When I saw videos of two feet of hail in the streets of Santa Rosa in early July, and felt the power 10 days ago of the most intense wind and rain storm Albuquerque has ever seen, I thought of Senator Tom Udall’s line, “If anyone still denies that climate change is real, I invite them to come to New Mexico.”
Having seen the predictions of climate change scientists come to life, it’s heartening to know that New Mexico’s senior senator is among the most outspoken politicians in the country when it comes to confronting the reality of our changing atmosphere.
While so much of Washington politics dithers and spins and yelps in pettifogging frenzies over piles of Nada, Tom Udall’s focus on our tumultuous climate gives him among the sanest voices in Congress.
Even his mass emails are on point: “New Mexico is suffering the worst drought conditions in the nation. Temperatures in our state have been rising 50 percent faster than the global national average in recent decades. Climate change is very real. And so are the costs to New Mexico’s economy, our families, and our way of life.”
How much wiser, and more humane, is it to focus on dangerous realities we are all experiencing than it is to incite violent paranoia about immigrants, brutally worsen food insecurity in poor children by attacking the food stamp program, deny African Americans their voting rights, and privatize essential public functions so companies can make billions off taxpayers with no accountability?
Unless some sanity takes hold in Washington soon, the United States is going to be overwhelmed by weather events we could have been working to prepare for, if our leadership hadn’t locked in a wasteful and maddening ideological blood feud that’s leaving us tragically vulnerable to what lies ahead.
It’s as if we were being “governed” by a committee of lunatics. Storms raging all around us, deserts creeping into our crops lands, our forests so dry a lightning strike can ignite miles and miles of devastation -- and the committee of lunatics grumbles and groans on about the moral implications of poverty and the ethical virtues of being filthy rich.
Udall has consistently supported renewable energy, the EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gases, cap and trade anti-carbon legislation, tax credits for renewable electricity, tax incentives for renewable energy, investments for homegrown biofuel, removing oil and gas exploration subsidies, a moratorium on off shore drilling, and raising CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency) standards and incentives for alternative fuels; and he voted against oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, according to OnTheIssues.com.
Udall co-hosted, with New Mexico State University last year, the New Mexico Water Resources Research Institute’s 57th Annual Water Conference. Udall served as a catalyst for a detailed Conference Report.
The Report stated a reality that many are still trying to deny. “It is likely to be drier in New Mexico in the decades to come than it has been in recent decades past….By almost any measure, under current trends and trajectories, future water supply will not meet future water demand in New Mexico.
“Although supply can clearly be augmented in the future by conservation, improved policy and management, and new technologies, the evidence that emerges from the best New Mexico water science is that significant reduction in demand will be essential to meeting the constraints placed by smaller future supplies.”
Economic development in New Mexico, urban planning in our major cities, and agricultural practices and policies statewide cannot pretend these conditions do not exist. Leaders can’t pretend water scarcity is not the determining factor of our future. Wasting water for fracking or uranium mining, gobbling up agricultural water rights to promote l950s sprawl development, or allowing massive pollution of irreplaceable groundwater supplies is a slow form of communal suicide.
I think Senator Udall understands this with a clarity that few in Washington share.
Udall’s been described in the Daily Beast, and its columnist Eleanor Clift, as being on a “lonely climate-change Crusade.” Clift writes, “Not since Al Gore made a splash with ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ has Washington heard a politician so impassioned about global warming. Udall is not as apocryphal or as sanctimonious as Gore.” He tends toward marketplace solutions, Clift says, like putting a high price on carbon pollution, requiring power companies to use renewable energy sources in increasing amounts, and creating tax incentives for wind and solar energy that don’t have to be renewed every year, thus helping investors to make long range decisions.
Most efforts like those are being squeezed out of the public discourse by thedead-ended propaganda of climate change deniers and their corporate sponsors.
It may be that Udall’s lonely crusade is more important at the moment than the policy it can generate. When someone has the courage to say “Look, the Emperor has no clothes,” others might eventually come to see he’s telling the truth.
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