Do the hard thing first
Addressing the important before the urgent, for once
Our top national priorities this August are the economy and national security. Both are troubled, complex arenas. On the economic front, Fitch Ratings has downgraded the country's long-term credit rating and no one can confidently say we've avoided falling into a recession. Potential conflict with China, over Taiwan, strategic mineral rights, and chips, tops the list of national security issues.
At the same time, the catastrophic effects of heat are becoming visible. We're running out of adjectives. Harrowing heat waves, epic flooding, and unbreathable air all afflicted Americans in July, and months of extreme weather events are still ahead. Looking out across the globe, profoundly troubling changes are obvious: Antarctic sea ice is at all-time low levels, the North Atlantic is unbelievably warm, and surprising, uncanny weather is everywhere. The oceans of the globe seem to have run out of room to store carbon emissions, after having absorbed 90 percent of the stuff over the last century.
We're used to seeing climate issues as "driving" instability when it comes to our national priorities—a "force multiplier" in national security troubles, and a heavy weight on our economy. We are paying for enormous increases in electricity use to cool our working and living spaces, bring us drinkable water, irrigate our crops, and recover from wildfires and punishing storms. We'll be paying forever for lost productivity, billions of dollars in wasted infrastructure spending, and scrambled reactions to disasters. Jesse Keenan's testimony before the Senate Budget Committee last week and this year's analysis of the many ways in which the federal budget is exposed to climate risk are both useful entryways for this economic discussion.
The climate emergency is in third place, at best, when it comes to urgent priorities. Today the stunning notion that Mr. Trump is running for president in order to get out from under his legal burdens is front and center, for example. Planning ahead for a giant social upheaval in preparation for increasingly chaotic change is not on the menu.
What if we're looking at our priorities the wrong way around?
The technical and industrial society that produced Mr. Trump and the Wall Street Journal began, broadly speaking, about ten thousand years ago. Since then, and until relatively recently, the worldwide climate has been pretty stable. All kinds of powerful systems and assumptions—democracy, an assumption of expanding growth, generally increasing life expectancy—were built within the context of a predictable climate. Spencer Glendon has been talking for years to investors about this reality. The one prediction we now know is true is that parts of the earth, perhaps large parts, will become uncomfortable, unlivable, or non-existent in potentially far less time than scientists thought just a few years ago.
Companies in states and provinces in China, India, and the US face the highest levels of physical climate risks. This knowledge is allowing private firms to make better bets concerning their facilities and supply chains, as torrents of consultants rush in to advise them of their risks. The trouble is that people, ordinary people, often can't perceive long-term risk, either by by inclination or because they feel they cannot afford to. A less-expensive home or an almost-affordable rent in a risky area seems like a good deal, and the dangers of extreme weather can seem distant by comparison. And so people continue to move closer to danger rather than away from it.
The larger import of this single correct prediction—that extraordinary uncertainty lies ahead—is that all levels of the US government could be, in effect, consultants or assistants in aiding citizens to make better decisions. That advice might be forceful in form: "We will decommission and disinvest in infrastructure in Year X, and until then we will buy out your mortgage and help your community make choices about relocation." There's lots to explore along less-forceful lines, as well.
The first step down this path would be to ensure governments had access to the best science and an agreed approach for evaluating it. That's a high hurdle.
Even the federal government is challenged along these lines. Although the U.S. military is charged with assessing physical climate risks to its "major installations," a recent DoD Inspector General audit that looked at five such assessments found that "installation personnel [across the five places] used 35 different sources of climate data to assess the risks facing the installation, sometimes using different data sources for the same climate hazard within a Military Department." No single data source was used by all five installations. Often data that was being made officially available for these purposes was known by personnel to be out of date or wrong. For example, people at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, in South Carolina, said the tidal surge data they were given was taken from a NOAA buoy that was too far away to be accurate, and launched their own buoy.
If the Department of Defense can't get world-class, localized data to a Marine installation that is home to 17,000 people at a time, how is a small municipal government to know what to do? Most won't have the capacity to do more than hire a consultant, if they have the money to do so, and consultants vary widely.
The biggest story of all is that the health and persistence of the American economy and sense of security have been based since the beginning on a stable, predictable climate. Climate change is not merely a "driver" of economic insecurity. It is the risk we need to reduce in order to have a functioning economy and national security construct in the first place. In many coastal areas of the US, the way to reduce risk may be to plan to move away, but taking on that task will require leadership and agility that is in short supply. And better, far better, local data and knowledge. The first step is to acknowledge that the effects of climate change on human beings, and our country's need to help people continuously adapt in light of these effects, must come first.