VICE US - undefined USRSS feed for undefinedenFri, 20 Sep 2019 10:00:00 +0000<![CDATA[This Is Exactly What Will Happen After the Last Fish in the Ocean Dies]]>, 20 Sep 2019 10:00:00 +0000Picture a beach along the same vast ocean you know today—the same powerful waves and shifting tides, reflecting the same beautiful sunsets, even the same green-blue water. Now imagine a crowd gathered at the shoreline, standing in a big circle, gawking at something that just washed up. Kids tug on their parents’ shirt sleeves, asking questions about the dead creature lying on the sand. Reporters arrive. The story is momentous even if the takeaway isn’t much fun. Everyone knows there used to be fish in the oceans—kind of like the ones that still live in some rivers and lakes, except they could be much bigger, sometimes meaner, more diverse, more colorful, more everything. But those mythical ocean fish all died. Except maybe this one. This one was alive in there, and now it’s dead too.

According to Stanford University paleobiologist Jonathan Payne, an expert in marine mass-extinction events, a scenario where all the ocean's fish, mammals, and other creatures—even tiny animals like krill—are all gone is far from science fiction. The type of die-off that would lead to a largely lifeless ocean has happened before, and we're well on our way to seeing it happen again.

To get into Payne's frame of mind, we have to look at two areas of history. First, there's pre-dinosaur times, where we can find a precedent for the kind of huge-scale extinction we're seeing now. Then, we have to look at the past few hundred years, to understand why our fishless future kind of looks like, uh, the present.

We know that, about 250 million years ago, some extremely bad stuff happened, because almost everything on Earth that was alive at that time died very quickly, taking only a few million years to die off. This event is not to be confused with the meteorite impact that happened 65 million years ago—the one that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs. That was nothing. A lot of those dinosaurs never went truly extinct; they're now known as "birds," and quite a few mammals made it, and evolved into humans, in pretty short order. This earlier event, the Permian–Triassic Extinction, is frequently called "the Great Dying" by paleontologists who like historical events to sound like Morrissey album titles. It made the Earth pretty quiet for a while—the oceans quietest of all.

In 2017, Payne and several colleagues looked into the source of the aforementioned extremely bad stuff that led to the Great Dying. They concluded that temperature-dependent hypoxia—loss of oxygen due to changes in temperature—caused about 70 percent of the losses. An oddly familiar culprit was fingered for this temperature change: "rapid and extreme climate warming." Payne and his pals weren't the first to draw comparisons between the events leading up to the Great Dying and the changes we're seeing today. A previous study had found that the Great Dying had resulted from rising carbon emissions—caused at that time by geothermal events—that occurred over the span of two to 20 millennia; in other words, the blink of a geological eye.

"The relevant thing we know from these recent results is that the patterns of warming, and loss of oxygen from the ocean that can account for the extinction at the end of the Permian are the same features we're starting to see right now," explained Curtis Deutsch, a chemical oceanographer at the University of Washington and one of Jonathan Payne's colleagues on that 2017 study.

This is adapted from an excerpt out of The Day It Finally Happens. To buy this book, go here.

Thanks to our species' multi-pronged and comprehensive approach, humanity's present day "Kill All the Marine Life" project is going extremely well. Here's a quick cheat sheet listing our main strategies:

  • We dump several metric tons of plastic garbage into the oceans every year.
  • Bottom trawling, or dragging fishing equipment across the seafloor, is turning "large portions of the deep continental slope into faunal deserts and highly degraded seascapes" according to a 2014 report on the long-term effects of this widespread practice
  • The planet is heating up really fast, and the resulting extinctions are happening in real time. (Although, for the record, at this rate it will take a few more centuries for this effect to reach the lifeforms at the deepest depths of the oceans.)
  • Ocean acidification—the other major side effect of CO2 emissions besides global warming—is causing countless die-offs, most famously in corals, the backbone of coral reefs, the most biodiverse ecosystems on earth.
  • Fertilizer and pesticides poison the ocean, and when combined with the above factors, they help create "dead zones," nearly oxygen-free patches of ocean where almost nothing can live. According to a 2018 paper published in Science magazine, dead zones make up four times as much of the oceans as they did in 1950.
  • We eat the sea's living creatures—which is the number-one cause of their declining numbers. There are rates at which we can supposedly fish sustainably—meaning in such a way that we don't run out—but the fishing industry operates in volumes that meet, or surpass the peak equilibrium rate. (Right now, we're hauling up 90 percent of fish stocks globally, according to the UN.) In other words, we're killing as many fish as we possibly can as a byproduct of our industries, and then on top of that, we're also eating as many as we can.

To be clear, the Great Dying wasn't 100 percent caused by warming either. But whatever the cause, 286 out of 329 marine invertebrate genera we know of died back then. All the trilobites and blastoids died, for instance. Every single one! But no one mourns the trilobites and blastoids, and that actually helps illustrate why we fail to grasp that we're annihilating life in the oceans. There's actually a sociological term for this phenomenon: it's called a shifting baseline.

"Shifting baselines" have to do with everyone's gut-level perception of the natural world. The term refers to our tendency to perceive our own early experiences of ecology as the norm, in contrast to what we see later in life. To explain with a non-oceanic example, my own childhood memories of summers in California's Inland Empire include street gutters choked with thousands of California toads. Twenty years later, those toads are mostly gone—likely decimated by chytrid fungus infections. Their loss leaves me with the false impression that the natural order in Southern California has vanished in a very short time, when actually, the damage humanity has caused here is of much longer duration and much larger in scale than the loss of one species of toad (a species that arguably wasn't "supposed to be there" in the first place). Much more serious losses of biodiversity have been rolling out for centuries, but I don't miss animals like the Southern California kit fox, which went extinct over a century ago, because my own baseline never included them.

Similarly, according to Deutsch, we won't collectively care about the death of all the fish, because when it finally happens, our baselines will have shifted so much that the lack of fish will seem normal.

So back to the first question I asked those scientists: what will the fishless ocean look like?

Aesthetically, it won't be very different, according to Payne. A point I came across again and again in my research is that crystal-clear blue waters are often relatively lifeless. It's rare to look at the ocean and see strong indications of life—even plant life. "It's not carpeted in green, there aren't cells everywhere photosynthesizing," Payne said. "The color you see is mostly just the physics of light absorption and water." So in most places, you wouldn't actually see anything at all by looking at the ocean, just as a flight over the Great Plains doesn't tell you anything about the decline of the American buffalo.

Holistic accounting of the numbers of various species in the oceans have only begun recently, so it's hard to pin down exact numbers, but according to a 2015 report by the World Wildlife Fund, the oceans lost 49 percent of all vertebrates in just the time between 1970 and 2012. So rather, we should try and imagine the perspectives of people who saw the oceans when they were teeming with life, and Deutsch suggests reading accounts from the Age of Exploration. If they could time travel, Deutsch said, the Spanish explorers who first visited the New World would look at our ocean today, and say, Wow, that's dead.

"They would describe coming in on their ships through the Gulf of the Caribbean and not even being able to get to shore because the backs of the sea turtles were just so thick they couldn't get their boats in," Deutsch said. Indeed, when Columbus arrived, there were so many turtles, they thunked against the hull of his ship all night, keeping his crew awake. Today, spotting a sea turtle is a momentous event, because the number of sea turtles in the Caribbean is down to about 3 to 7 percent of what it was before Europeans arrived.

I have seen precisely one wild sea turtle in my entire life, and that was because I was searching for one.

I was off the northeast coast of Queensland, Australia, at the time, snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef in the hopes that it might at least partially correct my own shifting baseline vis-a-vis ocean biodiversity. Even if you've never had the extreme privilege of visiting a coral reef, you've undoubtedly seen one, as magnificently CG-rendered in Finding Nemo, or majestically photographed for the BBC's Blue Planet TV series, which means you know the broad strokes of what a coral reef is—a place so teeming with life that it's one of the rare places for which the word "teeming" seems appropriate.

But don't picture a technicolored Disney wonderland. Unless you have the right lens filters and the weather is just so, a coral reef just looks like what it is: a section of ocean with, well, a lot of life—like any part of the ocean you've ever seen, except with more brown and yellow (alive) stuff in there. When you look closely, there are the charismatic, photogenic animals down among the corals, and inside the anemones. Your expedition guide will call out when there's something to see, "Does anyone want to see Nemo?" they'll ask, and show off the clownfish, because clownfish are to the reef as the Eiffel Tower is to Paris. But the clownfish down there look pale and brown, and impossibly tiny, nothing like the bright red cartoon characters brought to you by Disney and Pixar. (I'm not implying that the Great Barrier Reef is anything other than breathtakingly beautiful; just that when you see it, it looks more "normal" than you might think.)

Meanwhile closer to the surface, thousands of indifferent, brownish fish dart around in schools that change directions in twitchy unison. In some parts, you can busy your hands at a coral reef by reaching out and gently closing your hand around a fish, feeling it squirm away, and then immediately grabbing another. The sheer density of "biomass" had a mounting emotional effect on me, particularly when my thoughts inevitably drifted to just how much below me had already died. Recently, 30 percent of the coral died in one year, bringing estimates of the total loss to about 50 percent. When I visited in 2018 there hadn't been much coral bleaching recently, and lots of fish were around. The way the future is shaping up, though, finding a lot of life there is likely to become rarer and rarer.

After three hours spent touching what's essentially a closed-off memorial to the living ocean we once had, you inevitably leave, and this gives you an opportunity to test your original perception of the ocean against your fresh memories of a marine wonderland. When you look down at the seafloor off the coast of California, you see the exact opposite of the Great Barrier Reef: bupkis. No visible fish at all. Not all patches of coastal ocean can be the Great Barrier Reef, but that doesn't mean they should all look like lifeless deserts. To assume they should be this lifeless isn't natural at all; that's just your already-shifted baseline talking.

If the Great Dying is our model, the process of environmental degradation wouldn't just mean dead marine fish, but massive die-offs in most of the plants and animals eaten by fish, meaning algae and kelp, along with many plankton, krill, worms, and everything else we tend to lump into "the bottom of the food chain." That carnage would, in turn, devastate species that rely on small fish, like most whales, dolphins, seals, penguins, and many humans.

It's a good time to pause and point out that some of fish species, like the coelacanth, a deep sea cave-dwelling monster fish, made it through the Great Dying and survived all the way to the present unchanged—so no, the Great Dying didn't kill all the fish on Earth, "great" though it may have been. It was just a very large-scale mass extinction. But as long as we're being pedantic, keep in mind that fish can't all be lumped into any single taxonomic category like phylum, class, order, or family. From a certain genetic perspective, a shark has more of an obvious connection to its fellow cunning predator the seahorse (look it up) than with a coelacanth, and a coelacanth shares DNA with a salamander that it doesn't share with a shark. So when I say "fish" I'm casting a very wide net (pun intended) that includes all marine vertebrates with gills that aren't tetrapods—so no salamanders. That might not mean much to you, but if any jargon-crazed biologists are reading this, they'll be glad I'm making this distinction.

And with the Great Dying as our model, we're imagining the disappearance of about 96 percent of all life in the ocean—not just fish, but just about everything down there with eyes (and a lot of blind species, too). What happens?

Well, in some ways this will be a vastly improved business environment for large corporations. Just as the overabundance of marine life in oceans around the New World was bad for business, today's ships also run into problems.

For one example, let's look at retailers that ship globally like Walmart, Amazon, and Alibaba, which increasingly face regulations aimed at preserving marine animal habitats. The container ships—which are the size of a small town—that move merchandise currently have to plot out inconvenient routes to circumvent certain animal habitats, and to avoid some forms of water pollution caused by their 100,000 horsepower diesel engines. And they must carve a path through the seas without making sounds that are too loud, or that fall below 100 hertz because animals like whales use those frequencies to communicate. In the heated, acidified ocean that has killed all fish, baleen whales will have certainly starved to death long ago, obviating the need for any such regulations. The die-off will also allow for the easing of regulations against sewage dumping, and—needless to say—negate most of the public's antipathy toward oil spills.

That's not to say that businesses will make more money and that's that. Environmental remediation, a term that means "cleaning up after businesses that pollute," is currently a growing industry, with some market researchers claiming it'll be worth as much as $123.13 billion by the year 2022—an amount that's almost equal to Google's 2017 revenue. Some of those profits will obviously fall away when there's much less demand for oil spills to be cleaned up. But it's not clear how long the mostly dead oceans could be treated as free and open spaces to dump things.

We can safely predict one very large effect of all that dumping: the marine fishing industry will no longer involve "fishing." It may nonetheless survive with the help of fish aquaculture.

Fish farms appear to be a growing business. Just look at "Bluefin tuna," the marketing term used to describe several giant, silvery fish—all endangered or threatened—that we hoist onto ships, carve up by the thousands every day to extract the $15 morsels of fatty tuna we label on menus with the Japanese word "toro," and serve for the gustatory pleasure of the wealthy inhabitants of coastal cities around the world. Those morsels are about to become even more effective advertisements of wealth when the three or four species of fish they come from go extinct in the wild sometime in the next few decades, and prices skyrocket.

To mitigate this inconvenience, projects exist today to grow Bluefin tuna in tanks, like the ones at Yoni Zohar's marine technology lab at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The purpose, currently, is to grow fish larvae, including bluefins, along with smaller species like sea bass, into viable juvenile fish that can be taken out in boats and tossed into overfished bluefin habitats to replenish the depleted population. But this plan will only work as long as the ocean can sustain schools of wild tuna, which it won't be able to for much longer. The death knell has been sounded for even the more plentiful albacore, and the yellowfin species marketed as "ahi," both of which are declining in number as well. That means tanks like Zohar's have to evolve if these luxury consumer goods are going to continue to exist. Tuna will have to survive in their tanks for multiple decades—long enough to transform from a microscopic and inedible hatchling to a 400 kilogram titan with fatty, palate-pleasing jowl meat. Making the feat even more problematic is that they never stop swimming, which is no big deal when the fish are tiny, but will be harder to accommodate in a tank when they're capable of swimming at speeds exceeding 70 kilometers per hour.

In the case of something like a dolphin, this sort of small-tank captivity is viewed as cruel, but fish taste better than dolphins, and don't squeak happily at children, so, much as has been the case with cows in the U.S., it's doubtful anyone will take an interest in their welfare. We can probably expect vast factory farms full of tuna, along with any other large marine fish humans want to continue to eat in the future since there's no alternative, apart from not eating them.

But if we move away from looking at the ocean as a business, it bears mentioning that not eating any fish whatsoever is decidedly not an option for a vast swath of humanity. "You'd be looking at a lot of starvation," Payne, the Stanford paleobiologist, told me. According to a 2016 op-ed in Science magazine by public health researcher Christopher Golden, 845 million people—about a tenth of the global population—face some form of malnutrition in the near future when traditional fishing ceases to be a viable source of food for many of the world's poor.

We're also in for more big changes to the weather, Payne said. Part of the reason the oceans work as a "carbon sink" is that plankton consume carbon as a part of photosynthesis, turning them into organic matter. A reduction in photosynthesis means more carbon will just stay in the atmosphere and speed up global warming, particularly in the vast dead zone around the equator—a probable cause of the extreme ocean temperatures of the Great Dying; areas that are now usually around 28 degrees Celsius were 40 degrees Celsius or more back then.

Apart from heat, Payne said, "one thing you would see very quickly is the effect of storms on coastal systems would change, because with nothing living on the reefs, the reefs will start to fall apart. That will reduce their ability to protect coastal systems from waves during big storms." This means huge changes in the terrestrial climate near these coastal systems, particularly in places like Australia and the Bahamas.

But even with the combined ocean ecosystem more or less converted into a giant marine desert, there's a very good chance we'll always have a man-made oasis or two. A 2017 proposal by the consortium of tourism businesses and Australia's Reef and Rainforest Research Centre would protect six particularly profitable sites along the reef by literally pumping in cold water at a cost of millions of dollars to lessen the effects of climate change. The idea has been regarded as perverse, with critics noting that pumping cold water into a few areas of the Great Barrier Reef would be nothing but a band-aid, and that large scale action is needed. But large scale action isn't happening, and the mass die-off is proceeding.

Since it appears we lack the willpower to curb our worst impulses when it comes to the oceans, a few band-aids may be all we can hope for.

Adapted from an excerpt from The Day It Finally Happens by Mike Pearl. Copyright © 2019 by Mike Pearl. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

qvg3zmMike PearlCathryn VirginiaKate LowensteinearthFeaturesfishWILDLIFEclimate changeextinction
<![CDATA[Good Job Striking, Now Here's How to Make Your Climate Activism Have an Impact]]>, 19 Sep 2019 16:29:43 +0000 This article is part of a series on climate change activism VICE is running in the lead-up to the climate strike on September 20. Read the other entries in the series here and here.

Alaskan cities are experiencing temperatures above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, Miami floods are up 12-fold from just two decades ago and Washington, D.C., got a record-smashing 3.3 inches of rain in a single hour this July. All of this is terrifying, but we can expect climate-driven natural disasters to get even worse in the years to come—and people under 40 may legitimately find it hard to imagine what the world's climate will look like decades down the road.

A growing body of scientific research warns that if we do not immediately begin cutting greenhouse gas emissions we could pass an irreversible tipping point within four decades—or possibly sooner. Anyone in high school or college today could see massive strains on the food and water systems necessary for human civilization by the time they're middle-aged. That's why a majority of teens are worried about climate change, and why a quarter of them have already participated in activism around the issue, according to a recent poll.

That is also why thousands—and possibly millions—of people will be walking out of their schools and jobs on September 20 and 27 to force our leaders to create an economy that no longer depends on climate-destroying fossil fuels.

Current and former student organizers contacted by VICE said that if enough young people rise up against the politicians and CEOs locking us into catastrophe it could make the future less scary for all of us. Here are some of their suggestions.

Find a group to strike with rather than going it alone

You might not feel you have that much in common with your classmates. But they're almost certainly just as scared as you are about the climate dystopia on the horizon. Amplify this collective fear into a statement parents, teachers, media, and politicians can't ignore by finding other people at your school to strike with.

"Any action is more powerful if you do it in a group," said Juliana Rossi de Camargo, a fellow with the Sunrise Movement, which is helping organize students for the September walkouts. "Although individual action is important to a certain extent, it is not what we need right now, what we need is systems change."

The easiest way to do this is to seek out student-led climate organizations at your school or college. But basically any student group whose members have an interest in averting doomsday can work. In a pinch, just ask 10 of your friends—and ask them to each ask 10 of their own.

"This seems really daunting, like, 'Who am I, I'm just one person,'" Rossi de Camargo said. "But social movements have always just had regular people participate, and if enough people get together they can get their demands met."

Identify the politicians you can pressure in your own backyard

Actions on the day of the strikes are completely up to you and your group. Maybe you all go silent in class, gather in front of the school, or join one of the larger demonstrations taking place in your area. Make sure you tell teachers and parents why you are striking and tag any photos and videos you post with #ClimateStrike.

If you really want to amp up the effectiveness of your strike, target one of your elected officials with your message. Perhaps that's a city councillor who's voted against new public transit, a state representative who supports the coal lobby, or a member of Congress who opposes the Green New Deal.

"Depending on where you are, there's so many creative opportunities to build a movement and put the pressure on," said Chloe Maxmin, one of the early student organizers of the fossil fuel divestment movement and now a state representative in Maine.

Earlier this spring, Maxmin sponsored a "Green New Deal for Maine" bill that would shift the state to 80 percent renewable energy by 2040. On the first day of hearings hundreds of students showed up at the state house to show their support.

"That has an impact," she said. "There's so much potential for amazing climate policy at the state level and I think that has been really overlooked by the left." The bill passed its final legislative hurdle in June.

Link your local action to a wider revolutionary demand

Even as you target politicians and other people in power locally, figure out a way your strike can help contribute to systemic change.

Pushing your city to commit to 100 percent renewable energy is one potential goal because it's a concretely achievable action that would also, at scale, transform our entire economy. The same goes for getting your college to divest from fossil fuels.

One of the more successful recent examples of this is the 2012 Quebec student strikes, which brought more than 300,000 people into the streets over a 78 percent increase in tuition fees but evolved over six months into a wider critique of austerity policies. Demonstrations eventually led to the election of a new provincial government and the cancellation of the fee hike.

"I think movements are strong when they're able to do both of those things at the same time: to ask big questions about the system we live in but to also mobilize people on a very specific target," said Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, one of the strike leaders and now an elected member of the democratic socialist political party Quebec solidaire. "This is one of the lessons from 2012."

Radicalize your parents

The climate strikes are a perfect opportunity to have a conversation about the climate emergency with your parents and convince them that nothing short of making our entire economy zero-carbon is an acceptable response.

Under normal circumstances your mom and dad might dismiss that as impractical, or perhaps even as a socialist plot to take away their hamburgers. But hearing directly from you why climate change is so terrifying that you're willing to miss school could impact their thinking.

"It's helpful to have these strikes as a way to reach parents and tell them that this is a crisis and that this is a matter of our future," said Rose Strauss, a Sunrise activist who went viral last year after a Republican called her "young and naïve."

Keep the conversation with your parents neutral and non-accusatory. Ask a lot of questions. Identify what's holding them back from taking action and make helpful, practical suggestions. Maybe they even want to join the strikes with you. Consult this recent VICE guide for more details and advice.

Use your strike action to build toward 2020

Even in a best-case strike scenario with millions of participants and a Herculean shift in public opinion, the U.S. still faces the potential reelection of a president who has drastically rolled back environmental protections and given fossil fuel executives so much access to the White House that attendees at a private oil industry meeting erupted in laughter earlier this year.

To that effect, the climate strikes could be used as a tool to organize young people into a powerful voting block to counter both Trump and Senate Republicans who have enabled him every step of the way.

Practically speaking, this could mean setting up a voter information station at your strike event or walking around with a clipboard and registering people to vote. Sunrise has guides for how to do this. "Our votes are likely going to be the deciding factor in the 2020 elections," reads one sample script. "Can I help you register or update your voter registration today?"

Think of the September climate strikes as one of many actions leading up to next November. And check out this VICE guide for future suggestions.

"All of this organizing in my mind goes into making sure that we're pressuring candidates, that people are coming out to vote and that the youth voice is really defining the landscape next year," Maxmin said.



zmjz38Geoff DembickiNico TeitelKate Lowensteinpoliticsclimate changeprotest2020environment-peopleclimate strike
<![CDATA[How to Force Your Employer to Help Save the Planet]]>, 18 Sep 2019 14:13:02 +0000This article is part of a series on climate change activism VICE is running in the lead-up to the climate strike on September 20. Read the other entries in the series here and here.






Start talking with your coworkers instead of avoiding them










Use the strike as an excuse to demand a greener workplace





Pressure your employer to dissociate from fossil fuels







Do monthly dinners afterward to keep the strike energy going







7x5kn4Geoff DembickiKoji YamamotoKate Lowensteinclimate changeprotestenvironment-peopleclimate strike
<![CDATA[5 Things You Can Do During September's Climate Strike if You Can’t Leave Work]]>, 11 Sep 2019 15:30:04 +0000This article is part of a series on climate change activism VICE is running in the lead-up to the climate strike on September 20. Read the other entries in the series here and here.





Ask your boss to shut everything down





Get creative with how you interpret workplace rules





Take a selfie







Go silent at work—like, literally stop speaking to people





Figure out what you’ll do after the climate strikes are over






kz4z9mGeoff DembickiNico TeitelKate Lowensteinpoliticsclimate changeprotestenvironment-peopleclimate strike
<![CDATA[Dorian Shows Us the Bleak Future of How the US Will Treat Climate Refugees]]>, 09 Sep 2019 18:25:14 +0000 On Sunday evening, hundreds of Hurricane Dorian survivors boarded a ferry from Freeport, Bahamas, to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, relieved to finally escape the storm's destruction—at least 45 people are dead, hundreds are missing, and nearly 70,000 have been left homeless. Suddenly, however, an announcement was made: Those without the proper paperwork would be refused entry to the United States.

"Please, all passengers that don’t have a U.S. visa, please proceed to disembark," a crew member announced over the intercom in a video posted to Twitter by reporter Brian Entin. Something had changed: The evacuees had been told when they boarded that they would only need a passport and a certificate proving that they had no criminal record to gain entry; now, they needed a visa as well. More than 100 people were forced off the Baleària Caribean ferry, including children.

Baleària did not immediately respond to a request for comment from VICE. While the precise details of this story are still being clarified, the incident points to an emerging dynamic: the systemic inability of countries like the United States to welcome the growing number of climate refugees in a just and humane way.

The UN Refugee Agency has not settled on a definition of who qualifies as a "climate refugee." But while it's impossible to blame individual natural disasters on climate change, a warming planet means decidedly more extreme weather events, and scientists warn that climate change has made hurricanes more powerful and dangerous. Just as drought is helping fuel the mass migration of Central American farmers north, it seems likely that as more storms devastate the Caribbean, residents will find themselves seeking refuge in the nearby U.S.—and at least under Donald Trump, it seems that the government will do what it can to deny entry.

According to the Palm Beach Post, rumors have spread through the devastated island nation that the U.S. was waiving travel requirements for refugees. Hundreds of displaced people gathered at an airstrip on Treasure Cay hoping to catch a ride on a private plane, only to be turned away. "I don’t know where the rumor surfaced," Terrece Bootle-Laing, a local official, told the Post. "But when most people aren’t prepared to cope with the difficulty of lack of water and lack of electricity, the news more or less spread quickly."

Even so, many Bahamanians have been able to make their way to Florida since the storm abated last week, including nearly 1,500 aboard the Grand Celebration humanitarian cruise ship. According to the Washington Post, hundreds have been processed with only a passport and police certificate—so it's not evident what changed aboard the Baleària ferry on Sunday.

For its part, Customs and Border Protection claims that it would have processed the evacuees and blames the company for having made a "business decision" that hurt Bahamanians: Baleària "raised the expectations of these poor people who have been through an unimaginable situation with the hurricane," CBP Florida spokesperson Michael Silva told Newsweek. "They raised their expectations only to then leave them terribly disappointed." What's more, Silva said, the company charged evacuees $150 per person, unlike Grand Celebration, which had provided passage for free.

Whoever is at fault, the expectation that people whose roofs are being ripped off should keep track of passports and police reports—a requirement that is transparently rooted in the racist history of U.S. immigration policy in the first place—is absurd on its face. And while cruise companies might be stepping in to fill the logistical gaps in humanitarian aid for now, how many charity missions will a for-profit cruise company have to run before deciding to act like a business again? After all, desperate people can be a great source of revenue. As climate change spreads crises around the world, some are going to see it as opportunities.



d3a3ykBrendan O'ConnorKate Lowensteinclimate changerefugeesFloridabahamasclimate refugeesenvironment-peopleHurricane Dorian
<![CDATA[What Happens to a People When Their Land Sinks Into the Ocean?]]>, 05 Sep 2019 14:04:20 +0000This article appears in VICE Magazine's Borders Issue. The edition is a global exploration of both physical and invisible borders and examines who is affected by these lines and why we've imbued them with so much power. Click HERE to subscribe to the print edition.

With Shimizu’s Green Float project, floating islands are designed to form a lily pad– like colony. A skyscraper on each pod will be equipped with vertical plant farms while livestock and other farming would take place in “plains” surrounding the tower. The company hopes this would produce 100 percent of the food needed by the residents.

Anote Tong pointed his camera phone out to face an eroding shoreline at sunrise. “You can look out into the beautiful sea,” he said, before turning the camera back closely to his freckled face. “Beautiful, but on the way to be taken.”

Starting in 2003, when he was elected president of the island nation of Kiribati, a series of alarming reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change landed on Tong’s desk. By 2007, they laid out how a slew of climate change–related issues, from coastal erosion to groundwater shortages to increasing dengue fever, could soon force the nation’s 117,000 residents to join the 25 million people displaced by environmental impacts related to climate change every year. “I must admit there was a great deal of denial in the process. My initial reaction was anger, frustration, and a sense of paralysis,” Tong said.

The problem for the people of Kiribati (pronounced KEE-ree-bas), he said, was that they wouldn’t have anywhere to go. The reports detailed how climate change threatened to literally erase Kiribati’s borders. Sea-level rise meant that within this century, the South Pacific could swallow the 33 islands that make up the nation. Tong would have to develop what he called “radical solutions” to protect the people of Kiribati—building floating islands and underwater cities, and purchasing land from other sovereign nations. “If we are going to have to relocate,” said Tong, “we need somewhere to relocate.”

The science is clear: People who live in coastal cities, like Miami, Sydney, and Shanghai, are already vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Many will have to move internally within the next 80 years to get themselves out of harm’s way, with or without the help of their governments and aid agencies. For citizens of low-lying atolls like those that make up Kiribati, it’s a different story. Climate change isn’t just destroying people’s homes but their homelands, and there soon might not be any nation within which to move internally. Countries in the Pacific with little elevation above the ocean, including Tuvalu and most of the Marshall Islands, all risk becoming uninhabitable for their people by 2030.

This is the reality for almost 200,000 people of the South Pacific: Their countries might be wiped off the map, and literally no one can agree on what’s to be done about it and them.

In the past, wars and political conflict have changed states’ borders and shaped power over territories and people. But never before in the history of the world have countries lost sovereign territory permanently because of climate change. Though the question of what happens to the people and territory of states that sink into the ocean has been under discussion since at least the early 90s, there is still no international legal consensus on what can be done for these soon-to-be-stateless people. That has left it up to individual leaders and innovators like Tong to propose radical, sometimes imagination-straining solutions for how to maintain national integrity even when there’s no land on which the nation can stand.

A rendering from Shimizu’s Green Float project.

As he faced the prospect of his nation literally sinking into the ocean, one extreme solution Tong considered while still in office involved moving the country underwater preemptively. Really.

In 2014, the Japanese engineering corporation Shimizu unveiled a design for an underwater glass city called Ocean Spiral that could house as many as 5,000 people. The conceptual metropolis would consist of a spherical city, within which a tower would accommodate homes and work spaces. There would also be a spiral structure connecting this sphere with a base station on the ocean floor, 2.5 miles down—providing the city with essential resources such as energy, freshwater, and food. According to the Shimizu spokesperson Hideo Imamura, however, Ocean Spiral’s technology is still in development.

Since 2008, Shimizu has been working on another project, also noticed by Tong, known as Green Float, which Shimizu promised could be a solution to accommodate people from nations at risk of becoming stateless. The new floating city project would house 10 times as many people as Ocean Spiral and would be designed to withstand natural disasters such as typhoons and tsunamis. An agglomeration of floating islands, each less than two miles wide, forming a lily pad–like colony, Green Float would feature a 300-story-tall “city in the sky” tower. A section built on the outer edge of the central lily pad would host a beach resort and an ocean forest with a wealth of sea life nearby. Shimizu hopes to finalize a first unit, called Green Float II, by 2030, according to the French newspaper Le Monde. Technological innovations in the coming years could make the project possible through the ability to produce very light metal alloys right at an island’s building site, using magnesium extracted from seawater.

And yet, creating permanent floating homes at sea is not an isolated case: It’s been hyped by the Seasteading Institute, which advocates for “seasteads”—politically autonomous human settlements in international waters. According to Duncan Currie, an environmental lawyer and adviser to the High Seas Alliance—a partnership of organizations aimed at conserving the portions of the world’s oceans that exist outside any government jurisdiction—while rising seas may wreak havoc with maritime boundaries, territorially speaking, “the high seas belong to no one for being beyond national jurisdiction, so when it comes to exploitation, they belong to everyone.” Essentially, building floating nation-states in international waters appears to be legally feasible. It’s a reminder that even Kevin Costner’s Waterworld movie scenario is currently a possibility.

Shimizu’s proposed underwater glass city, Ocean Spiral, is designed to draw power and resources to sustain itself from the deep sea.

Up to this point, seasteading has mostly been the interest of a libertarian movement of freedom seekers gearing up to live in permanent dwellings at sea safe from government meddling. But Currie explained that with more than 50 percent of the ocean outside sovereign jurisdiction, it is also an avenue that may be increasingly explored for displaced populations. “The idea is not to get territory but to establish human habitation, and I think some island states are considering it as a solution,” he said. However, without a new ocean treaty, the legality is still disputed, and things are not quite working out for the lodgers of a two-story octagonal seastead floating off the coast of Thailand who will face the death penalty if they are convicted of violating that country’s sovereignty.

Let’s face it, floatable houses or underwater cities are not yet able to provide any long-term solutions for what Alex Randall calls a “humanitarian crisis” in the Pacific. According to Randall, who runs the Climate and Migration Coalition, a network of refugee and migration NGOs, the fact that nobody knows what happens to people from countries that will potentially get wiped off the map in a matter of decades is deeply frustrating: “The way I look at it is it’s also a really tragic answer, because there are clearly potentially millions of people who will be in that position.”

As Randall suggested, this is not just a crisis affecting a few dots of land scattered across a vast ocean—it is the future of 800 million people living in hundreds of low-lying coastal cities the world over. In several Pacific countries, villages have already disappeared. Tong recalled the thriving village where he went to school that no longer exists: “The community has totally relocated. We have a number of those in process. It’s real.” And yet what seemed to worry him equally is the conditions within which his people are forced to relocate. “I’ve always rejected the notion of our people becoming refugees,” he said. “That’s why I started advocating for a policy of migration with dignity.”

Part of that migration with dignity initiative involved the 2014 government purchase of nearly 6,000 acres of land in Fiji—another island nation, more than 1,300 miles away—to move Kiribati’s residents to. He wanted to develop a well-planned relocation program so that if and when people decided to emigrate, they could do so as people with skills and qualifications, not as “second-class citizens.” Still, today, the land remains largely uninhabited, and there doesn’t appear to be much political appetite for the move, either in Fiji or in Kiribati. In 2016, Tong was replaced as president by Taneti Mamau, who is known for downplaying the climate crisis and who has halted the migration with dignity project.

According to Alan Toth, a journalist who visited the purchased land in 2017, the government of Kiribati had given Fijian farmers permission to cultivate taro and coconut on the plots in the absence of Kirabti’s citizens. Claire Anterea, a former nun and the cofounder of the Kiribati Climate Action Network, said almost no one has moved there, and the purchase has mostly been regarded as an opportunity to safeguard the nation’s food supply, not as a viable option for a new home.

A rendering from Shimizu’s Ocean Spiral project.

A looming issue still to be addressed is the lack of an internationally accepted framework that grants protection to people already forced from their homes. Under current international refugee and human rights law, there is no effective and uniform recognition of climate change as a driving factor of cross-border displacement. This is demonstrated by the lack of a commonly accepted definition of “climate refugee” and by the absence of legally binding treaties that ensure human rights protection for climate-change-affected people.

Kira Vinke of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research is developing a proposal for a travel document—or climate passport—that might allow climate displaced people to live and work in countries that are largely responsible for global emissions. Vinke said that the climate passport would allow people to claim an entitlement to relocation rather than be subject to government edicts. As mitigation of climate change becomes less and less feasible, migration is one of the only responses remaining.

“We’ve been trying to lower the rest of the world’s emissions for years, but now we’re at a point where we can’t just focus on mitigation anymore,” said Kathy Jetñil-Kijner, a poet and the United Nations climate envoy for the Marshall Islands. But, she added, “I don’t see anybody opening their doors anytime soon or welcoming us.”

Currently, there are limited arrangements between islands that have experienced environmental ruin and powerful countries responsible for the damage. The United States and the Marshall Islands negotiated a Compact of Free Association in the 1980s that entailed U.S. financial aid and extended the right to live and work in the U.S. to the Marshallese, in part as restitution for conducting 67 nuclear tests there. Meanwhile, Australia and New Zealand have made various agreements to take in a few thousand migrants, often for “labor assistance reasons,” from nearby Pacific island countries every year. This extremely limited patchwork of bilateral agreements can’t accommodate the growing number of climate refugees in need of new homes.

A rendering from Shimizu’s Ocean Spiral project.

“World leaders know exactly what’s happening to people like us in Kiribati,” said Anterea. “Looking at our neighbor, our big brother Australia, they haven’t taken any major sacrifices to support us.”

To remain in a sinking country might seem an impossible task, and yet there may be a workable solution, one that Tong called his “first preference.” He is referring to the principle of raising islands, either through the elevation of their existing land or building artificial ones in their lagoons by dredging sand and gravel—an option currently under consideration by the Marshall Islands and other Pacific nations.

Tong thinks it’s only a short-term possibility for the people of Kiribati, though: “It may give our homeland another 100 years, but eventually the islands will go.”

Chip Fletcher, a climate scientist at the University of Hawaii, has been a strong advocate for island raising nonetheless. Fletcher explained that the Maldives have already taken this approach by dredging material on the island surface and adding vertical elevation an average of two meters high in certain parts, which is what he believes all these atoll nations need to do in order to “stay alive.”

In spite of the potential need for other more long-term solutions, Jetñil-Kijner argued that the Marshallese and other neighboring nations are taking responsibility for their own situation and doing what they can with what they’ve been given. The last thing people want to do is move. Jetñil-Kijner explained how she grew up in the diaspora and knows what it’s like to be separated from land, to be separated from culture. “Staying in our own country is the best option right now and given the climate of immigration rates around the world,” she said. “Building and planning for a disappearing island, envisioning a completely new kind of landscape for our people. That’s definitely visionary thinking.”

A rendering from Shimizu’s Ocean Spiral project.

If you want more border stories, check out this additional package which explores how the borders that divide and surround Europe affect the lives of the people living near them.

gyzxd7Sarah HurtesEllis JonesVICE Magazineclimate changeShimizu Corporationanote tongv26n3The Borders Issue 2019
<![CDATA[The EPA Is Deregulating One of the Most Climate-Destroying Greenhouse Gases]]>, 29 Aug 2019 17:10:48 +0000 The world is on fire, all the ice is melting, and the Trump administration wants to turn up the heat.







j5ym38Brendan O'ConnorKate Lowensteinclimate changeDonald TrumpmethaneEnvironmental Protection Agencyenvironment-policy
<![CDATA[Democrats Say They Want a Climate Debate. So Which Ones Killed It?]]>, 28 Aug 2019 18:23:14 +0000 Over the weekend, members of the Democratic National Committee appeared to kill off any hopes of a debate devoted to climate change. Following a Thursday vote by top DNC officials to not hold a presidential debate focused on climate, the full DNC voted 222-137 on Saturday not to even allow candidates to debate the issue at hypothetical non-DNC-sanctioned events. In doing so, the DNC ignored the voices of protesters who, The Mercury News reported, disrupted the meeting in San Francisco with chants of "We can't wait!" DNC Chair Tom Perez has been adamant throughout the public wrangling over the debate that it would be unfair to raise up climate change above all other issues, and this argument has apparently carried the day, even though climate advocates say that the warming planet deserves to be placed at the center of the Democratic agenda.

What makes this decision notable is not that the Democratic establishment has ignored demands from left-wing activists—everyone is surely used to that by now—but has also publicly broken with the vast majority of Democratic candidates who have publicly indicated they want a climate debate, a group that includes not just lefties like Elizabeth Warren but the relatively moderate frontrunner Joe Biden. Confusingly, the Democratic Party is publicly breaking ranks with the most popular and prominent Democrats in the country, and the DNC needs to offer a better explanation of why it is doing what it's doing.

The DNC is largely not a public-facing organization. Its membership, as laid out in the Democratic Party charter, mostly consists of the leadership of the state Democratic parties, the heads of various Democratic organizations like the National Democratic Municipal Officials Conference, and other VIPs appointed by state parties. These people are mostly not famous and the DNC itself is rarely in the news. A full list of its members, if it exists, is very difficult to find.

But the decision to not hold a climate debate isn't just another intraparty squabble, it's a matter of vital public importance. In an oversaturated, overlong 2020 campaign, debate nights still cut through the noise: The first debate in June scored record ratings, and though the second round of debates drew fewer viewers, nearly 10 million people tuned in. Setting aside one of those debates for climate change would create an opportunity to educate Americans about the issue, emphasize its importance, and underline how committed the Democratic Party is to fighting it. (A seven-hour climate change "town hall" scheduled to be livestreamed by CNN will likely have far fewer viewers, and less impact, than an official debate.) While defending his record on climate change in May, Biden said of his attitude in the 80s, "I said, we have an existential threat, we are in a situation where, if we don’t act quickly, we’re going to basically lose almost everything we have… And that’s exactly the case. It’s even more urgent now." Surely nearly every Democrat, in or outside of the DNC, would agree with that.

So it seems fair to ask why Symone Sanders, a senior Biden adviser, was against holding a climate debate and called it "dangerous territory in the middle of a Democratic primary process." It seems fair to wonder who voted to quash the climate debate, and what positions they hold within the party. (VICE asked the DNC for such a list but did not get a response. We also asked the Biden campaign to clarify its position on a climate debate but have not heard back.) Perez, the DNC chair, wrote that changing the debate rules to devote an event to climate would amount to "putting our thumb on the scale"; it might be fair to wonder whether he was partially motivated by the thousands donated to the DNC by fossil-fuel company executives. Last year, Perez backed a resolution, which the DNC passed overwhelmingly, that allowed the organization to take money from fossil-fuel employees—he said he wanted to make sure the Democrats remain "a party of a big tent where all working people are welcome. We’re not a party that punishes workers simply based on how they make ends meet."

Do you have inside knowledge of internal deliberations about a climate debate going on inside the Democratic Party? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Harry Cheadle securely on Signal at +1 929 400 2927 or email

One might also ask whether the Democratic candidates who have loudly supported a climate debate might be willing to challenge the DNC publicly and agree among themselves to hold such a debate, with or without DNC approval. If Biden, Warren, and Bernie Sanders all said they wouldn't be apart of any debates unless one of them was devoted to climate, surely the DNC would back down. So why have the campaigns not done so? (VICE reached out to the Warren, Sanders, and Kamala Harris campaigns to ask whether they would defy the DNC on the matter, but did not receive a response.)

A slate of candidates feuding openly with the party establishment would be an extreme move. So, for that matter, is banning contributions from the oil industry; so is changing the previously-agreed-to rules to create a climate debate.

But if climate change is a crisis—or, to quote the Democratic Party platform, a "real and urgent threat"—extreme measures would seem warranted. Democrats have two choices that make sense: They can continue to call climate change an existential threat and start acting like it, or they can continue to go about business as usual and stop using the language of crisis. As it stands, the stated position of the Democratic Party seems to be that the world is on fire, but that there’s no reason to do anything differently.


Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

kz4wpmHarry CheadleKate Lowensteinpoliticsclimate changeBernie Sandersjoe bidenElizabeth Warren2020OpinionDemocratsViews My Ownprogressiveskamala harris
<![CDATA[California Could Be on the Brink of Its Worst-Ever Wildfire Season]]>, 19 Aug 2019 10:00:00 +0000 After being devastated by wildfires last year, California has gone through several months of being relatively fire-free. But as we head into the heat of late summer, the state is ready to burn. When the ignition happens, experts warn, it could cause wildfires more intense and destructive than anything California has experienced.

Here's one version of what that could look like: Sometime in the coming days or weeks a storm originating from warm moist air in Mexico becomes drier and more lightning-prone as it heads north. Over California the skies suddenly begin crackling with electricity.

"We can have thousands of lightning strikes in just a couple of hours time, in many cases they're in concentrated areas," said Jessica Gardetto, a spokesperson with the National Interagency Fire Center.

That lightning could easily blast into some of the 147 million trees that have died in recent years because of the California drought and invasive pine beetles. What begins as a small fire could be quickly fanned into something ferocious by strong winds brought along with the storm. The resulting wildfire would roar through vegetation dried out by several weeks of hot summer temperatures until it’s so big that any community in its way—even those that take all available precautions against wildfires—can potentially be burned to the ground.

Last year saw a wave of horrific fires hit the state. Most notably, the Camp Fire killed 85 people—making it the deadliest fire in California history—and destroyed the town of Paradise. To the south, the Woolsey Fire devastated a stretch of coast that included the wealthy enclave of Malibu. The casualties and damage were such that some called it the worst fire season California had ever had. This year could be just as bad.

"The potential is there to have similar fire activity as last year and the year before," Gardetto said. "It just all depends on those weather factors lining up to create that unfortunate perfect storm."

That perfect storm may seem pretty far away to many California residents. From January to early August in 2018, over 3,600 wildfires charred about 615,000 acres across the state, according to statistics from the fire protection agency Cal Fire. This year during the same period only 22,900 acres have burned—the 2,900 wildfires responsible for that damage have been smaller and less destructive.

"So far it's been a mild season," said Amy Head, a Cal Fire battalion chief.

One reason for that is an unusually wet winter with record-breaking amounts of rain and precipitation. The snowpack in California is 33 percent higher than last year. High humidity has additionally caused soil moisture to be 40 percent above average. Aside from a few short periods of extreme heat, California's summer hasn't been as scorching as previous years'.

"It's been a good break for all of us because we've kind of been going nonstop for many years now," Head explained. "It's given us a chance to catch our breath."

But Head and other experts know that the potential this year for another Camp Fire–style blaze—which destroyed around 18,800 structures and caused $16.5 billion in damage—is all too real.

Heavy precipitation earlier this year created a "super bloom" of vegetation that is now drying out in the August heat, creating tinder that could feed a massive fire. "We're at a breaking point now," Southern California Edison fire scientist Tom Rolinski told the Palm Springs Desert Sun in August.

CoreLogic fire specialist Tom Jeffery earlier this summer explained to the New York Times that "all of the factors that contributed to previous fires are still there…There's no reason to think that we can't replicate or—I hate to say this—we could potentially exceed what we saw in the past fires."

The climate emergency is continually amplifying the risk. Overall warmer and drier conditions have in recent years lengthened the state's fire season to the point where the potential for wildfires may actually be year-round. The danger becomes particularly acute right about now: the late summer and into the fall.

"That's when we typically see these devastating fires," Gardetto said. So even with this year's milder conditions, she added, "California is not out of the woods."



wjw89zGeoff DembickiKate LowensteinCaliforniaclimate changeweatherWildfire
<![CDATA[Even with Trump in Office, the Climate Denial Movement Is Quietly Falling Apart]]>, 13 Aug 2019 13:25:20 +0000It might seem like the climate denial movement is getting everything it wants.

































gyzp9bGeoff DembickiKate Lowensteinpoliticsclimate changeDonald TrumpConservativesenvironment-policy