Climate change and taxes

You don't have to like it, you do have to deal with it. 

It’s easy to feel like adapting to climate change is something that we can put off for a while. It’s not like it is REALLY URGENT. Sort of the same way that filing taxes can be put off until all of a sudden that April 15 deadline swings down on us, and we realize “Oh CRAP! I should have dealt with this weeks ago!!” Then we spend several frantic days collecting forms, trying to make sense of the mysterious language of tax codes and in the end, we either file for an extension or get it in at the last moment and pray we don’t get audited for failing to report Billy’s income from mowing lawns over the summer.

Of course the difference with climate change and taxes, is at least with taxes, we have a pretty clear deadline. Climate change, not so much. Some people are even bold enough to decide that climate change isn’t real. We will let them slide for now, only because there is a better chance that climate change is real than taxes are. Yes, of course taxes are real, but they are also man made and the chances of getting audited are much smaller than being seriously impacted by climate change. It’s just a matter of when.

The other thing about climate change adaptation is we are not really sure what we need to adapt to, how severe it is going to be, or even when it is going to arrive. Taxes are easier that way.

But like filing our taxes, that does not excuse us from suffering the impacts if we are not prepared.

So what do we need to do?

We need to start thinking about what the impacts are. We need to think about how those will affect us. Yes us. Yes, personally. Yes, our safe secure little world where today we can reliably get good coffee in a warm shop on a chilly morning, and feel relatively secure that there will be food we want to eat available that day, and probably we even can drink the water from our taps (well, except in Flint…).

We need to think about what we will do when disaster strikes in huge snow storms with power outages lasting days, when our infrastructure no longer can function and serve our basic needs, like making our water safe to drink, when our government is stretched to the limit and we have to fend for ourselves. We need to think about what we will do when droughts and heat waves parch crops across the world, and make prices soar for basic things like food and energy. We need to think about how we will manage when coastal communities flood and mass migrations of human populations drastically strain every fiber of the support systems designed to help them. We need to be ready to think about how communities washed away by floods and storm surges will rebuild and where. We need to consider how we will feed ourselves when basic foods are not available or when the pressures we feel to survive become unbearable.

Because climate change is coming, it is real and it will impact each and every one of us.

But for today, we can wait. We can put it off. Until it becomes more immediate and urgent. We have other things to do, like start preparing our taxes for this year.