Meteorologists, who study weather events, have labeled Hurricane Harvey that hit Southeast Texas the last week of August, 2017, a 1,000 year flood. That means a given location could expect to see an event of that scale only once every thousand years.
Harvey dropped 50 inches of rain on some parts of Houston in five days.
Flooding? It was like nothing ever recorded before. More than 100,000 Homes and businesses damaged or destroyed across the region. Hundreds of thousands of people were affected. One estimate suggests that the clean up and restoration after Harvey will cost more than the 230 billion cost of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy combined.
Moreover, Harvey constituted the third major flooding of Southeast Texas in three years. Floods you should expect to see happening once in a hundred years, now coming annually. Okay, that might be a stretch. Let’s say, because of climate change, a hundred, a five hundred, or a thousand year flood can now be expected once in a decade in and around Houston. Combine that with the accelerating planetary sea level rise driven by climate change, the future does not look good from low elevation, densely populated regions like Florida and the Gulf coast of Texas.
In fact, as the exteme flooding in Texas was unfolding, there was also very extreme flooding happening in Southeast Asia.
When these things happen, we have no choice but to depend on government to be a big part of the solution. Unfortunately in Texas, government has been and continues to be an anti-regulation, bastion of denial, and a big part of the problem. So is the Federal government.
The science behind climate change is not complicated. Eight graders can understand it. Human activity pumps billions of tons of carbon dioxide, methane, and other hydro-carbon gases into Earth’s atmosphere. Those molecules get trapped in our planet’s atmosphere and absorb heat energy that comes from the sun. That causes land, seas, and the sky to heat up. The increased trapped heat destabilizes ocean currents and weather.
Ugly weather extremes like hurricane Harvey are becoming a regular part of life on Earth. We have only ourselves to blame
The solution begins with a cultural commitment to restore the ‘Of, By, and For the People’ part of the Constitution. The way to make that happen is to neutralize the use of money in our politics by bankers greedy billionaires, and big business profiteers. Removing the dirty money from American politics requires drastic grassroots action. We need a Constitutional amendment, a 28th Amendment, that says two things… ‘Corporations are not People’ and ‘Money is not Speech’. Anything short of that would be a half-measure at best. At this moment in time, the primary maxim we are governed by is ‘He who has the money makes the rules’.
Move to Amend is a political action group with one focus…passing a 28th Constitutional Amendment that says unambiguously that ‘Corporations are not People’ and thus are not entitled to human rights. The other part of Move to Amend’s equation is ‘Money is not Speech’, which means because you have money doesn’t mean you have the right to use it to buy the public policy you want.
We support Move to Amend. If you care about the future of our planet, so should you.
Go to www.movetoamend.org
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