Why we should politicize the climate – 7/18/2023 – Paul Krugman

After officially starting his presidential campaign, Ron DeSantis was asked about climate change. He brushed aside the subject: “I’ve always rejected the politicization of climate.”

But we must absolutely politicize the climate. In practice, environmental policy is unlikely to be a central theme in the 2024 campaign, which will revolve mainly around economic and social issues. Yet we are living in an age of accelerating climate-related disasters, and the Republican Party’s environmental extremism – it is more hostile to climate action than any other major political party in the advanced world – would, in a more rational political debate, be the main electoral issue.

First, the environmental backdrop: We’re only halfway through 2023, but we’ve already seen a number of weather events that would have been shocking not so long ago. Globally, last month was the hottest June on record. Unprecedented heat waves have hit one region of the world after another: South Asia and the Middle East experienced a life-threatening heat wave in May; Europe is now experiencing its second catastrophic heat wave in a short period of time; China experiences the highest temperatures on record; and much of the southern United States has been suffering from dangerous levels of heat for weeks now, with no end in sight.

Florida locals might be tempted to take a refreshing dip in the sea — but ocean temperatures in South Florida have reached close to 38C, not far below that of a hot tub.

While the rest of the US hasn’t gotten quite as hot, everyone in the Northeast remembers the smoke from the Canadian wildfires, which caused days of dangerously low air quality and orange skies.

But extreme weather events have always existed. Can we prove that climate change caused any particular disaster? Not exactly. But the fledgling field of “extreme event attribution” comes close. Climate models say that certain types of extreme events become more likely on a warming planet – for example, what used to be a heat wave that we experienced on average once every few decades becomes an almost annual occurrence. Event attribution compares the probability that we would experience an extreme event due to global warming with the probability that the same event would have happened without climate change.

Incidentally, I would argue that the attribution of extreme events gains credibility from the fact that it doesn’t 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 role in the extreme flooding that recently hit northeast Italy.

That was, however, the exception that proves the rule. Overall, attribution analysis shows that global warming has made the disasters of recent years much more likely. We still don’t have estimates for the latest series of ongoing disasters, 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 tip of the crisis, a small taste of the many disasters to come.

Which brings me back to “the politicization of the climate”. Worrying about the climate crisis should not be a partisan issue. But it is, at least in this country. Last year, only 22% of Americans who called themselves right-wing in politics considered climate change a major threat; the left-right gap here was much wider than in other countries. And only in the US do you see things like Texas Republicans actively trying to undermine their own state’s booming renewable energy sector.

The remarkable thing about climate denial is that the arguments haven’t changed over the years: climate change isn’t happening; OK, it’s happening, but it’s not such a bad thing; moreover, doing anything about it would be an economic disaster.

And none of these arguments is abandoned in the face of the evidence. The next time there’s a cold spell somewhere in the US, 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 greatly reduced emissions look easier than optimists imagined, has not stopped claims that the costs of the Biden administration’s climate policy will be unsustainable.

So we shouldn’t wait for record-breaking heat waves around the world to do away with claims that climate change, even if it’s happening, isn’t a big deal. Nor should we expect Republicans to reduce their opposition to climate action, no matter what happens in the world.

What this means is that if the GOP gains control of the White House and Congress next year, it will almost certainly try to dismantle the string of green energy subsidies enacted by the Biden administration, which experts believe will lead to a major reduction. in emissions.

So, like it or not, climate 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.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves

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