California is burning.
Houston is sinking.
Unlivable climate conditions will likely
displace a billion people in the next 30
years.
As governments debate possible
solutions, the free market has stepped in.
Can individuals buy their way out of a collective problem?
If there's one thing we know about at least American free
enterprise capitalism, it's that when
there are problems there's going to be
all kinds of solutions offered to you by
companies that spring up to fill those niches.
"Disaster capitalism" was
articulated by author Naomi Klein.
It refers to the system by which companies turn profit from the problems of the world.
There's an emerging market of
gadgets that help you cope with extreme
weather on a warming planet.
During wildfire season, for example, Californians
might notice targeted ads for
ventilation masks.
You're there on your
phone, the hurricane is coming, the fire is
burning, the climate disaster is happening,
and there's an ad for you to
survive this disaster.
And when government agencies are overwhelmed with responding to natural disasters, private
companies have stepped in to fill those
gaps too.
I don't think that the public
resources are adequately addressing
individual climate linked events.
As a result, some people have begun to
supplement public resources with their personal wealth.
Last year, news broke that private
firefighters helped the Kardashians save
their 50 million dollar mansion from the
Woolsey wildfire.
Typically this service
is contracted by insurance companies.
In rare cases, individuals can hire private
firefighters directly.
The fire insurance provider has an incentive for your home not to burn, and they contract then with
another company, that is the private
firefighter.
For the insurance companies
what a great idea for them right? It's like
the insurance is buying insurance for
themselves. If they can save one house or
two houses in a fire season that's
millions of dollars they get they get to
keep in their pocket.
With more acres
burning every year this might be the new normal.
Back in the 18th and 19th century London,  private firefighters were the norm.
Each insurer had its own fire brigade.
But this trend eventually ended in the
late 1800s after the city ruled the
level of fire protection provided by
companies was inadequate.
After that, firefighting was run by the city.
Of course, you don't want to prevent people from
being able to buy extra fire protection
on the other hand it does seem like we
would want the government solution, the
public solution, the collective solution
to be good enough to deal with the
problem for everyone.
I think there are moral implications to taking things that
were collective and making them sort of
individual, richer people are gonna get
better service than poorer people almost
like across the board. It's a question of
asking ourselves, like, do we want to live
in a world where everybody has to hire
their own firefighters or not?
None of this though addresses the actual problem
of the planet's changing climate.
And what the individual can do about a collective problem.
The dark version of the future
of climate change adaptation is just
like everybody's on Instagram buying,
like, gadgets to survive the climate
hellscape. I think the light version, the
mega-happy version, is that these climate
disasters create a new understanding
that we're really collectively on this
planet. We expect there to be a
communitarian impulse and that requires
understanding your place in the
collectivity, not just buying your way
out of it.
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