Climate-fueled weather disasters in Texas are tied to “a government hostile to the very concept of climate change,” Bloomberg Opinion editor Mark Gongloff declared Tuesday.
“No other state has suffered more climate-related damage over the past several decades than the Lone Star State,” Gongloff writes, fallout from “Texas’ aggressive pro-global-warming policies.”
The writer goes on to make the unfalsifiable assertion that while climate change may not have caused Hurricane Beryl, “it certainly made it more powerful and destructive,” before acknowledging that a growing La Nina phenomenon in the Pacific might also have something to do with it.
“Beryl is just the start of what will be an unusually busy hurricane season,” he prophesies, warning that “climate change makes each event more likely to go to 11.”
Government leaders in Texas have “dedicated most of their energy to not only denying the reality of climate change but fighting efforts to address it,” he asserts, and “have passed laws keeping state money out of investment funds that they claim ‘boycott’ fossil fuels.”
The fossil-fuel industry is Texas’ largest by revenue, he notes, but its politics “makes it harder for the rest of the world” to limit global warming.
All of this could simply be a New Yorker venting over Texas’ success story. Because of its refusal to pander to climate change alarmists, Texas has become a magnet for Americans looking for a better way to live.
A fisherman looks at vessels damaged by Hurricane Beryl at the Bridgetown Fisheries in Barbados, July 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Ricardo Mazalan)
While New York has been hemorrhaging citizens desperate to get away from its oppressive laws and exorbitant taxes, Texas has been celebrating a boom.
As the Wall Street Journal noted earlier this month, pandemic-related flight from Democratic-run states with onerous taxes and a high cost of living “has continued after life got back to quasi-normal.”
According to the most recent IRS data, the article observes, New York has been the second biggest income loser ($14.2 billion), while Texas is the second largest income gainer ($10.1 billion), thanks to Americans voting with their feet.
“Texas’s income haul surged by more than 150%” in 2022, the piece relates, while other Republican-led states such as South Carolina and Tennessee experienced similar gains.
“Blame in part its high energy and housing costs,” the essay reads. “Electricity costs two to three times as much, and gasoline $1 to $2 a gallon more, as in states without burdensome climate mandates.”
Of course, none of this matters to climate ideologues, but to people who live in the real world, it’s a game changer.