Some storm, that Irene. Trouble is, it may – as so many recent catastrophic weather events have – turn out merely to be a taste of things to come. I can tell you, I’ve lived in the northeast for fifty years – that’s 350 dog years, young ‘uns! – and I have never seen anything like the flooding that has affected so much of northern and eastern New York. For chrissake, a street two blocks away from me was evacuated due to flooding… and we got just a very small piece of the storm. I shudder to think what might have happened to us if that storm had hit a bit further to the west.

Here’s the thing, though – this has been a disastrous year for weather pretty much everywhere. We’ve had tornados here in upstate New York. Multiple tornados. (My cousin saw three funnel clouds while out on the golf course that day.) Sure, we’ve gotten them before, but they were more like three in a decade, and not anything on a grand, midwestern scale. Just this morning, on NPR, the first three or four minutes of their news summary was taken up by extreme weather and other disasters – the aftermath of Irene in Vermont and New York, a tropical storm bearing down on New Orleans, record-breaking drought in Texas as well as wildfires there and in Louisiana. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard harried residents of some devastated town say something like “this is the worst ____ I’ve ever experienced” or “we haven’t had a ______ this bad in 60/80/100 years.”

Former NASA scientist James Hansen (denounced by conservative hacks as an “alarmist”) and others have spoken out for years on the forces behind this extreme weather. But you hardly have to be a rocket scientist to work this out. Our climate is more unstable than it’s ever been in our lifetimes – I think we can all acknowledge that. And as of a few years ago, we seemed to have something like a broad consensus that the burning of fossil fuels was a major contributor to global warming. I think at that time major corporations saw some profit potential in what was agreed to be an unshakeable truth. Since then, the financial crisis and the Great Recession have convinced them and their political allies that cash-strapped Americans can more easily be sold comforting lies than inconvenient truths. Now it’s all about getting the economy moving again, drilling out more oil and gas, and turning everything into cash.

There are perceived upsides to things like building a massive pipeline to carry tar sands oil from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico. But there are enormous costs, as well. As Bill McKibben has said, the tar sands deposits represent an enormous carbon bomb waiting to go off. If it gets tapped more efficiently via that pipeline, it’s essentially “game over” in Hansen’s words, with costs previewed this past week in places like Montpelier VT and elsewhere.

luv u,

jp