This is a blog about climate change. Those who believe that climate change is real foresee a world of increasingly extreme weather, rising sea levels, shifting patterns of rainfall, changes in agricultural planting zones, shifting populations of animals and people ... the list goes on and on.
For most of us here the United States, most of the impact of these changes will be dealt with by state and local governments. I know when we got 5 feet of snow last winter our city and state budgets for snow removal were hit hard.
The financial collapse of 2007 and 2008 put many state and local governments into a very deep financial hole. Tax revenues fell while entitlement payments went up. Less tax dollars plus greater expenditures equals massive deficits. Unlike the federal government, which can borrow money to cover its deficits, state and local governments are required to have balanced budgets, which means cutting costs to meet falling revenues.
The bottom line is that state and local governments are barely able to keep up with routine requirements. If you look at natural disasters like tornadoes or earthquakes or hurricanes, you see two things. They are enormously expensive and take years even decades to recover from. What happens when something like climate change comes along?
Who will design and build levees along the East and West coasts to protect our major cities from rising sea levels? Who will upgrade the power grid and the cooling systems to deal with longer and more intense heat waves? Who will renegotiate the water rights agreements among states increasingly squeezed by declining annual rainfall levels. Who will cope with new waves of climate refugees?
All these things are coming at us with the inevitability of the next high tide. Will we do what it takes today to get ready? Not a chance. The cupboards are bare in most states, and what little there is must be used for things that are coming at administrators right now. Local, state and federal elected officials are not going to worry about what might happen 20, 30 or 50 years from now when the next election is just months away.
And so we continue with business as usual, going from day to day, missed opportunity to missed opportunity, our negligence and denial allowing today's ounce of prevention to become tomorrow's pound of cure.
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