A Flood of Folly
Environmentalism has been around for centuries, but only since the age of industrialization has the focus turned from preservation of the natural world to the damage humans have wreaked on the ecosystem. Even then, for decades, almost all the attention was on local phenomena; the pollution of a major river or befouled air in a particular city or downwind from a manufacturing plant. Even extreme events, as when the Cuyahoga River caught fire in Cleveland in 1969, were viewed as isolated and atypical examples of neglect.
In the 1980s, however, environmental scientists began to assert that pollution was a worldwide phenomenon, in which human activity, if it remained unchecked, literally had the potential to threaten the entire species. By the mid-1990s, they cautioned that, with a burgeoning world population, if governments and the private sector did not begin to take serious remedial steps, disastrous climate change, largely from greenhouse gas emissions, might become irreversible by the mid-2020s.
Predictably, those projections became politicized, with nay-sayers, mostly on the right, finding alternative explanations for each environmental catastrophe, which helped blunt the sort of commintment that scientists had warned a largely uninterested public would be required. Conservatives doubled down by pointing out that not only were clean-energy or pollution control programs unneeded—natural disasters would continue to happen no matter what we did—they were extraordinarily expensive and, gasp, increased the nefarious reach of government into businesses and ordinary people’s lives.
Scientific predictions are iffy things, and, despite the brief popularity of ominous jeremiads, such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, skepticism largely won out. There were initiatives, of course, even international agreements like the Paris Accords, but these continued to be undermined by conservative sniffing about the unreliability of pinheaded scientists who only wanted to get interviewed on MSNBC.
This time, however, the scientists were right. The environmental crisis is a worldwide peril and has arisen precisely in the time frame they said it would.
All this leads, of course, to the heartbreaking tragedy of the Texas floods.
Nothing bespeaks the incredible magnitude of the calamity more than the reaction of Donald Trump, who not only felt forced to issue a statement of genuine condolence (although it was clearly written by someone else) but also declined to blame Joe Biden, as he had for the fires in California.
Still, any hope that the resulting devastation would spur real action was again undercut by conservatives, just as they blame school shootings on everything but the easy availability of powerful firearms.
Right on cue, while the dead were still being counted, the Wall Street Journal issued the standard disclaimer. In an editorial, “The Texas Flood Green Herrings: Blame cruel nature, not DOGE, or weathermen, or climate change,” the Journal began by asserting the “horrific tragedy will be exploited by partisans,” by which they meant the left, not themselves, “but the real culprit is cruel and fickle Mother Nature.”
The editorial pointed out that the region has been prone to flooding since the middle of the nineteenth century, with cataclysmic events occurring every twenty years or so. The flooding had never before been this severe, but to WSJ, this was still merely “history repeating itself.” Nor could the lack of response be blamed on the Trump purge of government employees, since “the local National Weather Service office had extra staff on duty and upgraded its precipitation models and forecasts repeatedly,” claims that have been disputed elsewhere. In addition, they claimed “state and local authorities seem to have improved their emergency management and preparation,” neglecting to point out that Kerr County had refused to build a sophisticated early warning system because it would have cost too much.
Even if all their facts are true, which is hardly a certainty, in their eagerness to avoid taking any position that might dent their relentless commitment to both economic and social laissez-faire, they totally miss the point. Yes, it is true that any specific natural disaster might have occurred in the absence of an alteration of our environment, and that a forensic analysis of each might yield a plausible alternative explanation. But taken as a whole, that approach falls apart. The planet has seen too many “once in a century” events, including record-breaking heat waves, severe droughts, catastrophic storms, ravenous wildfires, and torrential floods, in the past decade to pretend all this is simply the natural course of things. And that doesn’t count the totally man-made disasters, such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.
Although the Journal borrowed a recommendation from that ultra-progressive organization, The American Enterprise Institute, “that Congress could establish a board modeled on the National Transportation Safety Board to investigate mistakes made during natural disasters to prevent their recurrence,” since they added that there are no indications “that extreme precipitation in ‘flash flood alley’ or the U.S. overall has been increasing,” their recommendation comes down to “let’s do nothing.”
Democracies are notorious for their tendency to be reactive rather than proactive, but the degree of denial of a trend that could not be more apparent is both maddening and agonizing. This is not to say that the Texas floods would never have occurred, nor that natural disasters are preventable. But it is to say that an absence of awareness about what is happening right under your nose and the willingness to take steps to mitigate its impact, even at the cost of some personal inconvenience, is a disaster in itself.
Now, after the terrible death and destruction, Kerr County is again considering the early warning system, which will make not one scintilla of difference to the families of those who might have been saved had they installed one the first time around. But will the nation finally make a serious commitment to dealing with what is certain to be a series of similar disasters in the future?
Given that the Trump administration is clear-cutting all the agencies that could help in such an effort, the answer seems obvious.