Pat Toomey gets it wrong; Sherrod Brown is right
Extreme weather events across the U.S. and the globe have increased in frequency and severity over the last two decades. Congressional Democrats want to invest in infrastructure improvements to protect against future disasters. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., opposes such investments, arguing there is not conclusive evidence of a rise in weather events.
And yet, in the first seven months of 2021, the nation has seen a recordshattering heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, wildfires blazing across the West, flooding along the East Coast and historic winter storms in Texas that crippled the state’s power grid and knocked out power to 4.5 million homes and businesses.
What more will it take to convince Mr. Toomey and others that we need to invest in protecting the nation’s infrastructure against future weather events?
Democrats have called for upgrading the electric grid, building electric vehicle charging stations, funding clean energy research and protecting shores from rising water levels. It’s a commonsense approach to the increasing number of weather-related disasters in the U.S. and, yes, they are laregly related to climate change.
Not every weather event can be attributed to climate change factors, but there’s an ever-growing body of evidence that climate change is impacting weather in the U.S . and worldwide. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that 2020 was a historic year of extremes with 22 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters across the country, easily eclipsing the previous record of 16 events in both 2017 and 2011.Those 22 events cost the country a combined $95 billion in damages.
NOAA records show that since 1980, the U.S. has sustained 285 weather and climate disasters in
which the overall damage exceeded $1 billion.
During a recent Senate Banking Committee hearing, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, the committee chairman, said the committee must do all it can to help communities protect themselves.
“It’s just common sense: When disaster strikes the infrastructure that our economy relies on, our economy gets interrupted over and over and over again,” Mr. Brown said. “It’s the American people who pay,” in the form of lost jobs, higher utility bills and higher consumer prices.
Mr. Toomey, however, suggested extreme weather events were not on the rise and used broader metrics that he contended showed damage to the economy was on the decline. He said direct economic damages associated with extreme weather have actually decreased and he added that the insurance industry has “always adjusted to changing risk, and climaterelated risks are no exception.”
This is wrong-headed thinking on the part of Sen. Toomey. The insurance industry may indeed adjust to the risk of increasing weather events, but investing in projects that protect people and property in advance of weather disasters is the right approach. Doing nothing and simply accepting extreme weather events as part of nature is to ignore the well-being of Americans.