There is a certain logic to EPA chief Scott Pruitt saying that now is not a good time to talk about global warming, what with the deaths and the hundreds of billions of dollars of damage from back-to-back ferocious hurricanes.
Pruitt’s logic is certainly bent.
You haft to be daft or a denier to look at the amazing size and power of hurricanes Harvey and Irma and not wonder if human-induced global warming affected the outcome.
It doesn’t matter. What matters is that the science is indisputable that human activities, mostly from our use of fossil fuels, is undoubtedly responsible for global warming and the resulting change in the Earth’s climate. Only the ignorant and the corrupt deny that.
What makes this a perfect time to talk about it is that it’s irresistible not to. This is our world’s future, and so much more. More flooding. Harsher droughts. Bigger storms. Rising seas. And there will be endless chain reactions to these cataclysmic disruptions.
It’s embarrassing enough that President Donald Trump has installed a unrepentant climate-denier to run one of the most critical American agencies needed to address global warming. But that this faker would try and dismiss what may very well have caused lost lives and unparalleled amounts of destroyed property is despicable.
Now, while the world is watching Trump and his band of denying fools squirm, is the perfect time to force them into action.
And just because Colorado doesn’t have a coastline to worry about or hurricanes to fear, there’s plenty to fret about.
The state’s premier economic engine is in danger here: tourism.
About 80 million tourists visit Colorado each year, bringing with them about $20 billion a year and leaving it behind. It’s Colorado’s life-blood that directly provides for more than 110,000 jobs, officials estimate.
Climate problems are real and serious threats to Colorado’s economic foundation.
Part of Colorado’s economic link to climate change is obvious: skiing. No snow or shortened seasons mean real dollars lost — billions of them. Consecutive years of snow droughts will move the industry to other states or Canada. Less obvious, however, is the connection between climate change and the loss of the state’s most valuable tourist resource year-round: its mountains. Global warming and beetle kill are causing substantial visible and ecological damage to massive swaths of Colorado forest. And the changing climate is certain to bring more and larger forest fires to the state, recent experts reports.
Colorado has seen what “a state on fire” in the media can do to its tourism business. Repeated years like that will be a spiraling death knell.
Abandoning the only global effort able to address the grave problem of climate change only guarantees Colorado will have to find ways to address an environmental problem that risks not just state economics, but our lives as well.
Congress must find a way to join world governments in combating the effects of global climate change — if Trump tries to stop it.
Massive hurricanes are only the most instantly dramatic effects of climate change. It’s the quiet, insidious changes that will have the worst impact on the largest number of people.
There couldn’t be a better time than now to persuade Americans to demand that the United States rejoin global efforts to slow and reverse world-wide catastrophes that will make these two hurricanes pale in comparison.
Push aside deniers like Pruitt and those under Trump’s thumb. Shine a light on what America will be like in just a few years as the impact of global warming increases. Let’s talk about it now.