Tag: climate crisis

by Lowell Here are a few national and Virginia news headlines, political and otherwise, for Friday, June 28.  France on red alert as heatwave is...

by Kellen Squire I was born and raised a dumb 'ole Iowa farmboy. It seems like an era so long ago we need carbon dating to...

by Lowell Here are a few national and Virginia news headlines, political and otherwise, for Sunday, June 9.  Virginia polls open in under 48 hours…when...

by Lowell Here are a few national and Virginia news headlines, political and otherwise, for Monday, May 13. ‘The Planet’s On F**king Fire!’ Bill Nye,...

I had a chance to sit down Thursday with Sam Bleicher, an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., who from...

Remember back in July 2015 (see screen shot on the right; click to "embiggen"), when I challenged Meet the Press host Chuck Todd to...

Every time somebody posts a photo of some sweet child or grandchild on social media, I feel terribly sad. These innocent young people will...

"The world stands on the brink of failure when it comes to holding global warming to moderate levels, and nations will have to take...

This piece has appeared in newspapers in my conservative congressional district (VA-06). ************* As it is said in the Bible (Luke 12:48), “From everyone who has...

A new report takes a closer look at which cities will be hurt by global warming-fueled sea level rise. As Brad Plumer reports, Virginia is in the climate crisis crosshairs:

Things don't look good for India. But the United States doesn't get off easy, either. If you look at exposed assets rather than total population, then Miami, New York-Newark, New Orleans and Virginia Beach all climb higher on the list, with $7 trillion in assets vulnerable to severe coastal flooding by 2070. [...]

Take Miami. A three-foot sea-level rise, experts have noted, would likely put all of Miami Beach underwater and turn downtown Miami into an island, channeled off from the rest of Florida. Yet the state isn't doing all that much to prepare for this eventuality. Instead, it's racing to subsidize new developments along the coasts, through state-run insurance and funding for coastal protection. By contrast, cities such as London and Amsterdam are taking more prudent steps to guard against future flooding - and, as the OECD report notes, are likely to cope with sea-level rise better.

That's not an isolated case. In general, the United States has been slow in preparing for rising sea levels. In many cases, we're actively making things worse, as Steve Nash laid out in this excellent article in the New Republic. This is one area in particular where climate-change denial can do a lot of damage - it's awfully hard to prepare for a problem that no one can agree even exists.

So we're not doing climate mitigation, like cutting carbon pollution. And as an event just last month at NASA's Langley Center in Hampton pointed out, we're not doing climate adaptation, either, like coastal restoration & limiting development in areas just above sea level. Basically, if you were consciously trying to leave the worst possible situation for the next generation, you'd be doing exactly what people like Gov. Bob McDonnell are doing now - deny the problem & delay solutions. And note the 2070 date - we're no longer talking about forecast impacts on some future generation, but real changes happening within the lifetimes of the children in your family right now. Amazing that the same people who profess such a concern with our budgetary national debt have no qualms about leaving our kids stuck with a multi-trillion-dollar climate liability.