Nebraska Couldn't Even Come Up W. $250K For Climate Planning Before Flood; May Not Do So Even Now
When it came to climate change in the great state of Nebraska, spending a whopping $250,000 — just one-quarter of a million dollars — on a study for how a flood-prone prairie state could prepare for the impact of the earth’s rising temperatures was simply too big a hill to climb.
The push for a climate plan in the Cornhusker State to be completed by next year emerged from a legislative committee, but it seemed dead in the water as recently as last month. Even though Nebraska had already experienced both record flooding and drought during the 2010s, some Republican lawmakers questioned the cost. The influential Nebraska Farm Bureau said the climate-change readiness bill “is not a top issue for us.”
At least until recently, it’s hard to imagine that Nebraska’s Republican governor, Pete Ricketts, would have signed off on the paltry $250K anyway. In first seeking the job in 2014, Ricketts declared: “I believe it is far from clear — despite what the other side is saying — it is far from clear what is going on with our climate.” Just this January, Ricketts openly snubbed the novelist chosen for “2019 One Book, One Nebraska” event because of the author’s activism around climate and related issues like the Keystone XL pipeline. Then the “bomb cyclone” struck.
Pelted by high winds and a week of near-biblical rainfall that melted snow and then cascaded across prairies frozen by the long winter, Nebraska has this month suffered at least $1.4 billion in flood and related damage. The rising rivers knocked down bridges, crumbled critical roadways, and destroyed 2,000 homes while crippling a strategically important U.S. Air Force base. Hardest hit were Nebraska’s farmers, who lost cattle and suffered crop damage to the tune of more than $800 million.
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And that’s how the Midwestern “bomb cyclone" became a day of reckoning for Republican ... ha ha, almost had you going there, didn’t I? In response to the growing evidence, from Nebraska to Mozambique, of the destructive and often deadly power of storms intensified by climate change, GOP lawmakers and leaders are doubling down — not just on the cynical nothingness of climate denial but on their dream that opposing not just environmentalism but basic science will be a winning strategy at the polls in 2020.
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https://www.philly.com/columnists/attytood/nebraska-flooding-climate-change-republican-lawmakers-denial-green-new-deal-ocasio-cortez-20190328.html
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