Trump Says Climate Change Is A Hoax. But That's Partly What Got Him So Obsessed With Greenland

Donald Trump's desire to seize Greenland is likely less
about national security and more about mining the 
island's riches, and climate change. 

If I had a penny for every time Donald Trump said climate change is a hoax, I'd be as rich as he claims to be. 

And yet. Trump's latest foolishness with Greenland has been brought about in large part by the very climate change he denies. 

Let's set the scene: 

As you may have heard, Trump is insisting that the U,S. annex Greenland. He keeps yakking about "national security," that Russia or China will arrive in take over Greenland in about an hour unless the U.S. does so first.

In reality, it probably isn't so much about security. Existing security agreements, and NATO, preclude Russia and China from causing too much trouble in Greenland.

Remember, the basis of NATO is if one member is attacked, the whole organization is attacked. So in a world without Trump, if somebody invaded Greenland,  U.S. and NATO forces would defend the Arctic island. 

I don't believe China or Russia would take such a big risk. I've seen a lot of analysis out there that says the same thing. 

Of course, if the U.S. attacked Greenland, that would be a war against Denmark. As PBS notes, NATO has no obvious way of dealing with open conflict among its members. 

That's why an American invasion or non-consensual takeover of Greenland would probably end NATO.

Here's why Trump might want to see NATO go the way of the dinosaurs: 

Trump and his oligarch cronies really want to exploit the natural resources up there in Greenland, including diamonds, lithium and copper.  These minerals are super valuable nowadays because we need them to build things like batteries and smart phones.

I also surmise that Trump sees NATO as an obstacle to obtaining those riches. He's probably looking for a convenient way to put NATO into the garbage dumpster of history.

Or something like that. 

Trump doesn't even have to take over Greenland for "national security." 

A 1951 treaty with Denmark gives the U.S. military carte blanche to do pretty much whatever we want in Greenland's territory. We could send thousands of troops up there tomorrow if we need to. So, as futurism.com tells us, there's no national security need for us to take over Greenland. 

Which means "national security" is just a fig leaf for Trump and his gang to make more money off his presidency. It's all transactional. 

IT'S CLIMATE

The Washington Post had a nice analysis of the situation in Sunday's editions. This one paragraph helps crystalize the situation. And tells us why climate change matters in all of this.  

"The prospect of the United States using military force against the NATO ally, as Trump has floated, could end the decades-old defense pact. His bid for the territory is one of the most concrete examples of how climate change is influencing geopolitics. As the northernmost parts of our planet continue to warm, the effects could change the ways the international community operates."

 The Arctic is warming at four times the rate of the rest of the world. The extent of Arctic sea ice is declining. That, in turn is exposing some potential tantalizing sea routes on top of the planet. 

 Here's how WaPo lays out the stakes:

"'The freeing of the Arctic from sea ice, at least seasonally, will create an entirely new theater for economic and security competition,' said Joseph Majkut, director of the energy security and climate change program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 'And while we've know that is going to be the case for some time, it seems we're at an inflection point.'"

A study in the journal Nature said that if the planet warms by a total of 2 degrees Celsius over the average in the late 19th century, the open water period in the Arctic would increase to 63 days each summer.  If that warming goes above 3,5 degrees above the Victorian Age climate, the Arctic could be open for shipping at least three months out of the year.

Of course we don't know how long it will take to get that warm, so all bets are off. 

There's another issue related to the climate change that Trump says is a hoax. As Greenland's vast ice cap inexorably melts, the diamonds, lithium and copper Trump and his billionaire buddies covet become more accessible.  

"His fixation on Greenland is an admission that climate change is real," John Conger, and advisor to the Center or Climate and Security said in the New York Times, as futurism.com points out. 

Trump probably also wants Greenland so he can change the rules up there. 

The New York Times notes that Greenland has banned uranium mining. Uranium is often found right alongside rare earth minerals like lithium. The ban is already facing legal challenges, and if Trump takes over Greenland, that no uranium rule would be gone in a flash.

It turns out Trump thinks climate change is real. The "hoax" language he uses for our warming world is just one of many ploys to gin up his cup. 

 

Zillow Drops Climate Change Information From Listings;

Zillow has dropped climate change information from its
real estate listings. Reportedly at least in part due to
resistance from the real estate industry

More than a year ago, Zillow, the big online real estate marketplace, began providing climate change risks in their listings.

They were responding to a willing audience, which for the most part really wanted that information to judge the risks of buying a home in a particular area. Especially now that climate change is upping the risk of disasters. 

A 2023 survey conducted by Zillow indicated 80% of buyers now consider climate risks when shopping for a home. 

But, as always, the moneyed class getting more money is far, far more important than those lowly home buyers. The climate change info is no longer on Zillow listings. 

According to realestatenews.com:

"Home search leader Zillow has changed the way that it shares climate risk information -directing visitors to the website of data partner First Street rather than surfacing it on Zillow home details page.

'This update ensures consumers continue to have access to important information to help them consider factors such as insurance, repair costs and long-term homeownership planning, and reflects our long-standing commitment to empowering consumers with transparent information,' a Zillow spokesperson shared with Real Estate News over email when asked about the move."

Well, at least you can get the information.You have to really dig for it, but I suppose it's there. 

The real estate industry appears to have helped kill Zillow's climate information sharing. As The Guardian explains it:

"....Zillow has deleted this climate index in the wake of complaints from real estate agents and some homeowners that the rankings appeared arbitrary, could not be challenged and harmed house sales. The complaints included those from the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, which oversees a database of property that Zillow relies upon."

It seems like the climate change information on Zillow fell victim in part to profit margins. People who want to sell homes, the real estate industry and insurers. There's a lack of affordable housing. There's been climate-driven disasters that have destroyed thousands of homes. 

"All of that adds pressure to close sales however possible....Climate risk data didn't suddenly become inconvenient. It became harder to ignore in a stressed market," said Matthew Ely, founder an chief executive of First Street, as Mother Jones reports.

First Street officials,  the Zillow data partner that compiled the climate risk information, said removing the information from Zillow website will leave many buyers"flying blind" at a time when the effects of extreme weather are messing with the real estate market in the U.S, Eby said. 

"The risk doesn't top away; it just moves from a pre-purchase decision into post-purchase liability....Families discover after a flood that they should have purchased flood insurance, or discover after the sale that wildfire insurance is unaffordable or unavailable in their area."

Of course the First Street climate risk data that was until recently on Zillow probably had some margin of error. The science of tagging individual properties with exact levels of climate risk might not be completely there yet. 

If these assessments are wrong, they could perversely make people doubt climate change, as the Mother Jones article notes. 

Meanwhile, other real estate sites are still showing climate data in their home listings. An example is Redfin, which said in a statement that they "will continue to provide the best-possible estimates of the risks of fires, floods and storms."  

Gardeners Supply Goes Down The Tubes, In A Sad American Way

A "Viking funeral" of memorabilia done by former
employees of the late, great Gardener's Supply. 

There's a black charred little spot on my property today. 

That's where on Sunday, myself and former coworkers and current friends burned some memorabilia from a now former Vermont company called Gardener's Supply.  I'll tell you why, but first some disclaimers.  

I'll admit this post is a little off topic from what you're used to here, but it's important.  It's about how corporate American ruins a good thing, time after time.

 Create monopolies, concentrate wealth to just a few people and corporations. Those few win, and everybody else loses.  

This is a relatively small story that echoes the biggest ones. And it's personal. 

After 12 years at Gardener's Supply, I and nearly 60 people were let go. A series of poor management decisions led to a bankruptcy, which led to a takeover by an outfit called Gardens Alive!

And yes, they have that obnoxious exclamation point in their name. 

Gardens Alive (screw the exclamation point) has been gobbling up smaller garden entities like Breck's Gurney Seeds, Henry Field's Michigan Bulb, Spring Hill Nursery and Zalenka Farms.

It's the familiar tale of one company vacuuming as many competitors as they can. It happens all the time now.  You get these little monopolies that give the consumer fewer choices, worse customer service, and often higher prices. You can do that if you wipe out the competition. 

The buyups, either by Gardens Alive or any other big firm which buys up, I don't know, all the widget factories in the world, are all done with  cold efficiency.  

That type of thing affects all of us.  If you look at the bigger picture, the concentration of business, money, our very culture into the hands of a few billionaires and millionaires and entities leaves us all with fewer choices, less freedom. It increases the income inequality that also leads to less stability in the world, less fairness, and plenty of unrest.

Yes, I'm sounding a bit like Bernie Sanders, who's always sounding off on the growing gap between the few haves and the very many have nots, but the dude has a point. 

This isn't a pity party for me. I'll be fine. I'll figure it out. I hope everyone else I worked with does.  

 GARDENER'S SUPPLY

 I landed at Gardener's Supplyin 2013, after the first big corporate F.U. I've experienced in my lifetime. 

The once great Burlington Free Press the big local paper in Vermont, was desiccated over time to basically nothing by the corporate overlords at Gannett, which owned the paper and hundreds of others. Gannet bled these local news sources dry, leaving "news deserts" across the nation and leaving the public more open all kinds of misinformation from dubious sources. All in the name of making their top top-tier shareholders happy.

The layoffs kept coming, and in August of 2013, I was unceremoniously dumped by Gannett. It was just as well. The work environment had become toxic. As I drove away from that layoff, Billy Joel's "Say Goodbye To Hollywood" came on the radio. It fit.

Stung by the bad experience, and unlike many of my great colleagues and friends from the Free Press, I largely left journalism. I kept my writing brain going by writing this blog and doing a few side projects, but that's it.

Instead, I found refuge at Gardeners Supply. The atmosphere at the employee-owned company was the opposite of toxic. Sure, you had to work hard. Sure, there were bad days. But many good ones, too. everybody was in it together. You made friends. You grew. The lack of toxicity was refreshing to say the least. 

The work slogan was People, planet profits. Not just profits. All three.

Gardener's Supply was never spectacularly profitable, as far as I could tell, but it did OK. I think. Until 2020, when things really started to go off the rails.

The biggest of all the big bad conglomerates - Amazon - was hitting us hard. We tried to play with them, selling on their marketplace. I'm not sure how that went. 

The pandemic in 2020 created a gardening boom, and a bust that we didn't handle all that well. After every boom comes a bust. The decision makers at Gardener's didn't plan that out well, at least I think i my 20/20 hind sight. 

We made a series of bad decisions on systems upgrades, sales philosophy and other issues. Chapter 11 became inevitable, and it hit this year.

The process and Gardens Alive moved in for the kill with that cold efficiency I've already mentioned. The stock we employees accumulated as employee-owners evaporated. 

The announcement that we were being laid off came in a brief Zoom meeting. No severance. No support, Just a message that essentially told us, "get lost, suckers."

This after we were told after the takeover, it would be business as usual. So they gave us false assurances during a time we could have been preparing for our next chapters, instead of getting hoodwinked.

Human beings are just part of the machinery. Why run an "expensive" older model when you get get slick plastic version to do the work over in India or somewhere? I get it, businesses are not charities. The workforce has to grow or shrink with what the current conditions allow. But this whole thing smells bad.

Gardens Alive is getting rid of a crew that bent over backwards for customer service while at the same time not giving away the store. We are all gardeners, so we know how to solve customer's problems and steer people to the products that will actually work

I imagine that according to some algorithm, that's not as profitable as having some unfortunate person at a call center in India try to help a customer battle some strange bug called aphids in a mysterious land called Iowa.

So, the bunch of us laid off from Gardeners gathered in my backyard on an atrociously hot Vermont Sunday to hug each other, and have our cathartic Viking funeral at a small backyard campfire I set.

Productivity sheets that measured how good we were with customers, into the fire. Instructions on how to manage the latest, non-working ordering system? Into the flames. Name tags, old catalogs, congratulations on your tenth anniversary paperwork, various instruction manuals on how to manage creaky ordering systems. All up in flames.

There's still some decent local, honorable businesses around. Cherish them, the ones that treat you honestly, are part of the community they serve, that are invested in both their own profits and you, the customer..

 Come to think of it, this column is a bit on point for this here blog thingy after all. The stuff I've reported on, the cutbacks at the National Weather Service and FEMA, the concerted effort by Trump and his minions to regard climate change as a hoax, is all about greed, protecting the big wigs from any change in circumstances that can threaten their billions.

So, I'm deciding what to do. If anyone wants to hire an old Vermont weather geek, or has side gigs for me, let me know. (Hey, I'm not above a little self-promotion here).

If anyone does want to pay me to do their gardens, write their copy, do an article, whatever, I promise you one thing: I'm not going to sell out to some billionaire who doesn't care about you.

Like my friends from Gardener's Supply, I actually care about where I live.

Latest Vermont Flood: Details Emerge As Questions Grow About FEMA

Map of rainfall yesterday in Vermont, from data 
collected by the National Weather Service in 
South Burlington. Heavy rains were confined
to parts of the Northeast Kingdom, and a 
couple spotty areas in central Vermont. 

For the third year in a row, some Vermonters are picking up the pieces today after yet another flash flood. 

The tiny town of Northeast Kingdom town of Sutton, population of less than 1,000, appears to be the hardest hit. The good news is that so far, I haven't heard of any serious injuries with this latest flood. 

But the damage was also scattered around the state. A large section of the Middlebury Union High School roof was torn off by intense thunderstorm winds on Thursday. The roof damage allowed some of torrential rains with the storm pour into the boy's locker room, cafeteria and auditorium. 

Officials at the school said the interior damage was thankfully not severe. 

Flood damage was still being tallied in West Burke, East Haven and other Northeast Kingdom towns, along with some spots in Addison County.  But Sutton took the brunt of it. Video from Live Storms Media showed water racing across a road near Sutton, forming a waterfall on one side where the road had washed away. 

 Vermont Public reports that the swift water rescue in Sutton involved a couple and their dog, who were pulled off their roof by the rescue group during the flood. 

Rainfall was highly variable and highly localized. Only a few places received torrents of rain. Many  Vermont towns received little or no rain yesterday. 

The disparity was evident even within the counties hit hardest. West Burke in Caledonia County reported 5.12 inches of rain. But in the opposite end of the county, Wells River and Barton saw only 0.04 inches.  

This is a map of rainfall in the July, 2023 flood. As you
can see here, that one affected pretty much the whole
state, not just a few areas. Pink and purple areas had
at least five inches of rain. Compared to yesterday,
July 23 was many times worse. 

Slow moving thunderstorms parking over certain towns were to blame. Disconcertingly, that same issue of stalled downpours has arisen today. But the storms are very few and far between, and smaller in size than yesterday's.   

If any new flash flooding develops late this afternoon or this evening, it will be highly isolated. However, we're still looking at low but not zero chances of isolated flash flooding Saturday, Sunday and Monday. 

That the chances of new flooding are - fingers crossed - low is good news, as some towns already have a ton of damage. 

Further details from Vermont Public:

"Roughly 20 homes in the Caledonia County town remained cut off from road access as of Friday morning, according to the town fire chief. Town officials said they've made contact with most of these homeowners, but expect it will take several days to make these roads passable.

The storm overwhelmed many of Sutton's roads, culverts and ditches and damaged several homes along Calendar Brook Road. 

According to initial estimates, repairs to the town infrastructure could cost upward of a million dollars - after Sutton has already spent millions on recovery from previous floods."

I don't think anybody knows where Sutton - and other affected towns in the Northeast Kingdom will get the money to fix damage from the latest calamity. 

This is especially true with the Federal Emergency Management Agency's future in doubt. 

FEMA AND VERMONT

We won't know for awhile yet whether the damage in Vermont would qualify for federal assistance even under the "old rules" for federal assistance that were in effect before Donald Trump took office in January. 

Even if Vermont qualifies for help under those old rules, who knows whether we'll receive it? Everything Trumpian is subject to his whims, and information and plans shift like the breeze.

Trump has said he wants to abolish FEMA. Or change it. Or shift all the responsibility to the states. 

Today, as Trump headed to Texas to survey damage from a deadly Fourth of July flood that was many, many orders of magnitude worse than what Vermont saw, his administration's previous vows to abolish FEMA are wavering. 

Per today's Washington Post:

"A senior White House official told the Washington Post that no official action is being taken to wind down FEMA, and that changes in the agency will probably amount to a 'rebranding' that will emphasize state leaders' roles in disaster response."

In other words, nobody has a clue what will happen. 

Which is the question everybody including Vermonters who would deal with disasters are asking. .  

Per Vermont Public: 

"State and national experts say only one thing is clear as of now: The new federal administration wants states to assume a bigger role in disaster response and recovery. The ambiguity over what that looks like, according to Eric Forand, director of Vermont Emergency Management, has complicated the business of disaster preparedness for state officials trying to gird for the next catastrophe."

Given Vermont's track record, this is really an important question.

Vermont Public had an eye-opening stat: 

"Vermont, which has experienced 25 federal disaster declarations since 2011, has been particularly reliant on federal aid. According to a recent analysis, the state has received more federal disaster assistance per capita over the past 14 years than any states but Louisiana, Hawaii, and New York."

There's no reason to think that trend will stop. Vermont is a flood-prone state. Climate change will continue to intensify storms, so more big floods are inevitable. We've already had two damaging flash floods this year, and we're only now getting into the peak of what you might call peak flash flood season.

Those humid July and August dog days can really produce those downpours. More so with climate change. 

 The theoretical solution for this entire mess is for the state, and disaster-prone towns to build up a rainy day fun to deal with inevitable future disasters. 

Good luck with that. The floods of 2023 and 2024 cost several individual towns more money than their entire annual budget. I'm pretty sure local taxpayers can't hand over twice the amount or more they've been paying already. 

We're lucky yesterday wasn't as bad as it could have been.

But still, we're screwed. 

  

Red States Learning How Callous Trump Can Be In Disasters

Wreckage left behind by one of the tornadoes that 
hit Arkansas in March. The Trump administration 
has turned down disaster assistance that 
would have helped with the tornado destruction. 

 The state of Arkansas has had a rough spring, beset by tornadoes, intense floods and severe weather. 

As is customary in these situations, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee has asked the federal government for help. For good reason. 

As Huffington Post reports:

"Last month, 14 tornadoes struck Arkansas over the course of two days, killing three people and leaving 32 more injured. The deadly outbreak damaged or destroyed 500 homes, cars and businesses, leaving behind more than $8.8 million in storm damage."

Customarily, U.S presidents respond to request like Huckabee's to issue a disaster declaration and that starts the process in which the Federal Emergency Management Agency to begin organizing funds to help the state with its emergency.

In this case it didn't happen. As HuffPost reports:

"But President Donald Trump said no. In a letter from April 11, the federal government said it had 'determined that the damage from this event was not of such severity and magnitude as to be beyond the capabilities of the state, affected local governments, and voluntary agencies."

To be fair, as bad as the March storm was in Arkansas, it's possible it might not have risen to the level of  a declared disaster in any administration. It's honestly kind of borderline. For instance, half of the destroyed homes were insured, so that might have been a mitigating factor. 

Still, Trump has talked about punishing blue states where voters aren't all that enthusiastic about him. Arkansas is a deep red state, and Gov. Huckabee is Trump's former press secretary, so maybe some Arkansas thought they would get the federal aid. 

The Arkansas Congressional delegation is asking Trump to reconsider the denial of aid, but we'll see where that goes.

The Arkansas tornado aid denial might be the beginning of a harsh new policy from FEMA.

Trump has long said he thinks states should pretty much handle their own disasters, though in many cases they don't have the resources to do that. That shift in tone is starting to make its way into official policy. 

As CNN reports:

"A memo from acting FEMA administrator Cameron Hamilton, a Trump appointee, obtained by CNN, outlines a long list of recommendations for Trump to follow that could drastically reduce the number of emergency declarations the president approves and the amount of federal assistance doled out to cities and states hit by natural disasters."

CNN says the proposal dramatically raised the threshold for states to quality for public assistance, basically quadrupling the amount of damage a community must suffer to receive federal aid. 

The proposal also reduces the share of recovery costs the federal government will pay, limit the types of facilities eligible for assistance and denying all major disaster declarations for snowstorms. 

To us Vermonters, a snowstorm doesn't sound all that expensive, and they often do more good than harm, given our winter sports industry. 

But in other states, especially those in the South and with a lot of urban areas, large snowstorms can be extremely expensive and disruptive.  

Like so much in the Trump administration, it's next to impossible to figure out if they will follow through with these recommendations, abandon them or make them even worse. It'll change every day, I'm sure. 

Moving quickly on this will be particularly harmful to states, Michael Coen, a former FEMA chief of staff under the Obama and Biden administrations told CNN. "If they were given notice and they could work with their state legislatures, they could prepare and budget to be able to handle the risks they know they have. But doing this without giving states any advance notice would leave them in dire straights."

Even with advance notice, I'm not sure how states would cope.  Here in Vermont, we're already dealing with cutbacks in federal funding that are messing up the state budget.  Property taxes are sky high and getting worse, so increased state budgets would make that crisis worse. We have an aging population in Vermont, which also reduces tax revenue as the relative number of wage earners shrinks. 

If we get hit by another massive flood like we did in 2023 and 2024, and we're screwed.  

It's not just Vermont, of course. Every state that faces a disaster will have so much  more trouble recovering because of Trump.  

Disasters are bad enough. It'll be even worse if the federal government compounds those calamities. 

Study: Cost Of Climate Change To Be Much More Expensive Than Mitigating Temperature Rise

Climate change is becoming a big drag on the global
economy and a new study suggests that will keep
getting worse in the coming decades.

 It'll cost six times more money to deal with the cost of unmitigated climate change between now and 2050 than it would to keep global temperatures from reaching more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. 

Doing nothing to blunt climate change would cost roughly $38 trillion per year by 2049, concluded a study published in the journal Nature.  

As Artstechnica.com reports:

"They find that we're already committed to warming that will see the growth of the global economy undercuts by 20 percent. That places the cost of even a limited period of climate change at roughly six times the estimated price of putting the world on a path to limit the warming to 2 degrees C."

A common talking point among those who are fighting efforts to limit climate is that those efforts are too expensive and a drag on the global economy.  The Nature study completely contradicts that position. 

Nations worldwide would feel the economic effects of climate change, whether it be poor developing nations and others considered to be at the top of the economic heap, like the United States and Germany. 

It's not that economies will stop growing in the coming decades due to climate change. It's just they will grow more slowly than they would have without it.

You'd think that extreme weather brought on by climate change, such as floods, powerful storms or intense hurricanes would create the brunt of the coming economic chaos. Those events would indeed have an effect the researchers concluded.

However, just the overall increase in heat distributed throughout much of the world would have the biggest effect. The added heat on balance would harm crops and hinder labor production. (Which, as an aside, makes efforts by Florida and Texas to block municipalities in those states to provide rest and water breaks for outdoor workers look especially stupid).

Southern parts of North America and Europe take an economic hit from climate change while northern reaches benefit. The minority of nations that might actually benefit a bit from global warming include Canada,  Russia, Norway, Finland and Sweden, according to the study. 

The pattern repeats in the United States. Southern states take a bigger monetary hit from climate change compared to those closer to the Canadian border, 

Much of the economic harm through the middle of this century is already locked in due to climate change. But emissions reductions done now could go a long way toward blunting economic hard after 2050 from climate change is already locked.

You can read the Nature study for yourself at this hyperlink. 

 

FEMA Funding Crisis Could Slow Vermont Flood Relief

Road crews begin flood repairs to Route 15 around the 
Wrong Way Bridge in Cambridge, Vermont on July 12.
Immediate funding from FEMA is not in danger, but
rebuilding money might be delayed as the federal
agency is running out of money for the fiscal year.

Is FEMA running out of money?

The apparent answer is yes, but that doesn't mean Vermonters won't get any help from the federal government. 

Money for immediate needs will flow in the Green Mountain State in counties that have been declared a disaster area. 

Vermonter who need help now if not sooner will get it. 

There's a chance the money shortage could slow eventual rebuilding, however. 

As Marketplace reports:

"The Federal Emergency Management Agency's disaster relief fund is running low, and is likely to be in the red sometime next moth. That's before the end of the current fiscal year, and right in the middle of hurricane and wildfire season."

Congress can approve supplemental funding, and has in the past when this kind of thing happened. But of course, Congress is so dysfunctional these days I'd be surprised if half the members can tie their own shoelaces. 

If FEMA quote, unquote "runs out of money," it's not like they will immediately stop helping. At last report, the federal government has approved nearly $5 million in disaster payouts to Vermont, and that number will surely grow.

FEMA will do the same for the flood victims in Kentucky, and whichever disaster comes down the pike in the coming months 

Marketplace again:

"Craig Fugate was FEMA Administrator during the Obama administration, and he said the agency will make sure it has cash for a disaster like that. 

'But it means a lot of other programs, like the rebuilding, the mitigation programs, will either cease or slow down until they get more funding,' he said. 

It's rare for that to happen, but Ari Renoni, a deputy director of disaster recovery at Hagerty Consulting, said when it does, there are consequences. "This can really have this downstream effect where, you know, the states, the local communities affected by these events, it just further delays their ability to recover,' he said." 

The following is pretty much speculation on my part, but it's something to consider. After the extreme floods from Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, Vermont officials wanted to "build back better" to borrow a phrase from the current Biden administration.

With climate change becoming a bigger and bigger factor, Vermont officials wanted to rebuild culverts and bridges to accommodate larger future floods. 

However - and I'm over-simplifing a bit here - FEMA rules pretty much said you could only build back to the level you had before the disaster. Vermont officials fought this, and we got some funding for better culvert, road and bridge designs that would lessen the effects of future floods. 

When July's floods hit, Vermont's bridges and culverts did better than they did during Irene, although we know there was still a lot of damage. 

Federal spending, as we know, is controlled by Congress. We still have incredible pushback from Senate and House Republicans on even the idea of climate change. With that crowd around, it's going to be a lot harder for FEMA to receive funding if even someone whispers the phrase "climate change" in appropriations requests. v

I obviously don't know what the sausage making in Congress will end up doing

There is a bill in Congress that would supply $11.5 billion in supplemental funding for FEMA's disaster relief fund.  That doesn't necessarily mean that will happen quickly. 

According to Roll Call in an article earlier this month:

"However, political dynamics for the caps in the debt limit law could imperil the chances of swift passage of an emergency supplemental. Specifically, lawmakers in both parties are expected to eye any moving spending bill as an opportunity to fund their own priorities, from Ukraine military assistance to aid for migrants crossing the southern border."

Senators from hurricane-prone states, including, notably, Republicans, are trying to get a clean FEMA bill passed without extraneous add ons.  We'll see how that goes. 

The United States is just now getting into the time of year when particularly expensive disasters strike.  The heart of hurricane season starts any day now and lasts into early October. From now into the fall is when wildfires out west tend to be at their worst.

Plus, August, like July, is traditionally a month that features flash floods like we saw this summer in Vermont, Kentucky, New York and elsewhere. 

Let's hope Congress makes the right decision about funding upcoming weather disasters, whether or not climate change contributes to them. 

 

Some Employers Don't Care If Their Workers Die Of Heatstroke

It appears that some industries really don't care if low wage
workers die in climate change driven, worsening heat waves. 

Yes, I know hot weather is over for the year for pretty much all of the nation, but I'm still stewing big time about a Washington Post article I ran across this past August.  

The headline is infuriating enough: "As Temperatures rise, Industries Fight Heat Safeguards For Workers."

Basically, the gist of the article is this: Many employers don't give a crap if some of their workers die of heat stroke. They figure they can just hire somebody else to replace them. No biggie, apparently.   

The Washington Post article starts out with an introduction to Sandra Ascencia, a South Florida plant nursery worker who once spent a week in the hospital from work-related heat stroke and once saw the body of a coworker in a parking lot, dead from heat stroke. 

WAPO continues: 

"Today, she belongs to a growing group of immigrant laborers in South Florida pushing for what for what many health experts say is the best way to prevent heatstroke as temperatures reach new extremes: A law requiring employers to provide outdoor workers with drinking water, shade and rest breaks on hot days."

Wait, what? Outdoor workers aren't entitled to drinking water, shade and rest breaks on hot days?

Ascencio goes on, as quoted in the Washington Post:

"'We're seeing temperatures above 100 degrees,' said Ascencio, 50. 'We meet workers who tell us bosses don't give them even 10 or 15 minute breaks. They know it's inhumane to work under these conditions but they have to pay their bills.'"

Ascencio is being Captain Obvious here, but you wouldn't know it from many industry leaders who say we shouldn't worry about heat stroke killing workers. My cynical side says some employers figure that workers, many of the POC and immigrants, are just cogs that are easily replaced, kind of like a part that breaks in a machine. To them, these workers aren't really human, so what's the big deal? 

Unless workplace safety rules are finally enacted, all this will keep getting worse. Climate change is making summers hotter and in many cases more humid. It is becoming more and more untenable to work in our worsening heat waves. 

The Washington Post says some states, like California and Washington, have enacted laws to protect workers from heat exposure. But in many other states, attempts to pass similar laws were killed or weakened by industry lobbyists. 

The Biden administration is also enacting rules to protect workers from excessive heat. At last check an OHSA vote on these rules has been delayed several times, so the fate is unknown. 

The rules are needed nationwide. An investigation by NPR and Columbia Journalism Investigations released in the summer of 2021 indicated 384 people in the U.S. died of work-related heat exposure in the last decade. 

This problem is bound to get worse without reforms, as a worsening climate crisis is intensifying and prolonging both extreme heat and humidity.

The reaction from several industries has been beyond callous regarding safety rules for heat. 

Here's some choice WAPO quotes on this, followed of course with my eye roll that can probably be seen from Neptune.

"Victoria Carreon, an administrator at the Nevada Department of Business and Industry, said the agency is in talks with industry groups about the burdens on businesses of having to implement regulations."

Yeah, like it's absolutely impossible for any business to provide enough water or workers and make sure they receive a break in a cool environment every once in awhile.  

Oh, and here's this gem from the National Cotton Council:

"The National Cotton Council wrote that many heat related issues are not caused by farm work or poor management 'but instead result from the modern employee lifestyle in an advanced 21st century global economy.' The group pinned workers' inability to withstand high temperatures on 'present day luxuries such as air conditioning and Americans' sendentary lifestyle.'"

Hear that kiddies? Cotton pickers aren't dying or getting dangerously sick from extreme heat. They're actually a bunch of wusses who are so completely lazy that they seek out air conditioning when they are off work and overheated. The selfishness of those cotton workers! They should be miserable 24/7!  Never mind that heat is dangerous to cotton pickers whether or not they have access to air conditioning during their off hours. 

In Oregon, trade groups for the timber and manufacturing interests are saying that heat rules would regulate "a societal hazard rather than an occupational hazard."

In other words, it's hot. Deal with it. Never mind that the workers in question would not willingly go out and kill themselves in the heat in their off hours. 

 In Virginia, Juley Fulcher, a worker health advocate for nonprofit Public Citizen said she was infuriated when one business representative told her, "If we give them breaks, it costs us money."

Fulcher said her reaction was "If you don't give them breaks, they die and that costs you money, too."

By the way, A United States farm worker is 35 times more likely to die from heat related problems that people toiling in other industries, according to Fast Company and Nexus News Media. Heat is also responsible for 170,000 heat related injuries. 

I'm guessing here that for many of these industries, this has nothing to do with ethics, morals, or humanity. To their minds, keeping employees alive in heat waves is more expensive than disposing of the dead ones and replacing them.  I'm being pretty blunt here, but that's what it seems to boil down to.  

Pretty demonic, but there you go. 

Of course, if we insist on talking just dollars and completely ignore humanity and morality, there is more that should be of interest to the billionaire overlords who want to rake in more dough. 

On NPR's Planet Money, they recently made a good case that workplace heat regulations would actually save industries money. 

David Metz a senior quantitative analyst at the RAND Corporation, laid it out for Planet Money. 

Metz crunched some numbers and concluded work place heat regulations in California would cost industry $100 million a year. Yeah, that is a lot of money but consider that California is a big state.

However, the same businesses that would lose that $100 million through regulation would also save $200 million, mostly through better worker productivity.  Which seems obvious. A worker who isn't about to keel over from the heat will probably do a better job.

As Planet Money explains, worker injuries increase when it's too hot. Decision making and cognition wilt in the heat too. 

So heat regulations in the workplace are a win-win, right?  Then why aren't employers embracing this idea?

Metz theorized businesses this cost/benefit ratio hasn't dawned on the Powers That Be because it just never crossed their minds. Metz charitable toward these managers with this assessment, but I'm a lot more skeptical.

The managers - the bad ones, anyway - never thought about this because they never wanted to. To them, who cares about employee safety?  They just want to make money. 

My whole screed here isn't an indictment of capitalism in general. It's a howl of disgust over the fact that many no longer regard capitalism as a system that at least has the potential to lift all boats. It's instead a game of which billionaire can vacuum up more cash and impoverish and exploit the greatest number of people.

We thought the last Gilded Age in the 1800s was bad enough. In some respects, the current one seems even worse. 

 

COP27 Climate Conference Ends In Weak, Iffy Financial Deal For Climate Victim Nations

Agreements reached at the recently ended UN COP27
climate change meeting in Egypt are vague and
don't seem likely to make much headway with climate change. 

 The just ended COP27 UN climate global conference resulted in some deals, some agreements, but things seem vague enough that I don't know what exactly will be put into action. 

I don't think these annual meetings are actually getting much done, but I guess you have to give people credit for trying. 

The COP meetings comes each year to encourage nations to cooperate in tempering the worst of climate change and dealing with its effects. This year's two-week long conference ended Sunday as nations hammered out at least some tentative paths forward.

This year's conference focused largely on the fact that poor countries, which never emitted much greenhouse gas, that are bearing the brunt of climate change. Meanwhile, richer countries, which have belched out those emissions for decades aren't compensating these poorer nations.

In negotiations that extended two days beyond what had been the scheduled close of the conference, richer countries agreed to establish a loss and damage fund to support those more impoverished regions.

I predict this will be a mess going forward. Sure, COP27 agreed to create this fund, but didn't work out the details. Countries involved have a year to cross all those t's and dot all those i's. 

The agreement struck Sunday also doesn't spell out which countries will be required to contribute to the fund. They also didn't specify when the bills to pay into this fund are due. 

Yikes. 

As NPR notes, past COP conferences have established various funds. Many nations, including the United States, haven't followed through on billions of dollars of promised cash. 

With so many nations and interests involved at the conference, there were a lot of moving parts, so striking a deal was complicated.

NPR gives this example: 

"The U.S. is the largest historical contributor to climate change by a large margin. Today, China is the largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions. But Chinese representatives at COP27 said, while the country is open to voluntarily contributing to loss and damage, it should only be an obligation for historically wealthier countries like the U.S. and European Union."

However, Europeans pushed back, saying a fund that didn't collect money from current big emitters of greenhouse gases, like China and India, was unacceptable.

As NPR explained, United States participates kind of kept their mouths shut, though the Biden administration had previous said it wanted to focus on using existing humanitarian aid channels and not create a new, separate fund. 

The goals coming out of this year's COP are ambitious to say the least. NPR again:

"'In all, the world needs to invest at least $4 trillion every year to create a low-carbon global economy,' the final agreement says. Raising that sort of money will require a 'transformation' of the entire financial system.'

Yeah, good luck with that. 

By 2030, damage from warming could cost the world from $290 billion to $580 billion a year by 2030, according to at least one estimate. 

COP27 clung to the goal of keeping total global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. That's getting harder and harder to do, as we're getting closer and closer to that threshold. 

To get to that goal, many nations, including the European Union have pushed nations to reach peak emissions by 2025, followed by declining emissions. 

China and India want to allow emissions to rise through the end of the decade. 

COP27 didn't end with any firm deadlines for new emissions commitments. So that doesn't help. 

Estimates out there say that if we want to keep warming checked at 1.5 degrees Celsius, emissions would need to drop by 45 percent by 2030. That's just a little over seven years. Not much!  Current estimates are that emissions will only fall by 10 percent by 2030.

The annual COP conferences, though definitely well-intentioned, are awfully unwieldy and chaotic.  Too many cooks are spoiling the pot. There's all these conflicting interests, there's these sideshows of celebrities swooping in to tell us they are big climate saviors, activists do their thing, which seems to fall on deaf ears. 

I honestly don't have a solution to this mess. The world has managed to make the rate of increase in greenhouse emissions somewhat less, but the trend line is still up. Meanwhile, the world grows hotter and hotter. 

Money still talks louder than anything.  Horrible regimes like Russia and Saudi Arabia are still making money hand over fist from fossil fuels, so they're not going to give up on this cash cow.

In western democracies like the United States, oil interests are also slowing progress on finding alternatives to fossil fuel.

As long as oil remains big time profitable, no substantive agreements will be made, be it through big UN conferences or other means. 

Probably the only solution is to make alternatives like wind, solar or what have you more profitable than fossil fuels. Like I said, money talks.