After Harvey, some conservatives in Houston area reconsider climate change
PORT ARTHUR, Texas — The church was empty, except for the piano too heavy for one man to move. It had been 21 days since the greatest storm Wayne Christopher had ever seen dumped a year’s worth of rain on his town, drowning this church where he was baptized, met his highschool sweetheart and later married her.
He had piled the ruined pews out on the curb, next to water-logged hymnals and molding Sunday school lesson plans and chunks of drywall that used to be a mural of Noah’s ark. Now, he tilted his head up to take in the mountain of rubble, and Christopher, an evangelical Christian and a conservative Republican, considered whether this violent act of nature had been made worse by acts of man.
“I think the Lord put us over the care of his creation, and when we pollute like we do, destroy the land, there’s consequences to that,” he said. “It might not catch up with us just right now, but it’s gonna catch up. Like a wound that needs to be healed.”
Jefferson County, Texas, is among the low-lying coastal areas of America that could lose the most as the ice caps melt and the seas become warmer and rise. At the same time, Jefferson County is more economically dependent on the petroleum industry and its emissions-spewing refineries than any other place in the United States. Residents seemed to choose between the two last November, abandoning a four-decadeold pattern of voting Democratic in presidential elections to support Donald Trump.
Then came Hurricane Harvey. Now, some conservatives in this part of Texas are newly confronting some of the most polarizing questions in American political discourse: What role do humans play in global
warming and the worsening of storms such as Harvey? And what should they expect their leaders — including the climate-skeptic president they helped elect — to do about the problem now?
Choosing sides
“Steroids for storms” is how Andrew Dessler explains the role that global warming plays in extreme weather. Climate change didn’t create Hurricane Harvey or Irma or Maria. But Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, and most scientists agree that warming and rising seas likely amplify storms that form naturally, feeding more water and more intensity as they plow toward land.
“It will be 60 inches of rain this time, maybe 80 inches next time,” Dessler said of Harvey’s record-setting rainfall for any single storm in U.S. history.
As a private citizen and candidate, Trump often referred to climate change as a hoax, and since taking office he and his administration have worked aggressively to undo policies designed to mitigate the damage. He announced his intention to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, a global accord of 195 nations to reduce carbon emissions, and his administration has dismantled environmental regulations and erased climate change data from government websites. This month, his Environmental Protection Agency administrator promised to kill an effort to limit carbon emissions from coal-fired plants.
Anthony Leiserowitz, a Yale University researcher, traces the politicization of the climate to 1997, when then-Democratic Vice President Al Gore brokered a commitment on the world stage to reduce greenhouse gases. The political parties have cleaved further apart ever since.
As the downpour from Hurricane Harvey stretched into its second day, with no end in sight, Joe Evans watched from the window of his home in the Jefferson County seat of Beaumont, and an unexpected sense of guilt overcame him: “What have we been doing to the planet for all of these years?”
Evans, a Republican, once ran unsuccessfully for local office. He ignored climate change, as he thought Republicans were supposed to do, but Harvey’s deluge left him wondering why. When he was young, discussions of the ozone layer were uncontroversial; now they’re likely to end in pitched political debate.
“I think it’s one of those games that politicians play with us,” he said, “to once again make us choose a side.”
Considering solutions
Most in Texas didn’t believe climate change existed when Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, sounded the alarm years ago. Now, studies estimate that 69 percent of Texans believe that the climate is changing, and 52 percent believe that has been caused by human activity.
Jefferson County’s refineries produce 10 percent of the gasoline in the United States, 20 percent of diesel and half of the fuel used to fly commercial planes, said county Judge Jeff Branick, a Democrat who voted for Trump and then switched his party affiliation to Republican, in part because of his disagreement with the Democratic Party’s climate policies.
Branick doesn’t deny that climate change exists, but he calls himself a cheerleader for the petroleum industry and believes environmental policies are “job killers.”
John Sterman, a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, said addressing climate change will invariably lead to gradual job losses in the fossil-fuels industry. But communities have lost a dominant industry before, and those able to diversify can prosper. Jefferson County could look to the renewable-energy industry, with jobs that require many of the skills refinery workers have, he said. Texas already produces more wind power than any other state.
Angela Lopez’s husband works in a refinery, so she understands the worry of the economic cost of addressing global warming. But her county is nicknamed “cancer alley” for its high levels of disease that residents have long attributed to living with the largest concentration of refineries in the world.
“It’s our livelihood, but it’s killing us,” Lopez said, standing in what used to be her dining room. Now, her house in Beaumont is down to the studs. As Harvey’s floodwaters rose, she tried to save what she could. She piled the dresser drawers on the bed and perched the leather couch up on the coffee table.
But the water didn’t stop until it reached the eaves, and the Lopezes lost everything.
“To come up with real solutions, you have to be honest with yourself about what causes something to happen,” Lopez said. “It’s not just because some storm came; it was bad and unprecedented. It was unprecedented for a reason, so we have to acknowledge that and start working toward being better. And part of that conversation should be climate change.”
Do the right thing
When Wayne Christopher was a boy in Jefferson County, it got so hot he remembers frying eggs on the sidewalk. It has always been hot. And there have always been hurricanes.
But it seems something is different. There is a palpable intensity in the air, in the haze that hangs over the interstate. The region has warmed about 2 degrees in his lifetime, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and annual rainfall has increased by about 7 inches on average. Christopher counts the number of times a beach road he’s driven on all his life has had to be rebuilt because the ocean overtook it.
“The sea keeps moving in — water rising, land disappearing or eroding or whatever you want to call it — it’s happening,” said Christopher, who is 66 and now retired after toiling more than 40 years for the railroad.
He thinks the president he helped put in office should do something: take the threat seriously, research before he talks or tweets, not dismiss established science as a hoax because acknowledging it’s real would mean acknowledging that something must be done.
His wife, who also supported Trump, thinks about the dilemma.
“I can see the pros, I can see the cons,” Polly Christopher said. “But if you were to simplify it to your children, and they say, ‘Well, everybody else is doing it, if I do it what difference is it going to make?’ you would just get on them and say, ‘You’ve got to do the right thing. Right is right, and wrong’s wrong.’”