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**JULY 12, 2021**

Kuttner on TAP

The Condo in the Coal Mine

****

You would think that the collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside,
Florida, combined with other recent climate-related disasters, such as
the severe drought in the Southwest and record-breaking heat in the
Northwest, would produce a national reckoning. Climate deniers would
start to have second thoughts; and foes of public management, public
regulation, and public investment would start appreciating that only
government-and relatively uncorrupt government-can begin to limit
the damage and move to a corrective course.

You would think so. But this is the era of cognitive dissonance and
denial. (These catastrophes are acts of God, maybe even God's
retribution for abortion and sodomy!)

Instead of an overdue reckoning, we are likely to get a politics of
special pleading for government help, without the needed changes in
regulatory policy going forward, and without a recognition of the prime
role of climate in these several, deepening catastrophes.

Looking backwards, Florida needed much tougher building codes and
inspections, while the nation needed much tougher carbon limits to
prevent the sea level rise that will threaten even well-constructed
seaside condos. It needs these measures even more urgently going
forward.

But these measures will be costly to developers and condo owners. And so
we can expect demands for the handouts without the reforms.

Southwest water politics, similarly, will pit agribusiness against
ordinary citizens who are already facing rationing of drinking water.
The fact is that many of these burgeoning Sun Belt cities located in
deserts should have had growth limits long ago. But try pitching that
idea in irrigated boomtowns in swing states like Nevada and Arizona.

This is a special dilemma for Biden and the Democrats. When food prices
go up because of extended droughts in irrigated farmlands, Biden will be
blamed. When massive government help is needed to prevent the collapse
of the next thousand condos, and Democrats try to attach conditions such
as better building standards, inspections, and limits on what can be
built on unstable landfills, Biden will be blamed.

Ironically, too, all this public investment is of course
infrastructure-the very infrastructure outlays that Republicans want
to shrink. (Infrastructure as pork barrel and emergency relief and
reward for irresponsibility is always popular; infrastructure as
responsible stewardship, far less so.)

Even as the safe and familiar world collapses around us, denial is an
easier politics than a painful reckoning with reality. Biden should be
rewarded politically for doing the right thing. But in this bizarre era,
when nearly half of the electorate lives in a fantasy world, that will
be an even heavier lift than getting the needed policies enacted.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

Robert Kuttner's latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.

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