Harvey should be the turning point in the fight against climate change ... by gimleteye

Houston but could have been Miami

In the Washington Post, Vernon Loeb -- managing editor of the Houston Chronicle -- writes, "Harvey should be the turning point in the fight against climate change". The operative word: "should". It won't.

As evidenced in Florida by Gov. Rick Scott's refusal to even admit to climate change and President Trump's empowerment of climate change deniers throughout federal agencies, the United States has descended to darkness on climate change; a grave threat to national security according to professionals in the US Department of Defense.

Just like Katrina in New Orleans, the portraits of suffering we see from Houston are of poor people; ie. the ones who live in affordable, low-lying and low-income areas.

No photos from River Oaks, whose homeowners fled to fancy hotels or flew off to safety until the floods subside and electricity and air conditioning return. The wealthy are not crowded in the Astrodome or other shelters.

Nor is there magic in this blunt assessment: climate change IS a class conflict.

The right-wing, Alt R media embed this idea; not instructively so much as a goad to its audiences to pick up arms and safeguard higher ground. It does so by denying science and constantly refuting the principle that our economic activities should "do no harm" to planetary resources and balances we need to survive. They don't refute the idea that industrial economies are polluting by definition so much as refuse that costs should be equitably shared, that polluters should pay and consumers directed by regulations to the least impactful choices. Climate change, in the view of the extremist right, is an unacceptable value judgment, and they will declaim on this point until there is no breath left.

While the world is buried in images from Houston -- petro-capital of the United States -- a wider angle view shows the class conflict now in Southeast Asia, where Bangladesh is buckling under historic monsoon rains. Seventeen million people in the region, including parts of India, are inundated by floods. Just like Sudan, Somalia and Syria, climate change is a moving catastrophe today. You won't hear or see the view on Fox News or Breitbart.

The UK Guardian points that way, in "Conservative groups shrug off link between Tropical Storm Harvey and climate change".

“Instead of wasting colossal sums of money on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, much smaller amounts should be spent on improving the infrastructure that protects the Gulf and Atlantic costs,” said (Myron) Ebell, who is director of environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian thinktank that has received donations from fossil fuel companies such as Exxon Mobil.

Thomas Pyle, who led Trump’s transition team for the department of energy, said: “It is unfortunate, but not surprising, that the left is exploiting Hurricane Harvey to try and advance their political agenda, but it won’t work.

“When everything is a problem related to climate change, the solutions no longer become attainable. That is their fundamental problem.” Pyle is president of the Institute of Energy Research, which was founded in Houston but is now based in Washington DC. The nonprofit organization has consistently questioned the science of climate change and has close ties to the Koch family.

If Pyle were honest, he would explain: solutions are not attainable because fossil fuel interests and dark money channels (ie. his funders including the Koch Brothers) who dominate Congress and a majority of state legislatures today are determined that any adaptation to climate change must work-around their profit models. These also hide behind the mantle of Christian values and the shield of individual liberty.

In his Washington Post OPED, Loeb writes:

Tom Friedman in his new book calls climate change a “black elephant” — a combination of the unforeseen “black swan” event with enormous consequences and the “elephant in the room” no one can see.

There’s really no other way to make sense of what’s happening in Houston. The black elephant is here in America, just as it’s in Africa and the Middle East and Antarctica, whether we want to see it or not.

Just acknowledging that will help Houston recover once the rain finally stops, making the political blame game even more futile than it has already become in American politics.

Yes, the political blame game on climate change is "futile", but it is extraordinarily powerful; backed by a legacy of wealth built in the fossil fuel and electric generation supply chain.

Harvey should be the turning point in the fight against climate change, and in an enlightened world it would: but it won't.

Nor will any disasters to come. Nor will the silent signals that nature is sending us from every direction: in the air, the water, from the arctic to the tropics, or seasons pushed off-kilter by rapidly warming temperatures.

In a stable democracy, voters could redress the imbalance between the greed of a few and the needs of the many. In the US, we once took this as a given.

Climate change should be an opportunity to rebalance the US economy and jobs toward a lighter and more equitable footprint. In some cases, like the adoption of solar power, it is but in other cases, climate change is driving our politics in the opposite direction. Now the Koch billionaires and their allies are mounting a plan for a constitutional convention in which climate change will be an unseen but primary driver.

There is only one solvent to futility on climate change: vote as if your lives depended on it.