Hurricane Katrina brought to the forefront of the minds of the US people the potential impacts of climate change on their own lives, in their own lifetimes. It demonstrated that the National Guard was overextended in Iraq, chasing foreign oil while neglecting domestic defense of citizens.

All levels of government failed miserably in evacuating the poor with the result that nearly 3,000 people died. This followed on years of official neglect, including Bush’s de-funding of required repairs to the levees which kept the waters of Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River, and the nearby Gulf of Mexico, out of the below-sea-level city of New Orleans.

Thousands of internally displaced people, refugees from New Orleans, were housed temporarily in Houston, Texas. When polled, three-quarters were highly critical of municipal, state and federal response. Three out of four had been rescued and assisted not by the state but by friends, strangers or their own efforts. A survey by Cutter (2006) asked evacuees about their sources of assistance in the aftermath of Katrina. “What is most striking,” according to Cutter et al, “is that religious organizations and friends and relatives are the predominant sources of aid.” Only a quarter of the respondents identify a government agency as the source of most emergency aid. “These data underscore the perception that private, nonprofit, and/or volunteer relief outperformed government agencies in the wake of this disaster” (Cutter et al 2006:30-31).

A high level of social solidarity and hostility at government incapacity spread rapidly with the diaspora of refugees, thousands of whom are scattered throughout the USA. They contribute to the groundswell of support for the African American 2008 presidential candidate Barak Obama. The historic militancy of black people in New Orleans has been multiplied immeasurably and generalized nationwide. To the rising mobilization against racism, war and poverty, is added a visceral concern with climate change and its extreme weather events.26

Jenna Loyd (2007) noted that “Hurricane Katrina resulted in the displacement of over 1.3 million people - frequently noted as the largest internal displacement in U.S. history. Of course, the significance of this displacement cannot be grasped solely by numbers, and as Osayande notes in “A Raging Flood of Tears”: “you cannot measure disgrace with a body count.” In “Nature Fights Back,” Ross Gelbspan situates Katrina within the science and politics of global warming: The federal government has known for decades that a large hurricane could hit New Orleans, yet monies for investing in flood protection and restoration of wetlands have been pitifully small. Gelbspan attributes the Bush administration’s “antiplanning propensity” to its ties with the fossil fuel industry. Again, there is a racial history to antiplanning. As Jordan Flaherty writes in “Corporate Reconstruction and Grassroots Resistance”:

“The “disaster before the disaster” that devastated this amazing city was man-made. It was birthed in institutional structures of racism, and it manifested in the crumbling infrastructures of schools and education and health care, and, later, in a hopelessly mismanaged relief and reconstruction overseen by ... what some local organizers have referred to as “the disaster industrial complex’” (Loyd 2007).

Hurricane Katrina was “the most devastating and costly hurricane in US history. It is estimated that Katrina impacted 90,000 square miles (an area nearly the size of the United Kingdom), displaced more than one million people, killed more than 1,300 people, and exceeded $80 billion in costs” (Cutter, et al 2006:1).

Some 100 days after 28 August 2005, when Katrina hit New Orleans, Congress had approved $62 billion in hurricane relief aid, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was operating 132 disaster recovery centres in the Gulf coast area and had 14,000 personnel in the field. By December 2005 FEMA had cleared 53 million cubic yards of debris and provided $5 billion in financial and housing assistance but 6,600 people remained unaccounted for and more than 400,000 were scattered in hotels and shelters across the USA (Cutter, et al 2006)

“Katrina was arguably the greatest natural disaster in modern US history. ... At least 1,836 people lost their lives. Thousands of Gulf coast residents lost their livelihoods, and many were forced to permanently relocate. Economic losses are estimated at $81.2 billion (and growing), nearly double the costs associate with the next-most costly disaster, Hurricane Andrew” (Chappell et all 2007).

Two weeks after the disaster, academics surveyed the population hardest hit by the hurricane.

“Nearly all of the evacuees in the Houston shelters were from the New Orleans area, and a large majority had lived in New Orleans their entire lives. More than 90% were African American, and approximately 6 in 10 had household incomes below $20,000 in 2004. About half had been employed full time before the storm. Compared to New Orleans and Louisiana residents as a whole, disproportionate numbers of the evacuees were African American, had low incomes and low rates of home ownership, had no health insurance coverage, and were at low educational levels. For example, 93% of the residents of the Houston shelters were African American as compared to 67% of New Orleans residents and 33% of Louisiana residents overall. About one third of evacuees in the Houston shelters reported making less than $10,000 in 2004, as opposed to just 10% of the general populations of New Orleans and Louisiana. Only 6% of Houston shelter residents had a college degree, compared to more than a quarter of the population of New Orleans and 19% of Louisiana residents. Nearly half of the shelter residents were single; 30% were married or living as married. Forty-five percent had children younger than 18 years, and 33% had their children with them in the shelter. This group of evacuees was also disproportionately uninsured: 54% had no health insurance before the hurricane, as compared with 26% of Louisiana residents overall. Fewer than 2 in 10 had private health insurance, compared with 63% of Louisiana residents as a whole. Furthermore, 41% of Houston shelter residents reported chronic health conditions such as heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, or asthma” (Cutter, et al 2006:1).

The very poor, disproportionately African American women and their children were unable to evacuate before the storm. Katrina hit New Orleans on August 28, two days before the end of the month when government welfare checks were to be paid out, leaving recipients unable to pay for transport out of New Orleans.

A subsequent analysis concluded that “it is unlikely, however, that we can completely evacuate entire cities; as we saw just a few weeks later [after Katrina] in the case of Hurricane Rita, many Houston residents were unable to evacuate as a result of freeway gridlock” (Cutter 2006:21).

The collective picture painted by Cutter’s 2006 study is that “Katrina caused significant economic disruption. There was extensive damage to or loss of physical property such as homes, and roughly half of the employed respondents lost their jobs. About a third of the households experienced a decrease in monthly income, and the resumption of basic economic activity was the exception rather than the rule. Thus, even those who did not experience a change in income found their daily economic life dramatically changed” (Cutter et al 2006:30).

According to Ross Gelbspan, “The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming. ... As the atmosphere warms, it generates longer droughts, more-intense downpours, more-frequent heat waves, and more-severe storms. Although Katrina began as a relatively small hurricane that glanced off south Florida, it was supercharged with extraordinary intensity by the relatively blistering sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.”

The increase in water temperature is significantly caused by the oil industry’s petroleum exploitation in the Gulf where dozens of oil drilling platforms and thousands of wells, pipelines, barges and related infrastructure are to be found.

“Unfortunately, very few people in America know the real name of Hurricane Katrina because the coal and oil industries have spent millions of dollars to keep the public in doubt about the issue. The reason is simple: To allow the climate to stabilize requires humanity to cut its use of coal and oil by 70 percent. That, of course, threatens the survival of one of the largest commercial enterprises in history. ... Against this background, the ignorance of the American public about global warming stands out as an indictment of the US media” (Gelbspan 2005).

Katrina shows that the socially vulnerable in the US, and moreso elsewhere in the world, are the most severely hurt by climate change. Hence the perpetrators of climate change, foremost amongst which are oil corporations, are also perpetrators of environmental racism and sexism within an attack that at its core is an attack on the most exploited of the dispossessed class worldwide. In this regard, Craig Hubley charged, in November 2007, that Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Harper have consistently off-loaded “climate risks on more helpless populations, including hurricane-prone people in the gulf of Mexico and Canadian Maritimes, who have seen a radical increase in extreme weather events and many of whom have died as a direct result of weather unheard-of before the longer seasons of warmer water” (Hubley 2007).

Hubley heralded 2007 electoral defeat of John Howard in Australia; calling it “a fitting end to a regime based on lies, denial, and ultimately racist beliefs that inconveniences in the industrialized world outweighed [weather-related] deaths amongst the poor - especially in low-lying nations like Bangladesh and South Pacific islands” (Hubley 2007).