New York State and New England have just been hit with horrendous, damaging weather, worse than many here have experienced before. What now?
Several weeks ago, I discussed God’s Response to Global Warming. This week I want to discuss our response.
Some states have been resisting the science of climate change and all the policy changes dealing with it requires. But investors are already reacting to climate change. Insurance companies have been pulling investments away from areas at risk in favor of more protected places, like some northern states and Canada. The impact of their changes has made some states so uncomfortable they are now trying to block companies from planning for global warming or the states are trying to cover homeowners’ fire and flood insurance themselves when it’s not available on the market. Regardless of their efforts, people will still be forced to move and rebuild their lives somewhere else; the insurance market will continue to suck more wealth from homeowners; and the states that decide to insure properties at risk will have to suck taxes for the same purpose.
So global warming is already affecting our decisions about where to live, work, build and invest. They aren’t choices we can avoid. Those who have the resources will protect themselves, but most of us will have to face hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts and floods.
I commented more than twenty years ago on this station that the then Republican president “could [have] promote[d] progress against global warming. As the globe warms, more of Canada and Russia will become livable and less of the US, pushing world power north. Instead [the president] concluded that global warming was on its way and we should just learn to cope.”
Decades before I said that, President Reagan tore the solar panels off the White House, put there by his predecessor, who had been an engineer in the Navy’s nuclear program.
We’ll all suffer incomparably more if we won’t learn to stop the production of greenhouse gases which keep warming the globe we live on.
My wife and I lived and traveled in once lush places in the Southwest and Middle East that are now empty of population and vegetation because people were chased away by climate changes. Climate has changed before. It’s changing again and affecting far more of us this time. The sooner we deal with it, the less catastrophic it will be. But will we ever learn?
The Bible doesn’t say, anywhere, that we should stop learning, that we shouldn’t pick up the ways the earth is changing and forcing us to change. It makes more sense to think of the scientists who are proving and predicting climate change as prophets, and, instead of being hard-headed as the Bible describes some of our ancestors, listen and learn.
But the bigger question is whether Americans can or will plan ahead, whether we will cut off the production, distribution and use of fuels and greenhouse gasses that are heating us beyond our ability even to survive. The result of such resistance will doom America. No amount of praying to earthly gods of supply and demand or to heavenly gods that expect us to work out our own problems will save us. We have a job to do and only America can do it.
Trump wants to produce more of the fossil fuels that are doing the damage. His mantra is drill, baby, drill. Some states have learned to produce power in safer ways. But Trump is not a candidate for an intelligence test. He’s only in competition to be America’s most destructive villain.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.