Our 9/11 Journey, Our Climate Commitment…

The attacks defined an era that lasted two decades. As we enter a new era shaped by climate change and energy transition, it’s not clear we’ve learned the right lessons.

India House (Museum of New York, The J. Clarence Davies Collection)

Twenty years ago today I celebrated an early birthday dinner, coincidentally, at India House in lower Manhattan, just a few blocks from the World Trade Center Towers.

India House was completed in 1854 in the style of a grand Italian Palazzo. It was named after India to evoke the exoticism of the East. The moniker harkened back to the Dutch East India Company, which brought Europeans to New York, and perhaps to the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus’s dream of a westward path to the Indian subcontinent, leading him instead to the Americas.

India House, in other words, had nothing to do with the actual India. Nor had I ever been to India. It was just a place I spent an evening with family two days before I turned thirty-nine. Looking back now, these were the last placid moments of my personal pre-9/11 era. Around us New York’s financial district bustled — equally oblivious to the epochal attack that had already been put in motion.

The next morning I watched from The Wall Street Journal’s offices across the street as two airliners slammed into the World Trade Center towers. Everything changed. The 9/11 era had begun, and would in its own twisting, turning, confounding, awful and harrowing way lead me to the real India and the world we are in today.

The attacks seemed like a tear in the fabric of history, a shearing of time itself. Here’s something I wrote years ago, trying to get my head around the shock:

On Sept. 11, 2001, I was at work in the Wall Street Journal's offices directly across the street from the World Trade Towers. I was editing yet another arcane story about the Middle East. I think it was about Palestinians jeering Jordanians by calling them Israelis during a "friendly" football match. 

Through that distant muddle, the first plane hit the north tower like a blast of clarity.

I went over to the window. It was a brilliant early fall day.

Eighty floors up from where I was in the World Financial Center, the scene across the street at the World Trade Center was difficult to take in. Flames burst out of a gaping hole far above in the building. White copy paper fluttered through the air, oversized snowflakes falling slowly from the sky, too early for the season, directionless.  Below, several cars were ablaze in the streets. The smell of burning materials -- chemicals, computers, stuff -- permeated even the thick plate glass through which seven or eight of us watched aghast. A bomb must have gone off, I thought. What else could have blown that yawning hole in the metallic skin of such a daunting structure? An announcement came over our building's speaker system: there was an emergency situation in the trade center; we should remain alert.

The distance between us and the event seemed great at first, the scale of what was happening more than we could take in. People started to jump from the jagged opening in the tower high above. Yet, it was difficult to believe that the impossibly small, indiscernibly remote figures approaching the edge, leaping, were people at all. They seemed miniature, able to fit comfortably into the palm. When they fell we could see their bodies flutter slightly, like the copy paper snowflakes.

"Those are people jumping!" one of my colleagues exclaimed in horrified realization.  

Even then we had to squint to verify the truth of this. The full terrifying reality of what was happening still seemed at a remove -- through the thick, glass skin of the building we were in, across the expanse of a street, dozens of floors of space, a few minutes of time and a chasm of consciousness. Whatever had happened, we still seemed somehow removed from it. It seemed safely over there, and somehow over, at least as far as our immediate survival was concerned. However incomprehensible, the situation didn't seem to directly involve us. We were observers in the moment, rubberneckers. Not really journalists, for we did not intend to observe. We hadn't yet come to our senses and pulled out our notebooks. We were onlookers, witnesses to a scene -- or at least thought we were.

I walked back to my desk to call my wife and mother to tell them they would be seeing some frightening images on television. I was all right, I told them. It didn't affect me. I stopped my wife Michele from bringing my two children -- Jackson a toddler then and Adele a four-month old infant -- to the park they had planned to walk past the Trade Towers to visit that day. They stayed home now and turned on the television. 

I walked back to the window, and the scene was more penetrable. Black ash and plumes of thick smoke now swirled among the falling debris -- shredded research reports, memos, calendars and other bric-a-brac flying about. It was clearer to me now it hadn't been a bomb. All the force seemed to have chewed a hole on the surface of the building. Something had hit it. But what, so many floors up? I settled on a missile, a shoulder fired missile. But fired by who? And why? We stood there trying to figure out what it meant. Paul Steiger, manager editor of the Wall Street Journal, turned to Jim Pensiero, the senior operations manager and asked where we could move the newsroom in a hurry if it came to that. This was as far into the future as any of us could think at the time.

Then the second plane hit. The other tower exploded even as our eyes lingered on the first. The projectile had streaked from behind us so quickly it still wasn't clear what had slammed into the structure -- was that a plane? A fireball expanded towards us. Bits of metal and glass hit the windows.

For the first time that day, intense fear flooded through me. All sense of distance collapsed. We had been wrong. We were not separated from this. We were in the middle of it. And it -- whatever it was -- was still happening. Where was this going? Where would it take us?

The next thing I remember is moving down the stairwell, spilling through the fire door onto the street and into the bright-crisp of the fall day. We were between the Trade Center and the Hudson River, blue swells of water behind us. The smell of smoke was thick. 

I couldn't return home the usual route, which ran right through the heart of the World Trade Center complex. I went south where I passed hundreds of makeshift hospital beds laid out and ready. None would be used.

There were few such casualties, just death.

Yet the attacks on New York and Washington did not come out of the blue. They were part of a pattern.

Al Qaeda had previously attacked the U.S. in Yemen and Africa. The 9/11 attacks weren‘t even the first with links to al Qaeda on U.S. soil, or the World Trade Center itself. Bush administration officials knew instantly who was behind 9/11 and just where to find them. I remember Pakistan’s press attache arguing to me months before the attack that al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan was, in effect, a shared problem spawned by the two countries’ close cooperation with Saudi Arabia to turbocharge a jihadist insurgency that ousted the Soviet Union. Within that insurgency grew al Qaeda. When the U.S. and Saudi went home after the Soviet withdrawal, the door for the Taliban 1.0 opened, along with its fateful alliance with al Qaeda.

And just as 9/11 flowed from events preceeding it, so did the attacks influence the course of history that followed: the invasion of Afghanistan to topple the Taliban (not for forever, as it turns out), the war in Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein, which in its own way influenced the course of the the Arab Spring, which helped spark civil wars in Syria, Yemen and Libya, and the rise of Islamic State.

None of this was inevitable, and yet each led in part to the next — by plan and miscalculation, through foresight and the accumulation of unforeseen consequences. 

After that day at the Journal, I was also thrust into my own 9/11 era. This included the gruesome assassinations of WSJ colleague Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and, later, dozens of other fellow journalists and sources in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria. I worked with teams that chronicled the pursuit of al Qaeda, the invasion of Iraq and, later, the unraveling of the established Middle East political order. It continues today with the deepening ties between Israel and the Arab Gulf states in opposition to an aggressive and aging Iranian regime.

For Americans, the shock of 9/11 opened the door to an unprecedented expansion of the security state, abroad and at home, to head off terrorist threats emanating from abroad. George W. Bush tried for a while to avoid a backlash against Muslims, but eventually antagonism against immigrants, even American minorities, spread as fears of terrorism dovetailed with angst over the country’s transition to a majority minority country. That, as much as anything, helped bring us President Donald Trump.

The return of the Taliban has been a frightening, dispiriting bookend to the 9/11 era. It was surreal exchanging emails recently with a former WSJ colleague I worked with closely in late 2001. He was on the Bagram plains outside of Kabul then, awaiting the U.S.-organized military push into the capital that would oust the Taliban and clear his way into the capital.

Just shy of twenty years later he was back in Kabul. “We think this place is going down,” he wrote, now awaiting the Taliban’s push to reclaim the capital. The fall of the U.S.-backed government was as chaotic as the rout of the Taliban just shy of two decades earlier. Thirteen American troops were killed in a terrorist attack during the height of the U.S. withdrawal, four of them the same age as my daughter, who I carried away from ground zero as an infant.

A corner near my desk at The Wall Street Journal after the collapse of the Towers, which were across the street from the WSJ’s offices in the World Financial Center.

As a new era dawns, we’re going to have to get better at this choosing of when and how to involve ourselves in the messy situations of other countries. Because the need to do so is only going to grow, right along with the risks. Sometime around 2014 — after the hopes of the Arab Spring curdled into authoritarian backlash, protracted insurgencies and civil wars, right about the time the Islamic State rose up to capture a huge swath of Syria and northern Iraq — it dawned on me just how much the world was simply ricocheting from crisis to crisis distracted from a much bigger and growing problem.

Climate change did not cause 9/11, create the political conditions that sparked the Arab Spring uprisings or spur ISIS to establish its murderous “caliphate.” But increasingly, it was helping spread that chaos, deepening those conflicts, complicating and undermining any sort of remediation and reconciliation.

Rising food prices — the result of poor global crop yields due in part to climate change — played a significant role in the unrest in North Africa that erupted into the Arab Spring. When that ignited a civil war in Syria over the next few months, I remembered visiting suburbs around Damascus years earlier. Makeshift shanty towns had sprouted on the edge of the city filled with migrants from the country’s north, where a years-long drought had wiped out agricultural communities. These were the same suburbs rising up — ultimately eliciting a brutal response by the regime of Bashar Assad that included chemical weapons. President Obama, tormented, in the end decided against an American intervention in response.

Likewise, climate change will increasingly exacerbate hotspots like Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Yemen, as well as North Korea, Africa, the Arctic and even India. Indeed, the rivalry between India and Pakistan — sworn enemies in an ever sharper competition for dwindling waterways sustaining hundreds of millions of people — is among the most worrisome tinder boxes. And the world will ponder how to respond. Some activity will be among terrorists targeting the U.S., much of it will be aimed at creating mayhem much closer. But increasingly climate changes will feed conflict and chaos. Worsening droughts leading to more crop failures and water shortages, heat waves killing workers and cutting into economic productivity, storms and rising seas wiping out communities. Waning economic opportunities will push youth, particularly young men, into armed groups, further inflaming the violence. Refugees will roil the social fabric elsewhere, both across borders and within countries. 

As journalist Peter Hergersberg noted in an alarming article recently about research on climate impacts in the Middle East by the Max Planck Institute in Germany,

“When global warming destroys the foundation on which people build their lives, armed conflicts, migration and displacement are nearly inevitable.”

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, 200 million people may need international humanitarian aid annually by 2050, double the number now. Some $20 billion in funds annually may be needed by 2030, seven times more than this year’s record $2.6 billion funding request from the organization (which is in turn double what the group needed in 2012). Already, armed conflict wracks a dozen of the 20 countries most vulnerable to climate change. Fourteen of 34 countries with a food crisis in 2018 suffered the double-burden of armed conflict and climate shock. More than half the world’s population will live in a drought-prone region by 2050. A study last year argued that more intense and longer lasting heat waves will cause many more deaths in poor cities than rich ones — a conclusion no less threatening to world stability for being obvious.

These crises will have to be addressed each and of themselves for moral as well as national security reasons. Yet if we only treat the symptoms of climate change as they pile up one upon the next we’ll soon be overwhelmed.

We have to tackle the underlying challenge, the biggest human challenge ever: accelerating an energy transition with daunting up-front costs, and that will itself be disruptive. The transition is achievable, even in the limited time we have, but only if the required, often difficult changes aren’t back-burnered for every other seemingly more urgent priority, whether that’s an ongoing Covid pandemic, rising tensions in the South China Sea, ousting dastardly dictators or going overboard to prevent international terrorists from reestablishing themselves in remote, troubled countries. The world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters — China, the U.S., Europe and India — also happen to be the world’s biggest geopolitical players. They’ve teed up the energy transition, and now must keep their eye on the ball. 

This will not be simple. They will have to recalibrate what they see as their national and security interests to make energy transition paramount, the organizing principle of policy. Odious as the Taliban are, it makes sense to help even them address climate risks to stabilize the country and minimize a refugee exodus — especially if such help can be leveraged for a modicum of humanitarian tolerance and acceptance of international norms. Ponying up significant sums to help Bangladesh cope with higher seas and stronger storms could help India avoid an overwhelming cross-border refugee crisis that could distract the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitter from transitioning to renewables and phasing out coal. 

At the other end of the spectrum, the strictly security related U.S. involvement in sub-Saharan Africa — which delivers bases for special forces fighting terrorist threats and little else to countries like Djibouti and Mali — is going to need recalibration, too. Economic development based on Africa’s remarkable renewable energy resources would do the job better, and offer many sub-Saharan countries an alternative to China’s coal-driven ‘Belt-and-Road’ projects on the continent. And yet working with China on climate will be just as critical.

A key will be investing bigger, early on, but with achievable aims short of societal restructuring. Increasingly, the smart investment will be in an energy transition deploying existing technologies to help these areas leapfrog fossil fuels and moderate the climate impacts down the road. Accompanying this should be upfront investment in resilience, such as reinforcing community infrastructure against storms and flooding to restrain migration. In this new calculus, early investments in energy efficiency might be the least exciting, most effective tool available, far more so than drone strikes that regularly create more enemies than they take out.

But dramatically accelerating the energy transition elsewhere, starting now, will be even more important. Researchers at the Cyprus Institute and Max Planck found that the rate the world is emitting greenhouse gasses at the moment will likely drive temperatures across the Middle East to unsurvivable levels for most of the summer months and create dustbowls of lethal air pollution. Half a billion people live in Middle East. Many will be looking for a new home in such circumstances, and won’t ask permission to migrate.

The morning of 9/11 was no gash in time. The attacks were brutal, awful, shocking — yes. Yet, sadly, murderous events on this scale aren’t that unusual in the sweep of human history. As for Covid-19, ditto: horrible as the pandemic has been, historically speaking, it’s hardly unprecedented. Climate change on the other hand — a single species on its own tipping the balance of the earth’s entire biosphere — now that’s a first, an actual epochal gash.

This hasn’t taken us by surprise. We have the tools to solve it. We need the will.

When India House was built in New York City in the 19th century, the age of empire was giving way to the industrial revolution. Those who built it sensed a new era of exploration and possibility as railways laid track the world over for coal-powered steam locomotives, the vanguard of new a technological advance.

The era of fossil fuel had begun. Who knew then where it would lead?

Now, we do. And a new era begins….

View of The Wall Street Journal’s former offices in the distance looking through Ground Zero today. Photo by Bill Spindle