Superyacht Gomorrah
Falmouth gets glitzy, and I get going...
Falmouth, Antigua is a scruffy, friendly, sort of town, and a natural hangout for cruisers. The anchorage is spacious, and reasonably well protected. There are plenty of funky restaurants and hopping bars along the waterfront. A couple of hit and miss groceries can help you stave off scurvy and starvation. There are marinas and marine services. Most of the year it is sleepy enough. But in early December it undergoes a brief character transformation. One by one the superyachts start trickling in, until a gleaming, grandiose, armada is assembled. The Masters Of The Universe, and their most ostentatious and expensive toys, take over the Falmouth waterfront.
The Masters themselves are mostly not aboard, but the floating monuments to their wealth and ego are assembled for viewing at the Antigua Charter Yacht Show. There, they can be viewed by Apprentice Masters Of The Universe—lesser beings who can’t afford a superyacht but might be able to scrape together the scratch to cosplay and charter one for a week—or their agents.
I can’t deny it. The yachts are spectacular, awesome testament to the creativity and luxe possibilities of modern superyacht design and engineering. They are also cringeworthy (to me, anyhow)—a clueless display of runaway consumption and wealth in an age of urgent climate crisis and shocking inequality. I know, I know. I will lose a lot of you here. But bear with me a minute. There is only so much carbon that humanity can burn before pushing global temperatures above the once achievable, now vanishingly ambitious, target of 1.5 degrees Centigrade, beyond which climate risks rapidly escalate. At current global emission levels we will breach that carbon budget in 4-5 years, which conveys the urgency of the moment. Yet billionaires are annually spending down that budget at 1500 times the rate of the marina staff taking their lines and hoping their island survives sea level rise and intensified hurricanes. If everyone’s lifestyle consumed carbon at the rate consumed by the average billionaire the carbon budget to remain below 1.5C would be used up in…two days.
That really is the sort of sh*t which runs through my brain when I see all the superyachts pimping themselves out. Can’t help it. And there is an even more disturbing moral equation to consider, related to what is known as the 1000 ton rule in climate science circles. It holds that for every 1000 tons of carbon equivalent emitted, the resulting climate impacts (such as heat, wildfires, more intense storms, and reduced food and water supplies that will exacerbate hunger, disease, violence, and migration, to name just some) will cause the future death of one person. One study of 20 billionaires concluded that their lifestyles (the houses, the private jets, the, superyachts) emit an average of 8,000 tons of CO2 equivalent annually (the average human emits 4-5 tons; the average American around 15 tons; the average upper middle class American around 28 tons; and the average wealthy American around 56 tons). Which means that the way a billionaire chooses to live now is, every year, indirectly linked to the future deaths of eight human beings. That’s the toll of a pretty successful serial killer, and one that adds up year after year, . You can object to this way of looking at the world and wealth, but the math is the math. We are all connected, even to future humans, whether we want to acknowledge it or not. Our choices go well beyond our own lives.
It would take more than a few decades for most Americans to generate enough emissions to cause one future death. But the same moral logic still applies. Every ton of carbon we emit comes with a cost to lots of existing and future humans (and to the planet and other species, if we decide we should care about that too, which we really should). In my lifetime I have already emitted more than my fair share of carbon (anyone with even a modest American lifestyle has as well). The least I can do for humans not born with my luck, island dwellers, and future humans (not to mention my own children), is try to radically reduce each year my own footprint and help make the case for the rest of the developed world (which got wealthy by burning lots and lots of carbon) to do the same.
No one should want to be a climate hog. But if you climate hog at the scale a superyacht owner does, you might just be eligible for the slashing epithet the great writer James Baldwin applied in another context: “moral monster.” Not being a moral monster should be a pretty good goal to guide one’s choices in life. Yes, I am naive in a world of monsters. But the first step is always to name the thing.
Here’s how Chat GPT imagines the situation:
With my head fogged by this spinning vortex of harsh moral calculation and unforgiving judgement, I had to get away from the Antigua Charter Yacht Show. Understandably, locals mostly welcome the show and the infusion of spending it brings to a parlous island economy. But is a global economy that is increasingly based on catering to the whims and tastes of the wealthy really what humanity aspires to? I hope not. In any case, I was ready for emptier horizons and cleaner waters (an urgent thought after I saw a dead rat bobbing past Laughing Gull on the morning tide). I upped anchor, hoisted the main and set off from Falmouth. To clear the harbor I had to navigate one last symbolic obstacle—the self-described “sustainable” superyacht Black Pearl—which was anchored almost perfectly, and somewhat ostentatiously, across the narrow entry channel.
Once into the boisterous Caribbean Sea, I cleansed my troubled spirit with a glorious and lively three hour beat into stiff southeast trade winds and a marching swell. It transported me from Superyacht Gomorrah to the relative emptiness and natural beauty of reef-fringed Nonsuch Bay, on Antigua’s southeast coast. A seascape that has flat water but is open to the breeze and a clear view of the sunrise, and is mostly populated by baitfish and wing foilers, can go a long way toward lowering the heart rate and restoring faith in the beauty and promise of the world. I breathed it all in, stripped, and dropped into the embrace of the sea.
Next Up: The limits of solitude.
What I am Reading:
1. The International Court For Justice is pondering whether climate polluters are liable for damage. It is unfortunate but not surprising that the United States, the largest climate polluter in history (and still the largest climate polluter per capita), is opposed to legal accountability. But hopefully the judges will have the courage to set down a legal marker that would be the first step toward offering nations and peoples who are suffering from the climate ransacking of others a route toward justice.
The case is the result of a campaign initiated by Vanuatu, a Pacific island that is relentlessly being inundated by sea level rise.
“I choose my words carefully when I say that this may well be the most consequential case in the history of humanity,” Vanuatu’s special envoy for climate change and environment, Ralph Regenvanu, said in his statement to the court on Monday. “Let us not allow future generations to look back and wonder why the cause of their doom was condoned.”
More here.
2. An excellent breakdown of the 2024 hurricane season (which officially ended Nov. 30):
There were 18 named storms, 11 hurricanes, and five major hurricanes. An average season has 14 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes. The season’s accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) reached 162 (33% above average), which officially qualifies 2024 as a hyperactive season, according to the definition used by the Colorado State University seasonal forecast group – and that’s in spite of a month-long pause in activity at the climatological peak of hurricane season.
AI is rapidly improving the accuracy of long-range weather forecasts, a development any sailor can cheer. More importantly, better forecasts can save lives:
Probabilistic forecasts are considered more nuanced and sophisticated than the deterministic kind, and are more difficult to create. Typically, a GenCast forecast draws from a set of 50 or more predictions that produce its range of probabilities.
Despite all the effort that goes into those calculations, Dr. Price of DeepMind said, the new agent can generate a 15-day forecast in minutes compared with hours for a supercomputer. That can make its projections much timelier — an advantage in tracking fast-moving storms.
GenCast, the team says, can predict with great accuracy the paths of hurricanes, which annually can take thousands of lives and rack up hundreds of billions of dollars in property damage. The Nature paper said comparative testing showed that its hurricane track predictions consistently outdid those of the European center.
Action Of The Day:
If you think global inequality is a problem and you would like to help do something about it, one of the most effective actions you can take is to contribute directly to someone who lives below the very, very low global poverty line. And one of the best ways to do that is via GiveDirectly, which sends your money directly to people who need it most. Even a few dollars a week can transform someone’s life, and I have been using GiveDirectly for more than a year. One cool aspect is that you can select what sort of aid you would like to give, from Poverty Relief to Climate Survival. My only quibble is that I would love to be able to choose to give directly to women, which has all sorts of other benefits.
Chart Of The Day (source):
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You rock, Tim! One of the only things that quells my climate anxiety is actively doing something positive to try and counteract all the damage... love that you recommend GiveDirectly.