Building a new sea wall in the Queens borough of New York City, one year after Hurricane Sandy devastated much of the area with severe flooding and wind damage Spencer Platt/Getty Images

“The fundamental problem with environmental justice in the world today is that the people and the places that are most responsible for getting us into this mess seem to be the ones most capable of dealing with the problem.”

So said sociologist Eric Klinenberg earlier this February. A prolific writer and editor, and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, Klinenberg had been invited to speak at an event entitled “Disaster and Environmental Justice”, the first of a series of evenings looking at climate change through the lenses of disciplines outside the natural sciences.

“Those who have done so little to drive global warming,” Klinenberg continued, “are about to experience an acute crisis, if they haven’t already.” The idea – that poorer nations will face the worst impacts of changes caused to the climate by the richest nations – is hardly new. But, according to both speakers that evening, it is one of which many in the US still seem unaware.


Environmental injustice

Pulitzer prize-winning author and journalist Elizabeth Kolbert was Klinenberg’s foil that evening, in a discussion about catastrophes and the role they play in galvanising people to deal with environmental injustice and global inequality.

Kolbert, a Pulitzer prize-winning environmental writer, revealed her chief anxiety: surprisingly, the US’s sheer ability to deal with the direct effects of global warming. A public and political assumption that because America is coping, climate change can’t really be that bad, would allow ignorance of global realities to continue, Kolbert feared. “Is that the messaging that we want? That the US is going to sail through this without any problems?”

Though broadly sympathetic, Klinenberg argued that 2012’s Hurricane Sandy marked a sea change in American attitudes: “For citizens here, Sandy made this concept of climate change transform from something that was abstract into something that felt concrete and somewhat terrifying,” he said. His own research centres on New York’s attempts to rebuild after the damage the hurricane wreaked on the city – a multibillion dollar effort that will, he fears, widen the gap between the global rich and poor: “One of the dangers of the moment is that we’re starting to invest our resources into coping with climate change, and there’s a real risk that this will exacerbate inequalities. It’s expensive to build seawalls, and drainage systems, and new infrastructure. There are many places that will do this better than others.”

Low priority for voters

“On the flip side,” Kolbert argued, “you could look at lower Manhattan and see there’s a phenomenal amount of value there. Whereas, if you have to move a low-lying slum in a developing country, you’re not moving all that much by way of infrastructure. So there are ways in which that equity issue can be flipped on its head.” It’s an interesting idea: that poor populations may have the flexibility to relocate more easily than their megacity neighbours – though it opens up even more questions about inequality, migration and the fate of refugees, and none of these have easy answers, especially for a nation that has for so long struggled with the reality of climate change.

“We didn’t expect that this conversation would take place the day after Donald Trump won an election, the Supreme Court blocked Obama’s major clean power bill, and New York City experienced its highest flooding since Sandy,” Klinenberg observed. Trump’s denialism aside, “It’s actually not the case that the majority of Americans doubt that climate change is real. We’ve reached a point where most people do believe that the climate is changing, and they believe for the most part that it’s related to human behaviour. The bigger problem seems to be that when you rate climate change against other considerations, it ranks pretty low. Unemployment, access to healthcare, crime, abortion, immigration: all these things are going to take precedence when people go to vote.”

Seeing how relatively little the environment features in the campaign rhetoric of the major presidential candidates this year, it’s hard not to subscribe to Klinenberg’s pessimistic outlook. The American public might finally be waking up to the truth about climate change, but for many, it’s still something that happens in the distant future – or, if it’s here and now, happens only in faraway places, and to other people.

NYU’s Environmental Humanities series runs in New York until 23 September: visit http://nyuhumanities.org/event-series/ for details