The First Victims of Climate Deniers Are Their Own Kids

By Clive Irving, The Daily Beast

14 January 19

Stop talking about the children and grandchildren paying the price of wrecking the planet. Here is the peril facing five states and the men who have betrayed their own families.

arnings about the imminent perils of climate change always include the trope that our children and grandchildren will pay the price of our neglect, indifference or denial.

Isn’t it obvious? But, once uttered, the charge tends to glide away without becoming assigned in a way that lands on anyone’s conscience. The familiar narrative unspools through many alarming details of the coming apocalypse until concluding with variations on the same phrase: “Climate change is real and the effects are terrifying.”

For some reason the personal responsibility involved has been deflected by the generality of the charge—“our children and grandchildren” defines a collective casualty without names attached.

Since the world embraced the industrial revolution there has never been a graver, more merciless case of get rich now and screw the consequences. What we confront is one of the most consequential of human failings and one of the most familiar—the inability of one generation to accept responsibility for the well-being of the next.

Right now the deniers (mostly serving the fossil fuel interests) are winning, as Donald Trump dismantles regulations. Until 2018 carbon dioxide emissions—a significant factor in global warming—had been steadily falling in the U.S. for 13 years. But last year they suddenly bumped back up 3.4 percent—industrial emissions were actually up by 5.7 percent.

So let’s make it personal. Here are five states where leading politicians are climate change deniers and each of these men has children, in some cases grandchildren. Their states are already experiencing some of the serious early effects of changing climate. (The predictive climate data that follows is drawn from Environmental Protection Agency annual state impact reports, unless otherwise stated, and storm damage details from contemporary news coverage.)

Jim Inhofe

This accounting has to start with Oklahoma. Eighty-four-year-old Senator Jim Inhofe long ago earned the title of Extreme Denier. He has constantly hounded and denounced climate science from the chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works since 2003. In 2012 he published his fundamental text, The Greatest Hoax: How the global warming conspiracy threatens your future.

“God’s still up there” he ranted, and “the arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”

Here is the future to be faced by Inhofe’s three surviving children:

Environmentalists active in Tulsa, the state’s second largest city, have learned not to use the term climate change. Instead the accepted euphemism is “extreme weather”—heeding a warning from Inhofe that it is unacceptable on factual grounds to say that the climate is changing in permanent and unpredictable ways… although the belief that the Earth is flat is rare. 

One of the greatest threats facing Oklahoma is water stress. The combination of a growing population and longer, more severe droughts is exacerbating already-strained water resources: every river and stream is vulnerable, with water tables falling after prolonged droughts.

The High Plains Aquifer, which provides most of the region’s water, has sunk by more than 150 feet in level. Overall precipitation is expected to decrease by 6-10 per cent by 2100. One result will be that the types of plants that can survive will begin to change. The risk of wild fires in forests will increase.

Oklahoma is also a sitting duck in Tornado Alley, and increasingly unstable weather will produce more and stronger tornadoes. Thanks to an extensive program of fracking for oil (supported by Inhofe) the state is now more prone to earthquakes than California.

Ted Cruz & Lamar Smith

We now move to Texas where from a cluster of deniers two stand out: Senator Ted Cruz and Lamar Smith, who has just retired after serving in the House since 1987 and who played a prominent role as head of the House Science Committee.

Cruz quickly recovered from being labeled “Lying Ted” by Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, and from Trump’s bizarre idea that his father was involved in assassinating President Kennedy—two things, you might suppose, that would make it hard to be civil in Trump’s company. Cruz is now a loyal Trumper and in full support of Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement on climate change: “The scientific evidence doesn’t support global warming,” he falsely claims.

As for Smith, he was heavily funded by the fossil fuel industry and used his position to give a platform to deniers who attempted to cut NASA’s earth science budget. He attacked climate scientists and re-tweeted Breitbart News stories denying climate change which was, he said, “not science but exaggerations, personal agendas and questionable predictions.”

Here is the future as it will be bequeathed to Cruz’s two children and Smith’s two children:

Texas is already experiencing two consequences of global warming—increased intensity of hurricane rainfall and significantly increased summer heat.

The clearest warning of increased hurricane intensity came with Harvey in 2017—the hurricane’s behavior conformed to scientists’ predictions of the future pattern where a storm traveling north in the Gulf of Mexico draws new energy from rising sea temperatures, powering up the storm with more moisture.

When Harvey hit the Texan coast at San Jose Island it was a Category 4 and dropped unprecedented amounts of rain over Texas. Fifty counties came under a state of emergency. The storm had effects well beyond Texas: the state’s major oil refineries are on or close to the Gulf coast. The forced closure of refineries created shortages in the nation’s fuel supply.

Like much of southern Texas, Houston sits on a flood plain near the Gulf. Many newer housing developments were engulfed by storm rains—nearly 50,000 homes were hit, with 1,000 completely destroyed and more 17,000 sustaining major damage. The hurricane season is likely to repeat these effects as the storms become more frequent.

Average temperature increases in the last 20 years range from 0.5 degrees in the northeast to 1.5 degrees in the southwest. Texas currently averages more than 6o dangerous heat days a year. By 2050 it will see 115 such days. Summer heat is up 3.3 percent since 1970. Texas also faces the worst threat from widespread drought of any state, with an increase in severity of 75 per cent by 2050, as well as a severe increase in the number of forest fires.

Flood surges on the coast are producing an increase in mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and dengue fever.

Jim Jordan

In Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan stands out as an aggressive and brittle right-wing nutter, spearheading attacks on the Mueller investigation and on Planned Parenthood. He was the first person in Congress to sign the so-called “No Climate Tax Pledge”—sponsored by the Koch brothers—committing to block any legislation on climate change that included an increase in government spending, and voted to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases.

He is doing his best to ensure that his four children will, if they remain in Ohio, inherit a state with a climate bearing little relation to its present condition:

Most of the state has warmed by at least one degree in the last century. Ice cover on the Great Lakes is forming later and melting sooner. In 2011 a confluence of heavy rain and melting snow caused a flood so great that the lower Ohio River was closed to navigation.

The climate is likely to swing from spring deluges to sustained summer droughts. By the end of the century Ohio’s climate will be similar to Arkansas’ present climate in the summer and Virginia’s in the winter. By the end of the century temperatures are expected to rise in the winter by as much as 7–12 degrees and in the summer by 6–14 degrees. This is equal to the amount of warming that took place during the 12,000 years since glaciers disappeared. Half of Ohio’s land is agricultural and, because there will be more extremely hot days, corn harvests will suffer.

In northeast Ohio forests that provide habitat for rare species are changing because of heat shock—temperatures are changing too fast for plants to adapt. People can move location but biospheres cannot. Increased levels of ozone appearing downwind of coal-powered plants are stunting tree growth.

Mitch McConnell & Rand Paul

In Kentucky the two senators, Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, act much as you might expect in a coal-producing state, though their utterances are as different as their personalities. McConnell, for whom the idea of explicit moral commitment is as attractive as the prospect of an intimate dinner with Nancy Pelosi, makes a point of saying he is not a scientist (we get that) but that for everybody who thinks the planet is warming he can find somebody who thinks it isn’t.

Paul spouts the familiar mantra that scientific opinion on climate change is not conclusive and opposes “onerous regulations.” He attacked a National Science Foundation grant to assist meteorologists understand climate change because he said it was supporting propaganda, not science.

The three children of each of these robustly myopic men should take note of the following:

The state’s average rainfall is increasing and likely to reduce crop yields and threaten aquatic ecosystems. Floods may be more frequent but droughts may also be longer—Kentucky competes for water with Ohio and Tennessee.

Very hot days will be more frequent. Droughts affect the amount of electricity produced by Kentucky’s hydroelectric dams—a drought in 2007 cut power production by more than 30 percent, which forced a switch to fossil fuel-burning plants to match demand.

Western parts of Kentucky are expected to have between 15 and 30 more days with temperatures above 90 degrees by the end of the century, severely reducing crop yields of corn and soybeans. Dairy herds will be severely affected by lack of grazing. Increased ozone levels will be dangerous to public health.

Rick Scott

Finally to the Sunshine State, Florida, and to the new senator and former governor, Rick Scott. He also deploys “I’m not a scientist” as he simultaneously makes sure that the terms “climate change” and “global warming” do not pass his lips.  Over his period as governor he cut $700m from the water management program, defunded bipartisan conservation programs and undermined the enforcement of air, water and climate protections.

His two children must already have felt the future.

Florida is the state most exposed to the earliest impacts of climate change – rising sea levels and amped up hurricanes.

The immediate effect of a rise in sea surface temperatures in the Gulf, up in some places by as much as 3.6 degrees, is to re-charge the energy of hurricanes as they near the coastlines.

In October Hurricane Michael became one of the most intense storms ever to make landfall in the U.S.: briefly touching a Category 5 and then, at Category 4 with 155 mph winds eviscerating the Panhandle coast, completely wiping out Mexico Beach and badly damaging Panama City.  At least 35 people were killed.

A University of Miami climate researcher, Brian McNoldy, said that Michael “saw our worst fears realized, of rapid intensification just before landfall on a part of the coastline that has never experienced a Category 4 hurricane.”  The storm had a minimum central pressure of 919mb—third lowest on record for a U.S. hurricane.

The sea level around south Florida has so palpably risen that tidal sea water now bubbles up from Miami storm drains and floods streets. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, predicts that sea levels in Miami will rise by as much as three feet by 2060. The state’s urban populations are concentrated at the coasts, many around either the beaches or, in the east, along the Intracoastal Waterway—both susceptible to storm surges. Palm Beach, home of plutocrats (including Donald Trump), is exposed as a barrier island. Inland ecosystems like the Everglades are vulnerable to salt water incursions. Infrastructure—highways, power grids and emergency resources—is exposed to storm surges.

According to the Miami Herald, by 2045 nearly 64,000 homes in southern Florida will face flooding every other week. That number could be a million by the end of the century. Summer temperatures are expected to be 9 degrees above the current levels—rising above 95 degrees for up to 90 days a year, producing intolerable heat indexes for a population that includes many elderly retirees.

And so to the homecoming. What exactly do these guys tell the kids? How do they subvert the delivery of un-mediated knowledge? What role do the mothers play—do they live in the same corrupted bubble as the fathers? And, most importantly, how long do these guys think they have before they have to concede that all along their first loyalty has been to the special interests that bought them, not the interests of their own families?

Tell the kids now, in the hope that they can shame the fathers. In every state where senators and congressmen are deniers, the kids, if properly informed, should raise hell, otherwise they will likely inherit hell.

The International Crisis of Donald Trump

By Susan B. Glasser, The New Yorker

13 January 19

While Washington melts down over the government shutdown, the worst-case scenario for the President’s foreign policy has actually happened.

ongressional committees, like the priorities of the politicians who run them, change with the times. On Wednesday morning, Eliot Engel, the Democratic congressman from New York who has just taken over the chairmanship of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, sank into an oversized leather chair in his office and told me that his first act as chairman will be to create a new subcommittee devoted to investigating President Trump.

After the 9/11 attacks, Engel’s predecessors on Foreign Affairs set up a new terrorism subcommittee, which underscored America’s sudden, obsessive focus on countering such threats. It is telling that this is the subcommittee that Engel will now eliminate in favor of his new investigative panel. There “wasn’t a great clamor” to keep the terrorism panel, Engel told me, whereas there is no end to the Trump foreign-policy scandals that his members are pushing to investigate. “We just thought, if we’re going to do something relevant in this era where Congress is going to reassert itself, where there are so many questionable activities of this Administration vis-à-vis foreign policy, that it made sense to have this.” Trump, in other words, is a bigger threat than terrorism. At least for now.

Foreign Affairs is not exactly an investigative sort of committee. In a different political moment, Engel’s top priority might be to hold hearings on the escalating conflict between Russia and Ukraine, or China’s increasingly hostile posture toward its neighbors, or the failures of American strategy in Afghanistan. Engel, who has represented the Bronx and parts of Westchester County in Congress since the late nineteen-eighties, is a relatively hawkish Democrat. He supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, though he later regretted it, and has long focussed on human rights and U.S. policy toward its neighbors in the Western Hemisphere.

But this is not the moment for such subjects. Those international crises will undoubtedly soon come up in Engel’s committee. They will not, however, top its agenda, which will be dominated, as so many other areas of our public life now are, by President Trump’s uniquely chaotic and unsettling approach to the rest of the world. Engel told me that he sees Trump as a practitioner of “fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants diplomacy” whose erratic approach to foreign policy escaped any real accountability during the past two years of Republican “rubber stamp” rule on Capitol Hill.

I asked for a list of what Engel proposed to investigate. It was long, although, he assured me, by no means exhaustive, since the subcommittee’s chair and membership have not yet been finalized. No matter who holds the gavel, the investigation is certain to start with the question of what, exactly, Trump agreed to in his private meeting with the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, last summer. “It’s been many months since Helsinki, and we still don’t know what Putin and Trump talked about,” Engel said. He also pledged to look at “the business interests of the President” and the extent to which Trump’s financial dealings with places such as Russia and the Middle East have “affected what he’s done in foreign policy.” That will be a big departure for a committee that typically examines policies, not people, and Engel will have to hold off other House committee chairs eager to encroach on what Engel views as Foreign Affairs’ turf. (Democratic sentiment on the Hill is such that “many other committees would love to poach some of our jurisdiction,” he told me.) But a probe of Trump, Inc., given the President’s tendency to conflate his personal interests with the national interest, now seems indispensable to the foreign-policy concerns of the day, whether it’s explaining Trump’s otherwise hard-to-fathom pro-Russia tilt or shedding light on his family’s pursuit of business deals with Middle Eastern figures who are also key to Trump’s geopolitical priorities. It’s “incumbent upon us to look at that,” Engel said.

From there, the list of Foreign Affairs’ priorities includes North Korea and the matter of Trump’s falling “in love” with its dictator, Kim Jong Un; the killing of the Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the Trump family’s close ties with the Saudi crown prince, whose aides appear to have carried out his execution; and the wild gyrations in Trump’s policy toward the long-running civil war in Syria, where Trump’s abrupt order, in December, to immediately withdraw the two thousand U.S. forces supporting the anti-regime Kurdish fighters led to the resignation of the Defense Secretary, James Mattis.

“It’s the first time in American history that a Secretary of Defense resigned in protest,” Engel reminded me. And yet, in the weeks since Mattis quit, Trump and his Administration have begun to pretend that there was no such order for a hasty exit after all. “Fake news,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters on Thursday, while on a weeklong Middle East tour designed to reassure allies who were unsettled by Mattis’s departure and the uncertainty about American strategy in the region going forward. “There’s no contradiction whatsoever.”

The Washington circus, especially at this moment, is both all-consuming and inward-looking, and it can be shockingly easy to forget how much of an impact the disruptions of the Trump era are having on the rest of the world. As I spoke with Engel on Wednesday, the U.S. government was eighteen days into a partial shutdown, with Trump and the newly Democratic House of Representatives at an impasse over funding for the President’s proposed wall at the southern U.S. border. The interview took place the morning after Trump’s crisis-at-the-border Oval Office address, the first of his Presidency, and a few hours before Trump would walk out of a meeting with Democrats at the White House, which he had convened to end the standoff.

Hundreds of thousands of government workers have been told to stay home or are working without pay. The streets of the Capitol are oddly empty, and a cab ride to the Hill that normally takes half an hour has been reduced to minutes. The State Department bureaucracy is on furlough, too, along with food inspectors and Justice Department lawyers and Coast Guard employees who are being advised, according to the Washington Post, to hold garage sales and consider bankruptcy, though only as a last resort. In the absence of substantive negotiations, and with Trump threatening to unilaterally declare a national emergency and build the wall anyway, the leaders of the world’s most powerful nation were arguing for much of Wednesday and Thursday over whether Trump slammed the table before storming out of his meeting with the Democrats or simply exited after throwing his hands up in the air and proclaiming, “Bye-bye.” “I don’t throw temper tantrums,” Trump tweeted on Thursday. He later elaborated to reporters, “I didn’t slam the table, I didn’t slam the table.”

The world, however, has not stopped spinning on its axis, and, out there, American power has rarely looked so vulnerable, dysfunctional, contradictory, and outright confusing. Such worries have consumed many American allies from the start of the Trump Presidency, and they have now become a reality with the abrupt resignation of Mattis, whose scathing letter to Trump upon quitting warned explicitly about the possible damage to “alliances” and America’s standing in the world.

For most of the past two years, the departure of Mattis from the Trump Administration under such circumstances was seen, even by many Republicans, as the sort of move that would prompt a destabilizing backlash, an outcome that would inevitably have severe political consequences for the President. Last spring, after Trump fired his first Secretary of State and second national-security adviser, the retired general Barry McCaffrey told MSNBC that the exit of the respected Secretary of Defense would, as the host Chuck Todd put it, “bring down the Trump Administration.” McCaffrey said, “If you try and push out Mattis . . . I think the Republican leadership would finally say, ‘Whoa, now we’re in trouble.’ I don’t think it’s going to happen. If it does, we’re in trouble.”

Well, on December 20th, it happened. But the Republican leadership has not risen up against Trump. The national-security establishment has not quit in droves, even if a couple of senior State Department officials have followed Mattis out the door. The President’s poll numbers have not collapsed, and the members of the G.O.P. in Congress who once said that Mattis was the only thing standing between Trump and utter chaos confined their protest over his departure to a few mildly critical cable-TV appearances and newspaper op-eds.

Trump’s opponents have often likened the outrages he has inflicted on the institution of the American Presidency to the old parable of the boiling frog that jumps into a pot and never realizes its own mortal peril as the water slowly heats. Mattis’s exit was meant to be the warning signal, but the muted response to his departure may well prove instead that it’s already too late. The frog is boiled.

For Engel and the other newly empowered Democrats in the House of Representatives, it’s a moment to show whether they can do more than assert their relevance. Will all the investigations and subpoenas amount to more than political posturing against the President? “We’re the only check left,” Tom Malinowski, a newly sworn-in Democratic congressman from New Jersey, told me the other day. Malinowski, a former Assistant Secretary of State in the Obama Administration, hopes to land a seat on Engel’s Foreign Affairs Committee. He is bullish on the Democrats’ ability to create a sort of “alt-State Department” for the remainder of Trump’s term. Of course, House Democrats cannot investigate their way to a different Trump foreign policy. Their subpoenas will not curtail the chaos, nor offer coherence to the zigs and zags of the President’s preferences. But the documents and witnesses and dogged questioning might, at least, help us explain it.