TICK TOCK THE CLIMATE CLOCK PART EIGHTEEN

Let’s step away from the usual Tick Tock gloom and doom climate catastrophe scenarios and focus on adaptation:  what some cities and states are doing to confront the looming fact that sea levels are rising, flooding coastal areas.  (The satellite photo below shows New York City with predicted flood mapping shaded.)

 
The May-June 2019 Climate Issue of MIT Technology Review (MTR) briefs this subject in a case study it calls “the mind-boggling problem of keeping New York dry.”  Here is the MTR link:  https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613329/the-mind-boggling-task-of-protecting-new-york-city-from-rising-seas/

After Super Storm Sandy inundated Long Island City in 2012, sending the East River cascading through city streets, pouring into the subway system, damaging Manhattan basements in commercial and residential buildings, floating away vehicles, and killing 40 people, NYC took a long, hard look at what its 520 miles of shoreline would look like in the coming decades as sea levels rise, high tides get higher, and flooding intensifies.  Here is their projection, based on low (8-inch), middle (16-inch), and high (30-inch) estimates for high tides in 2050.  Take a look:

The projections were a wake-up call that prompted the State of New York to join with New Jersey and Connecticut to engage the Regional Plan Association (RPA), a 100-year-old independent, non-profit planning organization, to come up with a redevelopment plan for the Tri-State Area to, among other things, address climate change, specifically rising sea levels.  The RPA plan is called The Fourth Plan, and it resembles the Green New Deal in its sweeping recommendations.  You can read it here:  http://fourthplan.org/

Confining ourselves to the climate change aspects of the plan, the RPA projections and recommendations are both a bucket of cold water thrown in your face and a giant hand thrust into your pocketbook.  We can argue about whether the seas are rising because of man-made climate change or “natural geological cycles," but the inescapable fact remains:  they are rising and they will permanently inundate certain coastal areas—not just wetlands, but metropolitan areas, too.  Here is what The Fourth Plan predicts will occur and what it urges be done in the Tri-State Area to adapt to this frightening, expensive reality (bullet points are courtesy of the MTR; italics are mine):  

·         More than 2 million people will be living in areas vulnerable to flooding.
The plan calls for housing buyouts in flood-prone communities like Jamaica Bay, Long Island’s south shore, and the Jersey Shore [that’s some expensive real estate]. It recommends banning new development in these areas immediately, and redirecting funds meant for upkeep toward housing buyouts.

·         40% of all water treatment plants will be at a high risk of contamination or running dry.
The plan calls for creating a network of water supply systems between Long Island, New York, and New Jersey, affording flexibility in case any one water source is contaminated or destroyed by a storm. The plan suggests this could be paid for by utilities [read:  ratepayers].

·         New Jersey’s Meadowlands will be underwater.
The Meadowlands—20,000 acres just five miles outside New York City—is home to essential infrastructure like warehouses, commuter and freight rail, and roads into the city. The regional plan calls for phasing out every bit of this infrastructure over time, ceding the land to the water, and making the Meadowlands a national wetlands park that grows over time as sea levels rise [a significant financial investment and a huge financial loss].

·         More than 60% of the city’s power comes from plants that will be at high risk of flooding.
The plan calls for existing power plants to be upgraded, replaced, preserved, or relocated on a case-by-case basis [utility bills will skyrocket, and the burden will not be shared equally]. It suggests flood-proofing facilities when possible by elevating them. It recommends that power plants form a network in case any are knocked out of commission during a severe storm, and calls for increased capacity to cope with the higher demand that will be likely during hot spells. 

·         Subways, railroads, highways, and airports will flood frequently.
Teterboro Airport in Hackensack, New Jersey, handles much of the freight bound for New York City—and it could be under a foot of seawater by midcentury. The plan calls for it to be phased out. Newark and JFK airports should be expanded, the plan says, to handle the extra capacity. Subway systems will become dangerous, given the likelihood of flooding and power outages. The plan recommends creating a government body to modernize the entire subway system—with funding coming from fees on motorists entering the city, among other sources [bridge and tunnel tolls will increase, another unequally shared burden].

So, it’s comforting to know that there is a Fourth Regional Plan, right?  But don't get too comfortable, because planning is not the same as doing.  As the MTR notes below, there hasn’t been a single implementation of any part of the plan.  Why is that, given that the New York City Panel on Climate Change estimates that sea levels could rise between 11 and 21 inches by 2050 and up to 6 feet by 2100, doubling the size and population of the 100-year-flood zone?  (Pssst:  it’s really hard to do and it will cost a bundle.)

MTR explains (emphasis added):

[A]nalysis of state disaster resiliency plans in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut…suggest that more than $27 billion of planned investments to recover from Sandy have not been made. Climate resilience is expensive and onerous.  Seven projects in the region got federal funding in a post-Sandy design competition,…but several years later on, not one has broken ground.

Extrapolating from this micro Tri-State view to a macro federal one, I think money is the real reason why the Trump Administration continues to deny climate change.  I don’t think it’s a war on science, per se, even though the Administration has made it clear throughout the Executive Branch that the words “Anthropocene” and “human-caused” are not welcome in government studies on climate change.  Rather, I think the war on science is a cover, a means to an end, and the end is the allocation of financial resources, i.e. federal tax dollars, to favored industries.   And those would be fossil-fuel-based industries, not renewables.  Yes, I think it’s a question of money—and more importantly, who gets the money.

   

Trump pretty much admitted as much on 60 Minutes.  Responding to a question as to whether he thought climate change was man-made, he deferred a direct answer on that but tellingly said, “I don’t want to give trillions and trillions of dollars; I don’t want to lose millions and millions of jobs; I don’t want to be put at a disadvantage.”  

One of Trump's former climate advisors, George David Banks, who was interviewed for the podcast, The Reveal, goes further, saying, “It’s not just him.  It’s a number of Republicans who will argue that if we acknowledge it’s a problem, then we’re going to have to deal with it, right, but, unfortunately, when we think about what we have to do to deal with it, there’s a tremendous economic cost to it.”  He says that Trump prefers to devote federal government resources (Hey!  Those are OUR tax dollars!) to making sure China doesn’t overtake the US as a geopolitical hegemon, to preserving American jobs, and to ensuring that the US is not at a competitive trade disadvantage.  Those may be worthwhile goals, but are they the most urgent, the most important, the sine qua non problems on the national plate?  That’s a political question, of course, but at the heart of most political questions is …money.  And it’s just not being spent by the federal government on climate adaptations.

 

A recent article in The Guardian explains the scope of the problem.  If the statistics quoted are correct, it's even worse than I thought.  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/07/fossil-fuel-lobby-pollute-politics-climate-crisis

According to the IMF, every year governments subsidise fossil fuels to the tune of $5tn – many times more than they spend on addressing our existential predicament. The US spends 10 times more on these mad subsidies than on its federal education budget.

But in many nations, governments intervene not to protect humanity from the existential threat of fossil fuels, but to protect the fossil fuel industry from the existential threat of public protest. In the US, legislators in 18 states have put forward bills criminalising protests against pipelines, seeking to crush democratic dissent on behalf of the oil industry. In June, Donald Trump’s administration proposed federal legislation that would jail people for up to 20 years for disrupting pipeline construction.

Because the dirtiest industries attract the least public support, they have the greatest incentive to spend money on politics, to get the results they want and we don’t. They fund political parties, lobby groups and think tanks, fake grassroots organisations and dark ads on social media. As a result, politics comes to be dominated by the dirtiest industries.

So it’s about the money, but not the money it costs to address climate change.  It’s about who spends the money to get the money.  And the guy who gets the money is the political friend of whoever doles out the dough.  The GOP is the party currently most overtly on the take, but this system knows no political boundaries.  It's a shining example of bipartisanship!

The story of tightly-drawn climate purse strings is personal.  I spent every summer at the Jersey Shore.  My mother didn’t work and my grandmother and aunt were schoolteachers, so our family rented a cedar shingle beach house every year from June until September.  My father and grandfather would join us on the weekends, sometimes bringing along my favorite aunt, Jessie.  After a day at the beach, I showered outside in the backyard in a wooden cabana painted glossy white.  I would inevitably drop the slippery Ivory soap onto the wood floor, encrusting it with defoliating beach sand.  There was the basket of live crabs that once overturned in the kitchen, sending all of us up onto our chairs to get out of their way.  My aunt Doris used to tell me bedtime stories as I fell asleep in the bed carved into an alcove at the top of the stairs.   

It was heaven, with Barnegat Bay to the west, the Atlantic to the east, and a wide, sandy beach with a boardwalk in between.  The Jersey Shore is where my father (below) surf cast for striped bass and blue fish every year until he died at 83.  Teterboro airport is where we landed when we flew him, cancer-ridden, back from Italy on an air ambulance so he could spend his last days at home. 

Soon the Jersey Shore and Teterboro will be permanently underwater, all gone, like so many Mafia dons sleeping with the fishes.  I’d like to see Prez Don step up and embrace reality, commit the necessary federal resources to adapt to climate change, and respect my past so others can have a future.

Keep it real!

Marilyn