climate crisis – Close Read

Cyclone Biparjoy and Chennai

When is a natural disaster a natural disaster? It began raining in Chennai last evening and hasn’t stopped as of this morning. But it’s been intermittent, with highly variable intensity. In my area, the wind has been feeble. I don’t know the situation in other areas because we haven’t had power since at least 3.45 am. My father tells me, from Bangalore, that early reports say Taramani (southern edge) and Nandanam (heart of the city) received 120 mm in the 24 hours until 5.30 am; Meenambakkam (outside the city, where the airport is) received 140 mm; and Nungambakkam (also heart of the city and near where I am) received 60 mm. @ChennaiRains has tweeted that the average rainfall in June in Chennai is 50 mm. Schools that were reopened just last week – after having been closed for two weeks longer than usual from the summer break due to a heatwave – have been closed again in four districts (Chengalpattu, Chennai, Kancheepuram, and Thiruvallur).

Does Chennai’s situation right now constitute a natural disaster? The consequences give that impression but the facts of the cause don’t. I’m sure some parts of the city have flooded as well, such as Pondy Bazaar (which, ironically, the state government had refurbished a few years ago under the ‘Smart Cities’ mission, including fitting a storm-water drain later found to have a critical design flaw) while many trees have been toppled. This is a city that has brought a state of disaster upon itself, like many other cities in India, thanks to their (oft-elected) leaders.

The problem at hand has two sides. One is that when a city has undermined its own ability to resist the worse consequences of an adverse natural event – such as receiving thrice the expected amount of rainfall for a month within 24 hours – it’s difficult to know what precipitated the disasterness, the state of experiencing a disaster: the city’s poor infrastructure or the intensity of the natural event. Determining exactly which one to blame is a nearly impossible problem to solve but attempting it could reveal, in the process, the most pressing problems to address at the local level. For example, right opposite my house is a vendor of construction materials who tends to close the nearest storm-water drain when loading or unloading sand to/from trucks, causing puddles of water to stagnate on the road, especially over some nasty potholes. There’s also a very rusted transformer at one end of the road and a sewage pipe that has burst at the other end. My block also doesn’t have power because I’m told a feeder line tripped in the night. But more fundamentally, this blame-apportionment exercise – the aggregate of all the local problems, for example – can be useful to piece together the true contributions of urban dysfunction to the city’s current disasterness, and contrast that with what the city’s and the state’s political leaders will soon claim the “actual problem” was, and attempt to take credit for “addressing” it.

The other side of the problem is that, thanks to climate change, we’re required to constantly update the way we think about disasters. For example, The Hindu has a good editorial today on India’s response to Cyclone Biparjoy, which made landfall over Kutch district last week as a ‘very severe cyclonic storm’. Thanks to the India Meteorological Department’s (IMD’s) accurate forecasts and the government response, only two casualties have been reported so far – versus the around-3,000 following a similar event at a similar location in June 1998. One reason there have been so few deaths this time is that the state government evacuated more than a lakh people from coastal areas, sparing them from being injured or killed by parts of their houses being blown in the wind or tossed in the water. That people were evacuated in time is a good thing but, the editorial asks, why do they have houses that can be so easily destroyed in the first place? The point is that disaster response has improved considerably, but it’s nowhere near where it actually needs to be: where the intensity at which a disaster happens following a natural event is much further along than it is today. Put another way, while the response to a disaster may never be perfect, there are ways to measure its success – and then when it is successful, we need to pay attention to how that success was defined.

When 3,000 people died, it was reasonable to ask why the IMD’s forecasts weren’t good enough and how the death toll could be lowered. When two people died, it became time to move past these measures and ask, for example, why so many people had to be evacuated and how many rupees in income they lost (that they won’t be able to recoup). This is less an attempt to downplay the significance of India’s achievement – it really is tremendous progress for 25 years – and more an acknowledgment of the nature of the beast: disasters are getting bigger, badder, and, importantly, pervasive in a way that they endanger more than lives. The living suffer, too. Storms render the seas choppy, destroy boats and fishing nets, deteriorate living conditions in less-than-pucca houses, eliminate livelihoods, and increase (informal) indebtedness. Evacuating a fisher’s family will improve its chance of living to tell the tale, but will that tale be anything other than one of greater destitution? It should be.

A related issue here is the subtle danger of using extreme measures: a focus on saving lives downplays and eventually sidelines the lack of protection for other aspects of living. They might be more recoverable, in a manner of speaking, but that doesn’t mean they will be recovered. And that’s what we need to focus on next, and next, and so forth, until our governments can guarantee the recoverability for everyone of, say, all the amenities assured by the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.

The same goes for rain-battered cities. In the limited context of my locality, my problems are the sewage on the road, the threat of the sewage line mixing with the drinking-water line underground, the risk of a vehicular accident on my street, and power not being restored soon enough. Sure, there might be worse problems elsewhere, but these ones in particular seem to me to belong on the urban-dysfunction side of things. They make day-to-day life difficult, irritating, frustrating. They disrupt routines, increase the cognitive burden, and build stress. Over time, we have less happiness and higher healthcare expenses, both of which diverge unequally for more privileged versus less privileged people. The city as a whole could become more unequal in more ways, and the next time it rains, a new vicious cycle could be born. An agenda limited to saving lives will easily overlook this, as will an agenda that overlooks facets of life that aren’t problematic yet but could soon be.

Or maybe Chennai still has some way to go? The Tamil Nadu revenue and disaster-management minister Sattur Ramachandran just came on TV talking about how it’s notable that no lives were lost…

Tech solutions to household labour are also problems

Just to be clear, the term ‘family’ in this post refers to a cis-het nuclear family unit.

Tanvi Deshpande writing for Indiaspend, June 12, 2022:

The Union government’s ambitious Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) aims to provide tap water to every household in rural India by 2024. Until now, 50% of households have a tap connection, an improvement from August 2019, when the scheme started and 17% of households had a tap connection. The mission’s dashboard shows that in Take Deogao Gram Panchayat that represents Bardechi Wadi, only 32% of the households have tap connections. Of these, not a single one has been provided to Pardhi’s hamlet.
This meant, for around five months every summer, women and children would rappel down a 60-foot well and spend hours waiting for water to seep into the bottom. In India, filling water for use at home is largely a woman’s job. Globally, women and girls spend 200 million hours every day collecting water, and in Asia, one round trip to collect water takes 21 minutes, on average, in rural areas.
The water pipeline has freed up time for Bardechi Wadi’s women and children but patriarchal norms, lack of a high school in the village and of other opportunities for development means that these free hours have just turned into more time for household chores, our reporting found.

Now these women don’t face the risk of death while fetching water but, as Deshpande has written, the time and trouble that the water pipeline has saved them will now be occupied by new chores and other forms of labour. There may have been a time when the latter might have seemed like the lesser of those two evils, but it is long gone. Today, in the climate crisis era – which often manifests as killer heatwaves in arid regions that are already short on water – the problem is access to leisure, to cooling and to financial safeguards. When women are expected to do more chores because they have the time, they lose access to leisure, which is important at least to cool off, but better yet because it is a right per se (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 24).

This story is reminiscent of the effects of the introduction of home appliances into the commercial market. I read a book about a decade ago that documented, among other things, how the average amount of time women (in the US) spent doing household chores hadn’t changed much between the 1920s and the 2000s, even though it coincided wholly with the second industrial revolution. This was because – as in the case of the pipeline of Bardechi Wadi – the purchase and use of these devices freed up women’s time for even more chores. We need the appliances as much as we need the pipeline, just that men should also do household chores. However, the appliances also presented and present more problems than those that pertain to society’s attitudes towards how women should spend their time.

1. Higher expectations – With the availability of household appliances (like the iron box, refrigerator, washing machine, dish washer, oven, etc.), the standards for various chores shot up as did what we considered to be comfortable living – but what we expected of women didn’t change. So suddenly the women of the house were also responsible for ensuring that the men’s shirts and pants were all the more crinkle-less, that food was served fresh and hot all the time, etc. as well as to enliven family life by inventing/recreating food recipes, serving and cleaning up, etc.

2. Work + chores – The introduction of more, and more diverse, appliances into the market, aspirations and class mobility together paralleled an increase in women’s labour-force participation through the 20th century. But before these women left for their jobs and after they got home, they still had to household chores as well – including cooking and packing lunch for themselves and for their husbands and/or children, doing the laundry, shopping for groceries, etc.

3. Think about the family – The advent of tech appliances also foisted on women two closely related responsibilities: to ensure the devices worked as intended and to ensure they fit with the family-unit’s ideals and aspirations. As Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite wrote in 2016: “The automatic processes of programming the coffeemaker, unlocking an iPad with a fingerprint, or even turning on the light when you get home are the result of years of marketing that create a household problem (your home is too dark, your family too far-flung, your food insufficiently inventive), solves it with a new product, and leaves women to clean up the mess when the technology fails to deliver on its promises”.

In effect, through the 20th century, industrialisation happened in two separate ways within the household and without. To use writer Ellen Goodman’s evocative words from a 1983 article: “At the beginning of American history …, most chores of daily life were shared by men and women. To make a meal, men chopped the wood, women cooked the stew. One by one, men’s tasks were industrialized outside the home, while women’s stayed inside. Men stopped chopping wood, but women kept cooking.”

The diversity of responsibilities imposed by household appliances exacts its own cost. A necessary condition of men’s help around the house is that they – we – must also constantly think about which task to perform and when, instead of expecting to be told what to do every time. This is because, by expecting periodic reminders, we are still forcing women to retain the cognitive burden associated with each chore. If you think you’re still helping by sharing everything except the cognitive burden, you’re wrong. Shifting between tasks affects one’s ability to focus, performance and accuracy and increases forgetfulness. Psychologists call this the switch cost.

It is less clear to me than it may be to others as to the different ways in which the new water pipeline through Bardechi Wadi will change the lives of the women there. But without the men of the village changing how they think about their women and their ‘responsibilities to the house’, we can’t expect anything meaningful. At the same time, the effects of the climate crisis will keep inflating the price these women pay in terms of their psychological, physical and sexual health and agency.

A why of how we wear what we wear

There are many major industries operating around the world commonly perceived to be big drivers of climate change. Plastic, steel and concrete manufacturing come immediately to mind – but fashion doesn’t, even though, materially speaking, its many inefficiencies represent something increasingly worse than an indulgence in times so fraught by economic inequality and the dividends of extractive capitalism.

And even then, details like ‘making one cotton t-shirt requires 3,900 litres of water’ (source) spring first into our consciousness before less apparent, and more subtle, issues like the label itself. Why is the fashion industry called so? I recently read somewhere – an article, or maybe a tweet (in any case the thought isn’t original) – that the term ‘fashion’ implies an endless seasonality, a habit of periodically discarding designs, and the clothes they inhabit, only to invent and manufacture new garments.

The persistence of fashion trends also presents social problems. Consider, for example, the following paragraph, copied from a press release issued by Princeton University:

People perceive a person’s competence partly based on subtle economic cues emanating from the person’s clothing, according to a study published in Nature Human Behaviour by Princeton University. These judgments are made in a matter of milliseconds, and are very hard to avoid. … Given that competence is often associated with social status, the findings suggest that low-income individuals may face hurdles in relation to how others perceive their abilities — simply from looking at their clothing.

Let’s assume that the study is robust as well as that the press release is faithful to the study’s conclusions (verifying which would require a lot more work than I am willing to spare for this post – but you’ve been warned!). Getting rid of fashion trends will do little, or even nothing, to render our societies more equitable. But it merits observing that they also participate in, possibly are even predicated on, maintaining ‘in’ and ‘out’ groups, demarcated by the awareness of dressing trends, ability to purchase the corresponding garments and familiarity with the prevailing ways to use them in order to incentivise certain outcomes over others on behalf of people who adhere to similar sartorial protocols.

(Aside: Such behaviour usually favours members of the elite but it’s not entirely absent outside the corresponding sociopolitical context. For example, and as a tangential case of enclothed cognition, the titular character in the 2016 Tamil film Kabali insists on wearing a blazer at all times simply because his upper-caste antagonists use their clothing to indicate their social status and, consequently, power.)

Obviously, the social and climatic facets of fashion design aren’t entirely separable. The ebb-and-flow of design trends drives consumer spending and, well, consumption whereas the stratification of individual competence – at least according to the study; certainly of likability based on status signals – sets up dressing choices as a socially acceptable proxy to substitute seemingly less prejudicial modes of evaluation. (And far from being a syllogism, many of our social ills actively promote the neoliberal consumer culture at the heart of the climate crisis.)

Then again, proxies in general are not always actively deployed. There are numerous examples from science administration as well as other walks of life. This is also one of the reasons I’m not too worried about not interrogating the study: it rings true (to the point of rendering the study itself moot if didn’t come to any other conclusions).

People considering a scientist for, say, career advancement often judge the quality of their work based on which journals they were published in, even though it’s quite well-known that this practice is flawed. But the use of proxies is justified for pragmatic reasons: when universities are understaffed and/or staff are underpaid, proxies accelerate decision-making, especially if they also have a low error-rate and the decision isn’t likely to have dire consequences for any candidate. If the resource-crunch is more pronounced, it’s quite possible that pragmatic considerations altogether originate the use of proxies instead of simply legitimising them.

Could similar decision-making pathways have interfered with the study? I hope not, or they would have strongly confounded the study’s findings. In this scenario, where scientists presented a group of decision-makers with visual information based on which the latter had to make some specific decisions without worrying about any lack of resources, we’re once again faced with yet another prompt to change the way we behave, and that’s a tall order.

A windier world

A new paper in Nature Climate Change reports a reversal in “terrestrial stilling” since 2010 – i.e. global wind speeds, thought to be in decline thanks to deforestation and real estate development, actually stopped slowing around 2010 and have been climbing since.

The paper’s authors, a group of researchers from China, France, Singapore, Spain, the UK and the US, argue that the result can be explained by “decadal ocean-atmosphere oscillations” and conclude with further analysis that the increase “has increased potential wind energy by 17 ± 2% for 2010 to 2017, boosting the US wind power capacity factor by ~2.5% and explains half the increase in the US wind capacity factor since 2010.”

Now that we have some data to support the theory that both terrestrial and oceanic processes affect wind speeds and to what extent, the authors propose building models to predict wind speeds in advance and engineer wind turbines accordingly to maximise power generation.

This seems like a silver lining but it isn’t.

Global heating does seem to be influencing wind speeds. To quote from the paper again: “The ocean-atmosphere oscillations, characterised as the decadal variations in [mainly three climate indices] can therefore explain the decadal variation in wind speed (that is, the long-term stilling and the recent reversal).” This in turn empowers wind turbines to produce more energy and correspondingly lowers demand from non-renewable sources.

However, three of the major sources of greenhouse gas emissions are concrete, plastics and steel manufacturing – and all three materials are required in not insubstantial quantities to build a wind turbine. So far from being a happy outcome of global heating, the increase in average regional wind speed – which the authors say could last for up to a decade – could drive the construction of more or, significantly, different turbines which in turn causes more greenhouses gases to be released into the atmosphere.

Finally, while the authors estimate the “global mean annual wind speed” increased from 3.13 m/s in 2010 to 3.3 m/s in 2017, the increase in the amount of energy entering a wind turbine is distributed unevenly by location: “22 ± 2% for North America, 22 ± 4% for Europe and 11 ± 4% for Asia”. Assuming these calculations are reliable, the figures suggest industrialised nations have a stronger incentive to capitalise on the newfound stilling reversal (from the same paper: “We find that the capacity factor for wind generation in the US is highly and significantly correlated with the variation in the cube of regional-average wind speed”).

On the other hand Asia, which still has a weaker incentive, will continue to bear a disproportionate brunt of the climate crisis. To quote from an article published in The Wire Science today,

… as it happens, the idea that ‘green technology’ can help save the environment is dangerous because it glosses over the alternatives’ ills. In a bid to reduce the extraction of hydrocarbons for fuel as well as to manufacture components for more efficient electronic and mechanical systems, industrialists around the world have been extracting a wide array of minerals and metals, destroying entire ecosystems and displacing hundreds of thousands of people. It’s as if one injustice has replaced another.
Godwin Vasanth Bosco, The Wire Science, December 2, 2019