You Can't Grow the Economy When It Is Literally Underwater | Opinion

For the past few years, it's been easy for people in certain parts of the country to look at weather-related disasters like wildfires in California or hurricanes in Florida, Texas and the Gulf Coast and think that these places will bear the brunt of global warming. But the ominous summer of 2023 has made it clear that there's no hiding from climate change. Not in New York. Not in Milwaukee. Not in Ontario. Not anywhere.

That's not to say that the regions that have already experienced the worst of it aren't getting slammed again. Ocean temperatures in Florida are 97 degrees, bleaching coral populations and cooking marine life like a malevolent crockpot. God knows what these boiler room water temperatures will mean for the upcoming Atlantic hurricane season. A slew of Texas cities set high temperature records last month as a brutal heat wave gripped the state. A heat dome is now parked over the Southwest, giving Phoenix—the 5th-largest city in the United States—a seemingly never-ending, 13-day streak of at least 110-degree highs that threatens to get worse this weekend.

But those of us in other parts of the country, accustomed to being onlookers to the chaos, have suddenly become unwilling participants. First, the Canadian wildfire season arrived weeks early. Uncontrolled forest blazes sent massive waves of smoke south into the United States, where it blanketed the cities of the Eastern seaboard and mid-Atlantic in a choking haze, blotting out the sun and sending anyone with respiratory problems indoors for days at a time. Then a few weeks later it was the Midwest's turn in the barrel when the smoke drifted down into the Great Lakes region and turned days into endless dusk. Breathing the air felt like slurping ash from a backyard fire pit and washing it down with Mezcal. Ominously, the Canadian wildfire season was just getting started, promising Smokeworld encores throughout the summer

On Wednesday night an enormous tornado nearly tore through O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. Earlier this week a slow-moving storm system dumped biblical amounts of rain on parts of the Northeast, particularly upstate New York, New Hampshire and Vermont. Rivers swelled as some areas saw 9 inches of rain in a single day—close to the average precipitation over the course of an entire summer. Widespread flooding wreaked havoc from the Hudson Valley in New York to Vermont, where large swathes of the capital city, Montpelier, were underwater with more rain forecast this weekend. Multiple dams were stressed close to their breaking points. Only the heroics of dedicated rescue teams prevented scores of deaths in life-threatening flash floods.

This is what it means to live in a warmer, wetter, more unpredictable world. People who have lived most of their lives without experiencing routine disasters will have to face the uncomfortable realities of a rapidly heating planet. Once-in-a-lifetime weather events will become routine. Thousand-year floods will happen every decade. The abnormal will become the depressing new normal. While the Northeast and Midwest are still much better positioned to ride out climate disasters in the decades to come (we promise to welcome all the snowbirds back with open arms), the idea that nothing will change here is delusional.

That's part of why it's so infuriating that the Washington chattering classes spent years making fun of the Green New Deal, treating it like some kind of imaginative child's musings instead of a vital piece of any plan to halt the advance of climate change. Even this week, gullible reporters eager to do stenography for the fossil fuel industry treated a temporary glut of electric vehicles in the U.S. like some kind of gotcha moment for environmentalists. The lack of official urgency around these issues drives public complacency—75 percent of U.S. adults still list 'strengthening the economy" as a top priority as opposed to just 37 percent prioritize addressing climate change, according to Pew.

I've got bad news for people who think these two issues are unrelated: you can't grow the economy when it is underwater, or when everyone is trapped in their houses for weeks or months at a time with nothing but the hum of air-conditioners to puncture the sweaty silence. In the decades to come, parts of the American South and Southwest are going to become close to uninhabitable, battered by infinite heat waves, tornadoes, wildfires, hurricanes and flooding. But everyone will be negatively impacted by a changing environment if we do not begin making bigger investments in a green future.

The Deloitte Economics Institute estimates that "weather, climate and water hazards" will wreak a $14.5 trillion toll on the United States alone over the next 50 years if we do not rapidly move toward decarbonization. It's not just that you can't strengthen the economy without addressing climate change. It's that addressing climate change will strengthen the economy, to the tune of $3 trillion over that same time horizon, according to Deloitte.

Maybe this summer's series of unfortunate events will finally puncture the sense of invincibility still felt by far too many Americans and push our calcified leadership to take dramatic action. If not, we might look back on the summer of 2023 as an idyll.

David Faris is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.