Lynne Sladky/AP Photo
An American flag and fresh flowers rest on a barricade just south of the collapsed Champlain Towers South condominium building, July 6, 2021, in Surfside, Florida.
You would think that the collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, combined with other recent climate-related disasters, such as the severe drought in the Southwest and record-breaking heat in the Northwest, would produce a national reckoning. Climate deniers would start to have second thoughts; and foes of public management, public regulation, and public investment would start appreciating that only government—and relatively uncorrupt government—can begin to limit the damage and move to a corrective course.
You would think so. But this is the era of cognitive dissonance and denial. (These catastrophes are acts of God, maybe even God’s retribution for abortion and sodomy!)
Instead of an overdue reckoning, we are likely to get a politics of special pleading for government help, without the needed changes in regulatory policy going forward, and without a recognition of the prime role of climate in these several, deepening catastrophes.
Looking backwards, Florida needed much tougher building codes and inspections, while the nation needed much tougher carbon limits to prevent the sea level rise that will threaten even well-constructed seaside condos. It needs these measures even more urgently going forward.
But these measures will be costly to developers and condo owners. And so we can expect demands for the handouts without the reforms.
Southwest water politics, similarly, will pit agribusiness against ordinary citizens who are already facing rationing of drinking water. The fact is that many of these burgeoning Sun Belt cities located in deserts should have had growth limits long ago. But try pitching that idea in irrigated boomtowns in swing states like Nevada and Arizona.
This is a special dilemma for Biden and the Democrats. When food prices go up because of extended droughts in irrigated farmlands, Biden will be blamed. When massive government help is needed to prevent the collapse of the next thousand condos, and Democrats try to attach conditions such as better building standards, inspections, and limits on what can be built on unstable landfills, Biden will be blamed.
Ironically, too, all this public investment is of course infrastructure—the very infrastructure outlays that Republicans want to shrink. (Infrastructure as pork barrel and emergency relief and reward for irresponsibility is always popular; infrastructure as responsible stewardship, far less so.)
Even as the safe and familiar world collapses around us, denial is an easier politics than a painful reckoning with reality. Biden should be rewarded politically for doing the right thing. But in this bizarre era, when nearly half of the electorate lives in a fantasy world, that will be an even heavier lift than getting the needed policies enacted.
