Bootleg Fire Incident Command via AP
The Bootleg Fire burns at night in southern Oregon, July 17, 2021.
This summer’s stormy weather—severe thunderstorms, tropical storms, and firestorms—has been the new normal for years. Seen-it-all New Yorkers take their chances wading through a cesspool at an entrance to a subway station. Boston usually averages a couple of inches of rain in July; this year, it’s eight inches after only three weeks. The Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon, the country’s largest wildfire so far, has spawned its own weather system capable of producing fire tornadoes, even as Western states confront a cataclysmic drought and heat waves.
Infrastructure building with resilience in mind is a deliberate strategy that has escaped congressional Republicans. States could put the $47 billion that President Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill allots toward resilience to work on fortifying their built environments—if the GOP stopped flapping their lips about bipartisanship and demonstrated a grasp of the concept by passing an infrastructure bill, instead of blocking one. Despite the Pentagon’s labeling of climate change as a national-security threat, despite Himalayan-high mounds of evidence and the deaths attributed to heat waves and other weather events, Republicans, and some Democrats, refuse to legislate in a way that matches the moment.
Captain Obvious headlines, like “Climate Change Is Here,” are symptoms of notorious gaps in human memory. The transformation in American weather patterns has been decades in the making. American interest in the phenomenon has accelerated since the 1980s, when scientists first started to warn that the U.S. was in serious trouble. “It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here,” James Hansen, then a NASA scientist, told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee—in 1988. The New York Times laid it all out right then under the headline “Global Warming Has Begun.”
Today, that key Senate committee is chaired by climate-resilient infrastructure obstructionist Joe Machin of West Virginia.
What current Republican members of Congress don’t seem to recognize is that weather chews up and spits out roads, bridges, transit systems, and everything else in the built environment over the course of 30 to 100 years. In the age of climate change, assets well past their useful lifespan are more likely to break down.
The GOP position on infrastructure spending is climate denial by another name.
Even when the sun is shining, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority must save the subway (sections of which are now 117 years old) from flooding by pumping out 14 million gallons of water every day. But the once-in-a-hundred-years storms are becoming regular events, according to a report published in mid-July by the Regional Plan Association (RPA), a New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metro area think tank.
Water floods subway stations because fast and furious rainfall overwhelms catch basins and drains clogged with debris or not designed for a deluge. Only a few stations were affected by the rainfall of the July 8 storm. But extreme rainfall would flood more than 400 station entrances (20 percent of the entire system).
The city’s sewer system isn’t built to handle those kinds of events. City officials and the MTA need to rethink their stormwater management, which is where federal funding comes in. New York–area climate change adaptation projects rely on federal dollars.
“The negotiations happening at the federal level right now over an infrastructure bill, for example, ought to account for climate change adaptation on a very significant and ambitious scale,” the RPA noted.
New York and the Army Corps of Engineers also continue to explore tactics like constructing a six-mile-long, $119 billion seawall—but again, that’s inconceivable without federal funding.
In California, there is new energy to steer mega-billions to shifting tactics to fight fires, such as moving away from putting every fire out to relying on controlled burning, firebreaks, and home hardening. (Federal firefighters remain integral to fighting conflagrations, and the infrastructure package gives them an annual raise of $20,000.)
After the GOP’s maneuver Wednesday to block the infrastructure bill, the conferees probably have until early next week to come up with the funds to pay for it. (Republicans had rejected $100 billion in projected funding to have come from increased IRS detection of wealthy tax evaders.) Should they fail, the particulars of the infrastructure bill will likely be added to the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, pushing it over $4 trillion, and perhaps including more measures to deal with the climate crisis than Republicans have allowed in the bipartisan bill.
A bill passed under reconciliation rules requires just 51 votes, of course—that is, it requires no Republicans whatsoever. Further infrastructure funding might be unleashed by the INVEST in America surface transportation reauthorization bill passed by the House earlier this month—but that might require Republican support, which no sentient being would count upon.
The GOP position on infrastructure spending is climate denial by another name.
Just as their concern for human life has taken a back seat to their opposition to the president’s promotion of COVID-19 vaccination, Republican members of Congress also are unwilling to act to reduce the impacts from severe weather until their own constituents start suffering and dying. And maybe not even then.
