The New Year is a time for new approaches and fresh starts. May we suggest that U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, the senior senator from our storm-ravaged state, adopt a wholly different approach to leadership on one of the most important problems in Texas, or anywhere: climate change.

The scientific community — including 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists — has reached consensus: A host of factors, including the way humankind uses fossil fuels, is causing the Earth to warm. That warming has triggered significant changes to the climate. And those changes have serious risks to people and infrastructure all over the planet, including right here in Houston.

The four warmest years on record, according to NASA data, were 2014-2017. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that Europe had recorded the highest temperatures for the first 11 months of last year since continental testing began in 1910. The U.S. Navy has sounded the alarm over the risks of climate change. The Department of Defense has named it among our greatest national security challenges. The White House’s long-term scientific planning committee has agreed, as has state of Texas, the European Union and the United Nations.

It’s also true that storms are getting stronger, less predictable and more frequent. Sea levels are rising, threatening both tiny islands in the Pacific and cities as large as Miami. Babies born today will be finishing graduate school when summer temperatures in Houston and Dallas will likely reach 120.

Not everything about these changes is settled science. But we all know the changes ahead are incredibly dangerous — and that rethinking how the world uses energy could mitigate the danger.

Yet despite such enormous economic and human stakes in Texas, Cornyn has offered mostly silence with occasional sides of skepticism.

Two tweets sent by the senator earlier this week highlight his lack of leadership.

When CBS News announced it would no longer allow guests to argue that climate change is not real, he offered a Sphinx-like rebuttal on Twitter: “Science is not static.”

Well of course, scientific understanding evolves. Our understanding of climate change will, too. But given Cornyn’s career-long refusal to back any meaningful response to climate change, his comment is mere casuistry.

Cornyn also used Twitter to mock a New York Times column stating, “Nothing else measures up to the rising toll and enormous dangers of climate change.” Our senator retweeted the piece with a single word of commentary: “Really.”

He went on to argue other crises ranked ahead of climate worries in 2018, from North Korean nukes to Iranian missiles to the opioid epidemic. Fair arguments, in terms of subjectivity.

But we can’t ignore how Cornyn’s tweets on climate change fit so cleanly into his record of silence, sprinkled with skepticism.

He has for years acknowledged the reality of climate change. Even as early as 2014, he conceded human activity was warming the planet dangerously. Many in his party were slower to acknowledge even this much.

Where he has fallen so unconscionably short is in his insistence that whatever its effects, the proper remedy to climate change is within the purview of private industry, or if regulation is ever needed, through state laws. After all, as he wrote in an 2015 op-ed, private-sector ingenuity has helped address previous environmental threats.

Translation: Congress needn’t be bothered.

What a dereliction of duty.

He’s hardly alone among Republican leaders, but for the senior senator from Texas, the energy capital of the world and with a coastline especially vulnerable to climate change, it’s a devastating shortcoming.

Congress could play a powerful role. If it did, just imagine the good a senator might accomplish?

Congress could help guide - through both sticks and carrots - industry and consumers to adapt to and even exploit coming climate changes.

An engine that burns oil without releasing carbon into the atmosphere? Natural gas drilling that does not include methane flaring? Air conditioners that use a fraction of the electricity now required? Batteries capable of storing at home days’ worth of energy generated by sunny or windy days?

Each of these could be billion-dollar bonanzas. Why shouldn’t the U.S. government take a prominent role in developing solutions like these?

And why shouldn’t these companies of the future be given incentive to start in Texas?

Government needn’t act alone, but left solely to their own devices, companies will naturally prioritize solutions that return short-term gains. Congress could help ensure that long-term dangers are addressed, too.

Instead, Texans are asked to settle for silence and skepticism from its senior senator, and for that matter, its junior senator, too.

We deserve better.