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Like most people in Miami, Mario Alejandro Ariza came from somewhere else.
He arrived from the Dominican Republic in 1993, just months after Hurricane Andrew had swept through Miami, taking what seemed to him like every leaf from every tree. He was 6 years old at the time. He didn’t like it one bit.
His mother had brought him, and love had brought her. She had married a stockbroker from Miami and then, when she needed to, reinvented herself from a stay-at-home mom to a spectacularly successful real estate broker in a city at risk of sinking into the sea.
That biting detail figures in Mr. Ariza’s cautionary love letter to the city, entitled “Disposable City: Miami’s Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe” and published this week by Bold Type Books, an imprint of Hachette.
Like any journalist interested in learning about the impact of climate change on a place, he interviews scientists, engineers, community organizers and the like. But it’s the story of family that makes the book relatable. You meet cousins and uncles. You attend a grandmother’s 80th birthday party. You are there at a rare lunch that Mr. Ariza attends with one of his mother’s wealthy real estate clients — rare because a son writing a climate change book can ruin a multimillion dollar transaction. “My mother nudges me with her elbow,” he writes about this lunch. “I better not spoil this deal.”
Mr. Ariza, 33, is a reporter covering federal courts at The South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper, though these days he is mainly covering coronavirus. I spoke with him by telephone from his home in Miami this week. The conversation has been edited for space and clarity.
Were you worried about climate change when you were growing up in Miami?
No! Not at all. It wasn’t treated very thoroughly in the science curriculum in my high school. There wasn’t a lot of it in terms of media coverage. There weren’t big rock stars talking about it. So the idea that this place where I was growing up, that I wasn’t necessarily very much in love with at the time, was incredibly vulnerable wasn’t something I knew or felt.
What does your mom think about your climate change worries?
She, you know, believes in climate change, understands what it’s going to do, is very worried about it and wants to see some kind of action taken. She loves this place.
My mom and my stepdad are very much going to be affected by this. They’re the kind of people who are going to be in business until their 70s. That game of musical chairs is probably going to end unless serious international, national and state action is taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and unless Miami does a lot to adapt very quickly. Even then there are still lots of areas in this city that will have to be responsibly abandoned.
How much of Miami’s troubles is climate change versus city planning and development decisions that have nothing to do with climate change?
This was a place that was built without climate change in mind. Climate makes things worse. It doesn’t necessarily make any of it better. So the racial inequality, it’ll add heat to that. The bad development decisions, it’ll amplify the poor choices that were made generations ago. So what climate change does is — it’s sort of like, if I can make the proverbial joke — it turns the amplifier up to 11 on all of your major issues.
So is the city doomed?
It’s possible that with a lot of hard work, smart adaptation and national and international reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, some form of Miami survives. It’s going to look different. The city is going to have to aggressively adapt. We’re going to have to retreat intelligently from certain neighborhoods. We’re going to have to figure out different ways to fund the economy. We’re going to have to figure out better ways of treating each other across socioeconomic divides, across classes and languages and ethnicities.
Will you have to retreat?
I live in Brickell and I live on the coastal ridge 17 feet above sea level. I may not have to physically retreat. But is there going to be a functioning governmental structure here once all of the tax base erodes away? Is this going to be a place where I’m going to have a job? I don’t know.
Do you like the city more than you did when you first came?
When I moved back here in 2015, I rediscovered this place and fell in love with it, really hard.
The reason I wrote this book, the reason I took the time, I took the risk, is because I need the people I love, in the city I love, to understand what’s going to happen, to pressure their political leaders when the political leaders deserve pressure but also to make smart personal decisions about what is coming.
What oil and gas bankruptcies leave behind
When I set off on a quest last year across America’s largest oil field to use the latest infrared technology to detect leaks of methane, a highly potent yet invisible greenhouse gas, I didn’t expect it to lead to a story of what happens when an oil company goes bankrupt.
My colleague Jonah Kessel and I used an infrared camera to see methane emissions streaming from oil and gas sites in one corner of the vast Permian Basin, which straddles Texas and New Mexico. We reached out to the operators of the sites where we saw the largest leaks.
But one operator never got back to us: MDC Energy. At an MDC well site outside Midland, Texas, our camera showed a battery of gray tanks leaking thick plumes of methane. MDC, however, had filed for bankruptcy protection that day, its finances weighed down by mounting debt.
I kept tabs on the MDC site even after we published our piece, in December. Sharon Wilson of the environmental group Earthworks went back to the site several times in early 2020 and confirmed it continued to leak. In June, the Texas environmental regulator issued the MDC site with six air emissions violations. As of last week, the leak had still not been fixed.
The collapse of MDC Energy’s business turned out to be a harbinger of things to come. The coronavirus pandemic has brought a wave of bankruptcies to the oil and gas industry — even as industry executives first reward themselves with multimillion-dollar bonuses. In bankruptcy court, MDC’s top lender, a French investment bank, accused the company of paying its chief executive $8.5 million in unauthorized consulting fees in the months leading up to the bankruptcy.
The companies are leaving much more than unfixed leaks in their wake. As financial turmoil hits a once booming industry, local governments are concerned about the cleanup cost of abandoned wells; communities adjacent to fracking sites worry about how the pollution affects their health and safety; the families of workers with death and injury claims against companies fear that those claims will fall by the wayside.
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