As Hurricane Milton barreled toward Florida last week, Billy Cox eyed the sky, talked to his neighbors, and decided to stay put.
He figured his home in Sarasota was on high ground, on a former cattle ranch just outside of mandatory evacuation orders. As the gathering storm slid east across the Gulf of Mexico, nearing the physical limit of how much heat could transfer into energy, his daughter Savannah texted late into the night, trying to convince him to “get the hell out of there,” he says.
Savannah Cox, who researches the role of financial systems in climate governance at the University of Sheffield in England, was worried not only for her family’s safety, but the consequences of yet another major hurricane hitting the state. “We’re facing futures that are radically unlike the past,” she says, whether or not people like her father are prepared to leave their homes.
As thunderstorms circled the hurricane’s eye like a tightening fist, a friend told Billy to write his name on his arm in permanent marker, so his body could be identified. He ignored this instruction, too. “That’s capitulation,” he joked. “I refuse to yield.”
As the climate crisis intensifies, stronger storms are killing more people and costing far more in damage. Just two weeks after the last major hurricane, search crews were still digging into mud to find the bodies of missing family members in North Carolina when scientists reported that cyclones are up to 50 percent wetter than they used to be. Along with Hurricane Helene, there have been twenty other billion-dollar disasters that have hit the United States this year.
Even as it gets easier to quantify exactly how much worse our new normal might be, the global financial system hasn’t…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Lois Parshley
