Easing Disasters’ Sting

Vice President Al Gore loves to champion federal measures to save the Earth from global warming, and congressional Republicans love to mock them. Both sides give short shrift to a more urgent challenge: the need to plan rationally for climate upheavals. Scientists generally agree that even if the United States turns “green” tomorrow and radically reduces its fossil fuel emissions, the Earth’s warming, and the extreme weather it fosters, will continue.

In the last decade, heat waves, storms, floods and other climatic events associated to some degree with global warming have saddled U.S. cities with $140 billion in property damage, according to a statement 576 U.S. mayors sent Congress earlier this week. Of course, not every hurricane can or should be blamed on global warming.

Ideas for solutions are surprisingly simple. Farmers could guard against some losses by planting hardier crops. For example, the Agriculture Department estimates that by using more genetically engineered crops, cereal grain production could be stabilized despite sharp temperature shifts; otherwise, says the USDA, cereal grain production will fall 18% to 29%. Insurers can increase their deductibles for clients who fail to protectively upgrade their properties. Critics rightly ask why inland Floridians should pay special insurance premium assessments on their pickup trucks and bungalows to underwrite highly predictable storm damage to seaside mansions. States and localities can dump outmoded zoning laws that encourage developers to build on eroding beaches and flood-prone plains.

Much of the problem is due to the needless polarization of the issue. Last month, congressional Republicans denied the Clinton administration the $85-million funding increase it requested for federal programs to predict and prepare for global warming. But the federal programs, begun as the Global Change Research Program by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, are aimed not at the dubious goal of preventing global warming but at the practical matter of helping industry, taxpayers and others prepare for and cope with its inevitable effects.

Most critical is protecting U.S. taxpayers from the nation’s global warming burdens. Start with incentives to strengthen building codes in high-risk areas. A greater burden of flood risk should be borne by those who already own coastal property; currently, they are subsidized by the less-affluent purchasers of federal flood insurance in inland areas.

An even greater danger to taxpayers comes from a bill now pending in Congress and backed by the insurers that would make the U.S. Treasury responsible for insurance companies’ losses in large natural disasters. That should be a nonstarter.

By spending tens of millions of dollars now on ways to adjust federal policies and private business practices to climate change, multibillion-dollar consequences of natural disasters might well be avoided.