By ERIC THOMAS
Courtesy Kansas Reflector
Let’s talk about the weather.
Yes, the weather. That fallback conversation that you can have with anyone.
“Did you hear that thunderstorm last night?”
“They say it’s going to be windy again tomorrow.”
Or, perpetually, in Kansas: “The humidity is what’s making it feel hotter than it is.”
The details of our weather — temperature, forecasts, rainfall and, with my dad, even barometric pressure — are the polite metrics that lubricate our conversations.
However, that genial mood surrounding our chats about the weather may be in jeopardy because, increasingly, we really aren’t really talking about the weather. We are talking about the climate.
A constant feature in our news, we see the drip-drip-drip devastation of climate change year-round. Recent summers, however, have quickened the pace with record high temperatures and dry conditions.
In Kansas, we have been largely insulated from the most cataclysmic climate effects in the United States. The wildfires in the West and the more intense hurricanes in the South don’t directly affect those of us nestled in the Midwest.
However, we too are suffering a cataclysm in Kansas — it’s just a crisis playing out in smaller increments. Searing temperatures make the outdoors more dangerous each summer. Our precious water source, the Ogallala Aquifer, is in jeopardy. Our creaking electrical grid can’t keep up.
All of this creates political pressure. Or, at least, it should.
The last few weeks presented a parade of headlines with the federal government acting alternately obstructionist, incrementalist, denialist and feckless. This week, one senator whose family created a fortune through fossil fuels submarined a climate change bill that would have increased funding for alternative energy. Also this week, the U.S. Postal Service announced it bumped up the percentage of electric cars in its fleet, but far below the recommendations of environmental groups. Most consequentially, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority blocked the EPA from enforcing administrative standards through a flimsy legal decision.
President Joe Biden stepped in as well. On Wednesday he announced overdue steps that will “build structures and programs to withstand the severe heat, storms, fires and floods that climate change has already started to bring.” That paltry approach is like ordering bandages for a patient who is still being stabbed. We continuously damage the planet but then sheepishly treat the climate’s effects on us.
Many progressives see this moment as a national emergency, a declaration that would empower the executive branch to be more robust in its actions. The White House’s response?
“Everything is on the table,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said on Tuesday. “(The emergency declaration is) just not going to be this week on that decision.”
In the wake of a Trump White House that was giddy to use executive power for its craven purposes, the Biden administration retreats from those same levers of power while the world bakes. If Biden calls climate change “a clear and present danger,” then why is he perseverating at a moment when the climate crisis is throbbing in the news?
In the face of these national failings, we must look away from Washington, D.C., for action. After the Supreme Court’s EPA decision, Maggie Astor wrote in the New York Times about how some states and municipalities have acted more decisively and quickly than the federal government.
“By removing partisan politics from community discussions about climate policy, it’s sometimes possible to reach a consensus that’s been difficult to achieve on a national level,” Astor wrote.
For Kansas, the most promising but quixotic roadmap comes from its western neighbor, Colorado. Through recent legislation, the state provided emissions standards with ambitious deadlines, including a 90% reduction below 2005 levels by 2050.
You don’t have to research the bill extensively to see how much of a political long shot it would be in Kansas. The four sponsors are Democratic representatives. The bill passed without a single Republican vote. Imagine the conservative legislature in Kansas creating goals for “statewide greenhouse pollution goals” while also appropriating state funding toward the problem.
Even if Kansan leaped into action, we would still need coordinated national intervention. Astor wrote for the New York Times that the more local “approach is no substitute for a coordinated national strategy. Local governments have limited reach, authority and funding.”
Our collective failing here is epic. Past generations have winced to look back at their moral failings: slavery, segregation, protracted wars, discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Our failure on climate change is similar in that the solution is political. However, its effects are even larger. Solving our heating earth is an existential and global crisis.
In this atmosphere of obstructionism on climate change, it’s grinding to continue with polite conversations about the weather. When I hear the complaints about the heat, I want to ask, “What steps do you think our city, state and country should take to slow down this oncoming stifling melt?”
But that wouldn’t be polite, would it?
Eric Thomas directs the Kansas Scholastic Press Association, a nonprofit that supports student journalism throughout the state. He also teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.