Hurricane Beryl — a sneak peek into the future

Hurricane Beryl hit Texas this week. Heavy rain and superstrong winds battered many towns across Texas. I am in Houston and I couldn’t sleep the entire night because of the noise when the hurricane made a landfall here. Houston and much of Texas woke up last Monday without any electricity. At the time of this writing, while the power where I live has been restored, much of the city is still in the dark. It has become one of the most excruciating power outages in Houston history because of the intense heat of Houston summer. And things are made even worse due to the usual increase in heat in the days right after a hurricane hits.

While many have lived through hurricanes that have come and gone in Houston, this is my first one. I am, however, not new to power outages because I grew up in Charsadda where power outages were a consistent presence of everyday life. However, it is my first encounter with the filthy side of climate change and capitalism, working hand in hand, against the poor and the weak of American society.

Following the hurricane, the main government body that handles the grid is called Centerpoint. Think of it as Wapda. Centerpoint is working day and night to restore power. Their slow response and even slower recovery have been heavily criticised. People created graffiti on several walls around Houston calling them centerpointless. But I observed something very familiar to what I have always seen in Pakistan.

America is divided into areas and zones by what is called zip codes. They say here that your future is determined by the zip code you live in. Even credit card companies and banks determine how much credit line one should have based on the zip code one is from. Centerpoint is also fixing power supply in zip codes with higher incomes and more business. I live in a good neighborhood but my business is in a poor one. I hear ambulance sirens blaring almost every 10 minutes minus exaggeration. Old people are dying in their homes due to the excessive heat. In some instances, their dead bodies remain in their hot homes for days because nobody knows about them or cares enough to go for them. These elderly people died there waiting for the power to be restored but being on the lower end of the income ladder, their fate was sealed.

This is exactly how we will all react when climate change comes for all of us. And that day is not in some distant future. The world would have only so much resources and the will to go for the protection of those with money and value. We saw the same during the pandemic, especially in Pakistan when Bilawal and Maryam advocated for the country to be shut down without worrying about the poor of the society.

Better citizenship would lead to better help compared to inferior nationalities. Governments around the world would only have the will to save only some. Help would be for sale and those who can pay for it would get it, which, if you think about it, defeats the entire logic of help. Help is for those who cannot help themselves.

I am watching help here in Houston available for the highest bidder. Just the mechanism of that transaction is a little different than paying at McDonald’s Drive-Thru. Think of it as air travel in Business class and economy class. Right now, Centerpoint is serving the Business class consumers even though those are the people who can afford to check into a hotel, they have AC in their car, and they also have friends and relatives in other cities where they’d be welcome until this madness ends.

It is quite unsettling to realise that climate change was started by capitalism driven greed. Today, how we tackle the ramifications of climate change are also driven by the same capitalist tendencies. The only plus is that we got a glimpse of how we will react in a future roughed up by climate change.