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March/April 2007 Living Now
A Storm of Denial: Making the Global Warming Connection

by Paul Rogat Loeb

Paul Rogat Loeb

It wasn't Katrina, not even close, but Seattle's storm of the century was no picnic.

The December 2006 storm dominated our local news and made national headlines, preceding the blizzard that stranded 5,000 travelers at the Denver airport. Both storms fit the predictive model of extreme weather events caused by global climate change, and the Seattle storm fit the specific predictions for the Northwest.

But other than a single Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist, I found no media commentator who raised the link to global climate change. It gave me one more a taste of a future where the weather can suddenly turn -- and destroy the habitability of our world.

The storm hit Seattle mid-December with pounding rain and 70 mile-an-hour winds, reaching 110 miles per hour on the slopes of the Cascade Mountains. The ground was already soggy from the wettest November in Seattle history. As the wind and rain uprooted trees, many fell on houses and cars, blocked roads and took down local power lines, cutting off heat and light to one million residents in the city and surrounding areas. Thirteen people died. Sanitation systems overflowed, dumping millions of gallons of raw sewage into Puget Sound. A week later, nearly 100,000 people were still living in the cold and the dark.

For two weeks the local media talked about little else except the storm. Reporters interviewed victims, judged the performance of local utilities, suggested ways we could have been better prepared. But by offering no larger context of global warming, they lost the chance to get people involved in shaping precisely the kinds of individual and common actions that might help prevent similar storms in the future. We'd encountered a profound teachable moment, then that moment was quickly lost.

In a culture where the most important questions too often get buried, even living in the path of a disaster doesn't automatically lead us to connect our immediate crisis with the larger choices that may have helped produce it.

When a 50-year-old tree topples or a storm floods our basement, it's tangible. But the shifts increasing the likelihood and frequency of such disasters are far harder for us to comprehend. We rely on the descriptions of scientists, policy makers, citizen activists and a hesitant media that is too cautious to lead an honest discussion on the impact of our choices and the alternatives we have. For all its accuracy in depicting the roots of the crisis, even the phrase global warming (rather than climate change) feels odd when describing freak blizzards and off-the-chart rainstorms.

It would be easier if these storms were like earthquakes, beyond our influence or control. Then we could simply hope they don't happen to us and do our best to minimize their potential impact, as we do when retrofitting houses and commercial buildings for earthquake safety.

Global warming brings a more demanding challenge because its most destructive potential can be prevented. Extreme weather events could once be called acts of God. Our actions have changed this, feeding the ferocity and frequency of hurricanes and tornadoes, blizzards, droughts, floods and every imaginable kind of storm. The longer we deny this, the higher the cost.

Public concern about global warming has been increasing. In a June 2005 poll, shortly before Katrina, 59 percent of Americans said they believed global warming threatens future generations. Now, the response is 85 percent.

But we have to view our actions as being magnified, for good and ill, by the choices of other individuals in our communities, our nation and the planet. Global warming can't be solved through individual actions alone, but individual choices will inevitably play a part. In the wake of Seattle's storm, I took some modest individual actions to lighten my impact on the planet. I scheduled an energy audit for further insulating our house, contacted a company that does solar hot water installations (even in Seattle, they pay back in seven to eight years with the new tax credits), and looked into leasing solar electricity panels for the cost of what you'd pay your local utility.

To make sustainable options available for everyone requires common actions, like alternative energy subsidies and tax credits, the mass purchasing by government entities of energy efficient technologies, and the creation of tax and regulatory codes that reward efficiency over waste. Our local utilities have been subsidizing energy-efficient compact fluorescent lightbulbs, which helps.

In 2005, the Washington State legislature passed a bill that will pay ratepayers for every kilowatt they generate with renewable technologies, and if they use in-state manufactured photovoltaic panels, make solar electricity affordable even here in cloudy Seattle. The bill to support these local initiatives passed our state legislature overwhelmingly, precisely because it combined investment in environmental sustainability with the promotion of local jobs.

The lights are back on in Seattle, but major storms in cities throughout America should serve as wakeup calls. But their ultimate impact will depend on what we're willing to learn from them.

Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear (named the among the top three political books of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association) and Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. Visit www.paulloeb.org.