White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The ‘New Weather’ Reality Will Change the Nation, Defy Politics

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I have never done political consulting. So it was novel to me when a candidate in the midterms asked me what he should be worried about in 2027. I repeated what Harold Macmillan, British prime minister from 1957 to 1963, is believed to have said, “Events, dear boy, events.”

Actually, I had a little list of crises that I have been gathering and which will come to bear on the political establishment — and we the people. Topping the list is one that is already at hand: the climate, which I call the “new weather.”

We have had weeks of atmospheric disturbance resulting in catastrophic floods, power outages, flight cancellations, oppressive heat and fires. Weather disruptions have been the first or second stories on the networks’ evening newscasts, pushing back the news on the wars in Iran and Ukraine, as well as news from the White House.

Television stations like to tell viewers they have “news you can use.” The new weather is news that will abuse you. It knows where you live and it may call. It has called in Europe and across North America. It is a new reality.

The Southwest is parched and the Colorado River, that life channel, is running dry, severely affecting people in seven states. It also affects the food supply, as much of farming depends on the river’s bounty. Even Mexico receives some of the dwindling Colorado River water supply under a treaty with the United States.

Hundreds of thousands have lost power for hours or days, and others may be choosing between keeping the air conditioning on and spending on other necessities.

Sustained heat of over 110 degrees is a killer, and electricity for air conditioning is a lifesaver. Every year, more than a thousand people die of heat.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports the number of heat-related deaths nationwide. The worst year was 2023, with 2,325 deaths, as measured by death certificate analysis.

But heat-related fatalities are hard to collect. I would wager that the real death toll is much higher.

Liberal politicians will blame the fossil fuel industries — coal, oil and natural gas — for continuing to drive up greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere; conservatives will blame regulation and lack of infrastructure building. Local politicians will attack the data centers and the utilities.

President Trump has called global warming a hoax. But “say it ain’t so” doesn’t work when it is too hot for kids to play outside or streets are rivers, and when the flow of food from farm to supermarket is interrupted.

Huge infrastructure projects will be proposed at a time when there is a growing awareness that the budget deficit is out of control and there is no way America will grow out of it on its present tax trajectory.

If my candidate makes it to Congress, he will find it easier to say no to new expenditures than it is to say yes to new taxes.

Nonetheless, effective pipelines will be proposed to move water from water-rich areas to water-starved states. Some of those, like Texas, drunk on its recent Mecca-like effect on business, will have difficulty accepting that people won’t come if there is no water and inadequate electricity.

Heat, not economics, could curtail the North-to-Southwest flow of people, which has been the population realignment in recent years.

How to live with the new weather will definitely be a new priority that politicians will find difficult to address. It doesn’t fit behind a political slogan. It does favor infrastructure repair and enhancement, from boosting the electric grid to planting water-frugal crops to serious concern about where people live and how they pay their electric bill — a matter of keeping cool and staying alive.

But for the political establishment, other issues are forming, each competing with the weather for attention. For a start, there is integrating artificial intelligence into our economy without severe disruption, dealing with a broken healthcare system, and providing care that is beyond the reach of people facing higher prices for other survival services and products, like electricity and water.

Easier to say your opponent is a rascal, the other party is fascist or communist, and to worry about the use of AI on cellphones in classrooms.

We all have the weather to deal with, Democrat or Republican, and it is still an issue for governance.

Watch Out When the Political Class Forgets Cause and Effect

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Anyone who has spent time in criminal court knows this: One of the characteristics of lawbreakers is a poorly developed sense of cause and effect.

At the low end, the folly of the defendants is always on display. The young man who takes a gun with him on a night of drinking. He has increased his chances that he might use it and spend the rest of the useful years of his life in prison.

The shoplifter who keeps at it despite past convictions faces undetermined years behind bars. The burglar who robs a house and, while there, calls home on a cell phone, which will ping off the nearest cell tower, negating any alibi. The murderer who posts on social media.

This poorly developed sense of cause and effect isn’t confined to the lawless. It is rife in the political class, in both cohorts, but primarily these days in the ruling Republican cohort.

We, as a nation, appear to have forgotten that actions have consequences. Those consequences ricochet down through the decades, even the centuries.

Bomb people, and you will get a massive refugee problem.

Deny medical funding, and you will get overburdened emergency rooms.

Underfund science, and the talent will pop up somewhere else, like the universities of Europe and Asia.

Cut off immigration, and you will have deflation from population decline.

Create stateless people — they are still people, still there — and they will become a burden.

Don’t raise taxes to cover the $39 trillion national debt, and the interest payments on the debt will be so enormous that there will be little left for the business of governance.

Action has consequences, just as inaction has consequences. Winston Churchill said: “A decision not taken is nonetheless a decision.”

Here are just some areas where the effect may linger long after the cause has lost its currency — long after the action, which seemed to be “a good idea” at the time, was taken:

Cause: Traduced allies, vitiated treaties and long-term friends abandoned with abusive disdain while rewarding the deplorable with praise, recognition and encouragement.

Effect: The slights and the negations won’t be forgotten, but the reason for them will have faded with the perpetrators. America diminished as a global power, taking a seat beside Brazil or Argentina, damned by a history of causing damaging effects for passing motives.

Cause: Profligate use of the presidential pardon.

Effect: A further temptation to abuse power and advance corrupt patronage. Friends go free.

Cause: The abandonment of the sacred right to see a judge, to identify the accuser, to be tried by a jury of your peers.

Effect: A lawless state of injustice and cruelty, the state out of control, thugs loosed on the people.

Cause: Undermine the elections by falsely claiming that they were rigged.

Effect: A fundamental weakening of democracy and the supremacy of the ballot. All elections are doubted and more easily overturned. The system is undermined.

Cause: Sustaining a lie in the belief that if you claim it long enough, it will sow doubt.

Effect: Truth becomes what those who have power say it is, whether it is about an election, immigrants, the cost of wind turbines or climate change. Truth becomes a commodity in short supply in the political marketplace.

All governments make mistakes, and most go too far in the service of political ideas, which have legitimacy for a time and then fade. This time it is different. The list of political actions that will have detrimental effects in the future and substantially threaten our world leadership is long.

Since the end of World War II, we have led the world in everything from creativity to moral example, from generosity in foreign aid to genius in medical science, from legal thought to environmental protection.

Now, political exigency is undermining that. Petty, small triumphs in what are often just the culture wars have effects that diminish us worldwide, and harbinger a more troubled future for us and the world.

Any day, in the heat of a political moment, another cause may leave an effect that will damage the decision-making mechanisms of the Senate. If the filibuster goes, both parties would rue the effects, long and often.

If it goes, the cause will be forgotten, but the effect will endure.