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The scenes that are emerging from the Hawaiian island of Maui are apocalyptic: it is quite literally a case of paradise lost. The beautiful town of Lahaina, whose history dates back thousands of years, has been destroyed. As I write this the death toll is in the 50s, but likely to rise substantially. Less importantly, but also tragically, Lahaina’s history is gone - it can be rebuilt, but it will never be the same. I never got to visit.
Perhaps the best way to see the extent of the devastation is to look at these before/after pictures of Lahaina’s historic banyan, the rare tree which merits its own Wikipedia page. The tree has been a landmark in Lahaina since it was planted in 1873, with a root system covering an enormous amount of space. Look at it; that’s all one tree:
And here is a picture of the tree after the fire, taken from a video shared by U.S. Senator Brian Schatz:
Whether the tree can be salvaged is still unclear. What is clear, though, is that what has happened to Lahaina has direct causal connections to climate change. Climate experts say that climate change increases the likelihood and severity of flash droughts of the sort that dried out Maui in recent weeks, rendering it bone-dry and ripe for enormous fires. And Maui has just experienced one heck of a flash drought:
Flash droughts are so dry and hot that the air literally sucks moisture out of the ground and plants in a vicious cycle of hotter-and-drier that often leads to wildfires. And Hawaii’s situation is a textbook case, two scientists told The Associated Press.
As of May 23, none of Maui was unusually dry; by the following week it was more than half abnormally dry. By June 13 it was two-thirds either abnormally dry or in moderate drought. And this week about 83% of the island is either abnormally dry or in moderate or severe drought, according to the U.S. drought monitor.
Maui experienced a two-category increase in drought severity in just three weeks from May to June, with that rapid intensification fitting the definition of a flash drought, said Jason Otkin, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Of course, Hawaii isn’t the only state to experience widespread destruction from fires in recent years. Every year my wife and I watch nervously as wildfires consume large parts of her home state of California, coming ever-closer to the towns that she grew up around and where our extended family lives. In 2020, the fires were so enormous that they blanketed most of the west coast in smoke, producing choking, carcinogenic fog and directly killing dozens of people. Here’s what it looked like from a satellite:
You would think, then, that these sorts of events - happening literally every year - would produce at the very least a strong debate in American national politics about climate change. The parties might disagree over what to do, sure, but they would at least agree that this is a major issue. The burning down of whole towns, the deaths of hundreds of people, the blanketing of entire swathes of the North American continent in deadly fog - this would seem to call for some response.
Wouldn’t it?
The Electoral College is a climate problem
The response of the American political system to climate change has actually been very different. The Democratic Party takes the issue seriously and has a major plan for dealing with it. Under the Biden administration, that has produced the largest federal investment to combat climate change in American history. Republicans, on the other hand, largely have no climate plan beyond undoing whatever it is that Democrats are trying to do. The Republican Party’s biggest climate priority right now is not some new plan to stop it, but rather an attempt to cancel the Biden administration’s investment in the energy transition. This was a key demand of the GOP during this year’s debt ceiling negotiations.
We’ve become so used to this state of affairs that it almost seems like just a natural feature of American politics. But like climate change, it’s not natural, it’s man-made - and it’s largely a result of the Electoral College.
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