Dan Jones: The climate emergency is our ‘moral equivalent of war’

This commentary is by Dan Jones of Montpelier. He has been working for years on helping develop models and services for a sustainable Montpelier future and was a candidate for mayor in 2024.

Some of us of a certain age will remember when President Jimmy Carter was publicly mocked for asking us to turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater. He asked us to invest in solar power, and he called overcoming our oil dependence the “moral equivalent of war.” His environmental advisors had shown him the long-range consequences of burning fossil fuels.

That was back in 1977, and America didn’t listen to Carter.

Instead, we chose “morning again in America” and went on to indulge our bottomless thirst for cheap fossil fuel energy. Today, the fires, droughts and floods prompted by our growing climate crisis are ravaging our landscape, tearing up our towns and cities and threatening our food supply. Yet we still refuse to recognize the severity of our burgeoning climate emergency.

Already, poor little Vermont is tied for seventh place nationwide in disaster declarations from 2011 to 2023. As Katrina Menard recently noted in a VTDigger commentary : “Washington County is tied for second as the most disaster-prone county in the country, while Lamoille, Chittenden, Orange, Orleans and Essex are all tied for fourth.”

Homes, roads and infrastructure have been torn up and washed away. Owners of homes in the Northeast Kingdom have been begging for volunteer help in digging out from recent flooding. Plainfield, a small town with a $1.4 million budget, is facing $8-15 million in infrastructure damages . And this hurricane season is promising even more flooding.

Meanwhile, the weather just keeps getting hotter. We are now constantly blown about by sodden southern winds and warmed by globally heated seas. This brings oppressive heat and rains further north. In our new climate, Vermont’s future summers will be full of repeated heat waves and deluges, rather than gentle summer rains and moderate temperatures we once enjoyed.

We have already lost the promised war on global warming. No longer will buying an EV, installing a heat pump and refusing to get on an airplane be enough to adapt to constantly worsening weather forces. These storms will repeatedly wash out recently repaired roads, down electric lines and cut off the internet.

Our changed climate will make it hard for many folks to continue living here. Thousands of our citizens will question their choice of locations, their declining financial prospects and their limited options in a state that is already catastrophically short on housing. Flooding events will immobilize our state and local governments, which have myopically ignored the long term challenge. Repeated destruction of utilities and infrastructure will lead the providers demanding that we, the end users, pay for the constant repairs.

Our political and bureaucratic leadership is incapable of dealing with this crisis, yet we keep voting for those we know rather than those who might have a clue on what to do. So they will keep raising our taxes to pay the ever growing bills for road repairs and destroyed services. Of course, it would be nice if the rich were sufficiently taxed for their share of this burden, but our current government keeps failing in that regard.

Soon there will be many foreclosed homes on the never to be repaired roads. Stuck with these bad loans, banks will not be able to finance needed repairs. One might ask where we are going to house the thousands of middle-class folks who are suddenly homeless.

We must imagine meeting these new demands on our personal finances, as the only source of such new public investment demands will be our personal retirement accounts, our winter vacation savings or the new car. Forget FEMA. That agency is about to stop even promising to make us whole. Hell, there are still lots of people washed out in ‘23 who haven’t seen their promised FEMA relief. Basically, we will be on our own from here on out.

It’s time to face up to these frightening prospects. We can start by moving our small city centers out of the flood plains. These city centers are the logical places to build up because they are transportation hubs, and can support sustainable work and housing.

I suggest we create a statewide extension of the American Climate Corps which could also provide physical and emotional support for those displaced in flood emergencies. Vermont’s ACC could also reconfigure upstream land use in order to mitigate future flooding.

Adapting to this new future will require imagination and courage. It will require a true democratic debate as to what we can realistically do to face the growing challenges. We have become part of a whole world facing different faces of the climate collapse and we will see different responses arising in different locations.

Vermonters are a creative people who could rise to the occasion. But as Jimmy Carter said two generations ago, “This difficult effort will be the “moral equivalent of war.’” The times demand we be ready to make the sacrifices and adaptations that this now-real war, with our fossil fuel dependency, will require.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Dan Jones: The climate emergency is our ‘moral equivalent of war’ .