AS THE death toll from Hurricane Katrina passes 1,000 and while Hurricane Rita inundates the five million residents of the Houston area, it's about time for our political leaders to stop running away from reality. With scores of scientists warning that global warming played a role in powering the worst hurricane season in recorded history, it's time for the nation's leaders to craft an energy policy that acknowledges the disastrous human consequences of climate change.
With the unprecedented destruction of recent hurricane seasons, the warnings that the scientific community has been issuing about global warming appear to have come to fruition. For instance, CNN reported that an article published by a team of Georgia Tech researchers in the journal Science said that the yearly average for category four or category five storms has climbed from 11 in the 1970s to 18 today.
CNN notes that the report concluded that surface temperatures in tropical oceanic areas have risen by one degree and raised the risk of dangerously strong hurricanes like Katrina and Rita. Although there has been some disagreement among experts as to the role played by climate change in the warming of the oceans, Judith Craig, a co-author of the study, told CNN that the phenomena "certainly has an element that global warming is contributing to."
While the link between global warming and the rise in destructive hurricanes is only beginning to be understood, the fact that the burning of fossil fuels is causing destructive global warming has been the majority scientific consensus for several years.
According to Paul Roberts in his book The End of Oil, as fossil fuels have been burned at increasing rates, temperatures have risen by three degrees Fahrenheit, while the atmospheric concentration of the global warming causing gas, carbon-dioxide, have risen from 270 to 370 parts per million.
Roberts notes that the monster hurricanes that have been so destructive this year could be just the tip of the iceberg in terms of global warming. In addition to hurricanes, climate change threatens to make crop lands barren, allow tropical diseases like malaria to appear in temperate areas like Europe and the United States and permanently submerge low lying cities like Miami and New Orleans as ice caps melt and sea levels rise.
While these scenarios should act as warning for the future, one of the most significant aspect of Katrina and Rita is that they have shown that the effects of global warming are not manifested through the papers of climatologists but through the suffering of millions of average Americans.
While Katrina and Rita have taken over 1,000 lives and made millions homeless they have also shown the vulnerability of the entire American system to natural disasters. With the vast majority of the nation's oil refineries located in the vicinity of Houston and New Orleans, these storms have created enormous disruptions in the petroleum market and caused the price of gas to skyrocket.
According to a Sept. 22 report by Chris Isadora in CNNMoney, gas prices could have easily risen to five dollars per gallon in the aftermath of Hurricane Rita. While the ultimate path of Rita spared most of Houston's refineries, the future storms could have even more devastating economic effects.An extreme rise in oil prices would be tremendously significant, as high oil prices drive up inflation, curb economic growth and raise unemployment.
With all this in mind, it is clear that it is now too late to put off dealing with the problem of global warming. Our political leaders should begin by crafting a serious energy policy that raises minimum gas mileage of cars and establishes a carbon-trading system for large corporations modeled on the successful system that has already been implemented by Europe.
While many detractors would lament that these efforts would hurt the economy by forcing producers to implement expensive environmental standards, Roberts notes that these changes could be made easily and cost effectively if consumers had an incentive to sacrifice some bells and whistles on cars and appliances for fuel efficiency. Moreover, Katrina and Rita prove that any harm that these regulations would inflict upon the economy would be far outweighed by the cost of inaction.
Because of this, political leaders should realize that dealing with global warming is no longer about the environment. Instead, it is about the factory worker who cannot feed her children after high gas prices forced her employer to lay off workers. It is about the thousands of Biloxians that have been left homeless as their city lies in ruins. Most of all, it is about the thousand men, women and children who have lost their lives in New Orleans as a flood of biblical proportions engulfed their city.
If our political leaders fail to seriously address this issue, they will be failing the American people.
Adam Keith is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. He can be reached at akeith@cavalierdaily.com.
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