The prolonged polar vortex event of 2021 is currently wrecking havoc in southern states. Governor Abbott of Texas even requested a federal emergency declaration, which allows increased federal resources and assistance for Texas communities affected by the unaccustomed cold. The request was approved very quickly by the Biden Administration.
Contrast that with the foot dragging and public castigation by the Trump Administration during the west coast wildfires over the past few years, particularly those in the blue state of California. President Trump tweeted that California’s ferocious fires were not caused by accelerated climate change, lightning storms, and careless individual human error, but instead by the state’s “mismanagement” of its forests, including a lack of “raking” the forest floors to deny the fires fuel. Trump insisted that “you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests – there are many, many leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up . . . Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us.” No matter that most of the fires began and raged on federal land, and were fueled by historically hot, dry weather and strong, sustained winds scientifically proven to be exacerbated by accelerated climate change.
But when much of the city of Houston was flooded during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the Trump administration did not hesitate to send disaster aid, despite the fact that Texas’ and Houston’s own lax development standards, flood mitigation strategies, and continued accelerated climate change denial policies greatly worsened the damaging effects of the historically strong storm. The irresponsible removal of wetlands and lack of proper storm water and zoning regulations caused flood water to divert to roads and populated areas, and a chemical plant to leak toxins into residential neighborhoods. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, after railing against aid for blue states New York and New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, wasted no time appealing for federal aid for his own red state five years later.
Fast forward to February 2021, as the current polar vortex causes ice storms and record snowfall and freezing temperatures in red southern states, freezing infrastructure and causing massive multi-vehicle accidents on roads. Southern red states have found their entire lives shut down for several days in a more complete way than COVID-19 managed to do over the course of the past year. Frozen wind turbines and fossil fuel well heads, malfunctioning power lines and transformer stations, frozen pipes and well systems threaten people’s safety even within their own homes as they go for days on end largely without power and running water, and unplowed, snow and ice-ridden roads make travel next to impossible. Mismanaged power availability by de-centralized, mostly unregulated private companies that now own most of Texas’ power systems has caused rolling black outs that last for most of the days and nights in many areas. To alleviate this, residents of surrounding states to the north with better managed power systems are going through less severe rolling blackouts to supplement the abysmal Texas power grid. Governor Abbott has called for an investigation into the failures of Texas’ power systems, which is good – but unless it leads to significant policy, behavioral, and fiscal changes it will be for naught and Texans will repeatedly find themselves in similar situations as the rest of the country becomes less willing to bail them out.
Like with Hurricane Harvey and similar recent storms, the warning signs of increased polar vortex events have been flashing for years, but the leaders of Texas and other southern states simply refused to heed them due to climate change skepticism and an unwillingness to raise taxes or energy rates and spend the money necessary to prepare for and mitigate the effects of these increasingly common extreme weather events. And so the rest of the country now gets to pay for it. Which we will gladly do – once. After that, these red states had better wise up, hold their leaders accountable, and start ponying up more state and local resources to help themselves so that less federal assistance will be needed in the future for similar crises. The southern states need to tax themselves and invest in weather proofing their own homes, businesses, communities, and infrastructure – from cold snaps, more frequent hurricanes, and flooding – both from severe storms and sea level rise.
Northern states have been expected to mitigate their own weather-related risks for a long time. No one in the South cries for northern states when they have a record heat wave, and northern states do not ask for disaster assistance when those happen unless it causes devastating tornadoes, the locations of which are more localized and cannot be precisely predicted like hurricanes and polar vortexes. Most northern communities have relocated vulnerable structures away from dangerously flood-prone areas along major rivers, including the Red River on the Minnesota-North Dakota border and the Mississippi River as it flows south through the Midwest.
Northern homes are insulated against cold, which also helps keep heat out during the summer months when residents run their air conditioners. Northern power grids, well heads, wind turbines, and solar panels are built to withstand months of winter weather as well as summer heat waves, and residents pay higher taxes for snow and ice removal from roads, bridges, parking lots, and airports so that communities do not have to shut everything down every time it snows or gets extremely cold. Northern home and business owners insulate their pipes so they do not freeze in cold weather or “sweat” during the hot summer months. Northern residents pay for a larger variety of clothes that residents must wear or store according to the appropriate season – one of the reasons why the state of Minnesota does not impose a sales tax on clothing. Of course, there are those in northern and coastal blue states that complain mightily about higher taxes and more cautious government regulation in regard to building codes, zoning, and environmental safety, saying that it stifles business growth and development. But as the past several years have shown in several southern states, ill-regulated and undertaxed growth and development can cause its own very expensive and even deadly problems, and as the old saying goes you often get what you pay for. Although no one is in favor of excessive taxes or wasteful spending, coastal and northern blue states with higher standards of living should not engage in a race to the bottom with red states for lowest tax rates, especially just for the sake of lowering taxes. Because those same low-tax red states are not as generous when it comes to helping blue states out when disaster occasionally strikes. When blue states ask for help, red state leaders cry “socialism” and preach about “local responsibility.” Apparently, it is neither socialism nor a sign of local negligence when it is red states who repeatedly need federal assistance.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/11/climate/houston-flooding-climate.html
https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-blame-wind-for-texas-electricity-woes-11613500788
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-power-outage-ercot/
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2017/04/17/red-river-flood-20-year-anniversary-towns-transformed