Forty years ago, as I was leaving my friend’s house to throw a baseball outside, his father stopped us for inspection.
“Where are you going?” Peter’s father asked. “When will you be back?” And most pointedly: “Have you done your homework?” Peter had, but I had not. “I’ll get around to it,” I said.
“Ah, well, here you go.” Peter’s father put a small round disk in my hand. I turned it over, and on the back printed in green was the word Tuit. “You said you’ll get around Tuit,” he laughed, every bit the corny dentist he was, “now here you go.” I still have my Tuit. It sits on my bookshelf, gathering questions. Did Peter’s father go to a woodworker to have these printed? Did he keep a bag in his car and refresh his pockets daily? Did anyone ever give it back?
I wish there were more Tuits in the world, reminding us of what we have yet to do. We’d all have a few. All of us would have received a few when it comes to climate action. After all, when scientists told us the planet was heating up in the 1960s, killing off species and threatening the delicate balance of the planet’s ecosystems, much of the world said, I’ll get around to it.
When trackable data suggested the warming was increasing, we said it again. Even in recent years, as catastrophic weather events—floods, tsunamis, heat waves, droughts—increased as a result of this warming, many of us and our governments said one more time, I’ll get around to it.
Across these years, instead of handing out Tuits, the world rewarded our laterism with soothing stories. For decades, the energy industry, using paid-for climate deniers, sowed disinformation. Their story was: It’s not as bad as they say. Or worse: It’s a hoax.
It has not been open for debate that we are in the middle of a species-threatening climate crisis for a long time. The buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere as a result of human activity has already warmed the planet by about 1°C above preindustrial levels, and as a result of this warming, we’ve seen impacts on a scale not witnessed before in human history. Hurricanes, wildfires, floods. They’ll get worse.
Still, even as we stare hard facts in the face, a host of excuses disguised as stories—a whole bag of Tuits—remain in the cultural narrative atmosphere, propping up the magical thinking required to keep delaying action. They included tales like Someone Else Will Fix This (as in I didn’t do this; let the experts deal with it), Nature Is Meant to Change (as in So what if we don’t have polar bears?), The Economy Can’t Afford It (as in Going green will wreck our way of life) and We’re Already Doing It (as in We can recycle and carbon-capture our way back to planetary health). If you look at them even for a brief moment, all of these tales deserve a Tuit. They have, however, been highly effective at one thing: allowing us to do nothing drastic.
And here we come to the most destructive story of all to emerge in recent years, one that many who believe the climate crisis is existential often tell. It says: We are not capable of drastic change.
Around the world, but especially in the U.S., this story tells us human civilization cannot make rapid adjustments to the way we live, and survive those changes. If you live in the U.S., this feeling is entirely justified. Film of unarmed Black civilians being shot by police cannot lead to the conviction of officers? During a pandemic, billionaires’ wealth grew by astonishing amounts, but a minimum wage guarantee is too expensive?
Change matters. Study after study shows that if sustained long term, a sharp reduction in carbon emissions will have immediate effects. If we can globally get to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, we can keep temperature increases across the world to 1.5°C. To reach these targets, though, we don’t simply need change, but drastic change.
There is an example of this. During the pandemic, businesses, governments and people made sudden, severe changes to stay safe. People stayed indoors for weeks. Some for months.
They didn’t hug or shake hands. They wore masks. They worked a job and taught their children. Here was an immediate threat to life, and were it not for these drastic changes, scores more would have died. We face a similar threat, but one with a much longer lead-up. If we do not reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, big parts of the world will be uninhabitable in our lifetimes.
There are not enough Tuits in the world to allow us to stay out of this one. But there is one story staring us in the face. We can change, we can change rapidly, almost overnight, altering almost entirely our way of life. It would be good if our leaders reminded us of this, and made the case scientists know well: it’s not tThe pandemic shows we’re capable of drastic change. It’s time to stop telling ourselves we can’t do the same to save the planetoo late.
However differently we register this pandemic we understand it as global; it brings home the fact that we are implicated in a shared world. The capacity of living human creatures to affect one another can be a matter of life or death. Because so many resources are not equitably shared, and so many have only a small or vanished share of the world, we cannot recognize the pandemic as global without facing those inequalities.
Some people work for the common world, keep it going, but are not, for that reason, of it. They might lack property or papers, be sidelined by racism or even disdained as refuse—those who are poor, Black or brown, those with unpayable debts that preclude a sense of an open future.
The shared world is not equally shared. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière refers to “the part of those who have no part”—those for whom participation in the commons is not possible, never was, or no longer is. For it is not just resources and companies in which a share is to be had, but a sense of the common, a sense of belonging to a world equally, a trust that the world is organized to support everyone’s flourishing.
The pandemic has illuminated and intensified racial and economic inequalities at the same time that it heightens the global sense of our obligations to one another and the earth. There is movement in a global direction, one based on a new sense of mortality and interdependency. The experience of finitude is coupled with a keen sense of inequalities: Who dies early and why, and for whom is there no infrastructural or social promise of life’s continuity?
This sense of the interdependency of the world, strengthened by a common immunological predicament, challenges the notion of ourselves as isolated individuals encased in discrete bodies, bound by established borders. Who now could deny that to be a body at all is to be bound up with other living creatures, with surfaces, and the elements, including the air that belongs to no one and everyone?
Within these pandemic times, air, water, shelter, clothing and access to health care are sites of individual and collective anxiety. But all these were already imperiled by climate change. Whether or not one is living a livable life is not only a private existential question, but an urgent economic one, incited by the life-and-death consequences of social inequality: Are there health services and shelters and clean enough water for all those who should have an equal share of this world? The question is made more urgent by conditions of heightened economic precarity during the pandemic, exposing as well the ongoing climate catastrophe for the threat to livable life that it is.
Pandemic is etymologically pandemos, all the people, or perhaps more precisely, the people everywhere, or something that spreads over or through the people. The “demos” is all the people despite the legal barriers that seek to separate them. A pandemic, then, links all the people through the potentials of infection and recovery, suffering and hope, immunity and fatality. No border stops the virus from traveling if humans travel; no social category secures absolute immunity for those
it includes.
“The political in our time must start from the imperative to reconstruct the world in common,” argues Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe. If we consider the plundering of the earth’s resources for the purposes of corporate profit, privatization and colonization itself as planetary project or enterprise, then it makes sense to devise a movement that does not send us back to our egos and identities, our cut-off lives.
Such a movement will be, for Mbembe, “a decolonization [which] is by definition a planetary enterprise, a radical openness of and to the world, a deep breathing for the world as opposed to insulation.” The planetary opposition to extraction and systemic racism ought to then deliver us back to the world, or let the world arrive, as if for the first time, a shared place for “deep breathing”—a desire we all now know.
And yet, an inhabitable world for humans depends on a flourishing earth that does not have humans at its center. We oppose environmental toxins not only so that we humans can live and breathe without fear of being poisoned, but also because the water and the air must have lives that are not centered on our own.
As we dismantle the rigid forms of individuality in these interconnected times, we can imagine the smaller part that human worlds must play on this earth whose regeneration we depend upon—and which, in turn, depends upon our smaller and more mindful role.
The COVID-19 pandemic, like the climate crisis, is amplifying existing racial and gender injustices in our society. TIME editors Naina Bajekal and Elijah Wolfson moderated a conversation with two women working to create a more inclusive climate leadership space: American author, strategist and teacher Katharine Wilkinson, who co-founded and leadsThe All We Can Save Projectto nurture a leaderful climate community; and queer Colombian activist Maria Alejandra Escalante, who is the climate and environmental justice advocacy officer atFRIDAThe Young Feminist Fund, which supports young feminist organizers in the Global South.
We know the pandemic hasdriven women out of the workforce, including out of academic research, in significant numbers. Do you have a sense of how this is playing out in terms of women’s leadership in the climate space — whether in your own life or from those in your network?
Wilkinson:There’s been a lot of “behind the scenes” conversation among women in climate about howhard the pandemic has been for mothers and caregivers. We’ve heard tales of “dad” colleagues proclaiming with glee how much time they have to write now, and foundation program officers expecting projects to proceed apace—if not faster!. The U.S. is ahard place to be a mother on a good day, in particular given lack of adequate maternity leave or affordable childcare and abundance of unwaged domestic labor, and those good days have been hard to come by in the last year. To be perfectly honest, “thank goodness I don’t have kids” has been a recurring thought for me during the pandemic. For some mothers who work on climate, just a simple good night’s sleep has felt desperately out of reach. Patriarchy, spotlighted by the pandemic, is bad for inclusive climate leadership.
Escalante:In my part of the world, women are connected to climate work from angles of land defense against exploitation, working towards food sovereignty and water protection in their communities. The pandemic has hit their safety and ability to build the equity and redistribution they demand. More rural women than men have lost their jobs and the possibility of other sources of income. Restrictions on mobility, combined with the absence of state presence in remote regions and the liberty gained by extractive corporations, has meant a rising number of women environmental defendersare being physically and digitally surveilled, harassed, and silenced.
In certain countries, the healthcare measures used by governments are excuses to decrease or even violate the rights of rural and Indigenous women and other marginalized identities, like what we have seen inHonduras where sexual and reproductive health rights are even more inaccessibleby these communities than before the pandemic hit.
Wilkinson:Most of my work has a U.S. focus, so I really appreciate learning from Maria Alejandra’s insights. During the pandemic, people’s attention has been pulled from climate onto more pressing needs. In 2020 in the U.S., we saw media coverage of climate drop to a whisper even asclimate-fueled fires raged. But our attention has also been pulled towardthings that are critically importantin a warming world—toward people’sprecariousness in our extractive economy, towardinjusticeand interdependence.
Mariano Vimos—Getty ImagesSaturia Campos, 80, receives a dose of the Novavax vaccine as her daughter watches in Chaguaní, Colombia, on April 8, 2021. Vaccination brigades made their way into inhospitable rural areas to administer COVID-19 vaccines to senior citizens. Depending on the distances and difficulty of access, each brigade vaccinates between 12 and 18 people per day.
Women are more likely to work in theindustries impacted by the pandemic, such as leisure, education, social, and health care sectors—70 percent of the health workforce is female; over 70 percent of global caregiving hours are given by women and girls, for example. Presumably climate change will cause similar disparities. Is this an underlying issue that needs to be addressed? How do you think we should address it?
Escalante:The climate crisis isalready generating these sorts of disparities. For example, when extended droughts happen, women, especially young women, in rural areas—who are usually the main caretakers of the home—must fetch water from further away, which has implications for their overall wellbeing, safety and time availability for other activities, including self-care and education. In rural and urban communities with weak infrastructure, the disparity is not a prediction of what may happen—it’s a reality.
The pandemic is making it evident that women, young people and gender minorities are at higher risk when systems fail to protect us, given already existing structural inequalities. The health crisis is an angle to observe how a parallel and unfolding emergency—the devastation of our ecological and climate systems—is also hitting these same communities more harshly. Women, young people, gender minorities—especially those who are Black and Indigenous and from the Global South—are at the interconnection of historical systems of oppression and exclusion. We have been marginalized from the centres of decision-making for far too long and that has made invisible our collective experiences.
What is powerful is that, as crises hit, we keep rising. We are building responses and bringing relief to our communities, usually leading from an intersectional place to address both the immediate problem as well as the root causes of their vulnerabilities.
To address these underlying issues we need diverse strategies. A start would be to increase funding to this intersectional organizing. A 2014reportshowed that only 0.2% of foundation funding focuses explicitly on women and the environment. To see systemic transformation, we need more unrestricted resources directly placed in the hands of women, young feminists, and gender minorities.
Wilkinson:Maria Alejandra makes so many critical points. I think the pandemic made visible to more people (specifically people of privilege, especially those in the Global North) what is already frayed and fraying in our social and economic systems. As with COVID-19, climate impacts “multiply” existing gender and racial injustices—the cracks already present in our global house, so to speak. It’s a reminder, I think, that social safety nets and social policy more generally are critical climate infrastructure.
I’m glad that there’s so much good research being done around the gender-climate nexus, because we need to understand how a warming world is riskier for women and gender minorities than men, riskier still for those who are BIPOC and living in the Global South. And then we need to design interventions and policies that respond to those differences. Otherwise, just as we’ve seen in the pandemic, inequalities deepen and the cracks get wider and more numerous. It’s also why we need to design climate solutions to advance equality and resilience alongside reducing greenhouse gases—what co-founder of Climate Interactive Beth Sawin calls “multisolving.” We can’t do the latter without the former. The Feminist Green New Deal Coalition recently released a helpfulpolicy screening toolthat policymakers can use to ensure potential climate legislation has an intersectional gender lens.
It’s worth noting that many of these women-dominant industries are low-carbon industries. We think about “green jobs” as retrofitting buildings or installing wind and solar power—and they are—but care jobs are also green jobs. Acare economy is a green economy. So there are climate reasons to strengthen and grow these industries, including ensuring good wages and labor protections.
Luis Tato—Bloomberg/Getty ImagesDemonstrators gather during a protest by health care workers, including nurses and clinical officers, against poor working conditions outside the Ministry of Health in Nairobi on Dec. 9, 2020.
TIME:Care industries have some of the greatest projected growth and the greatest need for additional workers already. But as industries that have historically been “feminized” they tend to be perceived as less valuable to society, and thus have wages that don’t reflect their value, and fewer labor protections. Do you all think that the pandemic will change this? If not, whatisneeded to make those changes happen?
Escalante:Your question is on point: can the realizations that the pandemic has brought about structural and gender inequalities be enough to shift these patriarchal and capitalist systems? On one hand, we must reckon with the fact that the pandemic has been approached so differently in every region and sector. In Latin America, for example, theinequalities are only stretchingfurther because of the pandemic, and yet this crisis has been a boom for the tech industry and the wealthiest people of the world. So the lessons that we derive from this health crisis can be so different depending on context.
On the other hand, the pandemic israising global alarm by showing us that societies and ecosystems are on the verge of collapsingand that doing something drastic, radical, systemic about it is what the moment is calling for. I believe anti-capitalistic work is the disruption we need to re-evaluate the commodification of nature, women and gender non-conforming bodies whose care labor has been historically undervalued. Clearly, politicians are not conceding to this type of disruption, which is why civil society pressure in all decision-making spaces is and will be crucial. Looking at theupcoming U.N. climate negotiations in the U.K., I would expect the political conversations and the media coverage to focus on the type of systemic shifts that are being proposed by the feminist and environmentalist collations around the world—some of which Katharine has also pointed out before.
Wilkinson:During the pandemic, we’ve heard quite a lot about predominantly white, “professional class” women in the US waking up to how dependent their lives have been on domestic workers, teachers, frontline service workers, etc., who are essential but marginalized and largely women of color. As labor activist Ai-jen Poo says of care work, it’s “the work that makes everything else possible.” More privileged individuals seem to be seeing that with fresh eyes.
Will these realizations translate into meaningful change? Will people be politically activated by these realizations or gladly return to pre-pandemic arrangements? I’m not sure. (And the climate crisis certainly reminds us that the gap between knowledge and action can be deep and wide.)
Clearly, we need legal and policy change to secure rights and dignity for all workers, just as we need it to advance just solutions to the climate crisis. We need good, justice-centeredresearch and scholarshipto inform it. We need those who are on the frontlines (of the pandemic, climate injustice, often both) to be centered in decision-making, not absent from the halls of power. As Maria Alejandra said, civil society has a vital role to play there. And we need the cultural shifts that make political change possible. I think there are some hopeful signs that those cultural shifts are accelerating—stories changing, hearts changing—but there is just so much work ahead.
I also think it’s worth noting that the material andpsychological tollof the pandemic—theisolation, the stress—means lots of folks aren’t showing up for the work of transformational change, which is what science tells us is required this decade, with their full superpowers. Not by a long shot. It strikes me as a presage of the challenges we’ll increasingly face to survive the climate crisis while we work to solve it.
Given the climate trajectory we’re on, there are hard things ahead—surely harder than the concurrent crises of 2020, which seemed unprecedented to many. I hope we’ll heed its lessons and find ways forward that don’t replicate injustices but redeem them. The success of mutual aid efforts over the last year is a reminder, I think, that in a liminal time like the one we’re in, we must link arms. Or as Christine Nieves Rodriguez, a Puerto Rican climate leader, says in her essay inAll We Can Save, “community is our best chance for survival.”
TIME: Given that our collective attention and energy is majorly sapped, where should we direct what energy remains?
Wilkinson: We’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context ofThe All We Can Save Project. To me, the bottom line is that the climate crisis is a leadership crisis. Today, far too many leaders across sectors continue to prioritize profit (including some who say they don’t), while so many people who genuinely care are still standing on the sidelines. A growing body of research shows thatwomen’s leadership and equal participation result in better outcomesfor climate policy, reducing emissions, and protecting land, but white men continue to hold most of the power and get most of the funding and airtime.
If we want to grow a life-giving future, we need an abundantly leaderful climate movement. I think we should center and support and follow thework and wisdom of women, especially women of color, leading at the grassroots/on the frontlines, in elected office working to change policy, in media and communication working to shift culture, and beyond. Just like there are no silver bullet climate solutions—a whole ecosystem of practices and technologies is necessary to stop emissions and drawdown carbon—there is no single sector of leadership that will get the job done. I wish there were. Let’s welcome in and grow the biggest, strongest team possible. I really believe that’s our best chance.
Escalante: We need a mix of creativity, strategy, vision and action. It is indeed a reality for many women-led movements and communities, particularly in Global South regions, that this health crisis has centred the question of immediate relief and shadowed other “less visible” threats around the corner for rich countries, like the climate one. The burdens of the pandemic are huge for those who already live in precarious conditions and under multiple vulnerabilities,like the hundreds of migrant peopleall across the world enduring severe drought, floods, economic encroachment, and forced migration and having to deal with closed borders and anti-migrant governments.
Yet, it is amidst uncertainty and fear, thatthese movements and communities are showing generosityandemergent strategiesto adapt to these compounded crises.Eldoret Women For Development——a FRIDA’s young feminist grantee partner—is fighting for the rights of incarcerated women in the Eldoret slums of Kenya. The pandemic caused women’s prisons to move toward decongestion as a way of limiting the spread of the virus; more than 100 of these incarcerated women are now a part of the Eldoret Women agribusiness program that grants them both a means of earning, as well as the opportunity for sustainable living. This community of women, which includes trans women and sex workers, are growing organic food in their own homes, using innovative methods, during the lockdown. To me, this speaks to the capacities that all of these communities have when it comes to shifting from chaos to solutions in times of crisis.
Energies need not be channeled in only one direction. I believe that it is these social and inclusive movements in different regions, particularly youth and women-led ones, that are rising up to the challenge of inadequate health systems, economic precarity, food insecurity, and gender-based violence with real alternatives at hand and with very little resources, even during a pandemic. If resources—financial, human, media, etc—are directed to these movements that understand their community’s needs, with a long-term vision of support, this would allow them to focus on transforming our world, rather than chasing every coin, worried about their survival.
So, as Katharine was pointing out, I see the need to fund and bolster justice in every instance. As we do that, we should center the knowledge, voices, experiences of those who have not participated in shaping this faulty world. This includes radical political leaders speaking up to power and building policies on justice-grassroots-based visions. This also includes a demand for equal rights for all people across sectors. This is not an unachievable future if there is a real commitment from governments, institutions, donors, academia and media. The pandemic has shown us that we can adapt and prioritize when needed and urgent. If we don’t do this now for the climate crisis, then when?
In an earlier era, green referred to grass and trees and jealous eyes. But over the past half-century, green has taken on a life of its own. The Green movement deals with the collisions and contagions of the contemporary world—how to view them, and how to cure them.
The book from which this essay is excerpted, The Spirit of Green, examines a wide array of social, economic and political questions from a Green vantage point. These questions include established areas such as pollution control and global warming. But they also involve new frontiers such as Green chemistry, taxes, ethics and finance. The example that follows concerns an approach to large corporations, or what is called social responsibility.
One of the major developments in corporate management is corporate social responsibility, which is the projection of Green philosophy into the business world. The idea is that corporations are more than moneymaking machines that buy steel, produce cars, and fight tooth and claw to enrich their owners. Rather, corporations are also societal citizens that have certain legal, economic and ethical obligations.
Corporate responsibility goes beyond obeying the law. It involves voluntary actions in which a business monitors and ensures its compliance with the spirit of the law, with ethical standards, and with national or international business norms. Moreover, responsibility recognizes that profits—which are a central goal of business—are sometimes a misleading compass that needs to be corrected.
If you study the literature on corporate responsibility, or look at corporate websites, you will find a tangle of confusions. The reason is that corporations generally want to portray themselves as responsible while satisfying the profit orientation of their shareholders.
The Green view sharpens the focus of corporate responsibility by emphasizing spillovers, or what are technically known as “externalities.” These are the unintended consequences of industrial activity. In an earlier era, such spillovers would include air pollution, toxic wastes and greenhouse gases. Over the past year, we faced a deadly pathogen that was passed unknowingly and invisibly among people.
Why should private corporations become involved here? The reason is that our political processes are unable to prevent all these spillovers and compensate those who are harmed. The lack of social protections might come because of scientific uncertainty or vested interests or partisan politics or international free riding or a weak social safety net—or all of the above. One clear example of political failure is that most countries have not moved forcefully to slow climate change.
Responsibility becomes particularly important in the presence of technological uncertainties. How harmful are asbestos and tobacco? How addictive are opioid medications? What are the emissions of new automotive technologies? What is the threat of fossil-fuel use to future climate change? Companies producing these products are the most knowledgeable about the properties of their activities. From tobacco through opioids and asbestos to emissions of sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide, firms engaged in these sectors have a special responsibility to society to inform and protect.
Most of the focus in business schools and academic writing is on corporate responsibility: do this, do that, measure this, and report that. The list of responsible actions is endless, and most firms can find several areas where they excel.
A more fruitful approach looks at corporate irresponsibility. Important areas include environmental issues (such as hazardous waste releases), corporate governance (such as excessive executive compensation) and production of harmful products (alcohol, tobacco and fossil fuels).
We can imagine a modern-day Virgil leading us through the various circles of corporate misconduct. Perhaps the first circle is for greed and populated by overpaid executives, the second circle contains the polluters, the next for lobbyists for special tax breaks and another for those involved in regulatory demolition.
At the ninth circle, we find the most egregious forms of corporate misconduct—companies who provide misleading or fraudulent information about their own products. Such behavior is a risk to the public that the company is uniquely positioned to understand. It is worse than simple thievery because those who are most knowledgeable use their knowledge to mislead their customers.
When Dante wrote Inferno, he described the ninth circle of hell as the deepest one, where treachery resides and where hosts betray their guests:
By effect of his malicious thoughts,
Trusting in him I was made prisoner,
And after put to death.
(Inferno, Canto XXXIII)
So it is with companies in the ninth circle. We are indeed prisoners when we unwittingly trust malicious companies who invite us as guests into their showrooms. These firms know about their dangerous products, withhold that knowledge, subvert science to advance their narrow commercial interests and put their guests to death.
A recent egregious example is Volkswagen, which not only hid the emissions of its diesel automobiles and fabricated the results but designed equipment to falsify the results. It did this to save money on the production of purportedly “clean” diesel engines. How many people died as a result? How many people bought VW cars believing they were Green? The behavior was not only illegal but earned VW a prominent place in the ninth circle of corporate irresponsibility.
As we pass through the ninth circle, we find other corporations languishing in their ethical filth:
Philip Morris, which destroyed research showing the lethal nature of smoking while increasing the addictiveness of its cigarettes
ExxonMobil, which, while fully aware of the dangers of climate change, suppressed the science and funded climate deniers
Johns Manville, for knowledge and denial of the dangers of asbestos for years before lawsuits ferreted out the truth
Purdue Pharma, for conspiring to foster use of OxyContin without legitimate medical reasons while aware of its addictive properties
Facebook, for selling people’s personal information without their consent, including to groups who used it to target voters and sow political discord
As we emerge from the ninth circle, we reflect that justice for its inhabitants is imperfect. All of the companies took financial hits, and some did not survive. Yet others slither along and continue to thrive on their flawed business models. They should not be forgotten or forgiven.
American tailpipes have played an outsized role in global warming. In 2019, transportation accounted for 29% of the country’s human-generated emissions, the most of any sector tracked by the Environmental Protection Agency—and the U.S. is the world’s second-largest carbon emitter. The Biden Administration wants to clean up transportation’s dirty reputation, and make America the global leader in electric vehicle production in the process.
At the moment, electric vehicles, or EVs, aren’t particularly common in the U.S. Only about 2% of vehicles sold in the U.S. last year were electric. “It looks like, somewhere around 5% of sales is where things really start to take off”—when EV’s transition from the novel to the ordinary—says Colin McKerracher, head of advanced transport at BloombergNEF. Experts say that smart government policy can nudge the consumer market towards that tipping point.
Indeed, it’s already happened in other countries. In Norway, for example, the government has built a massive charging infrastructure and subsidizes free parking for EV owners in many parts of the country, and exempts EV drivers from certain taxes and road tolls. That’s likely part of the reason that 54% of new cars sold in 2020 in Norway were EVs. Similarly, in China, government subsidies and investment in charging infrastructure have led to a robust and competitive market, with over 400 automakers producing EVs for drivers around the world. The U.S. has some catching up to do.
The Biden administration’s much-talked-about $2.65 trillion infrastructure plan allocates $174 billion for developing America’s EV industry, and calls for the installation of 500,000 publicly accessible charging ports, introduction of point-of-sale rebates for consumers and electrification of the federal fleet—the 650,000 vehicles owned by the U.S. government.
But Biden’s ambitions come with challenges. For one, he’s called for the electric fleet replacements to be “made and sourced by union workers right here in America,” but as of now, there are no EVs that fit that demand. There are signs, however, that this could change in the near future. For example, General Motors, which has expressed interest in federal contracts, announced earlier this year that it would stop making gas-powered light duty vehicles by 2035 and will introduce 30 new electric vehicle models over the next five years. And to produce those EVs, the company wants to bring its supply chain stateside. “Doing our own battery and cell production and battery assembly allows for all the key elements of the supply chain to be right here in the U.S. with American workers doing the manufacturing for us,” says Gerald Johnson, GM’s executive vice president of global manufacturing.
The president’s infrastructure package likely faces a long political path forward. But it clearly and unapologetically signals that electric vehicles are a federal policy priority, and that can have substantial implications for America’s automotive industry, positioned to emerge from an emissions-choked past into a battery-powered future. Watch the video above to learn more about how policy can shape America’s electric vehicle industry.
Mars is a lousy place to try to fly a helicopter. There’s the temperature, for one thing—a paralyzing -90º C (-130º F), frigid enough to cause nearly any machinery to freeze up and lock. There’s the remoteness too; Mars is currently 287 million km (178 million mi.) from Earth, meaning that radio signals, even moving at light speed, take nearly 16 minutes to travel just one way between the two worlds. And then there’s the tenuous Martian atmosphere—just 1% the density of Earth’s, making it awfully hard for rotating blades to get any bite at all.
But flying a helicopter on Mars is precisely what NASA did today, when the little Ingenuity drone lifted off from the floor of Jezero Crater at 3:34 AM EDT (just after noon, Mars time), hovered at an altitude of 3 m (10 ft) for 40 seconds, and touched gently back down, kicking up a plume of rusty red dust. It was the first flight of a powered aircraft on another planet, coming 118 years after the Wright Brothers achieved the same feat on Earth. For the record, Ingenuity’s total time aloft was more than three times the duration of the Wrights’ 12 seconds.
“We do kind of compare it to the Wright Brothers,” says NASA Acting Administrator Steve Jurczyk. “The first powered flight on Earth used twin-blade, counter rotating propellers in two gas powered motors in an aircraft configuration. We’re using two four-foot long counter rotating propellers on the helicopter, driven by electric motors.”
The modest flight on Mars was made by an equally modest machine. Ingenuity stands just .49 m (19 in.) tall and weighs 1.8 kg (4 lbs), small enough and light enough to have spent the entire cruise between Earth and Mars tucked inside the belly of the car-sized Perseverance rover. But Ingenuity’s humble dimensions belie its complex engineering—and its $80 million price tag. The helicopter has its own on-board computer, heater, guidance system, cameras and laser altimeter. Its 1.2 m blades spin at a dizzying 2,537 revolutions per minute—or five times the speed of terrestrial helicopter blades—which is necessary to gain lift in the whisper of Martian air.
Still images and stop-action video of the flight were captured by two cameras aboard Ingenuity—one black and white and one color—and another aboard Perseverance, which before the flight had backed a safe 65 m away from Ingenuity’s 10 m by 10 m flight zone. A microphone aboard Perseverance also attempted to capture audio of the helicopter motor, though as of this writing that data had not yet been processed.
Today’s flight might not have happened at all had the controllers not resolved a problem when Ingenuity first tried to test its blades at high speed on April 9. As the system was transitioning from its pre-flight to flight mode, a so-called “watchdog switch” shut it down after it detected an anomaly in the system. Ultimately NASA determined that the solution was to upload patches to the helicopter’s software to eliminate bugs.
That degree of caution was in keeping with the entire go-slow way Ingenuity has been handled from the start. Merely unstowing the helicopter from the rover and lowering it to the surface was a six-day, multi-step job that involved activating a bolt-breaking device, firing a cable-cutting pyrotechnic, rotating Ingenuity to its upright position, extending its four legs, and finally dropping it the final 13 cm (5 in.) to the ground. The machine’s light weight combined with Mars’s relatively lower gravity—just 38% that of Earth—made the fall an easily survivable one.
This first brief flight will by no means be Ingenuity’s only one. It is scheduled to make four more flights over the course of the next month—all from a site NASA has now given the playful airport designation JZRO, for Jezero. The altitude and distance of each flight will grow steadily greater and the airborne maneuvers more complex. “We’ll work up to 300 meters downrange and to 90-second flights,” Jurczyk says. None of that will be easy since the radio signal lag makes it impossible to fly the helicopter in real time; rather, as with the rover’s travels, all of the commands must be radioed up and preloaded in advance.
Unlike Perseverance, which was sent to Mars to conduct research, Ingenuity is able to conduct no science beyond merely scanning its surroundings with its cameras. Like the Wright Brothers’ first flight, it is merely a demonstration mission—testing whether Martian aircraft can someday be used both as advance scouts for rovers and humans and as a means of conducting research on hillsides and high outcroppings that would be otherwise out of reach. In a nod to its engineering lineage, Ingenuity does carry one bit of non-essential cargo: a tiny swatch of fabric from the Wrights’ original plane taped to its underside—a swatch that long ago flew on the beaches of North Carolina and today flew again, in a crater on distant Mars.
1171 Shoreham looks much like it did when Anna Zimmerman lived there: modest but presentable. A good starter home for Zimmerman and her husband when they bought it in 2005, for a while it provided an idyllic existence in suburban Charleston, S.C., a community of friendly neighbors for their young child, a quaint backyard and even space for Zimmerman’s mother-in-law. Then, in 2015, the first flood hit, taking most of their property with it after a heavy rain. This came as a shock; no flood risk had been disclosed when Zimmerman bought the house. But, determined to turn lemons into lemonade, she used the insurance money to fix it up just as she liked. “I would have been happy living in this house into retirement,” she says now, looking up at it from across the street.
Then came Hurricane Irma in 2017. Water inundated the house, destroying virtually everything up to the waist. The insurance adjuster declared the home a total loss, and Zimmerman was left with two options: use the insurance payout—and a considerable amount of her own money—to rebuild, or collect the cash and sell the house to any one of a bevy of real estate investors eager to flip it.
Zimmerman couldn’t fathom rebuilding when she knew the home would flood again, and selling it to a flipper felt wrong, because eventually it would just end up in the hands of another unsuspecting buyer enticed by a newly refurbished home. So she began the long process of trying to unload the property in a manner that she considered ethical. She unsuccessfully pursued a government program that buys out homes prone to flooding, and even explored razing the home herself, but abandoned that idea when she realized she would have to settle the mortgage, take out a loan to tear down the house and still pay taxes for the vacant lot. Defeated, she let it go into foreclosure.
It was all in vain: today, the home, owned by Fannie Mae, is listed for sale. The walls—on which Zimmerman had painted warnings like mold in walls—have been painted over, and a local broker’s listing offers no mention of a flooding problem. The real estate agent declined to comment; a Fannie Mae spokesperson said the company is working to assess how climate change will affect its business, and pointed to “insurance options and risk mitigation tools to protect homeowners, creditors and our company.”
Most of the homes on Shoreham Road look charming, with fresh paint and attentive decoration. Zimmerman walks me down the street, house by house, telling stories of former neighbors, almost all of whom have relocated. There’s the old man who had little family of his own and enjoyed when Zimmerman’s father visited; the neighbors whose kids would play with her child; and the home bought by a recent college graduate. But for all the variety in the lives of the people living in them, there’s a sameness to the stories of many houses: flood, hasty sale, repeat. Annual flood days in the city increased 750% from 1980 to 2020, according to data from the National Weather Service, and there are telltale signs all over. In wealthier neighborhoods, historic homes are discreetly being elevated at costs that can run to several hundred thousand dollars. Elsewhere, a careful eye can make out the watermark from a previous storm several feet off the ground on the walls of some homes.
So, how much is Zimmerman’s old house worth? Fannie Mae listed it for $210,000 before reducing it to $199,900, and Zillow says it’s worth up to $221,000. A comparably sized home across the street sold for $231,000 last year, and others on the street have sold for more in recent years. But, at the same time, the house next door was recently bought by the city and razed because of flood risk.
These may sound like parochial concerns specific to Shoreham Road and Charleston, but they actually reflect the types of questions homeowners around the U.S. may soon be asking. Millions of American homes are vulnerable to flooding, wildfires and storms, and they will only become more exposed as the effects of climate change worsen. There’s no universally agreed-upon estimate for the total value of real estate at stake, but experts agree that the number is enormous. Research from the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit research group that studies flood risk, estimates that flooding alone already results in $20 billion in property loss annually and that this figure will grow to more than $30 billion in 30 years. A report from reinsurer Swiss Re found that last year extreme weather caused a total of $105 billion in insured losses in North America. In California, $2 trillion worth of real estate sits in areas most at risk of wildfires, according to real estate brokerage firm Redfin.
Increasingly, experts see a collective threat to the U.S. economy. As the risks of owning a home in places affected by climate change stack up, economists and policymakers say climate-induced flight from threatened areas could shock the U.S. economy as home prices plummet, lending dries up and the local tax base diminishes in hard-hit regions.
“The degree of capital reallocation and the speed of that is going to be larger and happen more quickly than most market participants expect,” Brian Deese, President Joe Biden’s chief economic adviser, told TIME last year when he was the head of sustainable investing at BlackRock. Zimmerman calls herself “the canary in the coal mine.” She may be one of the first, but if the U.S. doesn’t heed her warnings, she won’t be the last.
The first message real estate investor Derick Herring sent to Zimmerman came via text. “Do you own 1171 Shoreham Rd? If so my partner and I are interested in buying it. Got any interest in selling?”
Zimmerman was honest from the beginning. She told him that it had flooded multiple times, cited an estimate from a structural engineer that it would cost $180,000 to elevate and said that a lawyer had advised her that selling would expose her to legal liability. “Someone is going to get stuck with a serious lemon,” she texted back.
“I am still interested,” he replied. Eventually, despite never meeting in person, he sent her a written offer and a contract. Herring wasn’t the only one, but he was one of the most aggressive. In 90 pages of text messages and emails shared with TIME, Zimmerman batted back attempts to buy her home from close to a dozen flippers.
A similar pattern has played out in the wake of disasters across the country. Homes are destroyed, but buyers are undeterred—whether because of the influence of home flippers, a lack of reliable information about a home’s risk, or simple carelessness. The net result is that threatened homes keep changing hands each year, leaving buyers, the banks that lend to them and the federally backed entities that guarantee them vulnerable to a climate-driven crash.
In Houston, for example, real estate agents worried in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Harvey that the storm would depress the city’s real estate. But data from the Houston Association of Realtors show that instead of driving people away, sales surged in the months following Harvey. The stabilization is at least in part the result of the $1 billion that, according to the Houston Chronicle, investors had planned to pour into the city’s real estate market post-Harvey—from individuals buying up single homes to institutional investors based elsewhere. “Hurricane Harvey was enormous,” says Brian Spitz, president of Big State Home Buyers, which buys distressed homes in Texas. “We probably tripled or quadrupled our volume for a short period of probably four months.”
And this might be just the tip of the iceberg, experts say. In the future, more homeowners could default on their mortgages, driving down prices in communities even for those whose homes are less vulnerable. Banks might stop lending, depriving the community of the capital to recover. “Potentially, we’re looking at a wave of mortgage defaults that would be similar to the subprime crisis in how it would play out,” says Michael Craig, an economist at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. As disaster unfolds, homeowners in cities across the country might start considering their own climate risk and run for the hills.
In January 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic set in, I met with Deese on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. He offered a warning about the risk climate change poses to the financial system and mortgages specifically. “When you talk about physical risk, usually the conversation immediately pivots to sort of far-off, long-term risks,” he said. “Those risks, while they do accelerate out into the future, are more pressing on the market today than most market participants understand.”
For years, climate risk in real estate has been a “known unknown.” Think tanks and nonprofits have published research, and policy wonks have discussed it at conferences. Some places have tightened disclosure rules and are considering adaptations to prepare, but at the federal level, things have moved slowly.
That’s changed since the Biden Administration entered office. In March, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a request for input on the potential for new rules that would require firms to evaluate and disclose the risk climate change poses to their balance sheets. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said climate change poses “an existential threat” to the financial system, and created a “climate hub” at her department. FEMA restarted an initiative, known as Risk Rating 2.0, to make the cost of flood insurance better reflect the risk. The rule, which had been halted by the Trump Administration, is expected to raise the cost of flood insurance for nearly 80% of policy holders and, in turn, discourage investment in risky homes.
The day before Biden took office, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA)—which oversees Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other financial institutions that provide more than $6 trillion in financing for mortgage lending—published a request for advice on new climate policy. The results have been overwhelming, with organizations calling for everything from more transparent disclosure to new policies to ensure risky loans don’t end up on the federal balance sheet. “I think it’s fair to say there may be no part of our financial system that’s more vulnerable to climate and natural disasters than our mortgage-finance system,” said FHFA head Mark Calabria at a March 4 listening session.
Lynsey Weatherspoon for TIMEA house in downtown Charleston that was raised to mitigate damage from future floods.
Many experts remain skeptical that the federal government will have the political buy-in to take on these issues with the focus they require. True reckoning requires hard choices: homes and communities will need to be adapted, while others will need to be abandoned altogether. Some communities have tried to embark on this path. In Scituate, Mass., a town of 18,000 with one of the highest flood-insurance claim rates in the state, officials have laid out a detailed plan that includes elevating roads and homes. On one beach, the town spent $10 million on a sea wall. Another beach was deemed unfit for such protection, leaving the town to manage a retreat from the waterfront.
Back in Charleston, the cost of flooding is adding up: an analysis from the First Street Foundation suggests that flood damage is expected to cost $744 million this year. The hard news has started to sink in for some—but not so much for others. Consultants have recommended buying out and demolishing hundreds of properties; thousands more will need modifications. Driving through the West Ashley neighborhood west of downtown, I spot the occasional vacant plot of land, where the city had purchased the property and demolished the home because of frequent flooding. The most startling sight is an empty patch that was once the site of 32 townhomes. Today, there are hardly any signs that the 4.5 acres of grass was once inhabited, save for an errant light pole. The city paid $5 million for the townhomes. How many more can it afford to buy?
