Fortress of Solitude: New York’s Climate Parochialism After Superstorm Sandy

• In Event: 254 - Section on Environment and Technology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 16. Attitudes and Behavior

Abstract

This paper argues that in the year (2012-13) following Superstorm Sandy, New York City government and many justice-oriented civil society actors embraced a dramatic shift in climate politics from mitigation to adaptation, and from tentative cosmopolitanism to defensive parochialism. This despite two intellectual developments that further specified New Yorkers’ global climate responsibilities—the emphasis on adaptation as a matter of social justice for the most vulnerable, paid for by the wealthy; the rise of consumption accounting showing that wealthy areas (and their wealthiest residents) were responsible for far more carbon pollution than prevailing counts suggested. These frameworks’ marginalization, the paper argues, are best explained via Steven Luke’s theory of power, supplemented by an account of global carbon. The paper’s empirical analyses are based on interviews with nearly 80 New Yorkers affected by the storm and/or the recovery, carried out by the author and colleagues in the Superstorm Research Lab that he-cofounded, in addition to document analysis. The paper argues that these New Yorkers’ views about climate change were largely unchanged by the storm; that the Bloomberg regime’s post-Sandy emphasis on adaptation politics constituted a dramatic shift from the regime’s earlier prioritization of mitigation and global solidarity; that many community organizations embraced this shift; but that some pursued an alternative, bottom-up cosmopolitanism. The “Fortress of Solitude” concept is that when locally vulnerable populations are enlisted in an area’s fortification, they lose capacity to organize across borders for broad alternatives to the prevailing socio-economic situation.

Author

• Daniel Aldana Cohen, New York University