Opinion: After Fire and Floods, Glimmers of Hope
An op-ed by the New York Times' editorial board discusses the Climate Insights 2020: Natural Disasters report installment in a piece about building in climate-vulnerable places.
Once again, disaster has yielded glimmers of hope, or at least evidence of common sense. A recent Times article by Christopher Flavelle, a Washington-based climate reporter, notes that Americans by substantial margins support much stronger building codes and even outright bans on new construction in flood- and fire-prone zones. Eighty-four percent of people surveyed supported mandatory building codes in risky areas, and well over half supported outright bans. One interesting aspect of these findings — drawn from a joint survey by Stanford University, the environmental research group Resources for the Future and the survey company ReconMR — is that a majority of Republicans favored tougher rules. That’s surprising because Republicans tend to be much more skeptical about global warming than Democrats and, more to the point, much more hostile to government regulation.
The survey, however, also highlights a depressing underside: While the public’s appreciation of the dangers of building in risky areas may be shifting, attitudes in state and local governments and the real estate industry have hardly budged. These are the entities that hold the cards when it comes to residential construction. For all sorts of reasons, not least the need for property tax revenues for schools and other purposes, local communities want to build, even when the environmental risks seem self-evident.
