"HARVEY" IS THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM THAT THE POLITICIANS CAN'T SEE

 

…The blue water areas inside this Houston map were not blue before Harvey hit.

 

 

The trouble in Texas:  Its major cities are highly liberal and Democratic, while all its statewide officials are usually conservative Republicans.

 

OK, here is the truth of what’s going on in South East Texas.  As the highly capable administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Brock Long, put it: “This is a storm the United States has never seen.”

What they are talking about, whether they care to acknowledge it, is called the effect of “global warming”. And yes Mr. President, “It is not a hoax.”  Due to human activity and the over production of greenhouse gasses, the planet is getting warmer, ocean temperatures are rising, the polar ice caps are melting, and the science of climate change says that more extreme-weather events are the consequence.  Yes, events like the results of Hurricane Harvey are going to continue to happen.  Everyone had better get used to it.

 

Author Tom Friedman has a new book where he calls climate change a “black elephant”.  That’s a combination of the unforeseen “black swan” event with enormous consequences of the “elephant in the room” that no one can see.  For those that are confused, a “black swan” event is a major “happening” that was previously considered “highly improbable”.

The Houston floods were not predicted, and because they were the result of global warming, they definitely became the “elephant in the room that no one could see.”

 

There’s really no other way to make sense of what’s happening in Houston. This black elephant is here in America, just as it is also occurring in Africa, the Middle East and Antarctica, whether anyone wants to see it or not.

 

Just acknowledging that fact might help Houston recover, once the rain finally stops.  But it will probably make the political blame game even more futile than it has already become in American politics.

 

 

Mr. Vernon Loeb is the managing editor of the Houston Chronicle.  He has been covering the news in Houston for years and he has been through multiple floods, but nothing like this “once every 800 years kind of flood”.  According to Mr. Loeb, Houston, is a town that is its own worst enemy when it comes to flood control.

A big part of Houston’s freewheeling identity is because of its lack of zoning.  This has produced more than 600 square miles of subdivisions and strip malls which have just become a large, asphalt and concrete prairie.  This vast expanse of what was once a  coastal plain was what they decided was a great place to build a major city. And most Americans are not aware that Houston has become America’s 4^th largest city.

 

Now. in my past life, I spent a lot of time and did a lot of business in Houston.  In addition, at one time a number of my wife’s relatives were long-time employees of Exxon and they lived in Bay Town, Texas.  Bay Town is not far from Houston and is on the Bayou.  Fortunately, all of those relatives have since left from working at the petroleum giant, and they have all moved into the Austin, Texas suburbs.

 

But Houston, like many cities in Texas, is politically polarized as most Texas' major cities are highly liberal and Democratic, while all its statewide elected officials are usually conservative and Republican. So there’s no end to the discord if someone wants to find reasons for all the blaming and finger-pointing.

 

These Texans lived through four straight days of torrential rain that surpassed 50 inches. They know perfectly well that no zoning code, infrastructure improvements or flood control regulations could have dealt with this much water entering a major metropolitan area this quickly.  And yes, it is an unbelievable amount of water.

 

One Houston citizen gave the following description as to what he saw in a walk on Monday morning just blocks from his home:

 

Not wanting to risk my car, I ventured a mile north to Buffalo Bayou, a bucolic urban park remade thanks to $25 million from a leading local philanthropist who once worked for Enron. The park was now gone, its meandering bayou now a roiling, fast-moving river that had engulfed parkways on both sides, flooded a television station and badly damaged much of the city’s theater district.  On a stretch of Kirby Drive in the River Oaks area, (Houston’s toniest neighborhood), the water was chest-deep, lapping up onto large mansion lawns.”

 

I have to tell you, the petroleum industry has made a bunch of millionaires and billionaires, and many of them have giant estates in the many exclusive areas of greater Houston.

 

Not known for exaggeration, the National Weather Service tweeted after the first devastating day of Houston rainfall, which some parts of Houston got more than 25 inches: “All impacts are unknown & beyond anything experienced.”  “It’s catastrophic, unprecedented, epic,” said Patrick Blood, a National Weather Service meteorologist. “Whatever adjective you want to use.”

 

And people like our president and the new head of the EPA, they are instead saying that, “A once every 800 year flood is just because weather is always changing.”   Even the meteorologists have said that the greenhouse gasses have caused the warming oceans, and that warmth has caused these hurricanes and tornados that are more devastating than any other time in history.

 

We know how long it has taken for New Orleans and other Gulf cities to recover from Hurricane Katrina.  Now thousands of Texans are working tirelessly and cooperatively to help the thousands of people trapped by the worst floods in Houston’s history.

 

When this event is finally over, (and that will take many years), Houston should use Harvey’s floods to jump-start its transition from the country’s center for oil and gas, to a world capital of alternative energy.  If this city can turn this devastating tragedy into a moment of reinvention, then a decade from now it may be argued that it was all worth it.

 

Some climatologists have now started to call the current age of this planet as that in which the planet’s conditions have been dramatically altered by man. We have to take responsibility for what we’ve done, and take charge of our future.

 

As for this nation, we Americans need to understand what leading scientists have concluded, even if many of our conservative political leaders don't believe them.  We need to begin today as if we were emerging from the last ice age.  That was when the earth became more comfortable for human life.

 

We obviously can’t stop what has been happening on the Gulf Coast.  But it may not be too late to save the planet if we heed Harvey’s hard lesson in Texas.

 

Texas could be the perfect place to start.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017