Miami-Dade Fire Rescue via AP
Miami-Dade Fire Rescue personnel search for survivors in the rubble of the Champlain Towers South condominium in Surfside, Florida, June 25, 2021.
There is no longer span between major cities within the continental United States than that between Seattle and Miami. So seeing the effects of climate change engulf both ends of the country in recent days, with extreme heat in the Northwest and a potentially climate-fueled building collapse in the Southeast, should leave no argument as to the deep urgency of mitigating this crisis. Yet we still don’t have a vocabulary to understand these tragic events as further reinforcement for climate action. While this is changing in activist circles, among establishment policymakers the frame for climate policy is always something we must do to prevent dire consequences in the future, not in the present.
As activists demonstrate in front of the White House to use the opportunity of the infrastructure package to establish “transformative” climate policy, we are seeing the rationale for it in real time. Connecting extreme events to climate is greeted with the same pushback as connecting major mass shootings to gun policy; it’s seen as unseemly, as unnecessarily politicizing, as the “wrong time” to have the debate. But we are in the midst of a political discussion about how much to prioritize climate mitigation. The effects of inaction, screaming from coast to coast, are not sidelights or separate news items. They must inform the policy.
Amid the rubble and the desperate search for survivors, with as many as 156 missing and feared dead, few have addressed the collapse of the Champlain Towers South in the Miami-area community of Surfside as a climate issue. But it’s fairly easy to connect the dots. Miami Beach is among the most threatened parts of the country for sea level rise, and routinely the city floods, even on sunny days. The reason is increased sea waters pushing through the porous limestone that makes up much of South Florida. Among the bigger targets for flooding are underground parking garages.
Water is a disruptive substance, and a corroded parking garage could lead to structural deterioration. We already know that investigators are looking at the underground parking garage as the potential failure point in the collapse of the Champlain Towers condo, or at least somewhere at the bottom of the structure, which would be most susceptible to water damage. It fits with what a consultant to the condo association found three years ago, with “abundant” cracks in the walls and beams holding up the parking garage.
This is what the climate crisis looks like from coast to coast—today, not ten or 30 or 50 years from now.
That may not be the only reason that the tower fell—there could also have been a design failure to the concrete slab on which the building sits—but it’s certainly in the mix of causes. The possible presence of a sinkhole under the building (which had been sinking at about two millimeters per year since the 1990s) also could have driven the disaster. This is also a dire situation exacerbated by climate, because many coastal cities construct on reclaimed land, and rising sea levels can transform that land into a serious hazard, even if constructed well. It’s not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the climate crisis, but the condo collapse suggests it should be much more prominent.
On the other side of North America is a problem that fits more neatly into prevailing discussions about a warming planet. But here, as in Miami, lack of preparedness is a major culprit. The Pacific Northwest simply never expected a heat wave of the magnitude it is faced with right now. The normal temperature for the Seattle area in June fluctuates between 69 and 74 degrees Fahrenheit; on Monday, it was projected to be as high as 117 in parts of the region. Portland, also usually a rather temperate place in the summer, has been just as scorching. This has broken records in both cities and made the region the hottest place on Earth at the moment, except for deserts in Africa, California, and the Persian Gulf.
What’s descended on the Northwest is a “heat dome,” a large high-pressure area sitting over the region. Heat domes are likely to be more intense and longer-lasting with a warming planet.
Seattle’s climate has been changing for long enough to give residents an early warning. But there isn’t the kind of infrastructure for central air-conditioning that you might see in U.S. cities known for their hot summers. Other places without enough air-conditioning have experienced deadly consequences during heat waves: In 2003, Europe saw 70,000 people, most of them older, die. Seattle and Portland have set up cooling shelters for residents, but it’s going to be scary for the next week or so. The bottom line is these cities were built for one type of climate, and now we have another one.
This is what the climate crisis looks like from coast to coast—today, not ten or 30 or 50 years from now. It’s already reducing the habitability of populous areas of the country and the world. It’s spurring catastrophe in ways both obvious and not so obvious. And it’s happening in the middle of a major political fight about how to upgrade the country in a time of global warming.
My colleague Alex Sammon reacted to news of the bipartisan infrastructure bill last week by saying, “With a climate situation as dire as our current one, any spending on burnishing fossil fuel–reliant technology is indefensible.” The reality staring us in the face this week makes that even more undeniable. A second bill intended to have major climate investment like tax credits for green energy would only cancel out, if that, the additional spending on freeways and bridges and other things you can drive cars on or transmit gas or coal energy through.
The world, including every corner of this nation, is telling us very loudly and directly of the hazards that will result from failing to slow down the push of carbon into the atmosphere. A political system that actually connects events in the real world to legislative priorities would immediately reassess what is needed in upgrading our infrastructure, both to make it withstand the warming already baked in and to prevent as much additional warming as possible. We need to make that connection, if it’s not already too late.
