Rumor is, McRoberts too.

…

Antifa, though, is a very specific group. It’s not just anyone who openly opposes fascism or white supremacy.

And, they are sometimes controversial on the left, too. Which doesn’t necessarily mean anything but it’s a conversation worth having.

===

“They have no allegiance to liberal democracy”: an expert on antifa explains the group
Why a loose network of militant activists is confronting fascists.

Aug 25, 2017

https://www.vox.com/2017/8/25/16189064/antifa-charlottesville-activism-mark-bray-interview

Before Charlottesville last week, most people had no idea what he meant. I’m actually not sure he knew what he meant.

“What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the ‘alt-right’? Do they have any assemblage of guilt?” Trump said during a rambling press conference.

If the alt-left exists, it’s probably best represented by “antifa” (short for “anti-fascist”) — a loose network of left-wing activists who physically resist people they consider fascists. These are often the scruffy, bandana-clad people who show up at alt-right rallies or speaking events in order to shut them down before they happen, and they openly embrace violence as a justifiable means to that end.

Antifa is not a monolithic organization, nor does it have anything like a hierarchical leadership structure. It’s an umbrella group that shares a number of causes, the most important of which is resisting white nationalist movements. Adherents are mostly socialists, anarchists, and communists who, according to Mark Bray, a historian at Dartmouth College and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, “reject turning to the police or the state to halt the advance of white supremacy. Instead they advocate popular opposition to fascism as we witnessed in Charlottesville.”

I reached out to Bray to discuss the group and its burgeoning impact on American politics. He’s sympathetic to antifa’s cause and makes no effort to hide that. He describes the book as “an unabashedly partisan call to arms that aims to equip a new generation of anti-fascists with the history and theory necessary to defeat the resurgent far right.”

In this interview, we talk about the ethics of “militant anti-fascism,” why groups like antifa don’t care if they hurt the Democratic Party, and why resisting fascism in a liberal democracy poses a unique challenge to conventional political norms.

Our conversation, lightly edited for clarity, follows.

MARK BRAY
Anti-fascism originated in response to early European fascism, and when Mussolini’s Blackshirts and Hitler’s Brownshirts were ascendant in Europe, various socialist, communist, and anarchist parties and groups emerged to confront them. When I talk about anti-fascism in the book and when we talk about it today, it’s really a matter of tracing the sort of historical lineage of revolutionary anti-fascist movements that came from below, from the people, and not from the state.

The sort of militant anti-fascism that antifa represents reemerged in postwar Europe in Britain, where fascists had broad rights to organize and demonstrate. You started to see these groups spring up in the 1940s and ’50s and ’60s and ’70s. You saw similar movements in Germany in the ’80s around the time the Berlin Wall falls, when a wave of neo-Nazism rolled across the country targeting immigrants. There, as elsewhere, leftist groups emerged as tools of self-defense. The whole point was to stare down these fascist groups in the street and stop them by force if necessary.

These groups in the ’80s adopted the name antifa, and it eventually spread to the United States in the late ’80s and into the ’90s. Originally, it was known as the Anti-Racist Action Network. That kind of faded in the mid-2000s; the recent wave we’re seeing in the US developed out of it, but has taken on more of the name and the kind of aesthetics of the European movement.

Sean Illing
And this is largely a response to Trump?

MARK BRAY
I think so. The basic principle of antifa is “no platform for fascism.” If you ask them, they’ll tell you that they believe you have to deny any and all platforms to fascism, no matter how big or small the threat. The original fascist groups that later seized power in Europe started out very small. You cannot, they argue, treat these groups lightly. You need to take them with the utmost seriousness, and the way to prevent them from growing is to prevent them from having even the first step toward becoming normalized in society.

Sean Illing
What’s their strategic logic? Why do they think physical violence, as opposed to nonviolent resistance, is both justifiable and effective?

MARK BRAY
That’s a very good question. Much of what they do does not involve physical confrontation. They also focus on using public opinion to expose white supremacists and raise the social and professional costs of their participation in these groups. They want to see these people fired from their jobs, denounced by their families, marginalized by their communities.

But yes, part of what they do is physical confrontation. They view self-defense as necessary in terms of defending communities against white supremacists. They also see this as a preventative action. They look at the history of fascism in Europe and say, “we have to eradicate this problem before it gets any bigger, before it’s too late.” Sometimes that involves physical confrontation or blocking their marches or whatever the case may be.

It’s also important to remember that these are self-described revolutionaries. They’re anarchists and communists who are way outside the traditional conservative-liberal spectrum. They’re not interested in and don’t feel constrained by conventional norms.

Sean Illing
You say one of the principles of antifa is “no platform for fascism.” How do they define fascism? Where’s the threshold?

MARK BRAY
Good question. The other thing that’s worth clarifying is that anti-fascist groups don’t only organize against textbook fascists. There is, first of all, a lot of debate about what constitutes fascism. And it’s a legitimate question to ask — where does one draw the line, and how does one see this kind of organizing?

Of course, there is no central command for a group like antifa. There is no antifa board of directors telling people where that line is, and so of course different groups will assess different threats as they see fit. But I suppose the question you’re raising has to do with the slippery-slope argument, which is that if you start calling everyone a fascist and depriving them of a platform, where does it end?

One of the arguments I make in the book is that while analytically that’s a conversation worth having, I don’t know of any empirical examples of anti-fascists successfully stopping a neo-Nazi group and then moving on to other groups that are not racist but merely to the right. What tends to happen is they disband once they’ve successfully marginalized or eliminated the local right-wing extremist threat, and then return to what they normally do — organizing unions, doing environmental activism, etc.

Sean Illing
You’re a historian. You’ve looked at the data. Is there evidence that the tactics adopted by antifa work? Are there cases of these sorts of groups successfully undercutting fascist movements?

MARK BRAY
Another good question. Whenever we look at the question of causation in history, you can never isolate one variable and make grand or definitive conclusions. So I don’t want to overstate any of the causal claims being made here. But Norway is an interesting example. In the ’90s, they had a pretty violent neo-Nazi skinhead movement, and the street-level anti-fascist groups there seemed to play a significant role in marginalizing the threat. By the end of ’90s it was pretty much defunct, and subsequently there hasn’t been a serious fascist [movement] in Norway.

Another example you can look at is popular responses to the National Front [a far-right political party formed in Britain in 1967] in the late ’70s in Britain. The National Front was pretty huge, and the Anti-Nazi League, through both a combination of militant anti-fascist tactics and also some more popular organizing and electoral strategies, managed to successfully deflate the National Front momentum.

One of the most famous moments of that era was the Battle of Lewisham in 1977 where the members of this largely immigrant community physically blocked a big National Front march and that sort of stopped their aggressive efforts to target that community.

Sean Illing
So antifa’s logic is that fascism is a rejection of liberal democratic norms, and therefore it can’t be defeated with what we’d consider conventional liberal democratic tactics?

MARK BRAY
Well, certainly the latter is correct. They argue a couple of things. First, they argue that in Europe you can see that parliamentary democracy did not always stop the advance of fascism and Nazism — and in the cases of both Germany and Italy, Hitler and Mussolini were appointed and gained their power largely through democratic means. When Hitler took his final control through the [1933] Enabling Act, it was approved by parliament.

They also say that rational discourse is insufficient on its own because a lot of good arguments were made and a lot of debates were had but ultimately that was insufficient during that period, and so the view that good ideas always prevail over bad ideas isn’t very convincing.

They other key point, which probably isn’t made enough, is that these are revolutionary leftists. They’re not concerned about the fact that fascism targets liberalism. These are self-described revolutionaries. They have no allegiance to liberal democracy, which they believe has failed the marginalized communities they’re defending. They’re anarchists and communists who are way outside the traditional conservative-liberal spectrum.

Sean Illing
Scholars of nonviolence will say the worldwide abolition of slavery was achieved almost entirely with nonviolent means (our Civil War being an obvious exception), that great strides in women’s rights were made, that nonviolent revolutions in Eastern Europe, South Africa, Chile, Egypt, the Philippines, and elsewhere were all accomplished without the use of force. What’s different about antifa’s mission? Why do they believe violence is more effective in this context?

MARK BRAY
As I said earlier, no single factor in history can explain an outcome. It’s always more complicated than that. Certainly that’s true in terms of the abolition of slavery. In Latin America, for example, a lot of the abolition of slavery happened through gradual emancipation laws, and a lot of those laws were enacted in explicit response to the Haitian Revolution and out of fear that if they didn’t start to adjust, they’d have an uprising on their hands.

This is also true of the civil rights movement, where the threat of race riots and Black Panthers and so forth made a lot of white America more sympathetic to the kinds of things that Martin Luther King and his allies were saying than they might have otherwise been.

The case of Nazism is obviously one of those intractable historical problems for advocates of pacifism. Even the school of strategic nonviolence that puts aside the ethical questions in favor of the strategic questions still fails, in my view, to show how nonviolence might have worked in that situation.

But look, anti-fascists will concede that most of the time nonviolence is certainly the way to go. Most antifa members believe it’s far easier to use nonviolent methods than it is to show up and use direct action methods. But they argue that history shows that it’s dangerous to take violence and self-defense off the table.

Sean Illing
Here’s my problem. I think the people who showed up in Charlottesville to square off against self-identified neo-Nazis did the world a service, and I applaud them. But when I see antifa showing up at places like UC Berkeley and setting fire to cars and throwing rocks through windows in order to prevent someone like Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking, I think they’ve gone way too far. Milo isn’t a Nazi, and he isn’t an actual threat. He’s a traveling clown looking to offend social justice warriors.

MARK BRAY
I think that reasonable people can disagree about this. I can’t speak for the individuals who committed these political actions, but the general defense is that the rationale for shutting down someone like Milo has to do with the fact that his kind of commentary emboldens actual fascists. The Berkeley administrators issued a statement in advance that they feared he was going to out undocumented students on campus, and previously he had targeted a transgender student at the University of Milwaukee Wisconsin. Antifa regards this as an instigation to violence, and so they feel justified in shutting it down.

Again, though, this is much easier to understand when you remember that antifa isn’t concerned with free speech or other liberal democratic values.

Sean Illing
Antifa defines itself in purely negative terms, in terms of what they’re against. But what do they want? Do they have any concrete political goals?

MARK BRAY
That’s a great question, and one that often gets overlooked. For the most part, these are pan-leftist groups composed of leftists of different stripes. They all seem to have different views of what they think the ideal social order looks like. Some of them are Marxists, some are Leninists, some are social democrats or anarchists. But they cohere around a response to what they perceive as a common threat.

Sean Illing
Do you think people are right to be concerned that this type of illiberalism will only occasion more illiberalism in response to it, and that the result will be a spiral of competing illiberalisms?

MARK BRAY
As I said before, anti-fascists don’t have any allegiance to liberalism, so that’s not the question that they are focused on. The question is also how much of a threat do we think white supremacists or neo-Nazis pose, both in a literal or immediate sense but also in terms of their ability to influence broader discourses or even the Trump administration.

I believe that for people who are feeling the worst repercussions of this, they are already experiencing a kind of illiberalism in terms of their lack of access to the kinds of freedoms that liberalism promotes and tries to aspire to; and so for me, that’s more of a focus, in terms of trying to mitigate those kinds of problems, than the fears of people who, prior to Trump, thought that everything was fine in the US.
Sean Illing
Do you anticipate antifa becoming larger and more active? And if so, what does that mean for American politics moving forward?

MARK BRAY
The first thing to point out is that being part of one of these groups is a huge time commitment, and the vetting process that these groups have for bringing in new people is very strenuous. You have to really commit — it’s basically like a second job. This limits the number of people that are going to be willing to put their time into it. I don’t think the antifa movement is going to explode as much as some do.

But I do think that antifa can influence where leftist politics in America is going. They are aggressive, loud, and fiercely committed. They’re having a wider influence on the radical left in this country, particularly on campuses and with other groups like Black Lives Matter. But I don’t want to overstate antifa’s role in these shifts.
Sean Illing
Well, that dovetails with my final question, which is: Do you think the influence antifa is having on the American left will ultimately hurt the Democratic Party — and by extension help the Republicans?

MARK BRAY
Not to be repetitive here, but they don’t care about the Democratic Party. But it’s still an interesting question to consider. Given the disaster that is the Trump presidency, I just think it would be a colossal failure of the Democratic Party not to win the next presidential election and gain a majority in Congress. If they can’t do that given this craziness, then they need to really rethink what they’re doing.

Will a lot of people see antifa and their methods as a poor reflection of the left? Absolutely. But I also think that these are not people who were going to vote Democrat anyway. If you read the news or pay attention to what’s happening, you know that Nancy Pelosi has nothing to do with antifa. This group loathes the Democratic Party, and they don’t hide that.

So anyone who blames the Democrats for antifa is likely already disposed to vote Republican anyway.

Aaron Green first Rams cut. Nm. CROMWELL21 09/01/2017 04:24PM

Five Takeaways: Preseason At Packers

Myles Simmons

http://www.therams.com/news-and-events/article-fivetakeaways/Five-Takeaways-Preseason-At-Packers/621752d7-b602-4c77-855d-f8315110f899

The Rams preseason has come to a close with a 24-10 loss to the Packers. Here are five takeaways from the contest.

1) No starters

As expected, the Rams and Packers did not dress their starters for Thursday’s contest. Before the game, Green Bay announced a total of 28 players who would suit up. Los Angeles did not do the same, but the visitors’ numbers were similar.

2) One final impression

The fourth preseason game represents one last chance for many players to make an impression before clubs must cut their rosters down to 53 players. Over the course of the week, McVay talked about how this year provides a better opportunity for players to showcase their skills because reduction from 90 to 75 players was eliminated.

One Ram taking advantage of that chance in the first half was wide receiver Brandon Shippen. He caught six passes for 53 yards in the first half to lead the visitors.

Running back Justin Davis also had a nice first half, taking a screen pass 19 yards down the right side for one of Los Angeles’ best plays.

“Just making the effort to make sure that there’s no doubt in my mind that I left all my heart out on the field,” Davis said of his goals for tonight’s game. “That’s the only thing I can do at this point. It’s up to the coaches after that.”

3) Orlovsky only QB in

While head coach Sean McVay had announced the starters would not play in Thursday’s contest, he did not announce backup quarterback Sean Mannion would not play either.

Dan Orlovsky played the entire game at quarterback for the Rams, with mixed results. He threw a pair of interceptions in the first half — though one went off a receiver’s hands before landing in the arms of a defender.

Orlovsky finished the first half 10-of-21 passing for 101 yards.

4) Westbrooks records a sack

Defensive lineman Ethan Westbrooks had one of the Rams’ best defensive plays of the game when he sacked quarterback Brett Hundley in the first quarter.

It looked as if Green Bay was attempting to set up a screen from Los Angeles’ 16-yard line, but Westbrooks found his way into the backfield and took Hundley down for a 13-yard loss instead.

“It was just anticipating the snap-count, along with get-off,” Westbrook said at halftime of the keys to his sack. “I was just hoping I wasn’t offsides when I caught the snap-count — that’s all.”

5) Now, it counts

With the final whistle in Green Bay, the Rams’ preseason has come to a close. Now the tough work begins, as the club must reduce its roster by 37 players by Saturday afternoon.

But the exciting work begins now, too, as Los Angeles can officially turn its attention to Sept. 10 and the Colts. From now on, every snap counts.

Football is back.

My response to the GB game

Five Players to Watch: Preseason at Packers

Myles Simmons

http://www.therams.com/news-and-events/article-1/Five-Players-to-Watch-Preseason-at-Packers/1efab9cb-4258-4746-bf59-dea928726a5c

The Rams preseason will come to a close Thursday night with their matchup against the Packers. Here are five players to watch in the contest.

1) RB Justin Davis – No. 42

Davis has been quite productive in the preseason so far and figures to take a number of carries on Thursday. So far, he’s taken 19 carries for 92 yards — an average of 4.8 yards per attempt. The USC product will likely get a good final chance to make an impression against Green Bay’s defense.

2) DL Morgan Fox – No. 97

Last year’s fourth preseason game was Morgan Fox’s coming out party, as he wreaked havoc in the Vikings’ backfield during the first half. He’ll likely have a chance to do the same in this contest after having a strong training camp.

3) WR Paul McRoberts – No. 19

McRoberts has made four receptions for 55 yards in the first three preseason games, and figures to get good time in this contest. The Southeast Missouri State product spent much of last year on Los Angeles’ practice squad and has shown improvement throughout training camp.

4) OLB Samson Ebukam – No. 50

Ebukam suffered a quad injury early in camp but appears primed to make his preseason debut against the Packers this week. The Rams selected the outside linebacker out of Eastern Washington in the fourth round of this year’s draft, and Ebukam has a chance to become a rotational player in Los Angeles’ defense as a rookie.

5) DL Tanzel Smart – No. 92

Smart has been a disruptive backfield presence in practice and in the previous three preseason games. He’s recorded a pair of quarterback hits, a pass defense, and a fumble recovery in the club’s three games. The sixth-round pick out of Tulane should receive significant playing time against Green Bay.

In terms of the GB game, I don’t hope to see anything more than some kind of encouraging sign. Can’t say in advance what that would be in a game like this, which will feature a lot of soon to be ex-players, but…I will know it when I see it. Or, I will know it if I don’t.

.

Harvey Wasn’t Just Bad Weather. It Was Bad City Planning

Houston exulted in sprawling, hands-off growth. That’s no way to prepare for natural catastrophes.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-08-31/a-hard-rain-and-a-hard-lesson-for-houston

By Peter Coy and Christopher Flavelle August 31, 2017, 5:00 AM EDT
Houston has been wet since birth. In the 1840s, the German explorer Ferdinand von Roemer described the Brazos River prairie just outside the young town as an “endless swamp” that mired the wheels of his wagons. He reported that some people who’d intended to settle in Texas turned around and left after seeing the “sad picture.” But Houston never let itself be hampered by its hydrology. It spent billions patching together a mess of dams and drainage projects as it grew and grew. It’s the fourth-biggest city in the U.S., boasting one of the world’s largest medical centers, oil refineries, a stupendous livestock show and rodeo, highbrow culture, vibrant economic growth, and speakers of 145 languages. The consolidated metropolitan statistical area surrounding Houston and extending to Galveston is larger than the state of New Jersey.

Harvey is a devastating reminder to Houston that nature will have its due. The Category 4 hurricane that hung around as a stationary tropical storm punished greater Houston with rainfall measured in feet, not inches. No city could have withstood Harvey without serious harm, but Houston made itself more vulnerable than necessary. Paving over the saw-grass prairie reduced the ground’s capacity to absorb rainfall. Flood-control reservoirs were too small. Building codes were inadequate. Roads became rivers, so while hospitals were open, it was almost impossible to reach them by car.

Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Sept. 4, 2017. Subscribe now.PHOTOGRAPHER: PHILIP MONTGOMERY FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
Harvey’s damage was selective. It’s a minor event for the $19 trillion U.S. economy, since most of the economic activity that was interrupted will be made up later. It was a light hit for insurers, because few underwrite flood insurance and the wind damage they do cover was minimal; insurers’ stock prices barely fell. The refining and petrochemical industries lining the busy Houston Ship Channel also got off fairly lightly (this time), because they’ve invested heavily in storm defenses.
The impact on taxpayers is more serious, because Harvey is likely to generate tens of billions of dollars in emergency federal aid and claims on the money-losing National Flood Insurance Program. In the short run, the precautionary shutdown of refineries drove wholesale gasoline prices traded in New York to a two-year high.
Above all, Harvey is a humanitarian disaster. Ordinary Texans were defenseless against rising waters contaminated by sewage and dotted with floating colonies of fire ants. The confirmed death toll, 20 as of Aug. 30, is expected to rise as rescuers discover more bodies. Residents will return to damaged homes vulnerable to the spread of mold. Much of the damage, which could run to $100 billion or more by one estimate, is uninsured. “This will be the worst natural disaster in American history” in financial terms, Joel Myers, founder and president of AccuWeather, predicted in an Aug. 29 statement.
Sprawling Houston is a can-do city whose attitude is grow first, ask questions later. It’s the only major U.S. city without a zoning code saying what types of buildings can go where, so skyscrapers sometimes sprout next to split-levels. Voters have repeatedly opposed enacting a zoning law.
Most of the time, the light hand works: Harris County, which encompasses Houston, added more people than any other U.S. county for eight straight years until 2016, when it fell to second. But Houston is suffering now from the lack of an effective plan to deal with chronic flooding.
Attitude is partly to blame. Michael Talbott spent 35 years with the Harris County Flood Control District trying to protect Houston, mainly by seeking funds for widening drainage channels and bayous. But he resisted the notion that more drastic measures such as preserving green space and managing growth were required. Shortly before retiring as executive director in 2016, Talbott gave an interview to ProPublica and the Texas Tribune in which he disputed the effect of global warming and said conservationists were antidevelopment. “They have an agenda … their agenda to protect the environment overrides common sense,” he said. Talbott, now retired, couldn’t be reached for comment.
It’s not only Houston that’s hands-off. Texas, despite being among the states most vulnerable to storms, has one of the nation’s most relaxed approaches to building codes, inspections, and other protections. It’s one of only four states along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts with no mandatory statewide building codes, and it has no statewide program to license building inspectors. Corpus Christi uses codes that reflect national standards, minus the requirement that homes be built 1 foot above expected 100-year-flood levels. But Nueces County, which encompasses Corpus Christi, has no residential building code.
Nationally, insurers favor tighter building codes and fewer homes in vulnerable locations. Homebuilders and developers want to keep houses as inexpensive as possible. As the costs of extreme weather increase, that fight has spilled over into politics: The federal government wants local governments to adopt policies that will reduce the cost of disasters, while many state and local officials worry about the lost tax revenue that might accompany restrictions on development.
The consequence of loose or nonexistent codes is that storm damage is often worse than need be. “Disasters don’t have to be devastating,” says Eleanor Kitzman, who was Texas’ state insurance commissioner from 2011 to 2013. She now runs a company called MyStrongHome that helps homeowners upgrade their homes to qualify for lower homeowners’ insurance premiums. “We can’t prevent the event, but we can mitigate the damage.”
Any measure introduced in Texas that increases costs draws opposition from homebuilders, a powerful group in state and local politics. At the end of this year’s state legislative session, the Texas Association of Builders posted a document highlighting its success in killing legislation it didn’t like. That included a bill that would have let cities require residential fire sprinklers. Another would have given counties with 100,000 people or more authority over zoning, land use, and oversight of building standards—something the builders’ group called “onerous.”
Ned Muñoz, vice president of regulatory affairs for the Texas builders’ organization, says cities already do a good job choosing which parts of the building code are right for them. And he argues that people who live outside of cities don’t want the higher prices that come with land use regulations.
The fight in Texas is a microcosm of a national battle. The International Code Council, a Washington nonprofit made up of government officials and industry representatives, updates its model codes every three years, inviting state and local governments to adopt them. Last year the National Association of Home Builders boasted of its prowess at stopping codes for 2018 that it didn’t like. “Only 6 percent of the proposals that NAHB opposed made it through the committee hearings intact,” the association wrote on its blog. The homebuilders demonstrated their power again this year, when President Donald Trump reversed an Obama initiative restricting federally funded building projects in flood plains. “This is a huge victory for NAHB and its members,” the association blogged.
Not all homebuilders are OK with the organization’s antiregulatory bent. Ron Jones, a member of the NAHB board who builds houses in Colorado, says that while the first priority now is helping the victims, he hopes the storm will force new thinking. “There’s no sort of national leadership involved,” he says. “For them it’s just, ‘Hell, we’ll rebuild these houses as many times as you’ll pay us to do it.’ ”
There’s a glimmer of a possibility that Harvey could lead to a détente between environmentalists and Trump administration officials in charge of disaster response. Some of the codes the homebuilders blocked had been proposed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is on the hook when homes collapse, flood, or wash away. In an interview before Harvey hit, FEMA Administrator William “Brock” Long expressed support for an Obama administration proposal to spur more local action on resilience, such as better building codes, if states want to keep getting first-dollar disaster relief from Washington. States that didn’t reduce their risks would have to cover a deductible before qualifying for federal aid. “I don’t think the taxpayer should reward risk,” Long told Bloomberg.
The Trump administration’s interest in strong building codes is less ideological than practical. Over the past decade, the federal government spent more than $350 billion on disaster recovery. Much of the money has gone to homes that keep getting damaged; 1.3 million households have applied for federal disaster assistance money at least twice since 1998—many of them in the same areas hit hardest by Harvey. Repeat claims are also common in the National Flood Insurance Program, which Congress must reauthorize by the end of September. Some lawmakers, and Long himself, have said homes that repeatedly flood should be excluded from coverage. “We need to take a look at where structures are being built,” says Todd Hunter, who represents Corpus Christi in the state legislature.
The pressure on government to back off from tough rules is strong, and how hard Long will work to make good on his pledge remains to be seen. When a reporter asked who was responsible for planning the rebuilding effort after Harvey, a FEMA spokeswoman suggested contacting the Texas Department of Public Safety. The department suggested asking FEMA.
However important it was in the past to come to grips with flood control and construction codes, it’s essential in this era of climate change. For Houston, the cruel irony is that the greenhouse gases that contribute to superstorms are intimately connected to the oil and petrochemical economy on which the city built its fortune.
The contribution from global warming is the result of what meteorologists call the Clausius-Clapeyron relation, which says the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere increases about 7 percent for each 1 degree Celsius increase in the temperature. (That’s 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit.) So: warmer air, more water, bigger storms. The temperature of the oceans is rising, too. Heat from the Gulf of Mexico is what fueled Harvey.
Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who flew with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s hurricane hunters in the 1980s and later co-founded the mischievously named Weather Underground Inc. website, argues that storms are worsening even more than one would expect from Clausius-Clapeyron. “The extra energy that you use to make the vapor stays with the vapor. It’s latent heat. When the vapor condenses into rain, it releases the heat that helps power the storm,” Masters says. “The more water vapor that you bring into a hurricane, the more energy, the stronger updrafts. You have to suck in even more air to replace the air that’s leaving. It’s a vicious cycle.”
Climate change could also explain why Harvey hovered over Houston, dropping rain on it for days instead of moving on. Global warming tends to cause subtropical high-pressure systems to expand, pushing the jet stream northward, Masters says. When that happened in August, the winds that might have pushed Harvey somewhere else were largely absent, he says. Michael Mann, an atmospheric scientist at Pennsylvania State University, together with five co-authors, explored the jet stream theory in a recent paper in the journal Scientific Reports.
Skeptics point out that the United Nations-affiliated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it doesn’t have the evidence to conclude that global warming is making storms and flooding worse. But not knowing if a phenomenon exists is different from saying it doesn’t exist. The IPCC, appropriately cautious, said its uncertainty is partly because of a dearth of reliable data from gauge stations and partly because extreme events are hard to analyze statistically. “The more rare the event the more difficult it is to identify long-term changes,” the panel wrote in 2012.
It’s also true, as skeptics note, that no particular storm can be attributed to a long-term phenomenon such as global warming. Then again, neither could any particular home run by Barry Bonds be attributed to steroids. “But steroids sure helped him hit more and hit them farther,” Eric Pooley, senior vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund and a former Bloomberg Businessweek deputy editor, said after Superstorm Sandy in 2012. “Now we have weather on steroids.”

A garden in the Energy Corridor district, which is home to many companies as well as residences.PHOTOGRAPHER: PHILIP MONTGOMERY FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
If climate change is a hoax, as President Trump has said, then Houstonians just got 50 inches of hoax dumped on their soaking wet heads. They don’t want to live through this again. Unfortunately, should things keep going the way they’re going, another 100-year or 500-year flood will hit within the decade, and we’ll be back to chewing this over all over again.
Houston’s clay soil doesn’t absorb water quickly, so when a hard rain comes, much of it runs off to pool elsewhere. Authorities have made matters worse by allowing developers to pave over much of Harris County and beyond; it’s spent its flood-control budget on culverts, canals, drains, levees, berms, pumps, and other “gray” (as in concrete) infrastructure to flush the water away—but that hasn’t been enough. It builds new roads with curbs and gutters designed to channel water away from buildings. Roads make good sluices in an ordinary storm, but in Harvey they couldn’t shed their water fast enough and became rivers.
Samuel Brody, a resident of the west side of Houston who says the flood waters crept up “into the freak-out zone” of his house, argues that Houston and the region should make better use of green solutions, such as preserving wetlands and digging more detention ponds, which are normally dry but fill up in storms. New buildings—and even old ones—should be elevated on piles so water flows under them, not into them, says Brody, who has a doctorate in city and regional planning and teaches at Texas A&M University’s Galveston campus. And, he says, builders should be prohibited from raising the heights of building lots with fill, which merely diverts more water onto their neighbors’ property.
The acreage of metro Houston that can’t soak up rainfall increased by 32 percent from 2001 to 2011, according to U.S. Geological Survey data. The political difficulty of green solutions is that they require buying up and ripping out stuff that’s already been built, which is expensive, or protecting existing green spaces from development, which means forgoing property tax revenue, which is also a costly response. (That’s especially so in Texas, which relies heavily on property taxes, since there’s no state income tax.) “What we’ve done hasn’t worked,” Brody says. “The question is, what else can be done? Keep developing and putting people in harm’s way, or do we need a shift in thinking?”
Making a city more resilient isn’t easy. Lots of U.S. cities—Miami comes to mind—were built in places that don’t make a lot of sense anymore. It’s worse abroad, where the world’s poorest cities are among the most vulnerable. More than 1,200 people in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal have died this summer from the worst monsoon flooding in years. One obvious solution is to curb the emission of the gases heating up the planet. But even if countries get a lot more serious about slowing climate change, we’re still going to have catastrophes. Mitigation of the consequences will have to be part of the answer.
Singapore could be a role model, says Michael Berkowitz, president of 100 Resilient Cities, a nonprofit founded by the Rockefeller Foundation. While its population has more than doubled since the 1980s, the city-state, which is in the path of monsoons, has increased to 46 percent from 35 percent the area of land with green cover, according to the government’s Centre for Liveable Cities.
A strategy such as Singapore’s takes time, though. Rattled by Harvey, Houstonians may understandably want a quicker fix. “There will be such a focus to reduce a single hazard, to get the water away as quickly as possible” through sluices, berms, and the like, Berkowitz says. “Houston will miss an opportunity. If you’re really going to make those improvements, that’s the work of a generation.”