After officially starting his presidential campaign, Ron DeSantis was asked about climate change. he he dropped the subject: “I have always rejected the politicization of time.”
But we absolutely should politicize time. In practice, environmental policy is unlikely to be a central issue in the 2024 campaign, which will focus mainly on economic and social issues. Still, we are living in an era of accelerating climate-related disasters and the environmental extremism of the Republican Party—it is more hostile to climate action than any other major political party in the developed world—would, in a more rational policy. debate, be the most important electoral issue of all.
First, the environmental background: We’re only halfway through 2023, but we’ve already seen several weather events that would have been shocking not too long ago. Globally, last month was the hottest june on record Unprecedented heat waves have been hitting one region of the world after another: South Asia and the Middle East experienced a life-threatening heat wave in May; europe it is now going through its second catastrophic heat wave in a short period of time; China is experiencing its own higher temperatures on record; and much of the southern United States has experienced dangerous levels of heat for weekswith no end in sight.
Florida residents might be tempted to cool off in the ocean, but ocean temperatures in South Florida have reached near 100 degreesnot far below the temperature of a hot tub.
And while the rest of America hasn’t warmed as much, everyone in the Northeast remembers how smoke from Canadian wildfires led to days of dangerously poor air quality and orange skies.
But extreme weather events have always been with us. Can we prove that climate change caused any particular disaster? Not exactly. But the growing field of “attribution of extreme events” approaches. Climate models say that certain types of extreme weather events are more likely on a warming planet, for example, what used to be a heat wave that we experienced on average only once every few decades becomes an almost annual Event attribution compares the probabilities of experiencing an extreme event given global warming with the probabilities that the same event would have occurred without climate change.
Incidentally, I would argue that the attribution of extreme events gains credibility by the fact that it does not always tell the same story, which sometimes says that climate change was not to blame. For example, preliminary analyzes suggest that climate change played a limited paper in the extreme floods that recently affected northeastern Italy.
This was, however, the exception that proves the rule. In general, attribution analysis shows that global warming made the disasters of recent years much more likely. We still don’t have estimates of the latest series of disasters still underway, but it seems safe to say that this global concatenation of extreme weather events would have been virtually impossible without climate change. And this is almost certainly just the tipping point of the crisis, a small sample of the many disasters to come.
Which brings me back to the “politicization of time”. Concern about the climate crisis should not be a partisan issue. But it is, at least in this country. From last year, only 22 percent of Americans who considered themselves on the political right considered climate change a major threat; the left-right gap here was much larger than in other countries. And only in the US do you see things like Texas Republicans actively trying to undermine their own state’s renewable energy sector.
The remarkable thing about climate denial is that the arguments have not changed at all over the years: climate change is not happening; Okay, it’s happening, but it’s not that bad; moreover, doing anything about it would be an economic disaster.
And none of these arguments are ever abandoned in the face of evidence. The next time there’s a cold spell somewhere in the United States, the usual suspects will once again claim that climate change is a hoax. Spectacular technological progress in renewable energy, which now makes the path to lower emissions look easier than even optimists imagined, has not stopped claims that the costs of climate policy Biden administration will be. unbearable.
So we shouldn’t expect record heat waves around the world to end claims that climate change, even if it’s happening, is no big deal. Nor should we expect Republicans to soften their opposition to climate action, no matter what happens in the world.
That means if the GOP wins control of the White House and Congress next year, it will almost certainly try to dismantle the series of green energy subsidies enacted by the Biden administration that experts believe will lead to one significant reduction in emissions.
Like it or not, then, time is a political issue. And Americans should be aware that it is one of the most important issues they will be voting on next November.
