Climate Change – Das Gift that Keeps on Taking

 

  From historyincharts.com/world

“The coast of California is marked by massive inequality. People don’t realize that because they go to Malibu, they go to Santa Barbara. Those are the beaches that people see and are familiar with…They don’t think of [polluted and 

lower income] places like Wilmington, West Long Beach, Barrio Logan, West Oakland, Richmond, Bayview-Hunters Point. You can name all these communities, and it’s the same story.” Environmentalist Lucas Zucker

It’s not as if the current X, Boomer and beyond generations are totally responsible for climate change. It just that the accumulation of pollution and greenhouse nasties that began in the late 19th century (with the Industrial Revolution) aggregated, that it began to come to our attention in the 1970s, before it slammed into us and our planet really, really hard in the 21st century. Compounded by global conflict and, as the above chart shows, explosive population growth accompanied by parallel demand for agricultural and urban land to hold all the people. We extracted, consumed and polluted. Modernity demanded massive food supplies, electrical power, autonomous mobility (cars, trains, trucks, planes and trust with supporting infrastructure) and manufacturing at a level that is difficult to contemplate.

Along the way, rivers, streams, seas and landfills were convenient dumping grounds for our accelerating waste. Laws, designed to stimulate business growth, also relieved massive polluters from any real responsibility for their environmental carelessness. Even where direct corporate responsibility could be identified, a simple filing in bankruptcy eliminated any real source to clean up the problem. Governments added to the problem with war waste (including nuclear waste and unexploded mines) and a proclivity of corporate, agricultural and governmental entities to bury what they could not otherwise get rid of.  Just about every nation became awash with toxic waste sites. Ultra-modern America was no exception. 

Our toxic waste problem became so bad that by the 1970s, we all knew something had to be done. But since then, we have discovered new sources like leaking drums of nuclear waste on the Columbia River, chemical deposits in drinking water everywhere (e.g., Flint Michigan) and in our waterways and land (there’s a reason paper-and-oil producing Louisiana is the cancer capital of the United States just as West Virginia generated massive black lung problems) with so many corporations disavowing responsibility that our own government had to step in to clean up the mess. An impossible task, particularly as companies continue to pollute without much risk of being held accountable.

We created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, about the time some scientists were also discovering hints of the global catastrophe in the making: global warming from greenhouse gasses. But the immediate issue was cleaning up large pockets of pollution and waste that were scattered everywhere. The notion of an environmental superfund was soon born as the EPA website explains: “Thousands of contaminated sites exist nationally due to hazardous waste being dumped, left out in the open, or otherwise improperly managed. These sites include manufacturing facilities, processing plants, landfills and mining sites… In the late 1970s, toxic waste dumps such as Love Canal and Valley of the Drums received national attention when the public learned about the risks to human health and the environment posed by contaminated sites. .. In response, Congress established the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) in 1980.   

“CERCLA is informally called Superfund. It allows EPA to clean up contaminated sites. It also forces the parties responsible for the contamination to either perform cleanups or reimburse the government for EPA-led cleanup work… When there is no viable responsible party, Superfund gives EPA the funds and authority to clean up contaminated sites.” 

Of course, Congress has never authorized enough spending even to begin to clean up that mess, and the backlog of projects is often measured in decades. Which means, basically, that we are unlikely to see sufficient measurable progress for most of this century and beyond. And that should make you ask the question of how global climate change will impact toxic waste sites left to fester. Particularly with coastal erosion and sea rise. A look at California, a very progressive state by national standards, may provide a clue.

California has identified over 400 toxic sites, mostly and obviously in less affluent areas, that are at serious near- and midterm risk from sea level rise, including near military bases that have been particularly irresponsible. Floods and recent wildfires have only contributed to the level of toxic flows into California’s environment. Writing for the December 1st Los Angeles Times, Rosanna Xia tells us the bad news: “Across California, high surf is already flooding homes. Major roads, utility lines and other critical infrastructure are dangling ever closer to the sea… In just the next decade, the ocean could rise more than half a foot — with heavy storms and cycles of El Niño projected to make things even worse.

“A growing body of research is now investigating how rising water will flood communities built on or near contaminated land. Efforts to study this issue in the San Francisco Bay Area have become increasingly coordinated, and state toxic substances control officials have started their own mapping project. At Cal State Long Beach and Cal State Northridge, a team of researchers recently launched a project to examine which communities in the state could be most harmed by potential flooding of industrial chemicals currently stored underground.

“‘This is where the conversation absolutely has to go,’ said Patrick Barnard, whose research team at the U.S. Geological Survey has done extensive flood modeling used by officials across the state. ‘We’ve made a lot of progress in terms of sea level rise projections. The next important step is: How do we translate that into vulnerability and impacts?’

“With [this] new Toxic Tides project, two environmental health scientists — Rachel Morello-Frosch at UC Berkeley and Lara Cushing at UCLA — teamed up with [Lucas] Zucker [policy director for the economic and environmental justice group CAUSE] and a number of community groups to design an online tool that could help fill some data gaps in this less-talked-about realm of sea level rise...

“Throughout the process, they turned to those living in threatened communities for help identifying data gaps. Community organizers also provided insight into which data points to use — beyond race and income — as a measure of social vulnerability… If most of the residents living near a toxic site are not fluent in English, for example, the barriers to understanding the flood risks — and how to advocate for solutions — are far greater. Voter turnout, unemployment and the percentage of people who own their home (or even a car) are also factors indicating how much a community lacks political power, insurance protection and even the ability to evacuate in an emergency…

“‘We know from past flood events that the wealthy communities are not the ones that suffer the greatest impacts,’ Cushing said, pointing to recent disasters in New Orleans and Houston. ‘The vulnerabilities of environmental justice communities to sea level rise have not been front and center in the conversation in a way that it should be.’” And most of the above represents just “progressive” California. How many communities embracing the top five percent of America’s wealth face parallel problems with buried and vulnerable toxicity? Exactly.

I’m Peter Dekom, and after well over a century of polluting ourselves, the piper has come a-calling with climate change as his greatest threat.