Hurricane Laura: The Butcher's Bill, Joe Biden, and Us

Per the New York times as of this morning, since the 1990s the frequency of extreme hurricanes (Category 4 or 5) in the Atlantic Ocean has roughly doubled. Read far enough in the literature and you will learn that the *number* of hurricanes is probably not increasing because of climate change – but the *severity* of each storm is. My layperson’s understanding of this is that warmer water provides more energy for storms. There is probably a third-grade level science experiment that I could do in my kitchen that would prove that. 

Beyond the devastation of lives and the searing human cost – which I doubt anyone could convince a Republican politician to care about, unless a family member of theirs were hit by lightning or washed out to sea – let’s think about how we're going to PAY FOR THIS MESS.  

Hurricane Rita (2005) cost more than $10 billion. The same year, Katrina cost $125 billion. Super Storm Sandy (2012) sent us an invoice for $65 billion. We haven’t got the butcher’s bill – or the contractor’s charges – for Laura yet. All we know is that the cost will be huge. 

So again: how are we going to pay for all this damage? How do local governments cope? How do states pay to keep re-re-re-building along fragile shorelines, on a warming planet where the seas are rising and extreme storms are pounding us relentlessly? 

Our current path of stubbornly committing to “rebuilding our lives” right where they’ve just been wiped out seems incredibly foolish and shortsighted – not to mention a recipe for eventual fiscal disaster. As climate change continues to worsen, we must collectively wake up to the fact that the costs will continue to rise and so far at least, there seems to have been precious little planning for this. 

And it's not just hurricanes. 

California must rebuild huge numbers of homes and buildings after every devastating wildfire season - and climate change is directly linked to those fires. https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/climate-change-and-wildfires 

The recent Iowa derecho caused catastrophic damage to property and crops. According to WaPo, the storms damaged FORTHY-THREE percent of the state’s crops – a staggering cost to that agricultural state. 

How do we pay for that? And who pays? Are we building this virtually certain future cost into budgets? Or we will be robbing Peter to pay Paul – like Trump leveraging FEMA money to give $300 a week to (some) unemployed citizens for a (very) short period of time? (This, by the way, is madness – and seems even more lunatic given that FEMA will soon be mounting an immense, and expensive, rescue effort in the Gulf.) 

There will be other, not-as-easily quantifiable costs, as well. Rising costs for the treatment of asthma, and diseases that can flourish in new territories further north than their original stalking grounds. There will be costs associated with increased immigration: even in a 2^nd Trump administration, refugees displaced by rising seas and desertification will need to be processed somehow – and that costs money. 

Humans react to each disaster as though it’s a standalone that “we can get through!” We rush to help with the mission of “getting better!” or “building back stronger!” (which almost never refers to infrastructure). We tweet hashtags like #HoustonStrong and #WeWillRise and pledge to come together as a community. All that is great and good – but it is not a solution. And it is certainly not a clear-eyed consideration of the future, which is going to include more and worse climate events if we don’t change course IMMEDIATELY. 

Remember – the climate is continuing to warm, despite whatever it is we humans are doing. At the moment, what we are doing is laughably piddly.  

No doubt you’ve seen Amazon’s recent self-congratulatory ad campaign touting their green bona fides: their “green pledge,” taken in 2019. Greenpeace says flatly that it’s “too slow and not enough.” https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/amazons-corporate-climate-pledge-too-slow-and-not-enough/ 

And even if Amazon – a single corporation – were really on the level and doing enough, it is an entirely voluntary effort. And do you – do we here as a community of Democrats – *really* trust modern, unfettered, piratical capitalism to fix this problem for us? I certainly don’t. 

Republicans have been useless on the issue, although I used to cherish the hope that they could be woken up to the danger of climate change if we talked to them seriously about the cost in dollars, rather than the cost to the environment. So far, however, nothing seems to have moved the needle with the GOP, and in this era of Trumpism, they’ve gotten even more recalcitrant and intractable. 

Further, it seems a dubious proposition to assume that a future Republican administration either “believe” in climate change or summon the will to enact any legislative solutions for paying the crushing bills that will continue to mount up. In fact, if we don’t win in November, I can forsee a future in which more money is siphoned off not just from FEMA, but other programs that help (poor) people, like SNAP and CHIP and Medicaid and LIHEAP. 

Our only hope to solve this is to elect a Democratic administration and hold their feet to the fire to enact a Green New Deal – one that includes provisions for funding after fires, hurricanes, floods, and other natural catastrophes brought on by the warming climate. 

We’ve already moved Joe Biden on the concept of the Green New Deal. But we will still have a huge amount of work to do once the Biden-Harris administration (I love typing that!) takes office. We can’t forget that emissions are still going up. And we have perilously little time to start to make a difference. 

#HairOnFirePeople #ClimateAction #VoteBidenHarris2020 /fin 

PS: AO-C’s Green New Deal is worth a read. Here’s just a snip to wet your whistle: “…building resiliency against climate change-related disasters, such as extreme weather, including by leveraging funding and providing investments for community-defined projects and strategies; repairing and upgrading the infrastructure in the United States, including by eliminating pollution and greenhouse gas emissions as much as technologically feasible; by guaranteeing universal access to clean water; by reducing the risks posed by climate impacts; and by ensuring that any infrastructure bill considered by Congress addresses climate change; meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources, including by dramatically expanding and upgrading renewable power sources; and by deploying new capacity; building or upgrading to energy-efficient, distributed, and ‘‘smart’’ power grids, and ensuring affordable access to electricity; upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximum energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification…” 

https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/sites/ocasio-cortez.house.gov/files/Resolution%20on%20a%20Green%20New%20Deal.pdf 

Let's talk about insects

Let’s talk about insects. 

I live in Seattle now.  I consider myself a New Yorker despite not having lived there since right after 9/11 (it’s been a long, strange trip).  And my family farm is in Iowa. 

As a kid I spent weeks there every summer, peeling potatoes, hanging up laundry, picking beans, making pickles, husking corn, going fishing, “helping” Grandpa Channer milk the cows, exploring in the pasture beyond the apple orchard, and taking minute inventory of the astounding variety of insect life.

I was a mini-biologist back then, and the farm was paradise for someone so inclined.  Everywhere, there were insects.  If you couldn’t see them you could hear them, thrumming and whirring and scratching as they went about their business.  Bees crowded the garden, all industry and drive amongst the peonies and bachelor’s button.  Palm-sized garden spiders hung in wait in the long grass at the far side of the driveway, midriffs bright with orange and scarlet coats of arms.  An almost infinite variety of beetles were everywhere to discover – huge ferocious stag beetles, pretty ladybirds, longhorns, and loud, startling click beetles.

There were giant walking sticks and waterbugs to catch and release – katydids and praying mantises to observe – wasps to fear as they buzzed protectively about their immense, bulging nests – fireflies to catch and imprison in Mason jars – and giant red velvet mites astonishing in their tiny perfection.

Clouds of gnats hovered in the cool under the oak trees at the bottom of the lawn, and at the stone quarry in Chickasaw Park there were traffic jams of dragonflies – bright blue skimmers, heavy cruising darning needles, emeralds and petaltails.  In August, any tiny patch of moisture on bare ground attracted cabbage moths, yellow and white, fluttering delicately as they sipped and looking in their numbers as if, when they flew off, they could hoist the Earth with them.

And now?  Now, there isn’t nothing, but there’s not much left.  The full-throated chorus of droning, humming, throbbing insect song is a barely-heard ghost in the distance.  A handful of gnats bother late porch-sitters if the screen door isn’t closed.  The garden spiders are a greatly reduced army, and they are all much, much smaller than before.  A Monarch butterfly in the garden is cause for exclamation, and farmers are importing bees from Australia. 

A recent study published in Science and led by UCL, Stanford and UCSB found that invertebrate numbers have decreased by 45% on average over the last 40 years.

I can see the decline when I visit the farm each August.  I can hear the silence where once there was an omnipresent roar.  But I had no idea how drastic the change was – and when I saw it quantified, I was astonished.

You might ask, “So what?  I don’t like spiders.  Gnats are nasty and annoying, and butterflies are pretty, but who needs them?”

According to the study,

This decline matters because of the enormous benefits invertebrates such as insects, spiders, crustaceans, slugs and worms bring to our day-to-day lives, including pollination and pest control for crops, decomposition for nutrient cycling, water filtration and human health.

And Dr. Ben Collen, last author of the study, said,

We were shocked to find similar losses in invertebrates as with larger animals, as we previously thought invertebrates to be more resilient. While we don’t fully understand what the long-term impact of these declining numbers will be, currently we are in the potentially dangerous position of losing integral parts of ecosystems without knowing what roles they play within it.

And yes, climate change.  

It’s not the only reason, of course, that insect populations are in decline.  We don’t know what’s happening with the honey bees yet.  In Iowa I suspect that factory farming, so reliant on chemicals, is killing off populations of any number of species.  And monoculture agriculture can’t be conducive to biological diversity, even where insects aren’t bug-bombed into oblivion.

But climate change isn’t helping.  Sure, a species here or there is able to expand its range – but that comes at the expense of other, neighboring species, on whom it must encroach.

Most concerning, I think, is that WE DO NOT KNOW WHAT WE’RE DOING.  We don’t know what’s out there.  We don’t know precisely how these complex ecosystems work.  We don’t know which species can die off with no human repercussions, and which are lynchpins on which our very survival might depend.  We suspect – we think we know – we study feverishly, attempting to limn the outlines of the story before the players change – but we don’t know.  Not for certain.  Not enough.

The issue is not that we act as though insects are pests to be gotten rid of.  The issue is that we are heedless in every way.  Our lumbering, careless, devouring predation and annihilation of ecosystem after ecosystem does not strike us – or at least not many of us – as the amoral violence that it is.  We’re rushing toward the future and we think it’s bright.  We think of planetary prosperity and food for everyone, a never-ending upward rise and expansion, a glorious future of technology and pleasure.

The minatory finger of evidence, however, points in the exactly contrary direction.  The insects are telling the real story.

So listen, will you, when you step outside.  What do you hear?