Hurricane stirs GOP to ponder climate
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 he’d attended his whole life.
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 what caused this destruction: that the 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 that could lose the most as the ice caps melt and the seas warm and rise. At the same time, it is economically dependent on oil refineries that stand like cityscapes across the community. Residents seemed to choose between the two last November, abandoning a pattern of voting Democratic in presidential elections to support Donald Trump.
Then came Hurricane Harvey. Now some conservatives here 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 like Harvey? And what should they expect their leaders to do about the problem now?
“It’s a Catch-22 kind of thing. Do you want to build your economy, or do you want to save the world?” said Christopher, who, like most people in Jefferson County, believed that global warming was real before the storm hit. Post-Harvey, he thinks the president’s rejection of the scientific consensus is no longer good enough.
Climate change doesn’t create hurricanes. But most scientists agree that warming and rising seas amplify storms that form naturally, feeding more water and intensity as they plow toward land.
Trump has referred to climate change as a hoax, and his administration has worked aggressively to undo policies designed to mitigate the damage. He announced his intention to pull out of the Paris climate agreement and has dismantled environmental regulations.
In Jefferson County, as the downpour from Hurricane Harvey stretched into its second day, Joe Evans watched from the window of his home 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, and he voted for Trump. But he’s now frustrated with what he describes as the “conservative echo chamber” that dismisses global warming instead of trying to find a way to apply conservative principles to saving both the Earth and the economy.