This commentary is by George Longenecker of Middlesex, who taught at Vermont Technical College.
The week after the flood, I walked through downtown Montpelier. On the lawn of the Kellogg-Hubbard Library was a 5-foot-high pile of waterlogged books. Across Main Street were piles of debris from Hugo’s Restaurant and other businesses. I had to meander around head-high piles of debris in front of Bear Pond Books and Capitol Stationers.
We met in offices above Walgreen’s Pharmacy, where a disaster recovery team had ripped the store to its studs. The building and the whole city smelled of mold.
In their book “The Big Myth,” Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway document how for the last century big business has lobbied against any government regulation. They say: “Climate change is a market failure, because markets, acting illegally, failed to provide what people need and created a problem markets have been unable to solve.”
In their earlier book, “Merchants of Doubt,” they documented how think tanks and lobbyists, some funded by fossil fuel corporations, cast doubt on the science of climate change. They did so, especially in the case of Exxon-Mobil, knowing that the scientific predictions of global warming were reasonably accurate.
Any science operates within limits of reasonable accuracy, but doubters twisted the science to claim that global warming was false.
If fossil fuel emissions had been more strictly regulated starting in the mid-20th century, we probably would not have had the disastrous Vermont flood of July 10-12. The freedom of industry to thwart emissions regulations and to argue that climate change is a myth got us into this disaster.
A few powerful corporations have tried to convince us that there should be no federal regulations on their activities and that the free market will fix things. Yet freedom has always been a delicate balance, weighing some rights against others.
With more than 4,000 homes and 800 businesses in Vermont destroyed, we see close up the effects of climate change. Vermont’s July flood was but one in series of summer climate disasters that are coming more frequently and coming sooner than predicted.
I recently drove through Montpelier at dusk; storefront after storefront was dark. I realized that things will never be the same. If this is the free market at work, where is the freedom?
It’s as though we’re driving a 1960 Edsel down the highway at 95, gas to the floor, 10 miles to the gallon, unwilling to hit the brakes even when we see the flood ahead.
There is still time to put on the brakes and reverse course, though we cannot easily undo the damage done and the warming that’s begun. It will take federal and international cooperation. Oreskes and Conway say in “The Big Myth”: “American antagonism toward science and government regulations has hindered action on global climate change.”
The bickering and blaming will have to stop. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was a good start. Congress needs to continue to do more. Without government leading the way on climate change, the weather we’ve seen this summer will continue.
