Slow Stirrings Among Conservatives on Adaptation -- Just Don't Mention Climate Change
By EVAN LEHMANN of ClimateWire
Published: July 28, 2011
Tony Allender believes in climate change, but his Texan bosses are more skeptical. That disconnection might have made his job to help prepare a coastal city for rising seas and more flooding a losing effort.
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So the city planner adopted a motto being used increasingly in conservative places where global warming and its orbiting impacts, such as more powerful storms, are hitched to zany liberal politics: Don't mention it.
"The minute I do, the conversation is over," said Allender, who arrived four years ago in League City, Texas, a community of 83,000 near the serrated Gulf Coast and encircled by assets of the nation's energy industry.
His quiet approach was rewarded. About two months ago, elected city leaders approved a comprehensive plan limiting new development near wetlands and in flood plains that might be threatened in the future by rising seas, heavier downpours and surging waves driven farther onshore by hurricanes.
Those are steps toward climate adaptation -- just don't tell city officials that.
"Nowhere in our documents would you see the words climate change -- because I wanted it to pass," Allender said. "It's still a topic that tends to generate more anxiety and discussion. If I can accomplish the exact same things without necessarily using the words climate change, then we'll claim that victory."
Rather than pursuing "setbacks" to forbid new building in areas vulnerable to potential sea level rise, the plan establishes conservation easements to preserve the city's natural areas. It restricts development in places likely to flood, but for different reasons. The provision was packaged as a way to attract higher-valued homes, and more tax revenue.
Here's what you don't call it: a responsive policy aimed at a menacing environmental threat.
"Let's say a coastal community has a resilience campaign. Resilience is the antidote to vulnerability. So you're admitting vulnerability. So it's kind of a deterrent for a tax base," Hank Hodde, who is working on environmental management policies in the area as a graduate student, said of some local officials' outlook.
Climate change an 'insufficient motivation'
With climate change now carrying the stigma of being a Democratic keyword, local planning officials and outreach scientists in Republican areas are increasingly seeking ways to promote adaptation policies without igniting political opposition.
From Texas to New Jersey, local officials and scientists say they can't mention climate change, or even observed impacts already under way, without fear of disrupting meetings with local engineers, flood-plain managers and politicians.
"We have a lot of decisionmakers that are really very skeptical of climate change. It is a politically charged, hot-button issue. We can't even use that word," April Turner, a coastal communities specialist with the South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium, said at a conference for coastal professionals in Chicago last week.
"The common perception is it's not a problem at all, or if it is a problem it is beyond our control because it's occurring naturally," she added. "This presents quite a challenge for us. Climate change is really an insufficient motivation for adaptation planning."
Sea level rise also is sometimes a diminished justification to act as it gets increasingly aligned with climate partisanship. New strategies by advocates and educators include focusing on stormwater management to prevent flooding. Hazard planning, like establishing evacuation routes, is another area that might satisfy local politicians' aspirations to address immediate dangers, rather than futuristic scenarios.
The South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium, which receives funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is helping the city of Charleston grapple with rising ocean waters, which already inundate some downtown city streets several times a year at extreme high tide.
The city, which is barely above sea level and is sinking, is also frequently flooded during storms. Drainage tunnels fill with seawater at high tide, leaving little or no room for rainwater. Some streets become impassable as a result.
God more involved in sea level than Charleston