Climate Change and the Grand Canyon
It’s called the Dragon Bravo fire, and it has burned well over 140,000 acres on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, taking the historic Lodge and many of the guest cabins with it. Whether we’ve been there or not, mark this loss as one of enormous proportions. Sitting on the canyon rim, the view of a storm crossing the chasm while resting in front of the Lodge’s great window almost 55 years ago still lights up my soul the way a western lightning bolt lights up the night sky. The guest cabins, which in those days you could rent for the night even mid-Friday afternoon without a reservation, were about as cheerful and inviting as the memory of a beloved childhood bedroom. It lingers still, a dreamscape, that today now lies charred and unrecognizable.
This raging firestorm is but one of hundreds darkening the sun across North America today. Just shy of 800 different fires burn across the hot, dry woodlands of Canada, plaguing us with some of the dirtiest air in the country. In the U.S., Alaska has over 450 wildfires burning today alone. Think of those numbers, almost 1,250 wildfires destroying carbon-eating trees, turning our precious forests into carbon emitters instead. These infernos kill people and wildlife, destroy homes and make our air dangerous to breathe. It wasn’t always this way, but now, thanks to drought and heat from our changing climate these horrendous fire seasons have become a very unhealthy, but regular, part of our summers.
While the drier side of our continent burns, those of us on the wetter side contend with drenching rains and floods. Even the climate naysayers among us can’t argue with that. Either way the losses mount up. The World Economic Forum says it adds up to $16 million an hour globally. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association reckons our country’s climate losses last year alone at almost $183 billion, making it the fourth most costly year on record – all four of which have happened since the year 2005. Munich Re, global reinsurance leader, says the U.S. has already racked up $131 billion in losses during the first six months of this year. Reinsurance is how the losses in other places – like last weekend in Milwaukee – also raise our own insurance rates as we all share in one another’s disasters.
While the rest of the world moves on with renewable energy and electric transportation in clear sighted acknowledgement of climate change, and our fossil fuel habit’s role in it, we in America remain tethered to those fossil fuels in a state of apathetic denial. We now have a president who smiles as he extols “drill baby drill!” as if none of this obvious climate chaos is real.
The profit and loss figures of insurance companies tell a vastly different story. Maybe when our home insurance rates become unaffordable due to all the mounting climate disasters, we’ll finally open our eyes and discover the benefits of solar and wind, EVs and heat pumps, rechargeable lawnmowers and electric motorcycles. And that’s the amazingly good news in all this. We can drive comfortably on clean, free energy from sunshine. We can heat and cool our homes without relying on fuels that pollute our beloved planet.
In the absence of forward looking, imaginative and innovative leadership in the White House today, all I can offer is a personal testimonial. For the past eight years my wife and I have driven EVs fueled by electricity made for free by the sun shining on our rooftop solar panels, and we love it. We call it driving on sunshine, and don’t miss those expensive and smelly gas station stops at all. In fact, we love it enough to say we will never go back to gas. Not for the sake of wealthy oil companies, not for a deceptive president, no, we’ll stay with clean sunshine for the joy and economic sense of it. But we’ll keep living our solar lives especially for the future of our grandchildren. We want to do what we can to ensure them, and your grandkids, a clean, livable and beautiful planet to live on. Makes all the sense in the world to us.
If this makes sense to you, too, there is still time to take advantage of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act money to help, but thanks to the Republican One Big Beautiful Budget Bill you’ll have to act fast. Tax credit eligibility for solar panels now ends on Dec. 31 of this year. The substantial $7,500 rebate on qualifying new EVs ends on Sept. 30, also of this year. The same is true for the $4,000 rebate on used EVs.