Climate Change, the GOP and Staten Island
Posted on November 13th, 2012 in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, no affected place has been written about more than Staten Island, which was pounded by the storm. And there were some heartbreaking stories of lost lives there; the old woman who was found drowned in her rocking chair in her living room, with a water mark on the wall above her head; the two children torn from the arms of their mother as she tried to wade through surging flood waters. They were found the next day; they were buried in the same coffin.
Staten Island is still recovering, will take years to recover. And of course there are some things from which you never recover.
But one thing that I haven’t seen mentioned is that Staten Island is by far the most Republican part of New York City. (Why, I’m not sure.) It elects GOP congressmen, supports GOP presidential and senatorial candidates, and is fiercely proud of its independence from state and federal governments—which is to say, the very same institutions on which it is now deeply dependent. (It’s partly because of that stubborn independence that more people on Staten Island died from the storm than anywhere else; they wouldn’t evacuate.)
In other words, Staten Island votes for people who deny the reality of climate change.
Take its current representative, Republican congressman Michael Grimm. Nice, clean-cut looking fellow. But his record on climate change is abysmal. He wants to “be surer of global warming before we destroy jobs.” He voted to bar the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases. He wants more oil drilling and lower gas prices. He opposes any kind of cap-and-trade regulation.
(The New York Times has reported on financial irregularities in Grimm’s background, though he’s only just finished his first term; at a benefit in support of Grimm, Staten Island GOP political powerbroker Guy Molinari happily joked that he was going to burn a copy of the Times, but Grimms’ dog “shit all over the paper,” then urged the wise GOPers on hand not to let these “shit-ass newspapers tell you what to do.” Yeah, it’s like that.)
Now, it’s impossible to say that any one hurricane is “caused” by global warming. But we can say with some certainty that recent irregular weather patterns are a function of climate change, and that those very same irregular patterns threaten Staten Island and probably contributed to the deaths of some of Mr. Grimm’s constituents.
Grimm is hardly the only Republican politican in this position; I’m sure you could find more than a few in Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, New Jersey—shoot, up until a year ago, Chris Christie said he was skeptical that human activity had anything to do with global warming. (He doesn’t think that anymore.)
But if Republican politicians are denying the realities of climate change and voting against measures to ameliorate or protect against the phenomenon, which means that their constituents are less concerned about storms than they should be; and these Republicans are also anti-government spending to protect against the consequences of climate change (hurricanes, flooding, rising sea levels, etc.); and people die as a result—isn’t it about time to start suggesting that they bear some responsibility for the deaths and tragedies that inevitably result?
2 Responses
11/13/2012 3:47 pm
There is a very good article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed this week (probably behind a paywall, sorry) about how the GOP flipped in the ’80s from being pro- to anti-environmental, and pro- to anti-science generally. Part of it was the invigoration, under the influence of new conservative think tanks, of an old anti-regulatory thread in conservative thinking, to which Nixon had for a time found politically expedient not to play. But there was more. changes in Republican strategy were not just the result of a political realignment; they were also a response to a conceptual realignment in the environmental movement. Before the 1960s, land conservation included the possibility of future economic use, while land preservation focused only on shielding specific wilderness locations from development in perpetuity. Both ideals focused on protecting areas of singular natural beauty. This “aesthetic environmentalism”—as some historians call it—did not inspire, or require, a big expansion of federal authority. Nor did it rely much on science. But pollution control did require federal government action—and a lot of science. Indeed, most environmental legislation passed in the early 1970s stipulated that policies be based on the best available science. As a result, scientists became part of the newly expanded regulatory state. This occurred just as the business community and its Republican allies were organizing a counterattack.
There was also the failure of the predictions in Limits to Growth to come true — insofar as they bore on food production and so on. Alas, the predictions about the progress of carbon emissions and pollution have proved to be almost completely correct, but easy to ignore.
Perhaps this history suggests a way forward.
11/13/2012 7:07 pm
Sounds like a fascinating article, Harry.