"The 9/11 of Global Warming"
Was Hurricane Katrina the "9/11 of global warming," as one researcher quoted in the Washington Post describes it? Another adds that the 250,000 Katrina victims who won't be returning to their homes are "the world's first climate refugees."
This debate about the connection between hurricanes and global warming is far from over, of course. But I do think that seeing global warming as a kind of war is, though a limited analogy, a provocative one. I don't know how many people died during and because of Hurricane Katrina, but surely the number must be comparable to the number of people who died on September 11th. And yet, consider the comparative reactions. 9/11 led to a mobilized nation in which everything is secondary to the "global war on terror." Katrina led to the resignation of one hapless federal bureaucrat.
Why the difference? Because while 9/11 was the work of "evildoers," the president and vice-president see Katrina as an act of God, toward which we contributed nothing and about which we can do nothing.
But what if they're wrong about that? What if we're causing global warming, and global warming really is contributing to more powerful hurricanes?
Imagine if the Bush administration put all the resources into fighting global warming that it has put into, say, the war in Iraq. Is there anyone who can doubt that the planet would be better off as a result?
And, in fact, fighting global warming—cutting down on our energy consumption, reducing oil imports, developing renewable energy sources, working with other nations on a common problem—would do much more to promote stability in the Middle East than our intervention in Iraq has accomplished....
