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Michael Dunne: I’m Michael Dunne. They say a picture doesn’t lie, and that certainly is the case when you look at old photographs of our beloved Pacific Northwest volcanoes and mountains over the years, from Mount Baker in northwest Washington to Broken Top in central Oregon. Old photos of the impressive glaciers in our region are wonderful to look at, and sooner than anyone thought, those pictures may be the only glimpses we get of Pacific Northwest glaciers. Today on the show, you’ll hear from the environmental reporter at the Oregon Capital Chronicle about the retreating glaciers of our region and how that could affect all of us going forward. Then, in the second part of the show, a Texas political science professor will weigh in on the historic political shift from red to blue in the Lone Star State. Alex Baumhardt covers the environment and a whole slew of things for the Oregon Capital Chronicle. Alex, it’s always great to talk to you. Thanks so much for spending some time with us.
Alex Baumhardt: A pleasure, always.
Dunne: Yeah. So, some things it’s great when they’re in retreat: floodwaters after a storm, inflation, gas prices. It’s always great when those are in retreat. Not so much glaciers. Why don’t you talk about your story on how more than a third of Western states’ glacial cover has been lost since the 1950s?
Baumhardt: Right. So, there’s a professor at Portland State University, Andrew Fountain, who has been working with the U.S. Geological Survey for years, gathering historical data about glacial cover in the West. The USGS really only has that data for the western United States, the contiguous Lower 48, going back to 1950. I actually talked to him back in 2023, when he had first taken a whack at this and looked at federally recognized glaciers, and there were some 600 of those. At the time, he told me, “Hey, I’m going to expand this. I’m going to look at every glacier we’ve recorded that’s 25 acres or greater, and I’m going to look at how much the whole body of them has retreated since record keeping began in the 1950s.” So here we are three years later, and he brought me this data. Lo and behold, we’ve lost about a third of that glacial cover, and that’s across seven Western states: Washington, Oregon, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado and a few others. So yeah, it’s been pretty extraordinary.
Dunne: Some people might be listening and think, OK, the 1950s, that was a long time ago. Not in glacial age. Was he shocked by how fast this has happened?
Baumhardt: Yeah, I think he’s shocked. A lot of this for him was really about raising concerns over reservoir water. In a lot of the Cascades and the Colorado Rockies, snowpack and glaciers are truly your water reservoir for late summer in so many communities. Industry-centric rural places, farms, ranches, orchards, they need that water. They rely on that water when their own streams dry up near the end of the summer. So, on the one hand, he was like, “Listen, this is very clear evidence that the Earth’s atmosphere warming so rapidly is affecting this snowpack and glacier water supply, but it also shows us that we are sort of barreling toward this future of really scarce water in late summer and into the fall in places that can’t afford that.”
Dunne: Yeah. Would you remind folks, or explain for folks who don’t know, the importance of glaciers? Because as I understand it, with this report that some are gone, it’s not like a great snow year can replenish a glacier. It’s a whole different thing than, say, a snowfield, correct?
Baumhardt: Oh, absolutely. It’s a freshwater supply. For the longest time, the guarantee was that there’d be some seasonal melt and then rethickening in the winter, and that’s just not the case. And obviously, these glaciers take millennia to be created naturally in the environment. You can’t simulate a glacier. You can’t stimulate a glacier. You can’t re-glacier a glacier. So, when these are gone, they are gone, and that’s safe water supply. You look at some of the volcanoes we’re surrounded by that have less and less snowpack on them, and it ends up affecting these whole ecosystems: how the sun hits them and radiates on surrounding areas. These are historically important water supply and water storage areas that we won’t have. Fountain alluded to the idea that in the future, the Cascade Range will look more like the Sierra Nevada in California: pretty dry, sort of high desert-looking mountains.
Dunne: Wow. You’ve probably dealt with this issue numerous times, covering the environment like you do, and perhaps the professor talked about this. Have we reached a tipping point? Is it still possible to reduce carbon emissions so that the remaining glaciers can be saved? Are we getting very close, or have we crossed over to where the retreat of glaciers is simply going to continue worldwide?
Baumhardt: Yeah, it’s going to continue. I’m sure everybody’s heard for years about 1.5 degrees Celsius being this sort of tipping point. On the whole, we’ve actually hit that substantially throughout the year. The 1.5 has to do with the Earth’s global average temperature. We haven’t hit enough days of a global average temperature exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius yet, but we are expected to in literally the next few years. We’ve already passed 2 degrees Fahrenheit of warming in the last 150 years. That’s substantial, and that’s a global average. The reason that’s important is because people say, “Well, it doesn’t seem like global warming’s hitting me. I see the snowfall. It’s been minus 20 degrees.” That is totally outside the spectrum of what scientists are looking at, which is the Earth’s global average temperature, and we’re in that. And the bigger issue is, you’ve probably heard of the greenhouse effect. It’s not like we turn off the faucet today and the Earth starts to rechill itself. We are trapped with these gases and this heat until their life cycle moves on. Everything about curbing emissions now to keep the average global temperature from rising is about mitigating how bad it could get later, given that we have to live with these temperatures for quite a while. And I don’t say “we”; we’ll be dead by then. But future generations, who don’t get to have a say in the decisions being made now, will. So, without sounding catastrophic or too morbid, as I always say with climate change, it’s death by 1,000 cuts. It’s not a comet or a meteor hitting the Earth. It’s losing these things along the way that actually play really integral parts in the total functioning of the atmosphere and ecosystems in places that we love.
Dunne: OK, so last winter we had a historically bad winter in terms of replenishing overall snowpack, and of course forecasters are talking about something we’re hearing is a potential super El Niño. With El Niños, it can go either way, and we understand that to a degree. But one forecast predicts a very warm winter coming up this year. Carrying on from how important glaciers are, and in terms of the snowpack situation, how bad could it be if some of the predictions for this super El Niño mean we have an even worse winter for snowpack this coming winter?
Baumhardt: Yeah, it just sort of exacerbates this ongoing drought. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said super El Niño. Typically, an El Niño year is actually pretty dry, and El Niño is dry in part because it’s warmer. Ocean temperatures are warmer, and atmospheric pressure creates more warmth. A super El Niño has the opposite effect: The warmth comes through, but it actually brings a deluge of rain. So, Larry O’Neill, the Oregon state climatologist, has said NOAA is being sort of cautious, 50-50. It could be dry and warm, or it could be wet and warm. He’s like, “I’m looking at historical data in Oregon, and in the Pacific Northwest, it’s going to be incredibly wet.” And atmospheric scientists are saying this could be one of the biggest El Niños in many decades. So, what he’s saying is warm and wet. What that does for snowpack: very little, unless you’re at a very high elevation. At this point, we’re losing any glaciers that are below a certain threshold. You’ll have snowpack and glaciers at very high elevations, like Mount Rainier, but not necessarily at the elevations we have in the Oregon Cascades. So yeah, I think you could easily forecast ongoing drought issues, and this might not hit in the spring. We might have this incredible rain. In my conversations with Larry, the idea is that this will be a wetter, warmer winter, and it’ll go longer. It’ll start later and go longer. So, you can anticipate perhaps a very rainy April, May, maybe into June. By the time you get to orchards, farms and ranches in August, September and October, it’s going to be pretty dry.
Dunne: She is Alex Baumhardt, environmental reporter for the Oregon Capital Chronicle. Alex, it’s always great to talk to you. Thanks so much.
Baumhardt: Oh, thanks for having me, Michael.
Dunne: Let’s now bring in a Texas political science professor to tell us what the heck happened politically in that state. Parker Hevron is an associate professor of political science at Texas Woman’s University. Parker, thank you so much for coming on and talking with us.
Parker Hevron: Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Dunne: Yeah. I’m speaking to you from deep-blue western Oregon, and I have to say, we were all pretty shocked at the results coming out of Texas. How shocked were you all on election night?
Hevron: Yeah, we were pretty shocked. In hindsight, I think what you see sometimes when there’s a wave election like this is you turn around and, in retrospect, you’re like, “Oh, well, the signs were there all along.” I think this case is no different. Obviously, we’re dealing with a deeply unpopular incumbent president who has pursued policies that in many ways have been harmful to voters, not only nationwide but especially here in Texas, and especially among constituents and parts of the electorate that swung pretty hard for him in 2024. Texas has a very large Latino population, particularly in our districts and counties in the Rio Grande Valley along the Texas-Mexico border. Some of those people swung very hard for Trump in 2024, and that’s a part of the state that has been reliably blue for a long time. But I think it votes with its pocketbook in many ways, and the Trump tariffs, not to mention the very hard-line immigration crackdown, really affected places like that. But that’s also getting a little ahead of your question, I think, because Texas hasn’t elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994 and hasn’t elected a Democrat to represent Texas in the U.S. Senate since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988. So, in terms of Democrats winning races here in Texas, the muscle memory just wasn’t there. A lot of Democrats in Texas had their hopes raised, maybe by Beto O’Rourke’s pretty spirited Senate campaign in 2018, only to see him come up about 3 points short of beating Ted Cruz. Democrats in this state have had their hopes raised for a long time, and Tuesday night was that dam breaking in a really big and really dramatic way.
Dunne: Yeah. So, introduce us to the two marquee candidates, whom many of us have really only just learned about. Talk about Sen.-elect James Talarico, and talk about Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa.
Hevron: Yeah, of course. Both of them actually have a pretty long history in electoral politics here in Texas. One of the dangers of living in what is essentially a one-party state, and I think this is true in Texas with respect to the Republicans, or in a place like California with respect to the Democrats, is that oftentimes the opposition party doesn’t have much of a chance to develop a deep bench of candidates who can plausibly run in an election. In 2018, in that race I mentioned earlier, Beto O’Rourke came very close to beating Ted Cruz, and one of the things he said later is that he wished there had been somebody else at the top of the ticket who was as well funded as he was and who was as serious a candidate as he was. Nobody really thought the Democratic candidate for governor that year had much of a chance of winning, so Beto was doing a lot of work at the top of the ticket by himself. This year, I think the Democrats were really smart statewide to not only field such a strong candidate at the top of the ticket in James Talarico but also to give their support to Gina Hinojosa, who ran a really nimble, agile, creative and very smart campaign for governor. I think it was a mutually reinforcing race for both of those candidates at the top of the ticket.
I can start with James Talarico. He’s a millennial with a really impressive backstory. He was raised by a single mom who had escaped an abusive relationship with his alcoholic birth father, and he grew up in central Texas. He went on to the University of Texas at Austin and served in campus government there. Then he took a Teach for America position, teaching at a pretty impoverished public school in San Antonio, and from there went on to a career in the Texas House. Along the way, he entered the seminary to become a Presbyterian minister. Talarico’s political experience is pretty interesting because he actually had his original seat gerrymandered out from under him and had to run in a new district in Austin. He’s been a pretty adept politician during the Trump era at toeing the line between a more overtly woke style of politics and a focus on populist economic issues, and he really leaned into the populism and the economic issues in this race. It’s interesting: We’ve seen in exit polling data, for example, that government corruption has been at the top of the list of Americans’ concerns this election season. From the get-go, Talarico was very smart and very effective at tying this overall issue of government corruption to the actions of his opponent, Ken Paxton, who in a lot of ways was just a generationally bad candidate. He was handpicked by Trump, but he was dogged by scandals of his own doing that have plagued him throughout his political career. Up to this point, none of those scandals had ended that career, although I think it probably ended Tuesday night. So, Talarico was able to tie corruption and Ken Paxton’s story very closely together. And if you watched any of his victory speech, some of the rhetoric he was using was very post-political. He talked about a politics of love, moving forward rather than a politics based on division and hatred, and a politics of coming together. In many ways, he was sounding themes we’ve heard successful Democrats talk about, from Obama in his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention to more recent rhetoric from folks like Jon Ossoff. I think when Democrats are at their best, they’re in this kind of aspirational, post-political mode.
As for Gina Hinojosa, as an outside observer, I really can’t say enough about the strategy her campaign was able to use. She leaned very, very hard into the decimation of public education here in Texas. Not a lot of people know this, but the Texas Legislature only meets once every two years, and even then only for 140 days at a time. So, our legislative sessions are quite jam-packed with things the Legislature has to cover. It’s the world’s ninth-biggest economy, and there’s a lot to do. One of the things Republicans spent a lot of time on in this last legislative session, at the behest of Greg Abbott, was pushing through a very controversial school voucher plan, which gives public school parents in the state money to send their kids to private schools. It proved to be pretty unpopular, especially with rural conservatives, and Gina Hinojosa leaned very hard into that on the campaign trail. She also leaned very hard into the construction of AI data centers, another issue that’s affected rural Texans. Until recently, these data centers had really been given the green light to be built here in Texas. We’re a pro-growth state with a pro-growth mindset, and pro-growth is great until you have a data center next door that’s sucking up all of the water in your county, leading to problems with the electrical grid, polluting the air and so on. So, both of these candidates were able to take these issues of the moment and turn them into something that would win on the campaign trail. Talarico will obviously have some tough decisions to make in Washington. As for Gov.-elect Hinojosa, it’s been since 1994 that a Democrat has been in the governor’s mansion here in Texas. To say that there is no experience leading the state held by any Democrat is an understatement. So, Democrats will have a lot of on-the-job learning to do, because not only did they take the governor’s mansion, but they also took every other statewide elected office. We have a multipart executive branch here in Texas, and Democrats swept it all down the line.
Dunne: He is Parker Hevron, associate professor of political science at Texas Woman’s University. Thank you so much for coming on and giving us the Texas perspective.
Hevron: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Dunne: That’s the show for today. All episodes of “Oregon on the Record” are available as a podcast at klcc.org. Monday on the show, we’ll talk to an author and leader of a national consumer rights organization about how we’re being gouged by big corporations at almost every level and how our personal data is the key. I’m Michael Dunne, host of “Oregon on the Record.” Thanks for listening.
