Planning To Avert Catastrophic Climate Change
Reader David Stout sent me this excellent article on the intelligent rebuilding of the New Jersey and New York seaboards after Hurricane Sandy. It contains a great number of terrific points about applying common sense in re-establishing housing, commercial buildings, and infrastructure in regions that are vulnerable to storms and violent weather events that are expected to become increasingly frequent and severe. Yes, we need redundant emergency solutions, and the half-dozen other solid ideas the author proposed.
But what we really need is a way to avert the impending catastrophe of climate change. We don’t live in 19th Century Holland when a city was saved by a little boy’s finger in a dike. We live in a world where the Greenland ice sheet, 660 thousand square miles, about 20% the size of the continental United States, is melting. Building sea-walls around Lower Manhattan in not an adequate answer to preventing the damage this world is about to incur if we can’t come together and construct a global solution here.
I’m not saying that it will be easy, but I am saying that it will be required.
Societal focus on the scale of our nation’s effort in WWII is needed here.
The awakening of the World Bank and the planet’s wealthiest investors is a welcome sign, but they don’t seem the ideal faction to inspire the populace. Maybe they can get the fossil firms to sign on and move some large capital behind a change in the direction of our capitol.
This certainly is not a matter of lacking the money, technology or resources – the hurdles are merely political and psychological.
That’s like saying, “It’s only 238,900 miles.” Oh, yeah, we covered that distance back in the sixties – with slide rules, and without CMOS chips. Amazing what people can do when they try.