A number of U.S. states are about to receive aid from the federal government to prepare for future disasters. Only three of them have talked about or linked these disasters to climate change. Their proposals ignore this driving cause, despite how NASA has written that “changes in climate not only affect average temperatures, but also extreme temperatures, increasing the likelihood of weather-related natural disasters.”
The government aid will come from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which in its rules, also does not mention climate change. The amount of money received by states is based on the amount of damage caused by disasters since 2015.
California, Florida and North Carolina specifically address climate change in their funding proposals, while other states such as Georgia, Louisiana and Texas leave mentions of it for their footnotes and appendices. But in funding, Texas will get more than four billion dollars, Louisiana will receive an aid package of 1.2 billion dollars and Florida will take 633 million dollars.
All the states but one, California, are led by Republicans. For the most part, the party has denied climate change and the role humans have in it. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, for example, has said that many scientists would debate how much human activity can be deemed responsible for global warming. Yet 97 percent of scientists believe that human activity is worsening climate change. Global warming is considered a scientific consensus, but Republicans like to argue that the three percent is right.
Their party has been pushing the narrative that climate change is not real for so long that not many in their base believe in it. A Goucher College poll of Marylanders found that only 44 percent of Republicans in the state believe human activity is a cause. In their denials, they explained that they had only heard climate change discussed by Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who they do not believe.
There have been some Republicans calling for more action by the party, though. Texas representative Dan Crenshaw stated on the issue: “Even if we don’t know what [climate change is] doing to the environment, let’s at least err on the side of caution.” Republicans in the House are preparing their own version of the Green New Deal. If it passes, it will focus on planting trees to reduce carbon dioxide in the air, moving the country to cleaner energy and better technology to recycle material such as plastic.
As another example, Florida and its state Republicans have already begun efforts to protect the state from climate change and have promoted efforts to prevent it from becoming worse. Governor Ron DeSantis has created departments and government positions to combat the issue, and he has pushed for more proposals to aid in the fight. In Miami, Republican mayor Francis Suarez signed a pledge to make the city carbon neutral by 2050.
These steps are a small part of what needs to be done. The actions taken by DeSantis or Suarez do not address the urgency of climate change. Many of DeSantis’ proposals do not directly combat climate change—instead, they focus on protecting the state from disasters worsened by it. By 2050, the date when Miami is supposed to become carbon neutral, many people fear that sea-level rise will have already severely impacted the city and its unprotected buildings.
Republicans need to take greater strides fighting climate change itself, such as making the energy economy based on environmentally-safer methods than natural gas and implementing a nationwide carbon tax instead of focusing on the disasters.
The plans that Republicans have made so far to prevent climate change are mainly in response to Democrats doing so and young voters agreeing with them. During the same speech that Rep. Crenshaw said the quote above, he also said, “We can make fun of the left’s sort of alarmist views on climate change—and we should, to an extent—but we can’t ignore it completely…From a political standpoint, we cannot ignore it completely.”
Republicans are not pushing environmental plans because they believe climate change is worsening—they push the plans because they are hoping to get elected. If they truly cared about the environment, they would have stopped the rollbacks of over 60 regulations. They would have protected the Arctic from oil drilling and defended the Clean Water Act that aided in the prevention of pollutants into waterways. They would not follow a president who has said that climate change is a hoax made by the Chinese and disparages 16-year-old climate change activist Greta Thunberg.
It is hardly surprising that many of the states who want aid for impending disasters will not identify climate change as the culprit. If the proposals stated that climate change was the cause, they would be discrediting statements made by Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Senator David Perdue of Georgia, Rep. Devin Nunes of California, Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and over 120 more Republican members of Congress who have denied human involvement in climate change or deny it as an issue completely.
Cases like Florida show that some Republicans do believe in climate change and are trying to aid in combating it. However, not enough of the party is trying to help, as many stop efforts on the federal level. So as of right now, what is the number one way to combat climate change? Vote Republicans out so the United States can actually get solutions started.
