Two weeks before the water started rising in Houston, President Donald Trump made the sort of shortsighted decision that is all too common in cities that flood in the age of climate change.
As part of the president’s alleged plan to jump-start a massive infrastructure building boom in the U.S. — think highways, bridges, trains, dams, airports — Trump signed by President Barack Obama that had a simple goal:
When building such projects, particularly federal ones, officials were directed to take climate change into consideration.
Already, scientists are pointing to climate change as a culprit to explain the expected record that might fall in Texas as a result of Hurricane Harvey, and the rising tide of water that is swamping and isolating America’s fourth-most-populous city.
People are also reading…
There will be some who will say now is not the time.
Now is a time for humanitarian rescue. Now is a time for prayer.
But as I write from 777 miles away in ºüÀêÊÓƵ — where many people are still recovering from two major flood events in the past 16 months — the president himself is tweeting about policy.
Sure, it’s the wrong policy, his ever-changing plan for a wall between America’s southern border and Mexico, and even a bit about the tax reform speech he plans to give in Springfield, Mo., on Wednesday.
Trump won’t tweet about climate change because he believes — or says he believes, anyway — that it’s a Chinese conspiracy.
So as people drown and die in Houston and Galveston and Corpus Christi, I’ll write about climate change and America’s love affair with bad flooding policy, because if not now, when?
Perhaps Harvey, hitting hard in the conservative Gulf Coast of Texas, in the nation’s center of the oil business — which has funded climate change denial to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in the past decade — will turn the tide.
In 2011, as a wall of water slowly made its way to ºüÀêÊÓƵ during one of the last massive Missouri River flood events, I sat in a downtown Army Corps of Engineers office with one of the engineers whose job it is to predict what is going to happen to the river and when. When it comes to getting people interested in making policy changes regarding flood policies, the engineer told me, timing is everything.
“From my perspective, you’ve got a two- to four-year window,†Matt Hunn said. “People forget.â€
In two to four years, Houston will still be recovering from Hurricane Harvey.
The president — or our next one — will still be talking about the need to improve America’s infrastructure.
ºüÀêÊÓƵ will still be talking about building in flood plains, whether it’s a city project on the banks of the Mississippi River, or a massive entertainment complex in the levy-protected flood plains of the Chesterfield Valley or Maryland Heights, or even still, the current debate over in federally protected Creve Coeur Lake Memorial Park, by raising land so it is allegedly out of the 100-year flood plain.
We will throw out those phrases — 100-year-flood and 500-year-flood — as though in the era of climate change they still have meaning.
And we will spend billions upon billions of tax dollars repeating the same old mistakes because we continue to believe the fallacy that it’s easier and cheaper to rebuild in the flood plain than it is to plan for — and around — the next flood.
There is another way, of course.
Responding to massive flooding and the threat of climate change in the 1990s, leaders in the Netherlands, where much of the country is under sea level, have been that would look foreign in ºüÀêÊÓƵ or Houston. They don’t build more levees, they give the water room to roam. They don’t curse climate change, they embrace it.
In 2013, a group of Dutch scientists came to ºüÀêÊÓƵ to meet with colleagues at Washington University to discuss a path forward for the city to better deal with rising flood dangers in the era of climate change.
The ideas could have caused a region to think differently about how it approaches development. Instead, ºüÀêÊÓƵ breathed a collective sigh and put another study on the shelf.
When the water recedes, the debate will rise again in Houston.
It will begin at the same time Congress has an impending September deadline to renew the nation’s National Flood Insurance Program, which is currently about $25 billion in debt.
Failing to plan for floods in the age of climate change, you see, is really expensive.
It’s also deadly. That’s the story of the day in Houston.
Today, we mourn the dead.
Tomorrow, let’s honor their memories by pulling our nation’s collective heads out of the murky and dangerous waters of climate-change denial.
With Mexico being one of the highest crime Nations in the world, we must have THE WALL. Mexico will pay for it through reimbursement/other.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
I will also be going to a wonderful state, Missouri, that I won by a lot in '16. Dem C.M. is opposed to big tax cuts. Republican will win S!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)