Analysis | Many Republicans reject link between disasters and warming, poll finds - The Washington Post

Many Republicans reject link between disasters and warming, poll finds - The Washington Post

Good morning and welcome to The Climate 202! The first Republican presidential debate is tonight. What climate policy questions do you have for the candidates? Will climate issues even come up? Send your thoughts to maxine.joselow@washpost.com.

In today’s edition, we’ll cover why Maui officials didn’t improve fire safety after a 2018 blaze, and why the Biden administration is restoring an Obama-era safety rule for offshore drilling. But first:

Republicans and Democrats are deeply divided over disasters and climate change, Post-UMD poll finds

This summer, deadly wildfires have devastated Maui, historic rainfall has drenched Vermont and July has gone down as the hottest month on record across the globe.

Yet most Republicans reject the notion that climate change is contributing to these disasters, even as scientific evidence piles up, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll, our colleagues Amudalat Ajasa, Scott Clement and Emily Guskin report.

A large majority of Americans — 74 percent — say they have experienced extremely hot days in the past five years, the poll finds. But when asked if they think climate change is a major factor in those extremely hot days, 35 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say it is, compared with 85 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.

The partisan divide persists when it comes to other extreme weather events. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say climate change is a major factor in droughts, severe storms, flooding and wildfires.

The Post-UMD survey was conducted July 13-23. Although the poll preceded the Maui wildfires and Tropical Storm Hilary’s landfall in the American Southwest, it came during some of the hottest days on Earth in more than 100,000 years, and after Canadian wildfires sent smoke across large swaths of the United States.

Scientists are increasingly able to pinpoint the influence of global warming on such disasters, especially heat waves. The deadly heat domes that scorched parts of North America and Europe last month would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change, according to a recent study by the World Weather Attribution network, a coalition of climate scientists.

The study has not yet been peer-reviewed, given the rapid timeline under which the analysis was completed. But the group has previously used peer-reviewed methods to conclude that dozens of heat waves, extreme rainfalls, hurricanes, droughts and floods were made more likely or more intense by global warming.

In the case of extreme rainfall, scientists agree that a warmer atmosphere can hold more water. This moisture-laden air can drop heavier rain at one time, leading to more intense storms, hurricanes and daily precipitation.

Other findings

The Post-UMD survey also finds that a majority of Americans — 74 percent — agree with the scientific consensus that human activity is causing changes to the global climate. Ninety-three percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents agree, compared with 55 percent of their Republican counterparts.

A little over half of Americans — 54 percent — say the area where they live is affected by climate change. That includes 78 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents and 30 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.

Looking ahead, 64 percent of Americans expect climate change to affect the area where they live in 20 years. That includes 90 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents and 37 percent of their GOP counterparts.

The Post-UMD poll’s sample of 1,404 U.S. adults was drawn from the NORC AmeriSpeak Panel, an ongoing survey panel recruited through random sampling of U.S. households. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points; the error margin is larger among partisan subgroups.

The politics

The findings come as GOP presidential candidates prepare to square off during a debate tonight in Milwaukee. Some of the candidates have similarly dismissed the connection between global warming and extreme weather.

- Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who leads a state that has been battered by hurricanes, proclaimed after announcing his presidential bid: “People said when we had [Hurricane] Ian, it was because of climate change — I’ve always rejected the politicization of the weather.”
- Former vice president Mike Pence told CNN viewers this month that he wasn’t sure if climate change played a role in July’s record heat or the wildfire smoke that walloped the East Coast.

Former president Donald Trump, who plans to skip the debate and release a prerecorded interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, has appeared at times to conflate weather and climate change, which he has dismissed as a “hoax.”

As president, Trump also rebuffed some requests for federal disaster aid, oftentimes in areas that didn’t support him in the 2016 election. In 2019, for instance, he threatened to cut off federal aid to California as it battled wildfires, accusing Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) of mismanaging forests there.

Pressure points

A terrifying fire struck Maui in 2018. Officials were warned of a repeat.

After a dangerous wildfire scorched Maui in 2018, causing $4.3 million in damage, officials promised to improve fire safety. But when an eerily similar yet worse disaster struck the island last week, it became clear that officials did not prioritize wildfire preparation or response since 2018, according to an investigation by The Post’s Brianna Sacks and Justine McDaniel.

The Post investigation — which relied on hundreds of pages of county documents and interviews with more than a dozen people, including current and former county and state employees — found that Maui Emergency Management Agency officials regularly warned county leaders that their staffing and evacuation infrastructure was inadequate to respond to a major disaster. However, even with a budget boost, the county only increased agency staffing from seven to nine employees between fiscal 2020 and 2021.

The agency’s administrator, Herman Andaya, also did not act on recommendations from residents of Lahaina, a historic seaside town, that the county use warning sirens for wildfires. At county meetings, he called the sirens a “last resort.” Emergency officials did not activate sirens Aug. 8 to alert Lahaina residents to the approaching fire, a decision Andaya repeatedly defended before he resigned last week.

Now, after the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century reduced Lahaina to rubble, residents are asking the same questions they asked nearly five years ago, challenging recent statements made by county and state officials that “nobody saw this coming” and that “this has never happened before.”

Maui county officials did not respond to telephone messages or emails seeking comment, and former mayor Alan Arakawa could not be reached for comment. In previous statements, Maui officials have said their immediate priorities are helping fire victims recover, assisting in the search for missing loved ones, and restoring services such as drinking water.

Agency alert

Biden restores Obama-era safety rule for offshore drilling

The Interior Department yesterday announced it will reinstate a safety rule for offshore drilling that the Obama administration issued in 2016, six years after an explosion on the BP Deepwater Horizon platform killed 11 people and caused the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

The Trump administration weakened the rule in 2019, saying it unfairly burdened the oil and gas industry. The new rule, which is set to take effect in October, restores most of the 2016 requirements for the use and testing of safety equipment on offshore drilling rigs.

In particular, the final well control rule from Interior’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement requires stronger blowout preventers, the system of valves that failed during the Deepwater disaster, which left a toxic legacy in the Gulf of Mexico.

“These improvements are necessary to ensure offshore operations, especially those related to well integrity and blowout prevention, are based on the best available, sound science,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement. “As our nation transitions to a clean energy economy, we will continue strengthening and modernizing offshore energy standards and oversight.”

Jacqueline Savitz, chief policy officer at the environmental group Oceana, said in a statement that while Tuesday’s rule marks a significant step toward preventing another disaster, “a big part of prevention has to be to stop selling new leases.”

Republican attorneys general and oil industry groups might challenge the rule in court. Holly Hopkins, vice president of upstream policy for the American Petroleum Institute, said in a statement that the regulation “continues the rampant politicization of the rulemaking process and represents another policy swing from administration to administration, resulting in a policy that fails to meaningfully improve the safety of workers or protect the environment.”

In the atmosphere

Scientists find new technique for predicting record-breaking heat waves— Kasha Patel for The Post
Is it safe to release water from Fukushima’s nuclear plant? What to know.— Ellen Francis and Amudalat Ajasa for The Post
Some states reject federal money to find and replace dangerous lead pipes— Michael Phillis for the Associated Press
Critics drill Big Oil over new carbon technology moves— Andrew Freedman and Ben Geman for Axios
Iowa regulators reject efforts to delay hearing for controversial carbon capture pipeline— Donnelle Eller for the Des Moines Register

Viral

— non aesthetic things (@PicturesFoIder)
pic.twitter.com/jtlaukdK7t August 21, 2023

Thanks for reading!