Climate of inaction: We can’t recover years of faltering on global warming

While it might seem nice to enjoy November days in New York with short-sleeves and no cold rain (or even any rain at all), the wacky weather is dangerous and damaging and we need to take real steps to address climate change at all levels of government.

Clear skies again and again and again, breaking the record books, is parching the city and the surrounding areas. The TV weather forecasters now look for the rare rainstorm as a good thing.

There are 15 New York counties currently under drought warning, meaning people are being urged to conserve water under the very real possibility that the reservoirs might begin running low and fires are breaking out in the too-dry vegetation. Mother Nature is out of balance and humans are part of the problem.

Unlike other areas of government action, like tax policy or tariffs, wrecking the environment can’t be undone. Regulations can be reinstated, agencies can be reconstructed, courts can be ideologically rebalanced, international treaties rejoined and so on.

The same cannot be said of our climate. If we get a future administration that chooses to prioritize combating climate change and emphasizing mitigation, it can of course put in place aggressive policies to achieve that, but the years lost are lost permanently.

We know, and have known for some time, that we have a limited amount of time to control the rising temperature before it spirals and its worse impacts become unavoidable. As we tick towards that grim milestone, we now have an incoming presidential administration that seems ready to stomp on the accelerator.

Former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin, picked by Donald Trump to be Environmental Protection Agency administrator, made his first post-appointment public promise to “restore U.S. energy dominance” and make the nation a “global leader” in the energy-sucking AI sector, tacking on the idea of clean air and water as an afterthought. Trump himself has often promised to scrap swaths of climate change policy.

Like clockwork, we hear about how every month and every year is the “hottest on record” or some variation, to the point that we barely notice what would have once registered as a concerning anomaly. The abstractions of a hostile climate are becoming concrete as deaths from heat increase, storms get stronger, crops and wildlife falter, diseases emerge, it rains too much in one place and not enough elsewhere.

Any reality lived long enough becomes the new norm, but we really shouldn’t have to get used to a future of this, of worsening standard of living driven by our failure to act when we had the opportunity to. Zeldin long represented Long Island, a community at acute risk from climate change. Trump himself, of course, was brought up in Queens, a borough where 10 people literally drowned in their apartments due to the storm surge from Hurricane Ida.

They should know that it is not a game nor a simple question of political maneuvering or preference. The droughts and the storms are not going to care about their electoral prospects or slogans. They are only going to respond to the types of policies that are specifically designed to prevent their intensity, things like control of emissions from agriculture and manufacturing and a move towards clean energy. A delay here is not one that we can simply recover.