Heath Haussamen
Asking whether President Donald Trump caused the deaths of 120 people in the recent Texas floods is like asking whether climate change caused the storm.
The limiting nature of the question makes it impossible to prove, and so social media and Russian bots divide us into two camps.
One says we had extreme storms before we began pumping greenhouse gasses into the air, and this isn’t any different. The other says of course Trump is responsible.
I got caught up in the latter when I heard the news over the weekend. I was wrong to do that.
Here’s how I’m thinking about things now: Regardless of who is responsible for what happened in Texas, Trump and his MAGA buddies are ensuring that more people will die during extreme weather events in the future.
I hope we can all agree that we deserve better than that.
These are two scientifically demonstrable facts: We did have severe storms before we altered our planet’s climate, and such storms are now more frequent and extreme because of our actions.
It’s not that climate change caused any single storm. It’s that our weather, because of changes we’ve made to the climate, is more extreme and less predictable than it used to be.
Similarly, people died during severe weather events before Trump and Elon Musk took a chainsaw to the National Weather Service and its parent organization, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), earlier this year.
But reducing capacity will make predicting extreme storms more difficult. It will negatively impact the agency’s ability to spread the word when extreme storms are coming. It could make forecasts slower and less accurate.
At a time when climate change necessitates building more robust weather prediction and emergency alert systems, it’s unconscionable that the MAGA cultists who run our government are taking us in the opposite direction so they can give their billionaire buddies a tax break.
Trump’s cuts
Trump eliminated 600 National Weather Service jobs earlier this year — though, in an apparent admission that he went too far, his administration says it’s hiring back more than 100 people to “stabilize operations.” That isn’t nearly enough. The cuts have led to seriously understaffed offices in Albuquerque, Midland and El Paso, which all serve portions of New Mexico.
Making things worse, Trump’s gigantic welfare-for-oligarchs bill included eliminating a $150 million fund intended to improve weather forecasting and getting information to the public. We have U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to thank for that.
That bill, which Trump signed into law on July 4, also eliminated $50 million in NOAA grants “to study climate-related impacts on oceans, weather systems and coastal ecosystems,” The Guardian reported.
That’s not surprising. Project 2025 calls for breaking up NOAA, commercializing weather forecasts and downsizing the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, among other things.
On top of all of that, in the words of ProPublica, Trump “has defunded the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s core program paying for infrastructure projects meant to prevent major disasters from causing harm.” Trump has also threatened to get rid of FEMA.
What we pay for
This doesn’t make sense. We hike and camp. We travel for work and to visit family — many of us, for example, along a deadly stretch of Interstate 10 between Deming and Lordsburg where dust storms keep killing motorists. Some of us live near coast lines, forests or other places where extreme weather can have dire consequences.
And, unless we’re billionaires, we pay our fair share of taxes.
Our tax dollars fund research, forecasting and other operations that allow us to open our favorite app and check the weather or get a forecast from our local television meteorologist.
Our tax dollars allow us to receive alerts when extreme weather is headed our way.
Our tax dollars allow our cities, counties, school districts, universities and states to have reliable, accurate data as they decide whether to activate emergency operations centers and prepare for the possibility of extreme weather.
In New Mexico that includes everything from activating cooling centers on the hottest days of the year to warning the public about flash flooding in burn scars following forest fires.
And our tax dollars pay for the federal government to help us when extreme weather creates an emergency.
Many meteorologists, including Byron Morton, chief meteorologist for KOAT-TV in Albuquerque, have said Trump’s cuts have already made it more difficult to put out accurate weather forecasts.
This is one of the clearest illustrations of our president’s willingness to harm us. Why would anyone support this, other than the billionaires who are getting a tax break in exchange for these cuts?
The dead
Government must invest in state-of-the-art forecasting and alert systems. Because we’re moving in the opposite direction, we are going to more frequently lose folks during extreme storms.
This time in Texas it was 120 people and counting, with 170 still missing. Girls at a Christian summer camp were literally swept away forever.
They included Mary Grace Baker, who had just celebrated her first communion as a Catholic, just completed second grade, and was “a girls’ girl who loved pink, sparkles and bows in her signature angelic ringlet curls.”
They included sisters Blair and Brooke Harber, ages 13 and 11, who died holding each others’ hands, and twin sisters Hanna and Rebecca Lawrence, age 8.
The dead also included 19-year-old Chloe Childress, a Camp Mystic counselor whose family remembered her “contagious joy, unending grace and abiding faith.”
And they included Dick Eastland, the Camp Mystic director, who was “the father figure to all of us while we were away from home.”
Officials in Kerr County had been discussing upgrading a flood-warning system for nearly a decade, according to ABC News, but they had not done it. The county had submitted an unsuccessful application for a $1 million federal grant.
I’m sure county officials wish they had prioritized this project.
Next time
There will be a next time. Climate change ensures the next times will come more frequently and be more severe. North Carolina was battered by severe flooding on the same weekend that so many died in Texas. Much of the nation is soaking wet right now.
Ruidoso experienced some of the worst flooding it’s ever seen on Tuesday, and three people died. They included Charlotte and Sebastian Trotter, ages 4 and 7, who were camping with their parents while their dad was on leave from his post at nearby Fort Bliss in El Paso.
Because of Trump’s cuts, more people will die in these storms.
Democrats and Republicans are dying. Children are dying. Opposition to what Trump is doing shouldn’t be partisan. Emergency preparedness should be something all of us can agree on — even folks who don’t believe in climate change.
Just like protecting our public lands, I believe this is an issue where we can find wide agreement among everyone except the billionaires and their lapdogs.
We have the technology and the money to ensure we can all check the weather and plan accordingly, and to be alerted when disaster is coming. We have the money to build infrastructure and systems that will reduce the impact of extreme storms.
We deserve a government that is committed to using our resources to protect us.
