Burying their heads in rapidly disappearing sand is something of a national characteristic of Americans when it comes to climate change. However, when it is aided, abetted and promoted by monied interests, all should be concerned.
I think it is reasonably well-known that several states have banned any references to climate change or global warming in official government documents. Florida, recently pummeled by monster Hurricane Irma, was one of the first to take such measures back in 2011, when current governor Rick Scott took office. Earlier this year, the state of Idaho stripped any references to it in its revised K-12 science standards. In 2012, North Carolina banned the state from basing coastal policies on the latest scientific predictions of how much the sea level will rise.
Of course, on the federal level, since Trump took office, intensive scrubbing worthy of Mr. Clean has taken place on the White House website. Predictably, that ardour has infected many federal departments. Even those researchers seeking grants from the US Department of Energy are being asked (?} to excise references to 'climate change' and 'global warming' from their proposals.
The mechanism behind this censorship is fascinating and worthy of deep study, but I will offer only a brief overview of the influence being wielded by powerful interests to suppress scientific fact. Not surprisingly, lobbyists for the real estate and housing development industries are leading the charge, striving to keep as quiet as possible some very, very inconvenient truths:
... a storm of scientific information about sea-level rise that threatens the most lucrative, commission-boosting properties ... warn[s] that Florida, the Carolinas and other southeastern states face the nation’s fastest-growing rates of sea-level rise and coastal erosion — as much as three feet by the year 2100, depending on how quickly Antarctic ice sheets melt. In a recent report, researchers for Zillow estimated that nearly two million U.S. homes could be literally underwater by 2100.Given the rapid progression of climate change, I suspect the 2100 date is far too optimistic. I believe I may see some of the worst within my own lifetime, even though I am admittedly getting a tad long in the tooth.
Truth is frequently unpalatable, and realtors and developers are proving especially resistant to it:
Some are teaming up with climate-change skeptics and small government advocates to block public release of sea-level rise predictions and ensure that coastal planning is not based on them.And they are getting some assistance from the top:
Last month, U.S. President Donald Trump rescinded an Obama-era executive order that required the federal government to account for climate change and sea-level rise when building infrastructure, such as highways, levees and floodwalls. Trump’s move came after lobbying from the National Association of Home Builders, which called the Obama directive “an overreaching environmental rule that needlessly hurt housing affordability.”Back in North Carolina, Willo Kelly, who represents both the Outer Banks Home Builders Association and the Outer Banks Association of Realtors
... teamed up with homebuilders and realtors to pass state legislation in 2012 that prevented coastal planners from basing policies on a benchmark of a 39-inch sea-level rise by 2100.
The legislation, authored by Republican Rep. Pat McElraft, a coastal realtor, banned the state from using scientific projections of future sea-level rise for a period of four years. It resulted in the state later adopting a 30-year forecast, which projects the sea rising a mere eight inches.
In South Carolina, the state Department of Natural Resources in 2013 was accused of keeping secret a draft report on climate-change impacts. In Texas, the 2016 platform of the state Republican Party states that climate change “is a political agenda promoted to control every aspect of our lives.”Fortunately, not everyone is wallowing in, and extolling, ignorance:
In eastern North Carolina, geologist Riggs resigned from the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission’s science panel in 2016, citing legislative interference. He has since teamed up with local governments on the Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds to address problems of flooding, windblown tides and saltwater intrusion, a threat to local farming.Climate change is growing increasingly dire, and it is clearly not the time for citizens to cede control and authority to those whose only interest seems to be squeezing out as much profit as possible in the finite time ahead.
Further east, the Hyde County town of Swan Quarter has built a 27-kilometre dike around homes and farms to protect $62 million in flood-threatened property. The dike helped prevent windblown flooding during recent storms, but county officials have some concerns about the future.
Indeed, some might call such massive venality a massive crime against humanity.
America still sees climate change as shutting down a mine whilst there's still ore to be extracted. It's a "not just yet" approach driven by influential entities wealthy enough to buy their way out of climate change impacts when they inevitably hit. In this way climate change becomes a class problem. Sorry if you have to wade chest deep in sewage contaminated water but I have to catch my helicopter now. Ta, ta.
ReplyDeleteAmerica has politicized climate change more than anywhere else. We're playing the same game but on a more subtle scale. We don't invoke institutional denialism but instead fall back on cognitive dissonance when reality clashes with ideology (i.e. neoliberalism).
It's the aftermath that's now showing the class divide. Increasingly it's the poor that are the most vulnerable, the most susceptible to the impacts of floods, droughts, and severe storm events of increasing frequency, duration and intensity. The poor get to flail about, reeling from dislocation and worsening poverty, rotating through toxic FEMA trailers, powerless over their fate. And it's a plague visited upon them by their betters for the sake of chasing that last vein of ore in the mine.
Louis XIV didn't see it coming and paid for it with his head. I don't think America's aristocracy will be so poorly prepared.
Your analysis certainly rings true, Mound. In earlier days, the entitled got away with a great deal that resulted in suffering by many people. Today, of course, the stakes are much higher, but the same mentality prevails.
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