Rebooting State Planning: Climate Change and the Energy Challenge

Abstract

Authors Note: While this commentary was being written, the terrible fury and destruction of Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. Numerous ecological disruptions, a result of the long history of Mississippi Delta water control and wetlands reclamation, have caused land subsidence as well as beach and protective barrier island erosion. These disruptions clearly increased the storm s destructiveness, but the power of the atmospheric depression itself, together with longer hurricane seasons and the increasing intensity of tropical storms generally, lead inexorably to the doorstep of global warming. No statistical correlation can prove this, and natural weather oscillations may well be involved. But the climatological models, and the assessments of global warming impacts, describe a picture entirely consistent with the mind-boggling events of Hurricane Katrina. While immense resources are rightly spent on disaster relief planning and preparation (though these elements were badly defective in the case of Hurricane Katrina), minuscule resources have been committed to proactive planning to reduce the causes of climate change, primarily greenhouse gas emissions.