Climate chaos has partisan political impacts

I'm a sucker for maps, so this grabbed me. Mark Muro and David G. Victor explain what we're looking at:

Scanning the map, you can see that while the projected economic impacts of climate change are widely distributed, they are especially concentrated in the American Southeast, the Gulf Coast, and Florida. In these places, many counties will see 10% to 20% or more hits to their aggregate income. ...

Drill down on the political geography of climate damage, and it becomes clear that in much of the country, Republicans are voting for people who are opposed to climate policy, even as they are most exposed to climate damages. 

... The pattern is unmistakable. Many of the states with the most to lose from climate change voted heavily for Donald Trump in 2016, thereby electing a president who has disavowed his own government’s National Climate Assessment and systematically moved to dismantle former President Barack Obama’s foreign policy and regulatory initiatives to reduce carbon emissions.  ... Nine of the 10 states contending with the highest losses of county income voted for President Trump in 2016, including Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama. 

And all those states have the usual complement of two Senators who represent largely rural square mileage, not numbers of residents; many boast fossil fuel extraction industries. Their elected representatives are not going to support nationwide efforts to mitigate climate disaster anytime soon.

I'm reminded of the popular refrain of the '00s: What's the matter with Kansas? -- meaning why would a once economic populist state be so bamboozled by fear of Feminazi abortionists and the Gay Menace that people would elect politicians aligned against their economic interests? There aren't any simple answers to that sort of cognitive displacement. The answers, if there are any, are likely multi-faceted.

Sure, in the urban areas of these heavily impacted states, people get it. Miami will struggle to do something to prevent chronic urban flooding; tourists and locals prefer not to get their feet wet. Houston has suffered two 100-year floods in the last decade; yes, Houston does have a problem and knows it. But their states continue to block progress through an anti-democratic Senate.
...At CNN in 2018, electoral analyst Ron Brownstein looked at the partisan alignment of Senators based on relative carbon emissions from their states.

... before November's election, Republicans controlled 32 of the 40 Senate seats from the 20 states that emit the most carbon per dollar of economic output. ... before the election Democrats controlled 32 of the 40 Senate seats from the 20 largely coastal states that emit the least carbon per dollar of economic output. Those numbers didn't change in November, as Democrats gained one Senate seat from these lower carbon states (in Nevada) while surrendering another (in Florida).

His conclusion is that the political fight between the parties is primarily in those states in a middle tier of 20 carbon emitters. Those states (with their ranking as carbon emitters) include the Democrats targets, Michigan (22), Wisconsin (23) and Pennsylvania (24).

Thinking about climate provides another lens on the partisan predicament we're in. Let's hope our stasis doesn't kill too many before nature's message gets through.