gracchusdixit

What has happened, and is still happening, to the people of the Gulf coast of Texas and Louisiana is heartbreaking.  Thousands have lost their homes.  Thousands more have been displaced.  For hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, it will be many months, even years, before their lives can be pieced back together.  A large swath of Houston, our nation’s fourth largest city, is underwater.  Much of its infrastructure has been washed away.  Many of its streets and schools, bayous and bridges, parks and public places are all but gone.  The mere thought of how all this damage is to be repaired boggles the mind.

Hurricane Harvey, which the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has dubbed a storm of “epic” proportions, will eventually cost our nation billions of dollars.  Exactly how many billions, we do not yet know.  It is all but certain, however, that the final figure will far surpass the costs of Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina.  The human costs may be even greater.  The population of New Orleans today is 30 percent less than what it was before Katrina struck that city more than 10 years ago.  Will a similar fate befall Houston?  We simply do not know.

Donald Trump can talk all he wants about how well the rescue and recovery effort is going, but such cheery self-congratulation rings hollow when it comes from the man who decided to renege on our commitment to the Paris Climate Accord, thereby ignoring the obvious truth that we owe the scope of this and other such calamities to global warming.  Thanks to climate change, the Gulf of Mexico has become one of the warmest bodies of water on the planet.  A major climate scientist recently described the Gulf as a “heat pump,” pushing hot, wet air up into the atmosphere, fueling torrential storms and hurricanes.  This means that another “epic” storm will inevitably strike the Gulf Coast.  It isn’t a question of “if”.  It’s only a question of when, and of how bad the next one will be.

There is no amount of preparation, there is no amount of money, there is no amount of engineering or technological wizardry that can protect a city like Houston.  The Greater Houston Metropolitan Area is larger than the state of Connecticut.  Much of it is below sea level.  No levees, dikes, or dams will ever be sufficient to stave off the catastrophic consequences of the next Harvey.   To pretend otherwise is folly.

The city of Houston—and more broadly, the state of Texas—have made the task of combatting such events harder, not easier.  The Republican governor of Texas and most of its legislators are climate-change deniers beholden to the oil and chemical industries.  In Houston itself, zoning is all but non-existent.  Commercial buildings and strip malls sit cheek-by-jowl with exclusive gated communities and tawdry trailer parks.   In the name of laissez-faire and the free market, developers have been allowed to build on flood plains and swamp lands, where no homes should ever sensibly have been allowed to exist.  Hundreds of square miles have been bull-dozed and paved over, with the result that torrential rains and rising waters have nowhere to go, except into the basements and bedrooms of homeowners.

To make matters worse, the Port of Houston has been allowed to become the entrepôt for at least 30 percent of the nation’s energy imports and exports.  The Houston Ship Channel, which is part of the port, is an environmental disaster—one of the most toxic areas in the country.  It is also a climatological disaster waiting to happen.  Thousands of oil and chemical storage tanks sit along the banks of the channel, with no protection against storms, with little regulation, and with next to no regard for the dangers they pose to the population at large. Through inattention, dereliction, and malfeasance, the economic fortunes of the entire nation have been anchored to a single city and a state that have made economic and environmental bargains with the devil.

We must therefore ask some cruel but inescapable questions.  Should the nation be called upon to pay for the restoration of Houston?  Should we continue to subsidize its bad practices?  Should we any longer allow such a city to exist?

Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t for an instant mean to suggest that we should in any way abandon the victims of this catastrophe or fail to do everything we can to help them reconstruct their lives.  The question is not about the people; it is about the place and other places like it.

Hurricane Harvey may be the worst “rain event” in the nation’s history, but that lamentable record won’t hold for long.  It will inevitably be overtaken by other, even more catastrophic events, and those calamities will come sooner rather than later.  Houston will need help again and again, and there will be many other Houston’s.  How many times can we as a nation be called upon to sustain the unsustainable?  As sea levels rise, as storms and torrential rains become more severe, does it make any economic or moral sense to continue throwing good money after bad?

It is long past time that we faced up to the havoc that is yet to come.  If we do not take drastic steps to abate global warming now, by the year 2050, many of our coastal cities will be uninhabitable, the cost will be $30 trillion a year, and the world as we know it will be gone.

If this strikes you as hyperbole, then turn your eyes from what happened along the Gulf Coast of the United States to the infinitely greater tragedy that simultaneously befell Southeast Asia.  A monsoon no less “epic” than Hurricane Harvey swept across India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, killing more than a thousand people, displacing millions, and bringing India’s financial and cultural capital, Mumbai, to a dead stop.

That is the future we face.  We can, of course, ignore it.  We can pretend, as Donald Trump and his minions wish us to do, that climate change is a hoax.  We can continue to rebuild cities that have no sustainable future and perhaps should never have been built in the first place.

All that would be folly.  Unless we act and change our ways, the havoc that came to us last week will be dwarfed by the havoc yet to come.