High Waters
Hi, all.
It’s that time of year again when it feels like you can’t get through a conversation without it turning to the Great Minnesota Get Together, AKA the Minnesota State Fair. It’s like, one minute you’re discussing dinner plans or the work day or how stunningly well your fantasy football draft went, and then the next you’re talking deep-fried everything with a side of potato sack slide, regardless of where the conversation started. (What, dear reader? You don’t relate to this phenomenon? Too bad the New York Times does…)
But, if there’s one thing that Minnesotans will talk about even more reliably than the State Fair, it’s the weather, and this past Sunday, the two collided in spectacular fashion as a large storm swept through the Twin Cities, causing street flooding and gusts up to 60 mph within the fairgrounds and a brief touchdown of a tornado nearby. Though the event itself was dramatic, the aftermath was less so: most of the water drained fairly quickly, damage from the storm was cleaned up the next day, and a lot of the water that fell actually helped to alleviate a summer-long drought in the Twin Cities area.
The same absolutely cannot be said for Pakistan, where truly unbelievable amounts of rain have fallen over the past weeks and have resulted in disastrous, ongoing flooding throughout the country. And when I say unbelievable, I mean that the Sindh province has received 784% of normal rainfall this year, and Balochistan has received 500% of its normal rainfall. You can see footage from the flooding here and here. More than a thousand have died as a result of the flooding so far and many, many homes, buildings, roads, and other structures have been torn apart. The Pakistani government has officially cited climate change as a major factor in the floods, and most news sites (and even Wikipedia) attribute the extreme nature of the flooding to climate change. Yet, as Bill McKibben points out in his newsletter this week:
“There’s no doubt that the people of Pakistan are not to blame for their tragedy: on average each Pakistani is responsible for about one fifteenth as much carbon dioxide as each American, and even that is fairly recent; over the whole span of the fossil fuel era, America has produced a quarter of the earth’s greenhouse gases; Pakistan, with about 220 million people, produces about one half of one percent of the world’s emissions. And yet, before the flooding, they suffered through a savage springtime heatwave; urban temperates [sic] reached 121 Fahrenheit, in a place where, as of 2018, there were fewer than a million air conditioners.”
The international community has started sending aid with promises of more to come, but there’s predicted to be over $10 billion dollars of damage and countless lives uprooted. To take another page from Bill McKibben, help as you can with the Red Crescent Society and the World Food Programme.
This time of year also marks the anniversaries of Hurricane Katrina (17 years ago) and Ida (1 year ago), which reminds us how disparate and unfair the consequences of environmental disasters can be within our own borders. In honor of the anniversaries, Southerly Magazine published an article/video about Black Louisianians fighting to rebuild their communities and Rebecca Solnit tweeted the following, where she ties Katrina to the floods in Pakistan and beyond:
The wacky and dangerous weather we’re seeing around the world is scary, but one bright spot this week has been California’s announcement that it will ban the sale of gas powered cars within the state by 2035, and hopefully more states will follow its lead. Plus, President Biden announced that up to $10 or $20 thousand in student loan debt will be forgiven! (Check out the post from a couple of weeks ago for the student-loan-climate-change connection.) And last but not least, you can take action this week with the Green New Deal Network to Tell Congress: Block Any New Fossil Fuel Handouts!
Thanks for reading!