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 2nd 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…”
