Capital's Flawed Green 'Resilience'

“Extreme Cities – the Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change,” by Ashley Dawson, 2017-2019

This is a series of anti-capitalist case studies on climate change's impact on cities.  Dawson correctly notes that most humans now live in cities and that the specifics of mass disaster due to rising heat, sea levels and rain accumulate in cities, especially those near water and on river deltas.  Dawson wants to correct the rural slant of climate activists like Naomi Klein, who focuses on rural ‘blockadias.’ She wants to focus on the dire exposure of megacities like Kolkata, Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta, Mumbai, Lagos and U.S. cities like New York, New Orleans and Miami.  Dawson does case studies on Jakarta and the Netherlands, a bit on Haiti, but most of her focus is in the U.S. – New Orleans, Miami and especially New York City after Super Storm Sandy. 

Dawson’s intention is to show the flawed and contradictory capitalist logic behind many climate ‘mitigation’ plans in cities – all forms of disaster capitalism and gentrification.

For instance, in New York Bloomberg’s PlaNYC plan built bicycle lanes, while allowing massive high-rise projects along the East River and the Hudson in flood plains.  Clearly the real estate industry cannot abide limitations on its freedom to build anywhere – even in areas which should be abandoned or revert to water sinks.  A plan to build a large seawall in NY harbor would only partially protect the most valuable parts of lower and middle Manhattan.

In Jakarta a plan to build the world’s biggest seawall across Jakarta Bay, the Great Garuda, includes upper middle class housing atop it.  The seawall will decimate Jakarta Bay’s environment and marine life, while doing nothing about the river flooding that actually inundated the city in 2007.  It might make that flooding worse by bottling it up against the city, as well as vastly concentrating the sewage dumped into the rivers in the bay. 

In Miami the politicians are pretending that the porous limestone that allows sea water to flow under the city can still be ‘beaten’ by raising every street and building, hoping to keep the Latin American money-laundering building boom going in that city.  Nor do they have a plan for freshwater, as the southern Florida aquifer slowly gets inundated with salt water.  Added to that is a nuclear plant right on the ocean south of town, Turkey Point, whose diesel generators for emergency cooling are 3 feet above sea level.  These failed at Fukushima in a similar location due to high water. 

In New Orleans for the first time in the U.S., a local indigenous tribe in the Mississippi river delta has received federal funds to relocate their community from rising waters.  At the same time, plans to build dikes that will divert storm surges and sediment into the delta are defeated by even deeper dredging of the river to allow bigger container ships to dock in New Orleans.  This will allow storm surges a better avenue into that city.

Every contradiction in these plans is based on the needs of capital, which is never questioned, so it becomes green-washing in reality.  The federal flood insurance that allows rich people to constantly rebuild in ocean-side flood zones is the icing on the cake, showing the government is also an enabler.  Her discussion of Holland / The Netherlands is nuanced, as both mega-projects and now more environmental methods are being used to mitigate flooding, but problems remain.

Super Storm Sandy Devastation

Dawson’s eventual focus in the book is on three things that nearly all capitalist mitigation and ‘resilience’ plans usually leave out:  1. The needed abandonment of land near water and subsequent ‘just’ relocation for working class communities.  This is against real estate capital logic.  2.  Using natural methods to defeat storm surges, rising seas and riverrine flooding, not just profit-oriented megaprojects.  This is against construction company logic.  3. Countering the unequal effects of climate change by protecting the most vulnerable – the poor, elderly, homeless, the working class and ethnic or skin color minorities – with community and political action.  The rich can always bail and are actually the first recipients of aid, as shown by Superstorm Sandy.  She calls the unequal effect of climate disasters ‘climate apartheid.’ Focusing aid on the various levels of the working class is against ruling class logic.

Highlights of Dawson’s discussion of NYC: 

1.     Left-wing New Yorkers responded to Super Storm Sandy with “Occupy Sandy.”  Occupy Sandy was acknowledged for a time as the main group helping residents – not the National Guard, the Red Cross, FEMA, the city or NGOs.  It was because, unlike these groups, they used ‘disaster communist’ methods relying on citizens and the ‘victims’ in ignored neighborhoods like the Rockaways and Red Hook to help themselves.  As I’ve said before, the ‘first responders’ in mass emergencies are actually neighbors and citizens, not professional departments like cops, fire and others.

2.     A deep dive into the environmental history of Long Island’s Jamaica Bay, which was once a massive marsh useful in absorbing storm water, and now has been whittled down by real estate ‘developments’ and JFK Airport into a polluted and small shadow of its former self.

3.     An environmental and natural plan to protect Staten Island with oyster beds based on a concrete breakwater actually moves flooding towards New Jersey.  At the same time increasing ocean acidification will damage crustaceans, so no oyster beds will probably form.

4.      2% of real estate in NYC, out of 1M buildings, uses 48% of the energy of the city.  These are the luxury high-rises, condos, townhouses and corporate offices.

5.     60% of the touted reduction in NYC’s carbon usage came from switching from coal to another carbon fuel, fracked natural gas from Pennsylvania.

6.     As Dawson puts it, a false sense of security based on huge seawalls or gates will increase the ultimate damage on newly built real estate when seawalls, breakwaters and other structures are eventually undone.  For instance 90% of the seawalls around the Fukushima nuclear plant failed, but their presence justified the plant location itself.

7.     Cities all over the world are sinking due to excessive ground water pumping, all while sea levels rise.  The whole east coast of the U.S. is also sinking due to continental shelf movement.

Dawson’s main focus on the role of the city in climate change is refreshing.  Her concentration on NYC might bore many outside “the city that never sleeps,” but it does indicate the strategies capital will use in every city world-wide. In her writing she is somewhat repetitive due to lack of editing, but repetition is common among academics.  Nevertheless Dawson is relentless in not buying the fake green hype of various neo-liberal city plans and corporate planners about sea level rise or increased rainfall and its effect on cities, even plans that use nice propaganda words or that seem ‘progressive.’

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box upper left:  “This Changes Everything” (Klein); “Planet of Slums” (Davis); “Tropic of Chaos” (Parenti); “How to Kill a City,” “Hell’s Kitchen,” “Balinese Political Art,” “Tale of Two Cities,” “Rebel Cities” (Harvey); “Capital City,” “Climate Emergency,” “Planet of the Humans” (Moore).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

July 21, 2020