21 September 2022. Weather | Democracy
Facing up to extreme weather. // Democracy rots from the head.
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1: Facing up to extreme weather
How do we understand the wave of extreme weather that has swept across the planet this year? The blog at the London Review of Books had the smart idea of inviting people to write about their experience of their extreme weather. Because weather, after all, is always local to us as well.
The project is a planned as a year-long collaboration with The World Weather Network, which comprises a network of 28 weather stations set up by arts organisations around the world. So far there are six pieces on the LRB blog: from Istanbul, Johannesburg, Northern India, Beijing, Lagos, and Seoul.
This being Just Two Things, I’m going to take some extracts from a couple of them. But they are—being the LRB—all well-written pieces.
One of the themes, of course, without reading too far between the lines, is that there’s no such thing as a ‘natural’ disaster. Our extreme weather is down to us.
In the evocative piece on Seoul, for example, the writer Krys Lee observes that South Korea is used to heavy rain—indeed, that it’s an important plot point in the Oscar-winning film Parasite. But this year’s rain was, well, heavier:
On 8 August... the rain came down so heavily that the view through our car windscreen was like the white noise of poor television reception. My partner and I were near home, thankfully, and steered the car at a crawl through the empty street to our garage. Under the merciless rains and shrill winds, our apartment walls shook and the lights flickered... I later learned that just ten minutes’ walk from my apartment, around the Yadang Station area, where I usually catch the subway, the flooding was so intense that men had swum away from their floating cars.
In the Gangnam area, made famous by the K-pop song ‘Gangnam Style’, which is shaped like a basin, the outcomes were worse.
the Gangnam Severance Hospital and the COEX shopping mall were flooded. Streets became canals. The rain came so hard and fast that a brother and sister in their fifties were sucked into a manhole and died. A forty-year-old man checking on his car in a basement parking lot was swept up by a sudden torrent and drowned. Three people died trapped in their semi-basement flat in Sillim-dong, a neighbourhood west of Gangnam, when it abruptly filled with water.
This clip of compilations from mobile phones gives a flavour of the experience. There’s five minutes of this, but the 90” from where this starts is probably enough to imagine it.
Since Gangnam is a relatively affluent area—and some of the real estate there is the most expensive in the city—there was less sympathy about some of the problems the rain had brought it:
There was no shortage of online comments taking satisfaction in Gangnam’s flooding: ‘Since water stands for prosperity, it’s only right that it floods the region where people are crazy about money’; ‘It is a cursed town after all ... The planned city of the privileged, please be doomed.’
By Lee’s account, so little sympathy that some newspapers had to close their comments sections. But even the semi-basement flats are not so cheap these days, and many of the victims of the Gangnam flooding were small business people operating in the area. But Gangnam itself tells a story of how we’ve made ourselves less resilient to rainfall over the decades:
Gangnam was once paddy fields and fruit plantations, the city’s rice bowl throughout the Joseon dynasty, but it became the target of city planning and real estate speculation from the 1960s onwards. The flooding was not only a natural disaster; it was also a consequence of poor engineering, and of a sewer system blocked by rubbish and cigarette butts, as well as much-criticised municipal budget cuts. Korea has widespread 5G and makes refrigerators that talk to you, but couldn’t keep its drains from clogging.
Skye Arundhati Thomas’ piece on northern India is more about the political economy that leads to the temperatures of 49 degrees that India experienced in the summer. It’s a story of business people and politicians saying one thing about clean energy and doing another, by enabling the building of more coal powered stations. The notorious Indian multinational company Adani, with its huge coal interests, gets rather more than a walk-on part here.
Gautam Adani founded his import-export business in Gujarat in 1988, gradually taking over and refurbishing the port of Mundra. Beside it, he constructed the country’s largest coal-fired power plant. In 2003, when several Indian industrialists tried to hold Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, accountable for the mass violence that had been provoked by him and his party, Adani instead offered his unconditional support. Days before Modi was sworn in as prime minister, it was an Adani private jet that flew him to New Delhi from Gujarat.
Modi’s interests and those of Adani seem to coincide. At least, they’re both interested in building coal-fired power stations. For one recent plant, the way was cleared, literally, by the Indian police:
(Adani) boasted this week that ‘we are leading the race to turn India from a country over-reliant on import of oil and gas to a country that might one day become a net exporter of clean energy.’ In recent years however the Modi regime has repossessed land that was once designated as protected and, with the help of the Adani Group, reinvigorated a national coal economy. In 2018 police officers invaded the lands of the Santal community of Jharkhand.... The police were escorting a demolition squad from the Adani Group, who proceeded to tear out paddy fields, uproot palms and cut down a mango orchard. They were clearing the way for the construction of a new power plant: coal from the new Carmichael mine in Australia – another Adani project – would be burned there.
There’s more depressing detail in the piece, but it’s also another reminder that until we get bankers and investors to take fossil fuel financing seriously, we’re not going to get anywhere with this. Welcome to more wet-bulb weather events, and yet more torrential rain.
2: Democracy rots from the head
Every so often I read that voters who live in democracies are losing their taste for it. There’s actual polling—I don’t have it to hand at the moment—that says that young people are less keen on democracy than their elders. (Although given how poor their outcomes have been from said democracies, as boomers corner the wealth, this can be regarded as a rational response).
The political scientist Sheri Berman has a piece at Social Europe, reviewing a recent book by Larry Bartels. Bartels is best known as a scholar of American political representation, but in his recent book, Democracy Erodes From The Top, he looks at Europe, wading through lots of country data:
Reviewing and analysing the public-opinion data, (Bartels) concludes that ‘insofar as the attitudes and preferences of ordinary Europeans are concerned’ there is a huge gulf between ‘the alarming portrait of democracy in crisis’ that so dominates popular and scholarly discussion and the ‘more prosaic reality of contemporary European public opinion’.
So Bartels finds that over long periods of time, attitudes in European countries to the welfare state and to European integration have broadly flatlined. Even on issues that are supposed to be populist triggers, the data hasn’t changed much:
(T)he average vote share received by populist parties in the 2010s was ‘only’ about 12.4 per cent—an increase, but a fairly modest one, over the 10 or 11 per cent these parties received in the 1980s and ‘90s. But more crucial is his argument that this increase cannot be attributed to changes in the attitudes of citizens, since during this period right-wing-populist and anti-immigrant sentiment actually declined... But it is not only over time that populist voting is disconnected from changes in public attitudes; the same is true cross-nationally. There is little correlation either, Bartels finds, between right-wing-populist or anti-immigrant sentiment in a country and the vote share received by the populist parties.
(Pro-democracy protests, Hungary, 2017. Image by Syp via Wikipedia. Public domain, CC0 1.0)
In general, Bartels argues that the data doesn’t support the idea of a declining support for political institutions or a democratic ‘crisis’. Instead, he suggests that declines in democracy haven’t occurred because voters want authoritarianism, but because parties that ran on conservative platforms then introduced authoritarian measures. He references Hungary and Poland here, but this looks like an account that fits the UK at the moment as well. Similarly, the ‘rise’ in populism can also be seen as a result of elite behaviour (Berman uses the word ‘manipulation’ in her review:
Political scientists differentiate between preferences and salience. Preferences refer to a person’s attitudes about an issue, while salience refers to the intensity or importance attached to those attitudes. Only attitudes which are salient decisively influence political behaviour. And this is where elites come in: over past years, politicians—particularly right-wing-populist ones—have actively worked to increase the salience of anti-immigrant and other right-wing populist preferences, making it more likely that citizens who already harboured such preferences would vote on the basis of them.
Citizens don’t get off free here, however. Some citizens do harbour extreme views. Others are more concerned with economic outcomes than democracy. Citizens who value democracy still need to make themselves heard.
j2t#370
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