Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (28 page)

No one I met wanted to discuss India’s fence. “Please, we cannot talk about such things,” said a representative of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). “It is very sensitive.” The official Bangladeshi government position was that illegal migration into India did not exist. Instead, the IOM told me about legal migration: the Bangladeshis who paid upwards of $2,000 to recruiters to join the bottom rung of the labor pool everywhere from Malaysia to Dubai to Iraq. There were seven hundred recruiting agencies in Dhaka and as many as two million Bangladeshi guest workers around the world. They were found in the Maldives, one of the few countries on the planet as imperiled as Bangladesh by sea-level rise, and in Libya, where, during the revolution, they fled to Europe in small boats, along with escaping Africans. At least one fishing boat packed with hundreds of Bangladeshis landed in Malta.

Most aid workers in Dhaka did not want to talk about the fence, simply because it represented defeat. As a rule, the young Bangladeshis I met, unlike young Senegalese, did not dream of moving permanently to another country, however threatened their own might be. The national ethic, learned on the
chars,
was to keep on adapting. Atique’s organization, COAST, preached more rice cultivation, more education, more local control. “Because of the food crisis, foreign companies are coming here and telling us that genetically modified hybrids are the only way,” its founder told me. Years earlier, Monsanto had partnered with BRAC, the largest NGO in Bangladesh and now the world. “There is not an example anywhere of companies just doing good for the people, but that is not to say that we are against all foreign aid,” he continued. “One Bangladeshi produces 0.3 tons of carbon a year. One American, 20 tons. We deserve the money.”

Meeting with NGOs usually meant shuttling from my hotel near Old Dhaka to the comparatively tranquil enclaves of Gulshan and Banani, which had expatriates and trees and which required a taxi ride rather than a rickshaw. The six-mile trip lasted up to ninety minutes; Dhaka has the worst traffic I have seen anywhere in the world. Drivers let their vehicles grind up against one another as they jockeyed for position, and nearly every bus and every truck and two-thirds of the cars had long scrapes down both sides. Even in the spacious Gulshan offices of Atiq Rahman, the venerable environmentalist and IPCC author, the traffic noise didn’t go away. “Migration is not adaptation,” he told me the afternoon I visited, and then his voice was nearly drowned out by a chorus of horns. “For us, climate adaptation is modifying your systems”—honk, honk, honk—“through technologies, through assistance. The moment you have retreated, that is not adaptation.” Honk, honk. “Migration is defeat. With climate change, there are three possibilities: Adaptation. Mitigation. And defeat.”

Rahman was one of the few people in Dhaka willing to talk about the fence. Just as cattle rustling was inevitable—“We need cows,” he joked, “and India has a lot of cows they don’t need”—some migration was inevitable no matter how much Bangladesh could adapt. His only hope was that the defeat be well managed. He told me about a reception he had recently attended in Los Angeles. “I told the Americans: I want a piece of California. I want a piece of Texas. I want a piece of Maryland for my people that you are inundating,” he said. “I can do the calculations, look into your emissions, to see how many each should take. I can determine how many Germany should take.” What Bangladesh had was workers. What America increasingly had was old people. “Many of them will want to play golf,” he said. “Many of them will have money, and they will need nursing help. They should have died at sixty-five, but they hang on until seventy-nine, and they’ll continue to hang on until eighty-five. They will need their massages. Rather than do a threatening migration, I would try to turn the climate-change migrant into an effective, resourceful economic migrant—something for both sides.” The alternative was bleak. “If that doesn’t happen,” he continued, “then I think we will run. And stop us if you dare. With what? How many bullets have you got?”

Despite the specter of climate change, Bangladesh received less foreign aid now than it did at the end of the 1990s—about $1.5 billion a year, a quarter of what its exported laborers sent back in remittances. The question Bangladeshis asked was not whether India would complete its fence—it surely would—but whether the high emitters of the West would make good on pledges of climate aid. Multimillion-dollar adaptation funds, filled largely with IOUs, were springing up on paper the longer international climate negotiations dragged on, yet some of the promised aid was simply existing aid, rebranded. Rahman could name only one project that had received funding: $200,000 for coastal reforestation work that would require $23 million to complete.

“There is no money!” he declared. “Money doesn’t get to the poor. That is the nature of money.” He explained how the Clean Development Mechanism, created by the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, allowed polluters in the developing world to get paid for reducing their emissions, earning China and India hundreds of millions of dollars. Bangladesh, with far fewer emissions to cut, had earned very little. It was a corrupt system, he said. The polluter didn’t pay; the polluter got paid. Carbon got dispersed equally around the world, but reparations money, however well-intentioned, did not. Rahman became quieter, the traffic noise louder. “The nightmare scenario on climate change,” he said, “is that there will be money floating everywhere. Floating around. A lot of money floating around, and a lot of zero-carbon technology being transferred to places that already produce virtually zero carbon. And nothing happens. For the poor, absolutely nothing happens.”

 • • • 

“THE FENCE WILL
not be enough to stop them,” admitted Enamul before I returned to Guwahati, as we walked past cows on the riverbank. “But still we must complete it. Because otherwise there is nothing.”

 • • • 

I STILL WANTED
to see the fence with my own eyes. In Assam’s neighboring state of Meghalaya, I finally did. From Shillong, the state capital, once a British hill station owing to its five-thousand-foot elevation and temperate air, I drove across the plateau to Cherrapunji, which is listed in
Guinness World Records
for the most rainfall in a year and in a month (1861 and July 1861, respectively). Sign after sign announced, “Welcome to the Wettest Place on Earth.” Along the sides of the road were chow mein shops owned by local Khasis, a Christian tribe that was fond of country music, especially love songs. I persuaded my taxi driver to follow the increasingly muddy road off the edge of the plateau, and down we dropped toward Bangladesh, losing forty-five hundred feet in less than an hour, skidding around corners, passing thin, horsetail waterfalls that tumbled down towering cliffs. The air became hot again, the people darker. Water trickled down to Bangladesh. People trickled up. This was how the world was.

The border, when we reached it at the end of the road, was anticlimactic: no Bangladeshis running across, no easy metaphors, almost nothing at all. There were a few wandering cows, a few homes and villages just yards from the zero line, a bucolic scenery of fields and farmers, and a pair of soldiers from Kolkata in a thatch hut. Their blank expression was the same I’d seen on the Vandoos on Devon Island, and their job was the same. They pointed their guns and waited. The fence was two rows of barbed wire separated by a narrow patch of no-man’s-land, and it looked formidable, even impenetrable. You could almost believe that all problems would remain safely stuck on the other side.

TEN

SEAWALLS FOR SALE

WHY THE NETHERLANDS LOVES SEA-LEVEL RISE

O
n a Monday the year before Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, attorneys and ambassadors sat in a cavernous auditorium at Columbia University discussing what happens, legally speaking, when an island nation disappears under the sea. There were “novel questions,” said the law professor Michael Gerrard in an opening statement. “If a country is underwater, is it still a state? Does it still have a seat at the United Nations? What becomes of its exclusive economic zone? Its fishing rights? Its rights to undersea minerals? Can its statehood be prolonged? What is the citizenship of its displaced people? What are their rights in the places where they will go—and who will have to take them in? And do the country and its people have legal remedies?”

The auditorium was shaped like a shell, and it had more vertical relief—perhaps fifty feet from lectern to cheap seats—than did many of the islands in question. More than two hundred people, most of them in suits, were packed in its ten rows. They included at least one lawyer looking for new business, or so she told me, and numerous representatives of AOSIS: the Alliance of Small Island States, a forty-four-nation bloc uniting global-warming poster children such as Tuvalu and the Maldives and seldom-discussed victims such as Grenada, Cape Verde, and the Bahamas. Gerrard had convened the conference along with the UN ambassador from the Marshall Islands, one of the lesser-known AOSIS states, which consists of twenty-nine Micronesian atolls and five islands near the international date line in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Though a bit player in the UN, the Marshall Islands have the peculiar moral authority that comes with twice facing annihilation from someone else’s pollution: In the 1940s and 1950s, the country was better known as the Pacific Proving Grounds, where sixty-seven nuclear devices were detonated by the U.S. military. The world’s first hydrogen bomb, Ivy Mike, was successfully tested here in 1952. (“It’s a boy!” wrote the bomb designer Edward Teller in a telegram to Los Alamos.) Two years later, America’s largest-ever blast, fifteen-megaton Castle Bravo, lit up Bikini Atoll. Now, thanks to their average elevation of seven feet and a high point of just over thirty feet, the Marshall Islands are expected to be one of the first nations extinguished by climate change. One islet is gone already: Tiny, verdant Elugelab was vaporized by Ivy Mike. Only a mile-wide crater remains.

The islands have had their independence from the United States only since 1986, their national anthem, “Forever Marshall Islands,” since 1991. “With the light of Maker from far above,” the anthem begins, its lyrics loaded with unintentional meaning. “Shining with the brilliance of rays of life/Our Father’s wondrous creation/Bequeathed to us, our Motherland/I’ll never leave my dear home sweet home.” The local economy revolves around foreign aid, coconut farming, tuna processing, licensing of fishing rights, and service jobs at a remaining American missile base. The nation also sells hundreds of flags of convenience to ships trying to avoid regulations in their home countries; Shell’s main Arctic drill ship, the
Kulluk,
bears the name of the Marshallese capital, Majuro, on its hull. The population of the Marshall Islands is sixty-seven thousand people, ten thousand more than that of Mininnguaq Kleist’s wondrous Greenland—making it nearly a wash, from a utilitarian perspective, if the former sinks into the sea thanks to climate change while the latter gets its own independence.

The Marshall Islands and Columbia had begun planning the conference after the world failed to ink a new climate treaty in Copenhagen, after seeing the UN climate process, with its focus on multilateralism and emissions cuts, achieve so very little. “This conference is a recognition of a big failure,” the ambassador said when it was his turn at the lectern. “There is no political will. No process. No urgency. A few weeks ago, in Bangkok, we spent one week discussing the agenda—one week discussing what to discuss! There is no light at the end of the tunnel, and that is why I approached Professor Gerrard.” More was at stake than mere survival. “For us, our land and our natural resources—particularly marine resources—are part of the Marshallese collective identity,” he said. Even so, retreat to higher ground was not an option in his country, he continued, and it would become uninhabitable long before full submersion: Occasional overwashing would dump seawater on cropland while contaminating the drinking water supply. While construction had begun on a seawall providing limited protection for Majuro, it cost a crippling $10 million per meter. Already dozens of low-lying homes had been flooded. Soon, the islands would experience a major outbreak of dengue fever—a mosquito-borne disease some scientists believe is worsened by higher temperatures and rainfall.

The first scholar to present research, tall and blond, stiffly recited the legal thresholds for statehood in a German-accented monotone. The first was a defined territory. This could still be met after sea-level rise by, for instance, artificial islands: floating structures towed into place, moored to the seabed. “Their capacity to generate [new] maritime zones was abrogated in 1958,” she pointed out. (That is, they were useless for expanded Law of the Sea claims. Otherwise, the Arctic would already be full of them.) But as a replacement for existing territory, artificial islands might be accepted by a sympathetic or guilty world. The second threshold was a permanent population—fulfilled in the future, perhaps, by “a population nucleus, a legal anchor, a caretaker population” on certain islands. This was like Sergeant Strong’s plan for Hans Island, expanded. The third threshold—a government—was easy to imagine: like that of Tibet in Dharamsala, India, a government in exile. The last threshold, independence, “is de facto granted by the international community,” she said. To kick a country out of the UN required a two-thirds vote. “I doubt that most of the members would vote to extinguish a small island state.” If the world wanted to recognize the Marshall Islands even after they were unrecognizable, they could find a way to exist forever, at least on paper.

Another speaker introduced the concept of the “nation ex situ”: the disappeared state as trusteeship, virtually there to take in reparations payments from the inevitable climate-change lawsuits—some of them no doubt filed by attorneys in this room—and to distribute them to the islander diaspora. The president of the Marshall Islands, a balding man with a blue tie, leaned forward in his seat at the front of the room and clenched his hands, as if bracing for a blow. The country’s foreign minister stood up. “The wholesale relocation of our nation is no more acceptable to us than it would be to the countries of the many UN ambassadors in this room,” he declared. Cape Verde’s ambassador seconded him. “A lot of people think that sacrificed lands will die without shouting,” he boomed. “But I assure you, we are shouting!” The issue, specified the Maldivian ambassador, “is not UN membership. Sure enough, these islands can disappear, and along with them a few millions of people, and the world will go on. But is that what human civilization has come to? When countries or peoples who become an inconvenience, that we let them go, as with the Darwinian survival of the fittest?”