One day last week, I sat down with my kids to watch the global-warming disaster flick "The Day After Tomorrow'' on HBO. This festival of cataclysm was already a family favorite, mainly because when we saw it in the theatre last summer I humiliated the children by attempting to wave one of its characters -- a TV reporter covering some killer tornados in downtown L.A. -- out of the path of a flying billboard. (He didn't listen to me, either; ouchie!)
At the movies, of course, it's fun to pretend. But when last year's goofball thriller, junk science in all its particulars, starts resembling this week's news footage, it's not such a laugh: A major American city is submerged and federal officials caught flat-footed, despite repeated warnings. Refugees set out on foot -- here -- with only the clothes on their backs. Relief is offered us by other countries. Only in Hollywood, right?
Not any more, of course. Now for the truly surreal we have only to turn on Nightline, where Michael Brown, the former estate lawyer now running the former FEMA, last night generously suggested to Ted Koppel that he wouldn't dream of second-guessing the City of New Orleans for its lack of preparedness.
Brown explained that the fact that more than a third of Louisiana's National Guard troops are serving in Iraq is irrelevant since they are not even military police - though that is exactly what they are in Iraq.
And no one could have predicted, he said, that an evacuation plan FOR PEOPLE WITH CARS would leave many thousands of desperately poor people stranded in a city where nearly a third of all residents live below the poverty line.
Nor, needless to say, could a storm so widely described as an "act of God'' have been brought to heel - even if that wacky Al Gore did dash off a few thoughts, 13 years ago now, about how such storms like this would become increasingly frequent and ferocious unless we cut back on CO2 emissions. (See hurricanes and warming oceans, page 106, Earth in the Balance.)
These dots have yet to be connected by the current administration, however. On the contrary, this Wednesday, the banner headline in the Washington Post was, "Floods Ravage New Orleans.'' And at the bottom of the front page: "New Rules Could Allow Power Plants to Pollute More.''
"The Bush administration has drafted regulations that would ease pollution controls on older, dirtier power plants,'' the story said, "and could allow those that modernize to emit more pollution, rather than less.''
The same day, Bush White House responded to the gasoline shortages caused by the damage to oil rigs and refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, which was caused by the storm, which was made worse by pollution...by announcing that it would relax environmental standards nationwide so refiners could produce, as the New York Times put it, "more - but dirtier - gasoline.'' In the movies, this script would be chucked as too ridiculous. In real life, it's too predictable.
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