Southampton, Long Island, before Sandy arrives

I like snow storms. I love thunder and watching the crack of lightning. This is no fun at all. The bands of rain and wind are coming in faster and harder already and we’re not expecting Sandy to make landfall till 8pm. There’s water over Battery Park, the FDR drive and the East River parks at 2.30. Long Island’s lights are out. Ours will be soon, no doubt, and you start to realize what a dark little box a NYC apartment really is.

Twitter and Facebook are alive with contempt for the climate silence of the campaign and a certain hope that perhaps this will be the event that changes all that. Just last weekend, David Attenborough, the BBC TV naturalist, speculated that it would take a disaster to do so. I’d like to see that– but I doubt it.

If things are bad, we will be told, as if this were yet another gun violence disaster, that now is not the time to talk about what caused the storm. Or that no one weather event can be attributed to long-term climate change. Or that it wasn’t as bad as predicted so the climate change lobby was wrong again. And before we get dried out on the East coast, before the power is restored upstate and in Long Island, we will have re-elected at a minimum the know-nothing Republican House, perhaps also a Republican Senate or President.

Given a golden opportunity to look presidential, Obama came on TV around lunchtime and delivered remarks with the affect of a professor changing the due date on a test. I don’t recognize or understand this person, who sometimes goes away when Obama is in front of a large crowd or even in the latter debates after the damage was done.

For Republicans, their angry white male core constituency regards science and research as two more of the things that prevent them from getting ahead. The coal-steel-auto-airplane-defense matrix that created the well-paying (usually union) jobs they hanker after both caused the climate crisis and has moved to China forever. That’s why Romney talks about expanding defense: not because we need the materiel but because it offers the prospect of some jobs where there are so few now.

We should not look down on these people. If you visit Copenhagen, to take just one example, there are windmills everywhere. In New York, not only are there no windmills but I can’t recall ever seeing a solar panel. In a place with broiling summers, why aren’t the roofs of all the buildings covered in panels to power the A/C? Why did diesel generators sell out immediately, while so few people have solar installed? I don’t have either at our house because both are expensive. But it never seems to occur to anyone that a solar panel could do the work of a generator without having to be refueled and without the noxious fumes.

We have all been in denial. For a few days around this storm, should it prove to be as devastating as predicted, there will be attempts to break that wall but, if past experience is any guide, the carapace of obfuscation will seal over the issue once again.

I don’t know when I will be able to get back online after tonight–maybe tomorrow, maybe not. But the work ahead came to me in a title: The Debtor’s Guide to The Climate Disaster.