Storm Surges

It was no coincidence that last week we saw the combination of destructive storms in America’s interior and an escalating crisis on the country’s southern border. These are two of the most pressing issues we are grappling with now, and as both become more severe, it will be apparent even to deniers that they are related to climate change.

Hang on — what am I doing here?

Some readers might recall that I wrote a column that appeared in these pages, and then, at the end of 2018, I got out before being thrown out. I had been having a conversation with Joe Shaw, executive editor of the Express News Group (yes, it says all that on his very, very wide license plate), about returning in some capacity — and then Phil Keith, who wrote “Mostly Right,” passed away three weeks ago.

My return to the eye-squinting limelight of the op-ed pages was moved up, though I can never replace my good friend.

This new column will not be looking back or looking inward. Instead, “The Road Yet Taken” will look at connections between the present and the future, and what is likely to transpire, in a nonpartisan way. (This might inspire some wags to contend that the column should be titled “Mostly Wrong.”)

I do believe that international and national events and trends will often have an impact on eastern Long Island, and perhaps we can anticipate that instead of startled and often inadequate reactions.

Last week, we experienced two storm surges. One was more directly related to weather. We had already seen, in February, the raging winter storm that battered Texas. Worse than the ensuing darkness and bitter cold that Texas residents experienced was that 111 of them died. In comparison, Hurricane Harvey, which had battered Houston in 2017, claimed 68 lives.

So Texas endured a storm that was nearly twice as destructive as a hurricane, with the effects more widespread: “The storm itself was massive, engulfing much of Texas with snow, ice and frigid temperatures that broke records in many places,” according to New York Times coverage. “But the devastation intensified as millions were left to weather the storm and days that followed without electricity.”

What is frightening is that this event will not be viewed as an aberration as the years go by.

Climate change is a scientific fact, and one result is more powerful storms. Eastern Long Island does not have a protective dome around it, so our time will come.

What we also learned from Texas is how fragile a power grid can be. The question going forward is not if we will be knocked down but how long and painful will it be to climb up off the canvas.

Then there were the most recent weather events, with storm-driven tornadoes drilling through primarily Alabama and Georgia. One could counter that tornadoes happen in the South and Midwest — no big deal. However, these were not in June or August but March.

The Storm Prediction Center issued two “high-risk outlooks” last month, and at least 19 tornadoes were confirmed. And people died, plus families had their homes and communities destroyed.

Unfortunately, these areas have the most porous safety nets because of tight state budgets and public health systems already stretched to the limit because of the pandemic.

The other storm surge is on the border with Mexico. There have been attempts to frame the influx of people into the United States as a political issue, because in the year before President Joe Biden took office immigration was not as much in the headlines. This can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic being more prominent and its restrictions keeping a lid, at least partially, on border crossings.

History will judge how well the Trump administration did with immigration. We already see only pieces of the promised wall built, costing American taxpayers billions of dollars — that check from Mexico must be a victim of the pandemic-related U.S. Postal Service slowdown — and, as time goes on and dust swirls around them, those forlorn border wall sections will be like abandoned malls whose stores could not stay in business.

The fact is, every administration (and Congress) of the last 35 years has kicked the can of effective immigration reform down the road. In 1986, Ronald Reagan signed a sweeping immigration reform bill into law. According to an NPR story, “It was sold as a crackdown: There would be tighter security at the Mexican border, and employers would face strict penalties for hiring undocumented workers. But the bill also made any immigrant who’d entered the country before 1982 eligible for amnesty — a word not usually associated with the father of modern conservatism.”

The effort largely failed, and there has been a fingers-in-the-dike approach ever since.

How is the situation at the Mexican border — and it is a crisis, whatever the Biden administration says — related to climate change? In the coming years, we — and by “we” I mean the more economically stable countries like the United States — will be confronted by more climate refugees.

In most cases, people crossing over from Mexico were looking for work and the opportunity of a better life for their children, especially in American schools. In the next few years, we will see more people trying to get in because they simply have no choice, with their countries devastated by intense storms like those that rolled through Central America and northern South America last fall. For thousands upon thousands of people, their homes and businesses and farms were suddenly gone, and there was no other option but to leave.

This is a topic for a whole other column, but one example of the pipeline: A March 29 Time magazine article reports that “5.5 million people have poured out of Venezuela since 2015” — that is almost 20 percent of that country’s population — “almost as many as the 6.6 million people who have fled Syria over the course of a decade.”

They are, of course, heading north. This is the kind of pressure, like steam, building in the pipeline.

How prepared are we to humanely handle the explosion?