As Hurricane Irma spun through the sea towards Florida, writers Dexter Filkin (for the New Yorker) and Michael Grunwald (for Politico) wrote about the dangers that the state had created for itself. The strikingly similar titles to these pieces (Elegy for the Sunshine State, A Requiem for Florida) suggested that Irma was going to be a turning point. But neither offered evidence of that.
Nor did a New York Times piece by Ashley Dawson that concluded: "One way or another, Florida is due for a reckoning. We can only hope that it will not be too grievous, and that whatever happens it will help transform the political culture of a state whose governor is a climate-change denier despite Florida’s extreme vulnerability to natural disasters, a place where solar power is essentially banned despite its fame as the Sunshine State."
Benjamin Wallace-Wells, author of the climate crisis piece that broke readership records at New York Magazine, now apparently writing for the New Yorker, has an article called The Change Hurricane Irma Brings. "Across Florida this week, the stress of an approaching hurricane has been accompanied by a feeling that things will not simply reset afterward, that the storm is not a one-off," he asserts.
Ignoring and denying the climate crisis is the state government of Florida's official stance, led by its governor Rick Scott, who famously said that Irma could "catastrophically devastate" Florida, along with the English language.
Will Florida and Texas change? Will they stop overbuilding and building on flood plains, destroying protective marshland, and so on? Will Florida embrace solar power instead of vulnerable nuclear power plants, or Texas regulate chemical plants for safety let alone pollution? Will they take measures to protect themselves against the effects of the climate crisis, and join the planet in addressing the causes?
History says they won't. Too much money yet to be made by people who've made enough money to buy politicians and government. But maybe they will, to some degree. Maybe the experiences of these storms will change people. But not necessarily in the ways you think: by providing the horrific reality, and scaring them straight.
Here's one of the great failures of the climate crisis debate that has contributed to our current conflicts and confusion: we have not admitted and freely discussed that climate crisis deniers and climate crisis accepters have one important thing in common. The climate crisis scares us all to death.
My thesis is controversial, for the deniers will forcefully deny that they are afraid, because there's nothing to be afraid of. But those who have studied nuclear fear in the Cold War decades can see the signs. Nobody denied the existence of atomic bombs, but plenty denied they were all that bad.
Strong denial in the face of so much evidence of all kinds is pretty clearly a product of strong fear. Apocalyptic fears are everywhere, expressed in many forms of popular culture as well as religious beliefs. Seeing the power of hurricanes and storm surges can open some eyes to the climate crisis as an apocalyptic source. But like the reaction to the thermonuclear arms race, it induces a sense of helplessness.
But experience with these storms also shows that all life does not immediately end. The storm results in a series of problems to be solved, from preparations to rescues to recovery. The storm changes life dramatically. Its effects become a way of life, at least for awhile.
That's what the climate crisis future will be like. It will become a different way of life. If that way of life includes addressing the causes of even worse climate change in the farther future, humanity may yet live through it.
We must govern our fear, not be governed by it. What can we do? always has an answer.
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