For us to tackle climate change, companies need to pay their tax

It’s been a year of natural disasters. After Irma, Maria, Harvey, hurricane Florence left a devastating landscape in the Caribbean. Extreme temperatures across the northern hemisphere have caused devastating fires from Europe to the US. Dozens have been killed in the Philippines after typhoon Mangkhut triggered landslides.

‘The IMF reports that the revenue lost from tax
evasion in developing countries is 1.3 times larger,
 as a share of GDP, than it is in advanced economies.’

And the worst consequences of climate change are yet to come.

It is a huge challenge for rich countries and for developing nations, a sisyphean task: how to collect enough revenue to respond to major catastrophes, while at the same time trying to lift billions of people out of poverty?

Look at Indonesia. Disasters are a familiar tragedy in the world’s fourth most populous nation, with its thousands of islands across hundreds of miles of ocean. This should make disaster risk planning crucial. It is not the case, as the latest earthquake and tsunami showed. Reports revealed that parts of the tsunami alert system didn’t work. In some areas, there were no sirens at all. The death toll is still climbing.

Read the opinion piece by Wayne Swan from The Guardian - “For us to tackle climate change, companies need to pay their tax.”

Climate change doesn’t care about our plans - that’s why cities need to plan for climate change

Ban Ki Moon, then United Nations Secretary General observed in 2011, that “Climate change does not respect borders, it does not respect who you are -- rich and poor, small and big.”

Interstate highway 45 is submerged from the effects
 of Hurricane Harvey seen during widespread flooding
in Houston, Texas, U.S. August 27, 2017.

Recent events from the immense damage that hurricanes Maria, Harvey and Irma have wreaked on Puerto Rico, Houston, Miami and the Caribbean, or the monsoon floods that have forced millions from their homes in India and Bangladesh, illustrate that climate change does not respect whether we are ready or not. Our planet’s climate has changed and its impact will be felt by every one of us and for generations to come.

Climate scientists have, historically, been reluctant to attribute specific natural disasters or weather events to climate change. Yet, there is no doubt that warmer surface water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Ocean and the seas and oceans of South Asia contributed to the intensity of recent hurricanes and monsoon rains.

Read the zilent.org story by Mark Watts - “Climate change doesn’t care about our plans - that’s why cities need to plan for climate change.”

Costs of Climate Change: Early Estimate for Hurricanes, Fires Reaches $300 Billion

The devastation from hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria—plus dozens of wildfires that raged across the West in early August—could result in the costliest string of weather events in U.S. history, according to a new report.

Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria hit U.S. communities and farms
 as powerful storms within weeks of one another, causing
 extensive damage to public and private property.

Over the course of a few weeks, the hurricanes and wildfires left a trail of damage that could add up to nearly $300 billion, according to early estimates from the authors of "The Economic Case for Climate Action in the United States," a report released on Wednesday by the nonprofit Universal Ecological Fund. If they're right, the cost of the damage would be equivalent to nearly half the president's proposed 2018 budget for the Department of Defense.

"The evidence is undeniable. These recent extreme weather events are a continuation of a three-decades trend of increasing numbers, intensities and costs of severe storms, hurricanes, flooding, droughts and wildfires," said report co-author Robert Watson, a former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "Simply, the more fossil fuels we burn, the faster the climate continues to change and cost. Thus, transitioning to a low-carbon economy is essential for economic growth and is cheaper than the gigantic costs of inaction.”

Adding up the economic losses from extreme weather events, more frequent weather events and the health impacts from air pollution, the report found that over the last decade, the United States has lost an average of $240 billion each year. And that's projected to go up.

Read the Inside Climate News story - “Costs of Climate Change: Early Estimate for Hurricanes, Fires Reaches $300 Billion.”

Conspiracies, Corruption and Climate

After the devastation wreaked by Harvey on Houston — devastation that was right in line with meteorologists’ predictions — you might have expected everyone to take heed when the same experts warned about the danger posed by Hurricane Irma. But you would have been wrong.

Rush Limbaugh in 2012, left; A satellite image on Thursday
 showed Hurricane Irma in the Caribbean Sea.

On Tuesday, Rush Limbaugh accused weather scientists of inventing Irma’s threat for political and financial reasons: “There is a desire to advance this climate change agenda, and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it,” he declared, adding that “fear and panic” help sell batteries, bottled water, and TV advertising.

He evacuated his Palm Beach mansion soon afterward.

Read Paul Krugman’s thoughts in The New York Times - “Conspiracies, Corruption and Climate.”

Rick Perry says climate change debate is "secondary" amid Harvey destruction

Energy Secretary Rick Perry, a former Texas governor, is still taken aback by Hurricane Harvey's devastation, but said conversations about climate change can wait.

U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry -
he has argued that the climate change
debate is very secondary at this
particular time.

"No one has ever seen flooding like this," he told CBSN in an interview Friday, noting that parts of Texas had seen 50 inches of rain. 

In spite of the record-breaking rainfall and scientists charging that warming seas have caused hurricanes of greater intensity, Perry declined to weigh in right now on whether the White House would make any changes to its stance on climate change.

"We can line up scientists on both sides of this," he told CBSN's Stephanie Sy, but "this is not the time to be having this conversation." At this moment, he said, it's time to focus on helping victims recover from the damage wrought by Harvey.

"Everyone wants to run to the climate change debate, but that is very secondary at this particular time," he said.

Read the CBS story - “Rick Perry says climate change debate is "secondary" amid Harvey destruction.”

(Most people have a perverse avoidance of discussing the cause of an event while it is actually happening or whichever community affected is knee deep in the recovery process - that is wrong, for the evidence is frequently its richest, and clearest, when at its peak, or when the difficulty as at its worst. Rick Perry’s suggestion that climate change debate - that’s the first mistake for there is no ‘debate’ - is "secondary" amid Harvey destruction is political delaying tactic during which people can avoid the hard questions and, equally, the hard answers - as Al Gore has said the “inconvenient truth” - Robert McLean) 

Hurricane Harvey: Connecting the dots between climate change and more extreme events

The science of attributing extreme weather to climate change is complicated and developing every day. 

Here’s a guide of what we know about the links between climate change and Harvey to help unpack the elements that contributed to this historic and unfolding storm. 

Read the Climate Code Red story - “Hurricane Harvey: Connecting the dots between climate change and more extreme events.”

Hurricanes, Climate and the Capitalist Offset

Texans will find few consolations in the wake of a hurricane as terrifying as Harvey. But here, at least, is one: A biblical storm has hit them, and the death toll —38 as of this writing — is mercifully low, given its intensity.

Nature has no respect for our status symbols.

This is not how it plays out in much of the world. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch ripped through Central America and killed anywhere between 11,000 and 19,000 people, mostly in Honduras and Nicaragua. Nearly a decade later Cyclone Nargis slammed into Myanmar and a staggering 138,000 people perished.

Nature’s furies — hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides, droughts, infectious diseases, you name it — may strike unpredictably. But their effects are not distributed at random.

Rich countries tend to experience, and measure, the costs of such disasters primarily in terms of money. Poor countries experience them primarily in terms of lives. Between 1940 and 2016, a total of 3,348 people died in the United States on account of hurricanes, according to government data, for an average of 43 victims a year. That’s a tragedy, but compare it to the nearly 140,000 lives lost when a cyclone hit Bangladesh in 1991.

Why do richer countries fare so much better than poorer ones when it comes to natural disasters? It isn’t just better regulation. I grew up in Mexico City, which adopted stringent building codes following a devastating earthquake in 1957. That didn’t save the city in the 1985 earthquake, when we learned that those codes had been flouted for years by lax or corrupt building inspectors, and thousands of people were buried under the rubble of shoddy construction. Regulation is only as good, or bad, as its enforcement.

Read opinion piece in The New York Times by Bret Stephens - “Hurricanes, Climate and the Capitalist Offset.”

Hurricane Harvey opens dialogue on climate change in San Francisco.

Harvey has dumped nearly 25 trillion gallons of water on Texas and Louisiana.

Piled on top of the entire city of San Francisco, that water would be more than 2,000 feet tall -- nearly twice the size of Sales Force Tower.

Harvey has dumped nearly 25 trillion 

gallons of water on Texas and Louisiana.

Many hope Harvey will motivate action to combat climate change.

Watch the video in the player above to hear what Congresswoman Jackie Speier had to say on the topic.

Read the ABC7 News story - “Hurricane Harvey opens dialogue on climate change in San Francisco."