Are We Ready to Hear This Yet?

Are we ready to hear this yet?  David J. Phillip in Politico:

"In all of U.S. history, there’s never been a storm like Hurricane Harvey. That fact is increasingly clear, even though the rains are still falling and the water levels in Houston are still rising.

But there’s an uncomfortable point that, so far, everyone is skating around: We knew this would happen, decades ago. We knew this would happen, and we didn’t care. Now is the time to say it as loudly as possible: Harvey is what climate change looks like. More specifically, Harvey is what climate change looks like in a world that has decided, over and over, that it doesn’t want to take climate change seriously."

Jack Ohman Sacramento Bee via Politico

There are other specific contributions to, for example, Houston's plight--its unregulated sprawl and environmental disdain.  There are the contributions of institutions and laws, like the bureaucratic Army Corps of Engineers and the way federal flood insurance does not penalize for building in flood-prone areas, so that 2% of those insured are responsible for 40% of the claims, including a home flooded 16 times in 18 years.

But the universal fact, no matter where, is climate change.  Its role in the hurricane itself and its behavior.  Its role in the rainfall and flooding.

The climate crisis has drowned all the old numbers.  Houston has experienced three "five hundred year floods" in the past three years.  Storms like Harvey are getting more powerful, more damaging, and more frequent.  And these are just one set of effects of global heating.

This week's news is an opportunity to see in detail what such a crisis can do to a very large, complex city, especially one with petrochemical industries.  Though effects of this storm will continue making news, attention will waver.  Is the climate crisis fact sinking in?

It's become commonplace now to say that Houston will never be the same.  But that's not a given.  Powerful forces created this unregulated sprawl and they will be back, relentlessly forcing their vision.  They will want to rebuild in that old image.

It will take political courage to fight this fight in Houston and other affected areas of Texas.  And it will take political courage beyond any we've actually seen to bring this lesson home to the country.  It will never be obvious.  It must be said, and it must be faced.

These days I'm starting to believe that nothing dramatic will change until one candidate--for Senator, for Mayor of a big city, for Governor--runs relentlessly on the issue of the climate crisis, and wins decisively in a state that is not deep blue.

California is a model of a state that takes the climate crisis seriously, yet even here there is much work to be done.  Such work has started in many places, but often almost furtively.  To address the causes and prepare for the effects requires facing them together.  Civilization depends on this.