The Texas Floods Were Made Worse by Climate Denialism
Elected officials must be held accountable, now and in the future, for the lives lost in disasters brought on by increasingly extreme weather.
No one can do this alone.
Photographer: Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images
The tragic news out of central Texas has been heartbreaking, but it’s also been maddening — because so many lives could have been saved if elected officials had done their jobs. They owe the families who lost loved ones — the death toll from the Fourth of July floods is now at more than 100 — more than thoughts and prayers. They owe them a sincere commitment to righting their deadly wrong, by tackling the problem they’ve turned their backs on for too long: climate change.
The scientific evidence is clear that the more frequent extreme weather we are experiencing is being driven by climate change — and that it’s only going to get worse. As the director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather at Texas A&M University put it, the storms and flooding in central Texas are “exactly what the future is going to hold.” And yet so many elected officials are pretending otherwise.