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“It’s Confederate Disneyland, and it’s about to be SeaWorld,” says Susan Crawford, the author of a new book about the city.
In the last few years, climate change has made its impact known in violent, eye-grabbing ways. Heat waves and drought slowly roll across the planet; hurricanes and floods and wildfires bring sudden devastation to communities that were once safe. But there are also slower, more insidious impacts that we can easily forget about in the wake of those disasters, including the most classic impact of them all: sea-level rise.
The East Coast is particularly vulnerable to rising seas, and in her new book Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm (Pegasus Books, April 4, 2023), Susan Crawford, a writer and professor at Harvard Law School, explores how the historic city, the largest in South Carolina, is preparing — or failing to prepare — for what’s to come. Flooding has become increasingly commonplace in Charleston, Crawford writes, and the city’s racial history has meant that low-income communities of color are bearing the worst of the impact, with little hope for relief.
Charleston is a bellwether for what the rest of the East Coast can expect as the waters of the Atlantic creep ever higher. When we spoke, Crawford, author of the books Fiber and The Responsive City, among others, began by describing her book as a survival story rather than a climate story. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Things are pigeonholed as climate inappropriately. This is more about the question of: Can we overcome our polarization and limitations as human beings and plan ahead for a rapidly accelerating cataclysm that will, in particular, hit the East Coast at three or four times the rate of speed it goes the rest of the world? Can we plan ahead? Can we think about what anybody with a belly button needs to thrive? Because after all, isn’t that the role of government?
I came to Charleston initially on a solo vacation in December 2017. I went there for Christmas. And it’s an interesting place, but I didn’t really know what the history of it was. And I decided to go back in February 2018 to interview the man who’d recently stepped down as mayor, Joe Riley. He had been mayor for 40 years. His tagline was America’s favorite mayor. And he had transformed Charleston over his tenure into a tourist magnet, seven million tourists a year. Lots of development. It became a food and arts destination. And I was just curious about Mayor Riley. So I contacted a local journalist named Jack Hitt, and he suggested that I ask the mayor about the water.
So, when I interviewed Riley, I asked him about flooding. And he’s a very charming guy, little bowtie, little khaki suit. And he clammed up. All he said was that it was going to be very expensive. That was it.
And I said, “huh, maybe there’s a story here.” And this became a quest to try to figure out what the Charleston story was. At first, I thought it was going to be a story of local government heroism. And in a sense, it still is. I think the city is, in a sense, doing what it can. But then I was lucky enough to be introduced to several Black resident leaders at Charleston who were very generous to me and explained what it’s like to be Black in Charleston, and the ongoing lack of a Black professional class in Charleston. There’s sort of the idea that the civil war never ended in Charleston: There’s a lack of Black advisors near the mayor, although there are Black members of city council.
Charleston’s successes and failures are just harbingers of what we will be seeing up and down the East Coast. They’re more visible in Charleston, and Charleston lives in the dreams of millions of people who want to visit. The failures of the structures around Charleston and inside Charleston are fractal in nature. They are replicated across the globe. It’s Confederate Disneyland, and it’s about to be SeaWorld.
Courtesy of Pegasus Books
Charleston is extremely low in terms of its topography. The peninsula itself was built on fill, like much of Boston. Enslaved people filled in the perimeter of what is now today’s peninsula. So about a third of that peninsula — the lower part where these gorgeous historical houses are — is five feet or less above sea level. And then these outlying suburbs, many of which were annexed into Charleston’s property tax base by Mayor Riley over the course of his mayoralty, were historically marshy wetlands. There’s very little high land in the entire city of Charleston. A lot of the area outside off the peninsula is about 10 feet or less above sea level. So Charleston’s topography sets it up for the threat of rising waters.
It’s actually more exposed than the Netherlands, because it’s not as if there are defined waterways that lead inland — it’s actually a gazillion interconnected tiny watersheds across a flat area. So water can just roll over the place unimpeded when it rises.
Charlestonians have almost gotten used to ongoing flooding, there’s a sort of complacency that sets in. And there’s also, I think, a sense in Charleston, that they’ve missed a lot of big storms recently, and maybe they believe it’s not going to happen to them. But they’re just one storm away from being flattened, basically.
Right now the city has a single planning horizon in mind, which is 2050, and a single level of sea level rise, which is 18 inches. That might be fine up until 2050. But after that we’re going to see very rapidly accelerating sea level rise — scientists are predicting more like three feet by 2070. And then at least five by the end of the century.
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Charleston was the place where 40% of the enslaved people forcibly brought to America first step foot. It’s the place where, after the slave trade was outlawed in 1808, a great deal of the domestic slave trade was carried out. Its entire economy, initially, was based on extractive labor from enslaved people.
After the Civil War, a lot of free Black people moved onto the peninsula seeking work. Charleston in the 1970s was a majority Black peninsula, with 75% Black residents. Today, it’s at most 12 percent on the peninsula: That whole population has been displaced and moved to North Charleston, which has one of the highest eviction rates in the country, or off in far flung suburban areas where it’s cheaper. There are still some concentrated areas of Black residents on the peninsula on the east side, which floods all the time and has been a lower income area for all of Charleston’s history. And then there are public housing areas, mostly inhabited by Black residents.
Well, for a long time, Charleston, simply lived with flooding and let its sewage go right into the water. But in the late 19th century, a brilliant and energetic engineer figured out how to install tunnels underneath the streets of the peninsula that would drain sewage away from the houses and also take water out of the streets. It’s a gravity driven tunnel system, and a lot of that system is still in place.
But gravity isn’t going to help as the seas rise. The peninsula will be at the same level as the sea, so the gravity-based system won’t function. The city’s hard working stormwater manager is working on upgrading that system substantially, furnishing them with pumps, so they don’t have to rely just on gravity. But they’re going to need a lot of pumping to get the water off the streets in order to make life possible on the peninsula.
Mayor Riley, to his credit, developed a stormwater plan in 1984. But it was all very expensive, and many of the projects have not yet been completed, in particular on the west side of the peninsula. And all of that planning is premised on the idea that you’re supposed to pump the water off the peninsula, that no matter how much water there is, you’re going to take it away. That kind of money has not been invested in the outlying suburbs. When water comes there it just sits.
The other factor is that the groundwater in Charleston is very close to the surface. So as seas rise, the groundwater is also going to be rising and it will have nowhere to go. You know, they’re doing their best to think of ways to get that water away. But as rainwater gets heavier and seas rise, groundwater rises, and you’ll have a situation of chronic inundation.
A historical map of Charleston, as seen in the book.
This is gradually shifting, but at the state level, certainly, you’re better off not talking about the human causes of climate change. There’s no point. Because then you look as if you’re Al Gore, bringing the heavy hand of government everywhere, and that’s not a good look. And the state government makes it impossible for cities to include the idea of retreating in their comprehensive plans.
When I first interviewed current Mayor Tecklenburg about this whole subject, he said, “do you want to talk about climate change or sea level rise?” And at first I was befuddled, but then I understood what he was saying: Let’s not talk about why it’s happening. But we can talk about the fact that it is happening, because we see it every day.
And so that that’s the approach: Don’t talk about the causes, talk about what’s going on. And in fact, that is, for me, the entire approach of this book. I, of course, fully accept that humans are causing the forcing of temperatures to their stratospheric heights these days, and we need to lower emissions and do whatever we can to decarbonize our economy. But I’m concerned that even if we do that, the changes in the climate that are already baked in are going to have disastrous effects on human beings’ lives. So we need to be planning in both directions at once, both planning to reduce missions and planning to help people survive.
One of the leading characters here is Reverend Joseph Darby, who is a senior AME minister, and also the co chair of the local NAACP branch in Charleston. He’s in his 70s, very wise, and he has, of course, personally experienced flooding, and in particular, flooding that makes his church inaccessible since he’s a preacher on the peninsula.
He told me he learned early in his career that it was important never to be surprised by anything he heard in Charleston. He could be shocked, he could be astonished, but he couldn’t be surprised. He continues to feel that way in the absence of powerful Black voices advising the mayor.
His two boys moved away from Charleston, as much as he might have hoped that they would stay. The Black professional class doesn’t stay in Charleston because it’s just too hard. It’s just not worth it. He feels that there’s a sort of a benevolent paternalism from political leaders, a sense of “we know what’s best for you folks.”
The Black leaders I talked to pointed out that nobody is talking about how we’re going to help low income and Black residents of the region who have nowhere to go when the flooding hits in a big way. Nobody’s talking about the kind of holistic support services that are going to be needed, and this will just further entrench and amplify the inequality and unfairness. They also point out that this is a regional problem and national problem. And they just don’t see that kind of coordination happening.
Yeah, the big plan in Charleston is to work with the Army Corps of Engineers on building a 12-foot-tall wall around the peninsula with gates in it, that would, in theory, protect the peninsula from storm surges. The wall wouldn’t be designed to protect the 90% of people who don’t live on the peninsula. Nor would it be designed to do anything about the heavy rain or the constant high tides. It’s just for storm surges.
It’s a plan to protect the high property values on the peninsula, and in particular the areas that are good for tourism. You know, pillars of the Charleston economy. It’s fair to say that that if it’s ever built, that wall will be outmoded by the time it’s finished, because it’s built to a very low standard — 18 inches of sea level rise by 2050. The reason it’s built to such a low standard is that if it was any higher the wall would mess with the freeways that come onto the peninsula from the airport. And the Army Corps of Engineers representative was pretty frank about that. He said that just wouldn’t pencil out, that wouldn’t make sense economically to build anything higher.
So I mean, Charleston is stuck, because the only vessel for money right now is coming through these armoring projects being built by the Army Corps. And the plan is for that wall to be built in very slow sections, gradually protecting parts of the peninsula. As planned, it would take 30 years to build. So the underlying plan is for Charleston to be hit by a disaster that then causes enormous concern and empathy for Charleston, and a huge congressional appropriation bill. That’s what happened after Katrina. And then that wall would be finished quickly,
The wall as designed would not protect a couple of Black settlements farther up the peninsula, because the cost benefit analysis doesn’t work out. But it’s not Charleston’s fault that it’s planning on a disaster, because our entire approach to this survival question is premising on disaster recovery, not on proactive planning. There are 30 federal agencies that have all these scattershot programs that are aimed at disaster recovery, and there is very little advanced planning going on.
Well, in our country, we’ve had decades of exclusion through segregation and redlining and soft processes not quite understood by a lot of people that have pushed Black citizens into lower, more rapidly-flooding areas. And that history then plays out into what we decide to value. If our history has put Black Americans into more flood-prone, lower value housing over time, then it’s a garbage-in, garbage-out algorithm. If we then decide to only protect the places that are high property value, we will inevitably, yet again, exclude Black residents from the benefit of federal planning.
So it’s a pattern that was set a long time ago and did not arise by accident, playing out in the way we make decisions today.
And to its credit, the Biden administration just issued a terrific Economic Report of the President that said inequality and property values and ownership in the U.S. reflects decades of exclusion of racial minorities from home ownership and public investment, and we need different criteria to capture the differential vulnerability of these populations. So yeah, they’re on it. They understand.
No, Congress has already voted on the Charleston project. They say they’ve got this great benefit-cost ratio, one of the best in the nation, they’re really trumpeting it. It feels strange that we would pump billions of dollars into short sighted armoring of coastline that doesn’t protect against the daily harms we know are going to happen.
Well, people’s attachment to their homes is very deep. Not just for Black residents who can’t afford to leave, but for white residents and rich people as well. It’s likely it will take a series of disasters separated by very few months to convince everybody that this place really isn’t going to be livable. For decades, we already know that you can show maps to city planners, you can talk about the data to people until you’re blue in the face. This is especially true when it comes to coastal properties. It’s not rational. People are highly reluctant to leave.
It also could be a sudden cliff in property valuation, which is likely to happen in the next few years as there are actors in the financial system who fully understand this. Private flood insurers walked away from selling insurance there, leaving the federal government providing 95% or more of the flood insurance in Charleston. At some point, the fact that coastal real estate is now overvalued in the United States to the tune of $200 billion will be reflected in residential property markets up and down, and people will be unable to sell their houses. And then we might see a change in behavior.
The only country in the world that is actively talking about relocation is the Netherlands. They are planning or at least talking about needing to keep options open to move large populations away from Amsterdam, Rotterdam, towards Germany. But for everybody else, it is extremely difficult to talk about it. And you would hope that we wouldn’t have to have a global economic crisis to force planning, because that’s what this would amount to. It would be worse than 2008 if this overvaluation is suddenly corrected, because the loss of property value is permanent, and it’s not coming back. And it would be too bad if it took that kind of market crash to force planning in this direction.
If we had a president who was able to engage in long term planning, we could, with dignity and respect, change the financial drivers and levers and incentives to encourage people to understand this risk and move away from it without having to lose all their wealth. And without having to be cast into the role of migrants.
We absolutely can do this. We built the Hoover Dam, and we built the Interstate Highway System. We can afford what we care about. And if this was a priority, we could do this. But for me, the moment of redemption, the first moment of redemption will be when it’s somebody’s job in the White House to speak publicly about this constantly in league with the best scientists in the world.
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New research out today shows a 10-fold increase in smoke mortality related to climate change from the 1960s to the 2010.
If you are one of the more than 2 billion people on Earth who have inhaled wildfire smoke, then you know firsthand that it is nasty stuff. It makes your eyes sting and your throat sore and raw; breathe in smoke for long enough, and you might get a headache or start to wheeze. Maybe you’ll have an asthma attack and end up in the emergency room. Or maybe, in the days or weeks afterward, you’ll suffer from a stroke or heart attack that you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Researchers are increasingly convinced that the tiny, inhalable particulate matter in wildfire smoke, known as PM2.5, contributes to thousands of excess deaths annually in the United States alone. But is it fair to link those deaths directly to climate change?
A new study published Monday in Nature Climate Change suggests that for a growing number of cases, the answer should be yes. Chae Yeon Park, a climate risk modeling researcher at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies, looked with her colleagues at three fire-vegetation models to understand how hazardous emissions changed from 1960 to 2019, compared to a hypothetical control model that excluded historical climate change data. They found that while fewer than 669 deaths in the 1960s could be attributed to climate change globally, that number ballooned to 12,566 in the 2010s — roughly a 20-fold increase. The proportion of all global PM2.5 deaths attributable to climate change jumped 10-fold over the same period, from 1.2% in the 1960s to 12.8% in the 2010s.
“It’s a timely and meaningful study that informs the public and the government about the dangers of wildfire smoke and how climate change is contributing to that,” Yiqun Ma, who researches the intersection of climate change, air pollution, and human health at the Yale School of Medicine, and who was not involved in the Nature study, told me.
The study found the highest climate change-attributable fire mortality values in South America, Australia, and Europe, where increases in heat and decreases in humidity were also the greatest. In the southern hemisphere of South America, for example, the authors wrote that fire mortalities attributable to climate change increased from a model average of 35% to 71% between the 1960s and 2010s, “coinciding with decreased relative humidity,” which dries out fire fuels. For the same reason, an increase in relative humidity lowered fire mortality in other regions, such as South Asia. North America exhibited a less dramatic leap in climate-related smoke mortalities, with climate change’s contribution around 3.6% in the 1960s, “with a notable rise in the 2010s” to 18.8%, Park told me in an email.
While that’s alarming all on its own, Ma told me there was a possibility that Park’s findings might actually be too conservative. “They assume PM2.5 from wildfire sources and from other sources” — like from cars or power plants — “have the same toxicity,” she explained. “But in fact, in recent studies, people have found PM2.5 from fire sources can be more toxic than those from an urban background.” Another reason Ma suspected the study’s numbers might be an underestimate was because the researchers focused on only six diseases that have known links to PM2.5 exposure: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and lower respiratory infection. “According to our previous findings [at the Yale School of Medicine], other diseases can also be influenced by wildfire smoke, such as mental disorders, depression, and anxiety, and they did not consider that part,” she told me.
Minghao Qiu, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University and one of the country’s leading researchers on wildfire smoke exposure and climate change, generally agreed with Park’s findings, but cautioned that there is “a lot of uncertainty in the underlying numbers” in part because, intrinsically, wildfire smoke exposure is such a complicated thing to try to put firm numbers to. “It’s so difficult to model how climate influences wildfire because wildfire is such an idiosyncratic process and it’s so random, ” he told me, adding, “In general, models are not great in terms of capturing wildfire.”
Despite their few reservations, both Qiu and Ma emphasized the importance of studies like Park’s. “There are no really good solutions” to reduce wildfire PM2.5 exposure. You can’t just “put a filter on a stack” as you (sort of) can with power plant emissions, Qiu pointed out.
Even prescribed fires, often touted as an important wildfire mitigation technique, still produce smoke. Park’s team acknowledged that a whole suite of options would be needed to minimize future wildfire deaths, ranging from fire-resilient forest and urban planning to PM2.5 treatment advances in hospitals. And, of course, there is addressing the root cause of the increased mortality to begin with: our warming climate.
“To respond to these long-term changes,” Park told me, “it is crucial to gradually modify our system.”
On the COP16 biodiversity summit, Big Oil’s big plan, and sea level rise
Current conditions: Record rainfall triggered flooding in Roswell, New Mexico, that killed at least two people • Storm Ashley unleashed 80 mph winds across parts of the U.K. • A wildfire that broke out near Oakland, California, on Friday is now 85% contained.
Forecasters hadn’t expected Hurricane Oscar to develop into a hurricane at all, let alone in just 12 hours. But it did. The Category 1 storm made landfall in Cuba on Sunday, hours after passing over the Bahamas, bringing intense rain and strong winds. Up to a foot of rainfall was expected. Oscar struck while Cuba was struggling to recover from a large blackout that has left millions without power for four days. A second system, Tropical Storm Nadine, made landfall in Belize on Saturday with 60 mph winds and then quickly weakened. Both Oscar and Nadine developed in the Atlantic on the same day.
Hurricane OscarAccuWeather
The COP16 biodiversity summit starts today in Cali, Colombia. Diplomats from 190 countries will try to come up with a plan to halt global biodiversity loss, aiming to protect 30% of land and sea areas and restore 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030. Discussions will revolve around how to monitor nature degradation, hold countries accountable for their protection pledges, and pay for biodiversity efforts. There will also be a big push to get many more countries to publish national biodiversity strategies. “This COP is a test of how serious countries are about upholding their international commitments to stop the rapid loss of biodiversity,” said Crystal Davis, Global Director of Food, Land, and Water at the World Resources Institute. “The world has no shot at doing so without richer countries providing more financial support to developing countries — which contain most of the world’s biodiversity.”
A prominent group of oil and gas producers has developed a plan to roll back environmental rules put in place by President Biden, The Washington Post reported. The paper got its hands on confidential documents from the American Exploration and Production Council (AXPC), which represents some 30 producers. The documents include draft executive orders promoting fossil fuel production for a newly-elected President Trump to sign if he takes the White House in November, as well as a roadmap for dismantling many policies aimed at getting oil and gas producers to disclose and curb emissions. AXPC’s members, including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Hess, account for about half of the oil and gas produced in the U.S., the Post reported.
A new report from the energy think tank Ember looks at how the uptake of electric vehicles and heat pumps in the U.K. is affecting oil and gas consumption. It found that last year the country had 1.5 million EVs on the road, and 430,000 residential heat pumps in homes, and the reduction in fossil fuel use due to the growth of these technologies was equivalent to 14 million barrels of oil, or about what the U.K. imports over a two-week span. This reduction effect will be even stronger as more and more EVs and heat pumps are powered by clean energy. The report also found that even though power demand is expected to rise, efficiency gains from electrification and decarbonization will make up for this, leading to an overall decline in energy use and fossil fuel consumption.
Ember
The world’s sea levels are projected to rise by more than 6 inches on average over the next 30 years if current trends continue, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. “Such rates would represent an evolving challenge for adaptation efforts,” the authors wrote. By examining satellite data, the researchers found that sea levels have risen by about .4 inches since 1993, and that they’re rising faster now than they were then. In 1993 the seas were rising by about .08 inches per year, and last year they were rising at .17 inches per year. These are averages, of course, and some areas are seeing much more extreme changes. For example, areas around Miami, Florida, have already seen sea levels rise by 6 inches over the last 31 years.
“As the climate crisis grows more urgent, restoring faith in government will be more important than ever.” –Paul Waldman writing for Heatmap about the profound implications of America becoming a low-trust society.
That means big, bad things for disaster relief — and for climate policy in general.
When Hurricanes Helene and Milton swept through the Southeast, small-government conservatives demanded fast and effective government service, in the form of relief operations organized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Yet even as the agency was scrambling to meet the need, it found itself targeted by far-right militias, who prevented it from doing its job because they had been led by cynical politicians to believe it wasn't doing its job.
It’s almost a law of nature, or at least of politics, that when government does its job, few people notice — only when it screws up does everyone pay attention. While this is nothing new in itself, it has increasingly profound implications for the future of government-driven climate action. While that action comes in many forms and can be sold to the public in many ways, it depends on people having faith that when government steps in — whether to create new regulations, invest in new technologies, or provide benefits for climate-friendly choices — it knows what it’s doing and can accomplish its goals.
As the climate crisis grows more urgent, restoring faith in government will be more important than ever. Unfortunately, simply doing the right things — like responding competently to disasters — won’t be enough to convince people that the next climate initiative will do what it’s supposed to.
The number of people expressing faith in government today is nearly as low as it has been in the half-century pollsters have been asking the question. That trust has bounced up and down a bit — it rose after September 11, then fell again during the disastrous Iraq War — but for the last decade and half, only around 20% of Americans say they trust the government most of the time.
It’s partisan, of course: People express more trust when their party controls the White House. And the decline of trust reaches beyond the government. Faith in most of the key institutions of American life — business, education, religion, news media — has fallen in recent decades, sometimes for good reason. The net result is a public skeptical that those in authority have the ability to solve complex problems.
Changing that perspective is extraordinarily difficult, often because of the nature of good and bad news: The former usually happens slowly and invisibly, while the latter often happens dramatically and all at once.
Take the program created in the Energy Department under George W. Bush to provide loans to innovative energy technologies. If most Americans had heard of it, it was because of one company: Solyndra, a manufacturer of innovative but overly expensive solar panels. Undercut by a decline in prices of traditional panels, the company went under, and its $535 million loan was never repaid. Republicans made Solyndra’s failure into a major controversy, claiming that the program showed that government investment in green technology was corrupt, ineffective, and wasteful.
What few people heard about was that the loan program overall not only turned a profit at the time (and for what it’s worth, it still does), it also provided help to many successful companies, even if a few failed — as any venture capital investor could tell you is inevitable. The successes included Tesla, which used its federal loan to ramp up production of the sedans that would turn it from a niche manufacturer of electric roadsters into what it is today. Needless to say, Elon Musk does not advertise the fact that his success was built on government help.
More recently, the hurricane response has shown how partisan polarization can be used to undermine trust in government — especially when Donald Trump is involved. Trump took the opportunity of the hurricanes to accuse the federal government of being both political and partisan, delivering help only to those areas that vote for Democrats. Soon after, he promised to do precisely what he falsely accused the Biden administration of doing, saying that if he is president again, he will withhold disaster aid from California unless Gov. Gavin Newsom changes the state’s water policies to be more to Trump’s liking. “And we’ll say, Gavin, if you don’t do it, we’re not giving any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the fire, forest fires that you have,” Trump said. And in fact, in his first term Trump did try to withhold disaster aid from blue states.
What sounds like hypocrisy is actually something much more pernicious. As he often does, Trump is arguing not that he is clean and his opponents are dirty, but that everyone is dirty, and it’s just a question of whether government is in the hands of our team or their team. When he says he’ll “drain the swamp,” he’s telling people both that government is corrupt, and the answer is merely to change who gets the spoils. If you believe him, you’ll have no trust in government whatsoever, even if you might think he’ll use it in a way you’ll approve of.
We’ve seen again and again that people want government to perform well and get angry when it doesn’t, but they don’t reward competence when it happens. Which is why making sure systems operate properly and problems are solved is necessary but not sufficient to win back trust. Government’s advocates — especially those who are counting on it to undertake ambitious climate action both now and in the future — need not only to deliver, they have to get better at, for lack of a better word, propaganda. Policy success is not its own advertisement. And despite his ample policy achievements, Joe Biden has not been a charismatic and effective messenger — on the role of government, or much else.
Ronald Reagan used to say that the most frightening words in the English language were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”; the oft-repeated quip was at the center of his incredibly successful effort to delegitimize government in the eyes of voters. To reverse the decline of trust so people will believe that government has the knowledge and ability to tackle climate change, the public needs to be reminded — often and repeatedly — of what government does well.
Touting past and present successes on climate — and disaster relief, and so many other ways the government solves problems every day — is essential to building support for future climate initiatives. Those successes are all around, it’s just that most people never hear about them or take them for granted. But promoting government as an engine of positive change should be as high a priority for climate advocates, including those who hold public office, as discrediting government was for Reagan and is for Trump.