By Dan Bodine
PRESIDIO, TX–Not exactly sure when this rental property case came up, 7-8 years ago at least. Long before I retired as JP down in Presidio, a small Far West Texas border town downriver from El Paso several hours, nestled deep in the Big Bend area’s Chihuahuan Desert mountains.
The head of the University of Texas Energy Institute coming out in news this week against the Republican Texas governor, Rick Perry, for his opposition to climate change, is what reminded me of it.
Real strange what protecting economic self-interest–which is what this climate change debate to Republicans mostly is, I believe–can do to one’s senses. Can change daylight to darkness; burning hot to just piddling warm. Indeed, with heated theatrics a new political reality–both climate deniers and protestors–one often wonders just where as a collective body did we lose our common sense?
Perry repeatedly cast doubts on what almost anyone with a wet finger in the air can tell you about our climate. That we’re getting hotter and dryer. Hell, even the polar bears in the northern Arctic and the carpenter ants beefing up on lawn water in my backyard can sense that! But maybe it’s time to cool the rhetoric and face the economic realities, too.
Wednesday’s Texas Tribune quotes UT’s Raymond Orbach, in a research paper in the forthcoming issue of the British journal, Reports on Progress in Physics, as having mounted scientific evidence that not only has man caused climate change but also argues an 80 percent reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions is needed by 2050 to stabilize global temperatures, and cut damages currently being done. (Readers who want to see results of climate change can look here at either these National Geographic shots or these lovely livescience.com photos.)
Anyway, it all reminded me of Carolina, a good friend in Presidio, who because of her family background, its stubbornness, and its strong economic interest there, too, I’d always suspected was a closet Republican, like some of her more “open” cousins. (Business and politics both make it difficult to be openly Republican in Presidio. Call the town old-fashion! Hee, hee.)
Carolina (The Spanish-pronounced i like an ee) was willing to sidestep the issue of it being hotter than blazes one summer when she came into our little justice court with an ex-renter, seeking an informal injunction against the person from “taking away my property.” It being hot didn’t have anything to do with the facts in the case, she felt.
The former tenant was attempting to remove her evaporative air-conditioner–and 15-20 ft. of metal, overhead ductwork she’d constructed–all from where it was attached to a small, backroom window in a small building she’d leased from Carolina for a novelty store business of some kind.
On the main drag in downtown Presidio, it was. Within walking distance for hundreds of weekly shoppers from over the international bridge in Ojinaga, MX. You got rental property in a location like that, you fight to protect it, right? Well, sometimes you just need to step aside from the personal insult of the moment and think rationally.
Physical improvements done by a tenant to improve property–yes, as Carolina had argued– generally “stay with the property,” property codes of most states say. Especially in New York City, for instance, which is notorious for entrenched family landlords of sizable estate holdings, who year after year, generation after generation, do little to make their living but squeeze more rent income out of tenants and their enhancement projects.
But this was Presidio, the former tenant had argued. The nation’s hot spot. The rent amount certainly wasn’t at a discount rate for it. And an air-conditioning system, which by decency should’ve been standard equipment for any business rental building in Presidio, wasn’t there either.
What was she to do? You can’t ask customers to come into your store and stand around in the sweltering heat! Not in Presidio! So she installed her own air-conditioning system. And she felt it was hers to keep!
After making sure she wasn’t damaging any property to remove it, I agreed with her, too. Against the injunction request. Call it bad logic or a bad hair day. Whatever you will. That’s the way I felt. Carolina wasn’t happy.
“This is Presidio,” I reminded her, feeling a little embarrassed for even having to do so in the first place. What actually is a pleasant climate 7-8 months out of the year, here it’ll soar up 115-120 in late spring-summer heat. Folks bonding together socially against not only the heat but the region’s isolated location long has been the established norm for treating each other in places like this. Talk before you fight. Generations have done it.
Which brings us back to the overall climate picture. Lord knows I’m not smart enough to figure out any solutions to climate change. But it’s obvious, to me, that “in a pinch” one must do what it takes to survive. Our planet’s air conditioning system is badly out of kilter. So we wait ‘til it’s too late to fix, to do anything? And risk the unspeakable? What are we to do?
For one, it’s refreshing to see some Texas honesty coming forward, at least. UT’s Professor Orbach, too, believes the stakes of Perry’s and Republican highroller’s economic self-interest (what they stand to lose in the debate) are the largest obstacle to getting an agreement on the problem.
And he's unashamedly simple about it. Stop using politics as a whipping post and recognize the obvious: It’s the economy, stupid! is his message to blood-sniffin’ critics. Find a political solution!
Orbach said that a major issue, indeed, is that it seems simply too expensive to fix. The current remedies, he said, “are economically not viable, and as a consequence I think people are reluctant to try to go through the processes that are so expensive and so deleterious to the economy in order to respond to climate change. …
“Countries are not going to destroy their economy” to prevent climate change, in short, he said.
He laid out an example of what he argues is a potential solution, involving carbon sequestration in saline aquifers under the Gulf and geothermal technologies — though he acknowledges more studies must be done to prove its feasibility. But on such paths we must press on, too. That also is a reality. A must reality.
Right now, Orbach says, “People are not going to spend 30 percent more on their energy just to capture the carbon dioxide” from a coal plant, so they can store it underground and out of the atmosphere. Maybe framing the economic debate like this amidst economic challenges is what our New Realism needs to be defined as.
Asked about the climate consequences particularly to Texas, Orbach said: “It’s not Texas. It’s the globe. We are part of, as [Buckminster] Fuller said, Spaceship Earth. … If the sea level rises, the people in Corpus Christi are going to get awfully wet. There are consequences everywhere.”
Wall Street protestors, it might be a good time before ratcheting up heat on this topic further, to back off and make sure we’re not asking someone to “cut off their (economic) nose to spite their (public) face.” See a spade as a spade.
Is it possible to have a national conversation about something like this without going into screaming hysterics? Is there an idea person amongst us? If so, please stand up.
The clock is ticking.
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