The other day I had a post on Marco Rubio’s climate change denial. Yesterday we found out that the West Antarctic ice sheet is collapsing which will result in a significant rise in sea level. For at least the last decade every prediction of sea level rise has been more dire than the previous one. As I noted earlier Miami is already experiencing flooding at high tide. Over at The American Conservative Noah Millman takes his fellow conservatives and the US people in general to task.
I have long maintained that we need to focus at least as much on the adaptation front as we do on the emissions-control front, because a lot of climate change is already “baked in.” And some rise in sea levels and increases in storm surges are particularly certain in the near term. Coastal cities like Miami, New Orleans, New York, etc. are going to have to invest heavily in infrastructure to keep the sea at bay, and the allocation of the cost of adaptation is going to become a significant political issue in the years and decades to come.
For the most part I agree with this but I think there are going to be areas that are going to have to be written off. I really doubt we as a country have the resources to save Miami and New Orleans. Yes, we are at a point of no return indeed we need to start mitigation. This doesn’t mean we should do everything we can to reduce greenhouse gasses. This will be part of the mitigation. Millman again:
It’s less clear how well we’d adapt to wholesale changes in the ecology attendant on changes in CO2 levels. An increase in the acidity of the oceans, for example, could significantly disrupt the marine food chain (what’s left of it after over-fishing). A wide variety of land-based species are also sensitive to changes in the climate; global changes could have an unpredictable global impact on overall biodiversity. The earth, of course, will adapt just fine; the terrestrial climate has seen some pretty huge swings over geological timescales, and the diversity of life has recovered from multiple mass-extinctions. Human beings, though, have only been around for a million or so years (much less depending on how picky you are about what counts as “human”), and large-scale civilization is only a few thousand years old. We have no idea how well that civilization would adapt to widespread ecological disruption.
Millman’s point is well taken, there is nothing conservative about most of the people who call themselves conservative today.\
Or, let me ask the question another way. Why are so many conservatives comfortable with arguing that it’s good for the rest of the world to free-ride on a collective-security regime where the bulk of the costs are born by the United States(to be sure, TAC-style conservatives are much less-likely to do so), or that it’s good for the rest of the world to free-ride on a pharmaceutical research regime where an outsized share of profits are generated on the backs of the American taxpayer, but balk at applying the exact same logic to fighting climate change? What kinds of threats spur us to action and what kinds make us numb with futility? What kinds inspire us to bear any burden and pay any price, and what kinds make us worry about being played for a sucker?