Year 4, Month 7, Day 29: It Was Easier When Poor People Didn’t Exist

Popular Science notes that economic status has an impact on how people are affected by climate change:

Feel the heat? Sure you do, but not everyone in the U.S. suffers equally. During many heat waves, more non-white Americans die than white Americans. That surely has to do with the links between race and poverty—and thus not having air conditioning—in the U.S., but one team of public health researchers had another idea.

What if some people in the U.S. live in areas that are hotter than the neighbors just across town? The researchers, all from the University of California, Berkeley, decided they wanted to check if access to trees and other green cover, which keeps neighborhoods cool, is correlated with race. Having more trees and less asphalt in an area keeps reduces air conditioning bills and air pollution.

The researchers found that non-white Americans are more likely to live in census blocks that have little tree cover and more asphalt than white Americans. Blacks were the most likely to live in so-called “heat islands” in cities and suburbs, followed by Asians, then Hispanics, then whites.

This means that in the future, if global warming brings on more heat waves, non-whites could be more vulnerable than their white neighbors. To fix this, cities could plan tree-planting initiatives, the Berkeley researchers wrote in a paper they published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. Many major cities, including New York and Chicago, already have new-tree plans in place.

But we knew that already. July 11:

Climate change’s disproportionate impact on economically disenfranchised Americans duplicates in microcosm what is happening throughout the world. Greenhouse emissions produced by privileged societies are endangering the world’s poorest nations; subsistence farmers in Bangladesh are losing their land, their hopes, and their lives to steadily rising ocean levels, despite having carbon footprints that are miniscule in comparison with those of industrialized nations.

In the planetary short-term, it’s “as we sow, so shall they reap.” The fallout of our profligate burning of fossil fuels is going to affect agriculture and infrastructure everywhere: droughts, extreme weather, and increased numbers of invasive parasites and diseases are going to mean shrinking harvests. Which, not to put too fine a point on it, means that more people will go hungry and more people will starve.

This blow to Earth’s poorest people is an unintended consequence of the industrialized world’s wealth and power. It is time for those of us in fortunate circumstances to work relentlessly to head off a catastrophe with profound environmental and humanitarian dimensions.

Warren Senders