chocolate and subsidence

climate climate climate climate

Two climate-induced stories crossed my laptop screen today and yesterday. I don’t argue they are of equal importance, though I have friends and family who will lecture me that I am inverting their relative importance. I look forward to your reactions.

According to the online news service Quartz.com, climate change is destroying the production of chocolate in the two primary locations where it remains cultivated on a commercial scale. Yes, other places produce the coveted cacao beans but Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana are finding it increasingly difficult to produce crops sufficient to meet the high global demands.

Colombia, Ecuador, and other specialty farmers are crafting exquisite chocolate bars for sale at boutiques or Whole Foods but the almost inexorable demand for relatively cheap products, whether agricultural or manufacturing, characterising the early twenty-first century globalised marketplace makes this into a perfect example of supply and demand at work. Hershey’s kisses will become ever so much more expensive as farmers adjust to the increasingly delicate environment of unpredictable flood and drought conditions growing more exaggerated as the heat intensifies.

I wonder whether the farmers and chocolate producers could make a case compelling enough to drive humans to change their behaviour to take the long path to reverse the danger? What will that entail? For many, chocolate has come to replace bread as the staff of life. The prospect of stratospheric costs for the item long beyond an occasional indulgence but now a basic food group might give more people pause than some of the other arguments. Then again, perhaps I associate only with a peculiarly chocolate-loving crowd.

The second story, which I intended to discuss yesterday before my revulsion at China’s treatment of the Uighurs reared its ugly head, discussed the number of cities in that country dropping below sea levels. Currently about one in eight major cities (China has dozens of cities with a million residents) is losing 10 millimeters of elevation annually. The story notes that half of the bigger cities are losing three millimeters per year. And they accumulate, of course.

No, that doesn’t sound like much but if they are coastal, the typhoons become a clear and present danger. Remember those annual storms are also becoming much more wicked so the reality of flooding in some portions of the country only gets far worse. Flooding, usually driven by rivers, has brought down dynasties over the course of China’s history when the rulers don’t provide sufficient relief for the affected. Relief can be immediate but citizens demand long-term solutions as well.

The crux of the study by a host of Chinese scholars, published in Science, is about cities threatened not by typhoons but by subsidence. The linkage to climate change is through the ever increasing droughts plaguing the Middle Kingdom. Water has for decades been a diminishng resource but the government does not want to appear incapable of addressing the problem so they pump out the aquifers below the big cities. I first heard that Beijing had pretty much pumped out its aquifers twenty-five years ago. When I lecture, I remind the audience that water is absolutely essential for life so the idea of providing bottled water for a city in excess of twenty million for all of their needs is pretty unrealistic. Neither bottled water nor siphoning water off the Himalayas (drying those down rivers in South and Southeast Asia dependent on the same water sources) by a grand canal seem adequate to ensure the food safety that we know worries Beijing. Even if bottled water were sufficient, its expanded us creates yet another consequence of ever more massive rubbish accumulation since recycling of plastics is a nascent, at best, technology.

Like so many problems confronting the country, the subsidence also results from the sheer weight of buildings and human activities in these massive urban centers which developed as a result of the Four Modernisations. While improving technology, science, agriculture, and military affairs were all aims of the Modernisations, an effect was to move the population from rural to concentrated urban areas where jobs could facilitate employment and people could be monitored as is the CCP way.

If you have ventured through the country beyond Beijing or Shanghai, you likely saw the ghost cities, forty and fifty storied empty apartment buildings constructed in hopes someone would have the money to move into them but guaranteeing that less educated young men were off the streets as they were busy in construction. Many of those buildings remain completely empty but their sheer size burdens the land that has been emptied of the aquifers below. As both China’s population and its aspirations for respect grew, so did the number of cities with these massive structures. They are now presenting unintended consequences.

Unquestionably the demand for water for people, for agriculture, for coal production (coal is highly water intensive in its mining process), and for anything else grows, incurring an ever larger subsidence challenge will as well. With no indications that human behaviour is dramatically addressing climate deterioration, these trends appear accelerating.

I am a champion of not straight-lining trends because human intervention can alter them. I am not sanguine in this case, however, that we are implementing sufficient required changes to prevent this inexorable trend from continuing. Yet one more thing that the CCP must address as it strives to retain power as the government in China.

This is a perfect example of why I so often see their governing principle as ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones’ rather than a centuries’ long plan to dominate the world. Perhaps Xi wants to dominate but he has to be in power to do that. Buildings collapsing under their own weight might bring an accountability they prefer not to confront. The CCP addresses those domestic problems they can’t avoid any longer, taking on the more immediate dangers when they must.

China is harbinger, according to comments in the Times story. As anyone along the Florida coasts or even on the shores of Lake Michigan has known for decades, rising water levels in the United States threaten populations as well. The difference is that many Americans do not live on our coasts but are distributed somewhat more evenly across this vast nation. China still has many people in the interior but their biggest cities are so big that the danger is immediate; ours is still emergent. Vietnam, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Pacific island nations, Africa, and other regions certainly understand that rising water levels are as risky to their populations as any other thing on a daily basis as it is hurting them now.

Americans perhaps have the luxury of focusing on finding alternate sources for cheaper chocolate while the CCP looks to shore up (literally) their massive buildings. In sum, climate change is real and manifests its risks in multiple ways every single day.

Are we there yet? Perhaps I should ask, why aren’t we there yet?

I have no beautiful photograph to share today. It’s raining, though I can still see helicopters cross Spa Creek’s air for some reason this afternoon. We haven’t had flooding the last few days, though our tidal waters do rise as you see in this picture taken late this afternoon.

Thank you for reading Actions Create Consequences today. I welcome any and all thoughts, disputes, rebuttals, questions, and comments on this or any other column. I appreciate each of you reading every day. If you think this worth circulating to others, please do so. Thank you to the subscribers who contribute to my work as you mean so much as I work on these pieces.

I thought I caught all of the appropriate Uighur versus Han references last night but I missed one. The paragraph that started ‘The Party’s eventual…’ ended with ‘but the 10.5 million HUI (rather than Han, of course) do feel…’ My sincere apologies. My attention has been on writing but my fingers seemed to go elsewhere three days running.

I wish you a wonderful weekend. I was sure the cold in the Chesapeake was gone but apparently not, though the sixty degree rain is better than a fortnight ago when it was barely 50 degrees Fahrenheit! May you get outside for some vitamin D.

Be well and be safe. FIN

Zurui Ao et al, ‘A national-scale assessment of land subsidence in China’s major cities’, Science, 384: 6693 (301-306), 18 April 2024, retrieved at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl4366

Delger Erdenesanaa. ‘China’s Cities are Sinking Below Sea Level, Study Finds’, NYTimes.com, 18 April 2024, retrieved at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/18/climate/china-sinking-sea-level.html

Quartz.com email teaser, 19 April 2024