Who’s Gonna Pay, Who’s Gonna Lose?

I’ve blogged about the Marshall Islands facing extinction from rising oceans. All over the world, estuaries, river deltas, low-lying coastal communities and once rich fishing grounds are facing a similar fate. Oxygen-deprived “dead zones” – the result of the unchecked flow of pollutants – are increasing the world over. Marine life is dying as a result, even here in the United States.

The picture (above left) is accompanied by this explanation on the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website: “Hypoxic zones are areas in the ocean where the oxygen concentration is so low that animals can suffocate and die, and as a result are often called ‘dead zones.’ The largest hypoxic zone in the United States, and the second largest hypoxic zone worldwide, forms in the northern Gulf of Mexico adjacent to the Mississippi River. This image from a NOAA animation shows how runoff from farms (green areas) and cities (red areas) drains into the Mississippi. This runoff contains an overabundance of nutrients from fertilizers, wastewater treatment plants, and other sources.” If you are commercial fisherman, you are already paying with your livelihood. But that is pollution directly into our water systems.

Greenhouse gasses have created another form of atmospheric pollution that equally impacts our seas and oceans. Temperature rises have elevated sea temperatures, directly expanding the devastation from tropical storms, where they absorb much more water from that heated water. It’s a double whammy. More intense, slower moving major tropical storms dropping vastly more water on hapless communities, plus accompanying storm surges that push seawater inland… combined with the generally rising seas as oceans absorb massive water released from melting glacial and polar ice.

We know that roughly 30% of Florida is likely to disappear underwater within this century, but for those who live in particularly susceptible coastal communities, they are losing their homes and businesses right now. The Carolinas have been particularly hard hit by flooding of late (picture above right). Thousands of homes and business face permanent destruction as this climatic change accelerates. But these communities do not remotely have the financial resources to contain the damage. If Democrats have been struggling to win over these red state constituents, they have an opening with climate change, the same climate change local Republican elected representatives have been denying or poopooing for years.

“Historic cities and towns along the Southeast U.S. coast have survived wars, hurricanes, disease outbreaks and other calamities, but now that sea levels are creeping up with no sign of stopping, they face a more existential crisis.

“With a total annual budget of $225 million, Charleston, S.C., can’t afford the billions of dollars to save itself without federal help. It’s counting on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to help surround its downtown peninsula with sea walls, harking back to the barriers the city built when it was founded 350 years ago.

“Keeping water off the streets and buildings is even more difficult for smaller towns like Swansboro, N.C., with 3,200 people and a $4-million budget that doesn’t account for climate-related sea rise… The most vulnerable coastal communities sit only a few feet above sea level and are already getting wet at some high tides. Scientists estimate the sea will rise an additional 2 to 4 feet in the next 50 years.

“Municipal leaders say they need billions of state and federal dollars to save block after city block of low-lying homes and businesses. And although even climate-change-denying politicians are beginning to acknowledge the inevitable onslaught, city officials worry that those who control the purse strings won’t see the urgency of a slowly unfolding catastrophe that’s not like a tornado or earthquake.

“Founded in 1783, Swansboro became the center of North Carolina’s steamboat industry. In 1862, it saw Union troops burn down a Confederate fort guarding the nearby Bogue Inlet to the Atlantic Ocean… Across its quaint downtown on the White Oak River, almost every building boasts a city seal with the date it was built. Most are much older than the gray-haired tourists strolling around and can’t forever withstand the kind of flooding they suffered last year, when Hurricane Florence brought a sea surge on top of 30 inches of rain.

“Stunned, the town commissioned a report for the future. It said the water’s edge might end up a block or two inland from the historic waterfront and soberly suggested: “Consider retracting services or strategically abandoning infrastructure in areas that are likely to be risky or dangerous.”

“Local leaders recognize the importance of Swansboro’s charm, but its future is largely out of their hands… ‘We’re going to be very, very dependent on outside funding,’ new Town Manager Chris Seaberg said. ‘We’re trying to preserve the history but [also] trying to accommodate these new issues that weren’t there 100, 200 years ago.’… North Carolina passed a law in 2012 preventing the state from forming coastal polices based on sea rise predictions.

“But Republican control of the Legislature is waning, and local leaders say hurricanes Matthew in 2016, Florence in 2018 and Dorian in 2019 — along with changing attitudes toward climate science— appear to be shifting the state’s outlook. North Carolina created an Office of Recovery and Resiliency this year to plan for floods and other extreme weather events… ‘There will need to be political stressors to get people to understand the importance of climate change,’ said Beaufort, N.C.,  Mayor Rett Newton.” Jeffrey Collins writing for the December 9^th Los Angeles Times. 

Like the Trump administration, which mandated that all government-issued communications eschew mention of man-induced global climate change, many of these coastal red states, like the above-noted 2012 North Carolina statute, have engaged in denying nature’s ravages by law. Nature, however, has refused to back off.

We well may be living in a world of too little, too late. Multiply the above stories by the hundreds, perhaps thousands of US coastal communities that face extinction from coastal sea rise, from storms and rising oceans. It would have been much cheaper to have addressed climate change, which we clearly knew about, decades earlier.

It is too easy for liberals to gloat on the fact that red states are facing the brunt of the coastal flooding catastrophes. But we are Americans. When the going gets tough, I’d like to think we rally as a unified nation to support assaults on our nation, our way of life. It’s time for that rally, very different from the Trump rallies that deny facts and resist the inevitable under a persistent pattern of lies that our President can undo the laws of physics, economics and nature. When any Americans need our help, that is a cry that every American must answer!

            I’m Peter Dekom, and it is time for us again to become “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”