continue to increase. Meanwhile, the party gets more crowded and raucous by the day, as global population swells, the wealthy pursue ever more luxurious lifestyles, and the poor yearn for their own taste of the comforts fossil fuels can provide.
If most of us nevertheless seem in no hurry for the party to stop, the second half of Chiara's statement suggests why: the danger is not here yet, at least for most of us. The majority of the world's people have not been hit by climate change yet; it has not cost us a house, a livelihood, or a loved one. Sure, we may feel nervous about the recent erratic weather, we may feel disturbed by news reports of distant tragedies, but our daily lives continue pretty much as before. And so the party continues.
For millions of less fortunate people, however, indifference to climate change has become an unaffordable luxury. For them, the danger is now.
While visiting Bangladesh for this book, I met a little girl who was almost exactly Chiara's age. Her name was Sadia, and her father was the unofficial mayor of a village that was literally disappearing beneath his feet. The village, Antarpara, used to straddle the mighty Brahmaputra River. Like most of the rivers that course through Bangladesh, the Brahmaputra originates in the snowpack of the Himalayan mountains. But rising temperatures were now melting the snow faster and, along with stronger monsoon rains, boosting the river's volume. No one could say for sure that the excessive flooding was caused by global warming — after all, Bangladesh has a long history of flooding. But the flooding of Antarpara was certainly consistent with what scientists projected as global warming unfolded: faster glacial melting and more volatile monsoon rains.
"You cannot definitively attribute any single extreme event to climate change, but the overall pattern is clear," said Saleemul Huq, a Bangladeshi biologist who directed the climate change program at the Institute for International Economics and Development in London and who had invited me to his native country. "In Bangladesh, we know very wellwhat a 1-in-20-years-size flood looks like. We've had them for centuries. But in the last twenty years, we've had four floods of that magnitude: in 1987, 1988, 1995, and 2005. This suggests we have entered a new pattern where we get a 1-in-20-years event about every 10 years. This is something we have to worry about now, not in the future."
Anisur Rahman, the mayor of Antarpara, was a broad- shouldered man who wore a dirty blue shirt and tattered rubber sandals. As we stood by the bank of the Brahmaputra, gazing out at the sluggish, silver-white current, he told me, "This river comes from India. For some reason, the water in India is increasing, so the floods here are bigger. They are sweeping away our houses, even the land beneath them. There were 239 families in this village before. Now we are 38 families."
Clustered around the mayor as we talked were dozens of villagers, mainly women in cheap bright saris — lime green, sky blue, scarlet — with skinny children clinging to their necks. "I have had to move my house seven times in the last twenty-eight years," said Charna, a haggard mother of two. "I used to live over there," she said, gesturing toward the middle of the river, "but floods washed the land away and I had to move here."
Later, when I bade the mayor goodbye, he was holding his daughter in his arms. Sadia was a pretty, solemn little girl, about eighteen months old. She was the mayor's first child, and he definitely wanted her to go to school one day, but it would not be in Antarpara. "By the time she is old enough," he explained, "this village won't be here."
There is a terrible injustice at the heart of the climate problem: climate change punishes the world's poor first and worst, even though they did almost nothing to bring it on. After all, they cannot afford to drive gasoline vehicles, fly in airplanes, eat much meat, or inhabit the climate- controlled buildings that are the principal contributors to global warming. "Eighty percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the richest 20 percent of the world's people," said Saleemul Huq. "The poorest 20 percent of the world's people are responsible for less than 1 percent of emissions. But because of their lack of resources, they will probably account for 90 percent of the deaths those emissions cause. This means that climate change is no longer just an environmental or energy or economic problem. It is also a justice problem."
"You'll Remember How Nice Summers Used to Be"
Even for the rich, climate change is now a matter of self- interest. "I attended a conference recently and found myself talking with an executive of DuPont, the chemical company," said Chris West, the director of the UK Climate Impacts Programme, a British government agency that educates local governments, businesses, and individuals on how to manage the impacts of climate change. "[This executive] told me about all the green initiatives that DuPont had launched — shrinking its carbon footprint, reducing its toxic emissions, just treating the environment better in general. 'Jolly good,' I said. 'But is DuPont also prepared for how the environment might treat you?' He didn't know what I was talking about. I asked how many facilities his company had around the world. 'About three hundred,' he said. I asked how many of them were located in floodplains. He didn't know. I said, 'Don't you think you should?'"
As we begin the second decade of the twenty-first century, every person on earth finds himself or herself in the same boat as that DuPont executive. Like the executive, we are largely unaware of what is about to hit us, even as we congratulate ourselves on our blossoming environmental awareness. Many of us have heard about global warming and want action taken against it. But few of us have reckoned with the inconvenient truth that climate change is going to keep coming at us no matter what for a long time. We do not realize that serious climate impacts are inevitable in the years immediately ahead. We have not considered how harsher heat waves, melting snowpacks, and other inevitable climate impacts will affect our work, homes, children, and communities; much less have we taken steps to reduce our vulnerability.
Don't you think we should?
"The point we have to get across to people is that the future is not going to be like the past. It's human nature to assume it will be, but with climate change that's no longer true," said Kris Ebi, an independent scientist who began analyzing global warming while working for the U.S. electric utility industry and later coauthored a chapter of the Fourth Assessment Report about health impacts. "I do a lot of speaking at colleges and universities, and even there this message hasn't gotten through," added Ebi, who has two adult daughters. "I told one class, 'When you're my age, you'll think back to how nice summers used to be. Summers in the future will be a lot less comfortable than today.'"
How did the students respond? I asked.
"They didn't say much, but their eyes got very big," Ebi replied.
Fear of climate change is only natural, and it is perhaps inevitable that some people take refuge in denial. One father I met in San Francisco, a city proud of its green consciousness, told me that he deliberately avoided news about climate change — it was too depressing, especially when he thought about the implications for his kids, aged seven and four. "I think people my age will be all right," he said. "Things will be tolerable for the next twenty years or so. But our kids are screwed."
Avoiding unwelcome truths may be standard procedure for human beings, but it isn't much of a survival strategy. If there is even a slight possibility of improving our children's chances of coping with what lies in store, how can we choose denial? We wouldn't do that if our child were diagnosed with a life-threatening illness; we would face the awful facts, find the best doctors we could, and pursue every possible treatment option. When Lisa Bennett, a Bay Area mother of two young boys, awoke to the dangers of climate change, she felt compelled to take action. She later explained, "I began to think it a bit crazy that I attended to every bump and scrape on my children's little bodies and budding egos but largely ignored the threat likely to put sizable areas of the world, including parts of the coastal city where we live, underwater within their lifetime."
To borrow again from fairy tales, it is facing the dragon, as scary as that may be, that calls forth the heroes who deliver victories. "The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination," observed the writer G. K. Chesterton. "What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon." Often the heroes who kill dragons are ordinary people, as frightened as anyone but impelled to do the right thing. In The Nutcracker, Clara must attack the seven-headed mouse king in order to save her beloved nutcracker. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her companions must bring back the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West before their wishes are granted. In the Harry Potter series, the young hero must confront and defeat his parents' murderer. Now, in the struggle against climate change, we need thousands of ordinary heroes to step forward and fight for our future.
Happily, there are genuine reasons for hope. Not only do we know what it will take to stop global warming, but most of the necessary technologies and practices are already in hand. Best of all, putting these tools to work could actually strengthen our economy, improve our quality of life, and make money, lots of it.
Ironically, one of the biggest profitmakers is a company that later caused the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history, the BP oil gusher that fouled the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. But in 1999, under different leadership, BP had invested in energy efficiency, which is by far the quickest, most lucrative way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. BP invested $20 million to install more efficient light bulbs, motors, and operating schedules in the company's refineries, offices, and workplaces. Over the next three years, those efficiency improvements lowered BP's energy bills by $650 million. Thus the company's original $20 million investment yielded a profit of $630 million — a stunning thirty-two-fold return on investment. Even organized crime doesn't enjoy those kinds of profit margins.
Plenty of other corporations are following the same path, and so are forward-thinking governments. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative government has subsidized energy efficiency investments that were initially devised by the left-of-center Green Party. Every year, the German government funds the renovation of 5 percent of the nation's pre-1978 housing stock, covering the up-front costs of installing more efficient insulation, heating, and electrical systems. The program is widely regarded as a win-win-win. The annual 1.5 billion Euros in subsidies are recouped through lower energy costs. Greenhouse gas emissions are reduced. And perhaps most important for a nation struggling with high unemployment rates, the program generates thousands of jobs for construction workers, jobs that by their nature cannot be sent abroad.
In the United States, the state of California boasts comparable achievements. Under the leadership of Governor Jerry Brown in the 1970s, California launched a sustained effort to improve energy efficiency, especially regarding electricity use. We'll discuss specifics in a later chapter, but the results have been remarkable. California's electricity consumption today is roughly the same as thirty years ago, even as the state's population and economy have grown tremendously.
California, Germany, and BP are but three examples of the larger truth: if we're smart, the fight against climate change can repair, not ruin, our economies. Renovating our homes, workplaces, farms, transportation, and other systems to run on low-carbon energy sources will cost money up front, but it will create jobs, spur innovation, and boost profits over the long term. Installing the protections needed against heat waves, sea level rise, and other future climate impacts could likewise stimulate enormous amounts of economic activity, especially for the construction industry and other labor-intensive sectors. Indeed, the green economy is shaping up as the largest growth field of the twenty-first century; a 2009 study by the HSBC Bank calculated that the global green economy will grow from a $500 billion market today to a $2 trillion market by 2020. Germany and China, the world's two leading export powers, clearly recognize this opportunity and are moving quickly to seize it; the jury is still out on the United States.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Hot"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Mark Hertsgaard.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Prologue: Growing Up Under Global Warming 1
1. Living Through the Storm 15
2. Three Feet of Water 31
3. My Daughter’s Earth 47
4. Ask the Climate Question 74
5. The Two-Hundred-Year Plan 107
6. Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? 128
7. In Vino Veritas: The Business of Climate Adaptation 159
8. How Will We Feed Ourselves? 177
9. While the Rich Avert Their Eyes 218
10. “This Was a Crime” 247
Epilogue: Chiara in the Year 2020 292
Acknowledgments 295
Notes 299
Index 319