Bad Takes: Talking about climate change's role in the Central Texas floods isn't 'politicizing the issue'

Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.

If we cannot recognize our own given natures and the natural world as setting any limit at all upon the desires that we contemplate taking seriously; if we will not listen to the anticipations and suspicions of the artefactual conception of human beings that sound in half-forgotten moral denunciations of the impulse to see people as things, as tools, as cannon-fodder, or as fungibles; if we are not ready to scrutinize with any hesitation or perplexity at all the conviction — as passionate as it is groundless — that everything in the world is in principle ours or there for the taking; then what will befall us? — David Wiggins, Sameness and Substance Renewed, 2001

Politicization is in the newsfeed of the beholder.

Three summers ago, when 53 trafficked migrants perished while trapped in the back of a semi-truck near Lackland Air Force Base, Gov. Greg Abbott wasted no time in tweeting out blame that very day: “These deaths are on [President Joe] Biden.”

Early this year, as wildfires ravaged Los Angeles, President-elect Donald Trump villified Gov. Gavin Newsom’s alleged water mismanagement, claiming Newsom “didn’t care about the people of California.”

Nary a right-wing pundit nor politician I could find accused Abbott or Trump of “politicizing a tragedy.”

As of press time, the death toll of the July Fourth flash flooding in Kerr County stood at 137, including 27 children and counselors attending Camp Mystic along the banks of the Guadalupe River. Yet right-wing pundits and politicians have shown no qualms about deflecting blame for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s excruciatingly slow response-time and the reckless mass layoffs at the National Weather Service by charging critics with — you guessed it — politicization.

Some calamities are understandably classified as “acts of God” while others are important to recognize, at least to some degree, as preventable. How ought a fair-minded person draw that ethically relevant distinction when it comes to the terrible loss of life in Central Texas last month?

“Natural variability alone cannot explain the increase in precipitation associated with Texas floods,” concluded a team of researchers at ClimaMeter, which analyzes contributing factors immediately after extreme weather events. When compared to the meteorological baseline of 1950 to 1986, conditions in the region were appreciably wetter, they found.

This preliminary analysis aligns with the consensus of the largest peer review in the history of science — the International Panel on Climate Change, which finalized its sixth report two years ago.

“In the near term, every region in the world is projected to face further increases in climate hazards, increasing multiple risks to ecosystems and humans,” the group summarized for policymakers everywhere. “The projected increase in frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation will increase rain-generated local flooding.”

“Preceding the floods, the amount of moisture above Texas was at or above the all-time record for July,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, told Grist magazine, a nonprofit source of environmental journalism. “This is exactly the kind of precipitation event that’s increasing fastest in a warming climate … .”

From the fifth National Climate Assessment to the Office of the Texas State Climatologist, the same dire predictions should already have been a wakeup call.

Further, the “total intensity was strongly correlated with global mean temperature,” swamping alternate causalities like El Niño, with “continued warming of the planet” expected to “cause more frequent, more severe, longer, and/or larger droughts and pluvials,” according to NASA’s satellite observations of 1,056 extreme weather events between 2002 and 2021.

The National Academy of Sciences also linked severe flooding to climate change.

“Approximately one-third of the cost of flood damages over 1988 to 2017 is a result of historical precipitation changes,” the organization said in a study published five years ago.

Lucky for us, the Trump administration has scrapped the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration database which had been keeping track of billion-dollar weather-related disasters.

Of course, fossil fuel emissions didn’t invent catastrophic downpours, and before smartphones, plenty of Texans unavoidably drowned in Flash Flood Alley. And we can debate whether federal, state and local officials dropped the ball by skimping on river gauges or more effective alert systems.

However, the fact that negligently dumping tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere makes us all candidates for deadly floods exactly like the one we just witnessed should by now be as noncontroversial as the link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer.

“But this is Texas,” the editorial boards of the Express-News and the Austin American-Statesman wrote in a joint statement, “where the oil and gas industry is supreme, and climate change denial is ingrained and pervasive” despite “the July 4 storm show[ing] the devastating cost of denying climate reality.”

In sharing the ominious warnings of climatologists and meteorologists, I have been accused of taking the focus off the flood’s victims — even as families and neighbors of the victims themselves flew to Washington, DC, in mid-July to protest. One demonstrator’s sign read simply: “No More Kids Lost To Climate Disasters.”

Donald Trump ran for president on a Sarah Palin-inspired platform of “Drill, Baby, Drill,” and that’s one campaign promise he’s dutifully fulfilled. But even if you don’t care one wit about dead kids, the nonpartisan think tank Energy Innovation projects that the repeal of clean energy tax credits as well as other provisions in recently passed reconciliation legislation will jack up annual energy bills for U.S. households by a total of $170 billion before 2034. Texas will rank among the biggest losers, according to group’s data crunching.

“Some $15.5 billion in investments in climate-friendly projects had already been canceled,” lamented E2, a nonpartisan group of business professionals.

And those effects will be felt in manufacturing-starved rural America.

“We’re talking about jobs for electricians, machinists, carpenters, the folks who were going to build and operate these new facilities,” Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance told The Hill of the expected employment losses under those cuts.

Never mind the hypocrisy-ridden charges of “weaponizing tragedies” or the job-killing sprees Trump and Congress have imposed on Red states — anyone who backs leaders who don’t take climate change seriously, or proudly exacerbate its predictable consequences, is excusing their own moral and intellectual laziness.

They should have to answer to the children: those yet to be born and those heedlessly flushed away.

Subscribe to SA Current newsletters.