As the east coast digs out from the latest record snowstorm, complete with coastal flooding, road accidents, canceled flights, collapsing roofs, tornadoes, power failures, blocked roads, and a number of fatalities and injuries, fault lines are showing. The old joke that everyone talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it isn’t funny any more.
The storm is just an extra-dramatic demonstration that the climate isn’t what it used to be. Every year is warmer than the last; records keep getting broken. The storm gets attention because in part it was so sudden. There was a massive amount of snow in a short time. (CBS Sunday Morning noted Washington DC normally gets about 19” of snow a year. This one storm dumped nearly twice that.)
But… the slower changes may be even more damaging. The long running drought in the west has had a huge impact. Cities need water. Farmers need water. What happens when the choice becomes you can drink now — but you may go hungry later? Or vice versa?
Even as New York City digs out, a few hundred miles north in the central Adirondacks and over into Vermont, it has been a terrible winter for snow sports. Snowmobile trails have been bare for weeks; ski resorts can make snow — but only if it gets cold enough. Lakes have failed to freeze on schedule, delaying winter carnivals. Areas that survive on winter tourism are hurting.
There’s signs that the annual tradition of maple sap harvesting may be in long term decline as well. No more pancake syrup?
Climate change is not a U.S. problem alone. The Pentagon has officially recognized that global climate change is a national security issue, a threat multiplier because of its effects on so many things.
"Climate change is a 'threat multiplier' because it has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we already confront today—from infectious disease to armed insurgencies—and to produce new challenges in the future," he* said.
* Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, on the release of a report: 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap.
Alone in the world, Republican denial of climate change plays into the larger Republican denial of government. That is what makes the prospect of Republican governance (or rather, lack of governance) a danger that transcends ideology. If the southern states are having so much trouble coping with the storm, is it just because the weather is so bad?
There’s a lot of back and forth between north and south over the storm, northerners poking fun at southern inability to cope with the kind of snow they have to plan for every year. And there’s the rub: planning. Southern states have gone red, meaning they are run by people who don’t believe in government — so who exactly is going to dig them out and get them ready for the next one? It’s how you make a bad storm worse.
One of the key roles of government is to plan for the long term, invest in things like snow plows, craft building codes with regard to predictable local conditions, plan for development that makes sense for the long term, take on big projects with no immediate payback, be prepared for emergencies… These are things Republicans refuse to deal with. Reliance on market forces to guide actions by society, (and society is something conservatives deny, unless it has to do with enforcing morality on others), has two serious drawbacks. Market forces are heavily biased towards maximizing immediate gain, and market forces are all about money — to the exclusion of everything else.
The movement conservatism that is the Republican party is driven by money — those who have it, those who see government as the biggest threat to their wealth. The religion of “free enterprise” is what their world turns around. (Hat tip to Joan McCarter.) Government that has larger concerns than maximizing their returns is a threat to everything they believe — and they have the money to act on those beliefs.
It’s a feedback loop; the more Republican actions and propaganda cripple and discredit government and the more government fails, the more public distrust of government grows.
In a sane world, the documented effects of climate change would be broadly accepted, as would the role of government in responding to it. In a world where everything becomes “political”, sanity is the first casualty. “Political” means objective facts are irrelevant: hard data, laws of nature, real world results must all take a back seat to ideology and belief systems. Decisions are made on the basis of who has the most power, the strongest unquestioning belief, the largest group of true believers.
Climate researchers warn us that weather patterns are shifting, meaning what we can expect for ‘average’ conditions is going to change. They warn us weather events (short and long term) may become more extreme, meaning we need to devote more resources to preparing for them. In short, we’re going to need more government, not less — which puts the Republican Party on a direct collision course with reality yet again.
In the aftermath of the storm, while the news features shots of a panda in the snow at the National Zoo, pay attention to the rest of the news. Anyone talking about Climate Change? Will any of the presidential candidates bring up the issue at all? Will any of them have a plan? Will the press ask them any questions, or will it just be poor players strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage, to be heard over and over again. Tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury signifying nothing?