Stormy Climate

The bottom-line first: "the central question about storms in the Asia-Pacific is who pays for the damage."

 Although China is now the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, America and Europe are estimated to have emitted 37% of the global total between 1850 and 2012. The Philippines, by comparison, emitted 0.5%. That has triggered repeated calls for wealthy countries to help poorer ones pay for the cost of the effects of climate change, not least from tropical storms. Those calls are unlikely to grow softer. But, with the Carolinas still reeling from Florence, and Mr Trump in the White House, America, at least, is unlikely to offer an encouraging answer.

Sometimes, I suspect that Republicans do not want to acknowledge climate change, or the human causation of climate change, because they worry that America will be asked to pay for it.  Because, the moment one acknowledges the human causation behind global climate change, then the immediate follow-up question will be about who caused it.  And if the question of who caused it comes up, ahem, America is on the hook for massive payments.  Climate reparations!  Republicans smell money--in this case, a potential loss of money.

Here in the US, we talk about the increasingly powerful storms.  But,

If storms can wreak such havoc in the world’s richest country, their impact in poor Asia-Pacific countries is even more far-reaching. Every year, the Asia-Pacific region is battered by more and bigger storms than reach America.

Meanwhile, people in Chennai are already worried about the coming monsoon season.  After the disastrous rains and flood of 2015, and then the cyclone that tore through the city in 2016, it has been "normal" for two years.  When the people of Chennai watched in real time the devastating floods in Kerala this past summer, it was deja vu for them.

Here in the US, the GOP couldn't care about the rest of the world.  Heck, the party and its dear leader do not care even about Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands!

Therefore, news was made when 17 Republican members of the House signed a symbolic resolution to "promising to take “meaningful and responsible action” to address human-caused climate change."  Seventeen.  Yep, 17.

It is the largest number of Republicans ever to join an action-oriented climate initiative in “maybe ever,” said Jay Butera, a congressional liaison for Citizens’ Climate Lobby, which helped put together the resolution. “I’ve been working on this issue for 10 years,” he told me. “This is a high water mark.” Of course, these 17 Republicans represent just 7 percent of the House GOP.

Seven percent!

It should surprise nobody that the Democratic Party is the only hope for those worried about climate change.

More and more, voters seem to agree with California’s Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who recently said, “If you want to go green, you better go blue.” Becerra was speaking from the stage at the Climate Summit, comfortable as part of an overwhelmingly blue majority.

An inconvenient truth!