Chris Campo

Link to Project

In this course, every week’s lecture ends with a survey for the class. The survey, consistent with the course’s title, always consists of four questions:

1. Are we doomed?
2. Are we doomed from [insert weekly topic]?
3. How long do we have left?
4. What needs to happen to save us from being doomed?

For the first few weeks of the course, before we had a lecture and series of readings on inequality, I was irked by the lack of nuance in the question “Are we doomed?”.

As a member of Generation Z, I’m (naturally) primarily concerned about the natural World that has been handed down to us. After reading about the international climate accords and lackluster emissions trajectories in class, my views on climate change only got more bearish. But, save for natural disasters that end lives on impact, the wrath of climate change will be felt gradually, and unequally, by people across the world. For this reason, I wanted my project to give a glimpse into the future with regards to climate change—in particular, I wanted to showcase that the impacts will differ very greatly based on our definition of “we”.

As it pertains to how my project was motivated by the class, the content I dealt with relied heavily on what I learned from our weeks dealing with both Climate Change and Inequality. From a solutions-oriented perspective, my project accomplishes very little, but what it does accomplish is focused heavily on the capabilities of technology to combat the problems the changing climate poses to us. What’s more, I didn’t spend any time focusing on the potential downsides of this technology other than its exclusivity/lack of proper distribution: No terminators or cyber security threats here!

In exploring the intertwining of climate change and inequality, I needed to first define the dimensions of inequality that I wanted to explore. With infinite directions to go, I had to keep the scope of the project feasible. Keeping this in mind, I settled on the following topics:

• Geography
• Gender
• Income/economic status
• Political/macroeconomic status
• Urban vs. Rural

I also had to define how I wanted to give us a view into the future. First, I had to decide how far into the future I wanted to go—for this, I decided on 2070, after roughly 50 years of climate change acceleration and delayed consequences. With that settled, there was the question of how I wanted information to be transmitted. For lack of a better phrase, the answer came in the form of “postcards” from future penpal dispersed about different areas of the world and from a variety of different backgrounds.

The postcards, written in modern language, are a microcosm of how the project attempts to abstract away from all of the different factors that might change with time other than the climate. To control for the effects of the climate alone, there was a need for a set of ground rules, or simplifying assumptions that accomplished the feat of letting the climate advance in time without the rest of the world’s existential threats and solutions catching up with it. After some deliberation, the rules were finalized as follows:

1. Trivially, the world has not ended yet.
2. Emissions trajectories persist at current rates, accelerate, or at least plateau beyond critical points in a manner that is inconsequential for the fate of the World and its resources
3. No gamechanging technologies have come into play. At best, we can simply observe innovations on currently-existing technologies.
4. Political borders, standing party + economic systems, and international entities all exist as they do today. No major international conflict has arisen, and internal conflicts do not have wildly different motivations than they do today, other than with the added kick from climactic pressure
5. Resource scarcity is primarily enforced by climate change itself, rather than by exogenous population explosion. Population explosions in certain locales can absolutely occur, but this is more the result of displaced peoples and migration rather than enhanced fertility rates.

With the parameters for our future world intact, the last crux of the project was pinning down exactly who we would be receiving our postcards from. These choices were entirely motivated by how I could express the effects of the different dimensions of inequality (as mentioned earlier) one-by-one. That is, each penpal checks a different number of boxes of the five categories I mentioned.

For example, three of them come from a wealthy tech tycoon in Dubai, a migrant worker just outside of Dubai, and then a child (from a reasonably wealthy, governmental family) in the Yemen. Between the first two, we see the differences that income imposes, some difference owing to gender, and then some social differences owing to the fact that the latter is a woman. Between the tech tycoon in U.A.E. and the child from the wealthy family in Yemen, the political turmoil in the Yemen is stressed heavily. Furthermore, the self-righteousness of the businessman in contrast with the naïve ignorance of the child showcases how wealth (over time) can reinforce romantic beliefs about personal identity, even in an otherwise crumbling world.

While the purpose of the project was initially stated as exploring how the impacts of climate change are dependent on existing inequality, I feel as though this was misguided. Because of 1) the graduality of the impacts of climate change and 2) the fact that our receiving letters from people presupposes that they have not passed in a natural disaster that they were made especially susceptible to, I believe I slightly mixed up the chicken and the egg in my stated goals. A more apt description would be that I am showcasing how existing inequality is further reinforced by climate change. The businessman in the U.A.E. becomes more sure of himself because he invests in solutions for the world suffering around him; the woman in the U.S. chooses to remain willfully ignorant of the plight of the world, as its only manifestation for her is a shorter fall/spring season and higher prices of avocados, almonds, and other crops that depend on large expenditures of fresh water. Meanwhile, from the other penpals, we see an utter crumbling of what they know and the worlds around them.

With the project all said and done, I came to the revelation that we need more discourse on inequality and climate change at greater granularity. In a short time, I obviously wasn’t able to account for all possible sources of inequality—what about personal disability? What about religious differences? What about housing discrimination within already-susceptible areas? While I didn’t have the resources to discuss these scenarios, someone certainly does. And we need them to talk about it.