Addressing climate change, finally
The watered-down bill passed by the Senate at least points us in the right direction, but more is needed.
This week, five years ago, Houston was reeling from three years of major floods — Memorial Day, Tax Day, Memorial Day again. Many of us were soggy but still skeptical of whether the heavy rains were really connected to climate change.
Then came Hurricane Harvey at the end of August and its biblical downpour, dumping more than 50 inches of rain onto the city. Bird’s-eye view photos told the story that so many lived, muddy brown waters filling roads and homes for days.
It changed us.
Some Houstonians are still recovering. We hold in a collective breath each hurricane season, tracking tropical storms as they make their way toward land. And we are far more convinced that the world is indeed already experiencing climate change and that we must do something about it.
At last, we may have a bill from Congress that does just that — even if it’s a pared down version of what proponents had initially hoped for.
Too many of us, in Houston and beyond, have experienced what climate change truly means to continue to go about business as usual. While the awakening for many Houstonians was sudden, the journey to this broader moment of reckoning has been a long time coming.
As early as the late 1800s, scientists described the connection between carbon dioxide and our changing climate.
More than 100 years later, in 2007, when a group of world leaders joined together for the annual Nobel Prize ceremonies, the moment was decidedly heavy: “We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency — a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here,” said that year’s Peace Prize recipient, former vice president Al Gore who had already dedicated decades of his own career to sounding the alarm.
“But there is hopeful news as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst — though not all — of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly.”
In her 2010 Merchants of Doubt, with co-author Erik Conway, Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes revealed what she described in a 2012 NPR interview as “systematic efforts organized by people outside the scientific community to undermine the scientific data and to convince all of us that the jury — scientific jury was still out in order to delay government, business and community action on taking steps to prevent further man-made climate change.”
The long history of climate science, industry obfuscation and escalating weather disasters underscores just how slow we have been to act. But just as climate change itself has seemed to reach an inflection point, so too has the debate shifted — ever so slightly — toward action. At last.
The bill that just barely passed the Senate Sunday with help from the vice president’s tie-breaker vote marks the first real effort at the necessary scale to curb emissions and address climate change. The New York Times described the legislation as “five decades in the making.” Though the bill is a drastically reduced version of its first iteration — Build Back Better — it is still set to cut greenhouse pollution significantly, according to analysis by Princeton University’s ZERO Lab. Not enough to “avert the worst,” as the New York Times explained, but a “sizable down payment,” thanks largely to an approach that favored incentives for good industry behavior over penalties.
So why now? After decades of struggle?
The evidence is all around us. Everything from worsening droughts to stronger tropical storms has been linked to climate change. So much so that what we once understood as “natural disasters” are increasingly understood to be, if not man-made, certainly man-enhanced.
In Houston — the heart of oil and gas and all things greenhouse — we’ve experienced a bit of everything and our shifting understanding of climate change reflects that. In 2011, fewer than half of the Kinder Houston Area Survey respondents thought that climate change was the result of human activity and not “normal climate cycles.” By 2020, that number was up to 69 percent.
The annual surveys also reveal a bit of the attitudinal fickleness that has made it so difficult to overcome the business-as-usual mentality of so many. In 2018, shortly after Hurricane Harvey dumped more than 50 inches of rain on us, 81 percent of survey respondents agreed that “more severe storms are almost certain.” By 2021, with the memories and floodwaters receded, that number had dipped down to 59 percent.
But it isn’t just Houston that’s been experiencing more severe weather. In the first six months of 2022 alone, the country experienced nine climate-related disasters with costs exceeding $1 billion, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information.
Even if Houston has been spared in recent years, others haven’t. This increasing exposure to climate disasters — from wildfires to urban flooding — means that we need only to trust our own eyes to see the truth.
It seems this “real-time data,” as the New York Times calls it, has undone what so many dollars of image management and PR attempted to do for so long: hide the truth.
The thing is, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, as all Bob Dylan fans know.
This legislation, at last, seems to know which way the wind is blowing. It moves us toward urgently needed emissions reductions but does so in a way we think most Texans would likely support, “balancing tax incentives for renewable energy with new oil and gas drilling in the Gulf and Alaska to ease that transition.”
The bill includes funding to help reduce air pollution at the nation’s busy ports, to help smaller oil producers meet emissions targets, and to help expand solar and clean energy investments.
As strong as it is, though, it will take only a handful of Democrats to tank it in the House. So far, only some Texas congressional representatives have said they plan to vote for the bill in the House, including Reps. Lizzie Fletcher, D-Houston, and Colin Allred, D-Dallas, while Reps. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, and Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen, were less forthcoming, according to the Texas Tribune.
Texas representatives should recognize what a gift this legislation really is to oil and gas. We can’t say we support every piece of the picked-over legislation, but we’ll save our gripes for a clearer picture of the final bill.
Right now, the progress is obvious. Wet your finger and feel which way the wind is blowing.