I first wrote about GOP rank and file voters-- who can literally see the oceans rising to consume their homes and communities, but will hear nothing about carbon combustion induced warming of the planet-- a little over a year ago:
Reality matters. But not to everyone. (June 25, 2017)
… the US is, far and away, the primary purveyor of climate change denial:
American climate change deniers have been remarkably successful in confusing public opinion and delaying decisive action. They receive considerable media attention and enjoy access to key Washington power brokers.
This is on full display not just in Beltway debates and demonstrations, but in local decision making:
On the Delaware Bay, N.J. town struggles against sea rise.
People who live in these communities don’t all agree with scientists who say they are on the front lines of climate change. Some insist it’s a temporary phenomenon that could be endured with enough effort and money.
Downe Mayor Robert Campbell discovered the township on a Sunday drive 35 years ago, fell in love with it, and stayed.
Now, Campbell, also a GOP candidate for state Assembly, is fighting to keep Downe’s six communities — which also include Fortescue, Dividing Creek, Newport, and Dyer’s Cove — viable. Scientists, he says, just don’t get it.
“There is no sea-level rise, and it’s a bunch of hogwash,” Campbell says.
This bayside community, whose homes are literally becoming submerged as sea-levels rise, elected as their leader— the person who will represent their interests with the state and federal governments— someone who believes climate change and sea-level rise is ‘hogwash’.
As the east coast awaits the arrival of Hurricane Florence, and the devastating flooding it will bring (and we are witness to unprecedented storm activity globally), we are again confronted with a community awash in the evidence of climate change, to which they respond with determined obliviousness, and self-destructive, ideologically driven vindictiveness and spite.
Writing for Pacific Standard, Elaina Plott offers a glimpse into the mentality of the residents of Tangier Island, which sits off the coast of Virginia in the Chesapeake Bay:
The question of sea-level rise in Tangier's waters has captured much of America's attention in the last few years. Back in 2015, the science journal Nature ran a study warning of Tangier's demise at the hands of sea-level rise due to climate change. The dire findings caught the attention of climate scientists and, of course, the island's residents themselves, most of whom were skeptical. But it wasn't until last June, when Donald Trump came calling, that Tangier's plight crept into popular consciousness. After his advisers showed him a CNN report about the disappearing island and its pro-Trump inhabitants, the president phoned Eskridge and personally urged him to drop any concerns about sea-level rise. And suddenly everyone, it seemed, had an opinion on what was happening on this previously obscure island, rendering Tangier a poster child for both sides in the national conversation on climate change.
The story of Tangier has largely been limited to the inevitability of an island going down—the science behind it, the politics around it. And without new infrastructure, fast, Tangier is indeed going down. What's been left out, however, is why its people are willing to go down with it—and why they've risked it all on Trump to keep them afloat…
"All we are is just a simple people," says lifelong resident Barry Williams. "Work on the water and come home, feed our families."
It is also to stand firm when an outsider calls your understanding of those things into question. In the living room of his home, Eskridge taps the thin glass covering a painting of the bay. Underneath the painting is a Bible verse, Mark 4:39. "And He arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, Be Still," the verse reads. "And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm."
"I believe this," Eskridge says. "If God still has a use for Tangier, nothing's gonna happen to us."
Of course, deeply cherished beliefs about one’s place in the world offer no bulwark against ocean waters that are inexorably swallowing the land you’ve chosen to live upon:
Climate scientists believe Tangier could be uninhabitable within 25 years.
David Schulte, an oceanographer for the United States Army Corps of Engineers who's published writings on the Chesapeake in journals including Science, co-authored the 2015 paper in Nature that put Tangier on the map. Based in Norfolk, Virginia, he'd been studying the island for years, alarmed by the lack of attention to the place he and his colleagues predicted could see some of the nation's first refugees of climate change.
Thermal expansion is partly to blame for Tangier's plight: As Earth warms, oceans expand, and sea levels rise. And since the 1990s, ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica have thawed at accelerated rates, likely in part as a result of man-made global warming, dumping more and more water into the oceans.
But who are you going to believe?
Some scientist who doubles as a government worker, or the comforting fairy tale you keep telling yourself (all evidence to the contrary)?
It’s an easy choice, apparently:
Eskridge said he loved Trump "as much as any family member I got." Which meant that a firestorm was ignited not necessarily over how to help Tangier, but over whether a hotbed of Trump supporters who refused to recognize the problem even deserved salvation. "What amazes me is how political and polarizing this issue became," Schulte says.
And then Trump called.
Less than a week after the CNN report aired, Eskridge was crabbing when one of his sons flagged him down. His son told him the president would soon be calling. Eskridge raced back home and waited by the phone. Trump finally rang. "We chatted for about 12 minutes," Eskridge recalls. "We talked about sea-level rise, and of course we're on the same page. He said Tangier has been here for hundreds of years, and it would be here for hundreds more."
"Now, he knows about the erosion problem," he continues. "As for climate change, he said, 'It's just cycles and whatever changing. I don't believe that it's man causing it.'"
Outside of Tangier's own citizens, very few people seemed to be championing Eskridge's diagnosis of the island. But Trump's endorsement made for a potent salve…
What would prompt someone to simply ignore the imminent, and obvious threat to their own life, and the lives of their family, their entire community? The answer is less surprising than it perhaps should be:
For Eskridge, loyalty on this island lies squarely with Jesus, but Trump is not far behind. He was deeply invested in the 2016 election and felt like he had a stake in things. Sure, he was a lifelong Republican, like most folks on Tangier. But Trump stirred something visceral in him, Eskridge says, reviving a hope that, on issues he cares about most—abortion, religious liberty, crabbing regulations—not all was lost.
There was a time when Eskridge believed people across the country weren't all that different from him. Maybe not all of them were Christians, but it seemed like there was a healthy fear of God in society. Prayer in schools wasn't up for debate, for example, and gay marriage still seemed unconscionable…
Trump endeared himself to Tangier not just because he affirmed what they were seeing, but also because he believed in what they weren't seeing. Most Tangier residents insist that sea levels aren't rising because, quite simply, they don't see it happening. "It's not a political issue to me. I'm not lyin' about it," Eskridge says. "I'm just tellin' folks what I see. ... I'm not a scientist, but I'm a keen observer, and I don't see it." How empowering it is, then, when the leader of the free world tells you that he agrees, and pledges that your home will be safe for hundreds of years yet.
But Mr. Eskridge, and the community he represents, are less blind than they seem at first glance. No amount of political rationalizing makes damp floors dry:
"One of the first things I [former Republican congressman from South Carolina Bob Inglis] noticed is that people park their golf carts up on little docks in their front yard—wooden platforms that are maybe a foot, 18 inches off the ground." This is to keep the water from ruining their electrical systems. "Then we went by the schoolhouse, and I saw the schoolhouse had been raised about six or eight feet, because at high tide, there's water underneath it."
Inglis understands that Tangier residents premise their argument against sea-level rise in observation. Which made it hard for him to understand how visuals such as the golf cart platforms and the elevated schoolhouse didn't at least cause them to pause and reconsider. Because those scenes show standing water, immovable water, water pushing up above the ground—something erosion alone can't explain. I ask Eskridge how he squares this. "It's not any worse than it's always been," he says.
And yet, without any detectable irony, after vilifying liberals and scientists and the government for trying to impose upon them our depraved, blasphemous hoax— that the oceans are going to erase their community from the map because carbon combustion is heating the planet-- the people of Tangier Island want all of us— liberals and scientists and the government— to help them with their ‘no different than it’s ever been’ problem:
"I wish we could get him to come here," Jerry Pruitt, who is in his seventies, says of Trump. A few minutes later, he turns in his chair toward Eskridge. "You should call him and say you'd like to have a meeting with him—you might get him."
"Yeah, you know, Donald Trump could put the wall around here," Eskridge says, his arms outstretched. The six men chuckle. "I'll say, 'Hey, we'll take the wall, and we'll even name it after him.' The Donald Trump Seawall."
Pruitt nods. "I believe he'd do great if they'd...." The room finishes his sentence in chorus: "Work with him." Pruitt continues: "Ain't got nothing to work with, not on either side."
Still, they're confident Trump can cut through the congressional morass and get them a seawall. "We're on the same page," Eskridge says. He's the first president in a long time, it seems, "who knows what we need." (At press time, a bipartisan water-infrastructure bill that would authorize the study of flood risk management for Tangier Island, but that makes no mention of a seawall, had passed out of committee unanimously.)
As my father might have said— well ain’t that a kick in the pants.
If I’m to understand Mr. Eskridge and his comrades correctly, there’s nothing new or different going on with Tangier Island, but they do want all of us to build (you just can’t make this stuff up) a great big beautiful Trump Memorial Wall to hold back the ‘not unusual at all’ sea level rise that is causing the island to disappear in barely a single generation.
The plain, inescapable reality for Tangier Island, summarized by Elenore Sens at Phys.org, is this (note that it is the same Mr. Eskridge quoted in this article as the Pacific Standard piece):
On Virginia's Tangier Island, about 100 miles and a ferry ride from Washington, the waters of the Chesapeake Bay are edging dangerously close to William Eskridge's house.
Eskridge's family has lived here for the last 200 years. But perhaps not for much longer. The island is under threat from rapid erosion that is being accelerated by rising water scientists believe to be caused by climate change.
At least a hundred feet of land have recently eroded, the fisherman says.
"And it just seems like it's getting worse every year. I'm kind of fearful what it's going to be down the road."
Tangier Island is wedged between the eastern shore of Maryland and the Virginia coast.
Now measuring just 1.2 square miles, it has lost two-thirds of its landmass since 1850. If nothing is done to stop the erosion, it may disappear completely in the next 40 years.
The 450 or so inhabitants here—most of whose families have lived here for several generations—are keen to save their island, classified in the National Register of Historic Places.
Carol Pruitt Moore, who belongs to one of the island's old fishing families, remembers going to the beach as a child. Back then, the walk would take an hour. Now it takes only 10 minutes. (emphasis added)
So, to be clear, you want our help to solve a problem that you refuse to acknowledge, and I’m guessing you’d like us to be more civil about it, perhaps smile a bit more while we graciously provide you several billion dollars of federal assistance to preserve your bigoted theocratic enclave, and in fact, at the very same time, you want to impose this theocratic vision on the rest of the country against their will, with the force of law.
Have I got that straight, Mr. Eskridge?