As we finally welcome some rain here after weeks of drought, with a November that has yet to really be coat weather, it’s a good moment to take stock of climate change and the city, not just in terms of the very big-ticket consequences but the smaller, daily ones.
While we tend to think of our changing climate and its impact in terms of sudden, immensely destructive circumstances like potent storm surges — and these are certainly going to be part of our lived reality — there will also be a series of cyclical, perhaps seasonal, or perhaps constant conundrums and threats. They will vary in scope and severity; some will be annoyances, others will threaten the health of particular groups or parts of the cities, and some will threaten us all.
Take the drought. We’re one step shy of a drought emergency, which would come with mandatory, not just voluntary, water restrictions. We are obviously not used to the idea of water restrictions in NYC, as much as they’ve been a facet of life elsewhere. We’re quite unlikely to get them to the point of not having enough potable water, but it means New Yorkers might not be able to do daily tasks like laundry and showers.
Other impacts might be more severe. The dry conditions have led to multiple brush fires around the city, now a common enough occurrence that the FDNY is creating a special brush fire task force. The fires haven’t spread to residential areas as of now, but they force the closures of streets and parks; the risk of more fires means certain activities, like grilling in parks, are banned, and other activities like construction are restricted. Then there’s the smoke, which has blanketed parts of the city for days, leading to warnings about unhealthy air, which restricts outdoor activities for vulnerable populations in particular — children, older people, those with respiratory conditions, and so on.
This wasn’t nearly as bad as the eerie orange-glow days we had during the Canadian wildfires last year, but that’s sort of the point. Climate impact is not just about the really awful or really visible. There are going to be a lot of smaller things that are going to likely become part of the quotidian processes of living here (or really anywhere). There might be a future not too far-flung where we are accustomed to checking air quality or water levels as easily as we check the weather or whether a particular train is running.
As the drought illustrates, these impacts sort of build on each other — shifting temperatures and rain patterns are responsible for drought, which is responsible for fires, which are responsible for smog. More heat is likely to drive the length of time that pests like mosquitoes are viable, which will risk increasing the amount of mosquito-borne illnesses. Heat is of course a problem in itself, which can kill when combined with high humidity in the somewhat oddly-named “wet bulb” phenomenon. Heat will impact infrastructure like the light rail that so many NY commuters use, which falters under extreme temperatures.
All this brings me to the elephant in the room, which is that Donald Trump will become the president on January 20, and has already signaled his intent to nominate former Long Island Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin to be administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. It seems Zeldin was picked at least in large part for his zeal to deregulate, and his first public comments post-announcement centered around a desire to “restore U.S. energy dominance” and other business-friendly goals, with clean air and water tacked on as an afterthought. Trump has already signaled that he would withdraw the United States from the Paris accords (again) and generally move away from any climate change mitigation. To state the obvious, while policies can be overturned and agencies reconstructed, albeit painfully, after the deliberate torching of the administrative state, we will not get back years of climate inaction.
In practice, that means that responding to climate impact is going to be even more heavily a state and local responsibility. The journalist Garrett Graff had a thoughtful and provocative analysis of possible scenarios under a second Trump term, one of which was a United States that becomes more like the European Union, with a loose and relatively weak central government that leaves each state to be even more of its own self-contained little entity with its own governing vision and laws. I don’t know if that’s quite where we’re headed, but I do pretty firmly believe that local and state policies are going to matter ever-more in the next few years, and set states and localities on increasingly diametrically different paths.
From immigration to transit to climate, cities and states will be defined in part by whether they cooperate or not with an openly authoritarian and anti-democratic federal agenda — with a compliant bicameral congressional majority and total control of the Supreme Court and a huge chunk of the federal judiciary — and how they infill where the federal government steps away. When it comes to climate change, I think that has to mean a state and municipal bureaucracy that is very attuned to the realities of a sort of forever-crisis with the type of relatively constant issues that I outlined above.
There have to be mitigation plans in place for all of it, for mosquitoes and droughts and bad air and sudden torrential downpours and flooding, issues big and small, and with officials empowered to both plan ahead and act fast to contend with them as they shift and suddenly get more or less serious. Maybe we have to fortify infrastructure, or have additional water reserves, or take more steps like the FDNY brush fire squad. We do of course already have emergency management systems and contingencies, but it would behoove us to consider the war not as one of great battles but of attrition against a relatively tireless enemy.
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