The Pandemic Should be a Call to Action on Climate Change

Clear skies over Istanbul with mountains visible.

The Covid-19 pandemic should be a wake up call that some things know no national borders, including climate change.  In addition, travel bans, economic slowdown and greatly reduced use of automobiles has made the impact of human activity on climate obvious as smog and air pollution and water pollution has been reduce to yield clear skies and clear water not seen in some areas in years.  Yet while this stark reminder is before us, the Trump/Pence regime - which so bungled the pandemic response - continues to wage war against clean air and clean water regulations and is loosening offshore oil drilling regulations, refusing to believe in science and pandering to special interest political donors. It's an insane strategy, but then so is the occupant of the White House who unbelievably suggested that humans be injected with (or ingest) lethal disinfectants  to fight the Covid-19 pandemic.  Adding to reasons to fear climate change is the potential release of pathogens long frozen in permafrost and warmer temperatures that will allow some diseases to spread to regions where they have heretofore not been a problem.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at what should be a wake up call but which is being ignored by the Trump regime and many on the lunatic far right.  Here are excerpts:

Travel bans and lockdowns have cleaned the globe, flushing the murk from Venice’s canals, clearing Delhi’s polluted smog, making distant snowy peaks visible for the first time in years from the shores of the Bosporus.

U.S. scientists still predict 2020 will be the hottest year on record, even as experts forecast the largest annual drop in carbon emissions in modern history — a direct consequence of the pandemic’s freeze on human activity, trade and travel. The crisis isn’t uniformly good news for the planet: For example, satellite data shows that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is at its fastest pace in years, with environmental officials otherwise sidelined or preoccupied by the outbreak.

The pandemic is not just a reminder of the human impact on the environment, including the significance of man-made emissions on global warming and air pollution. It’s also similar: an imperceptible menace that knows no borders, overwhelms aging infrastructure and bedevils policymakers and politicians who struggle to grapple with the scale of the threat.

“A good way to think about the coronavirus pandemic is that it is like climate change at warp speed. What takes decades and centuries for the climate takes days or weeks for a contagious disease,” New York University climate economist Gernot Wagner wrote last month. “That speed focuses the mind and offers lessons in how to think about risk in an interconnected world.”

In the Boston Globe, former U.S. secretary of state John F. Kerry pointed to evidence suggesting climate change could be a “threat multiplier” for zoonotic and pandemic diseases. He also took aim at President Trump and other politicians who cling to positions outside the scientific consensus and impede collective action.

“Just as in today’s pandemic, progress has been halted by finger-pointing, denial, replacing real science with junk science, misinformation, and flat-out lies, elevating political hacks instead of scientists and experts, refusal to work with allies and even adversaries, and leaving states and cities to fend for themselves,” wrote Kerry.

“The coronavirus pandemic has delivered sharp and painful reminders of our collective vulnerability and the value of paying very close attention to reality,” wrote physicist Mark Buchanan. “If there’s any good to come out of the current tragedy, it may be in helping to persuade a few people to help tip the scales and get our leaders to take the next looming issue much more seriously.” The Trump administration isn’t quite set on tipping the scales. Stimulus money the White House has been empowered to spend in the pandemic’s aftermath may go to U.S. fossil fuel companies that were already in financial trouble before the crisis.
 But away from the White House, others are seeking to take the lead. Under the aegis of the World Economic Forum, major financial firms — including some that may help manage elements of the federal response to the pandemic — have pledged to divest from fossil fuels. Campaigners are calling for government stimulus to fund sustainable development projects that could build the green economy. The World Bank is proposing linking governments’ post-pandemic spending to greener infrastructure projects and future disaster-proofing. “We all breathe the same air and we’re all going to live with the same rising seas,” Michael Chertoff, a former head of the Department of Homeland Security in the George W. Bush administration, told Today’s WorldView during a webinar this week. “And whatever we may disagree about some things, we’re going to need to sit down with them and our like-minded allies and everybody else and figure out what can we do collectively to protect the global commons against either pandemic diseases or disastrous climate change.” But, as Slate’s Joshua Keating noted, the opposite may well be true . . . . some right-wing parties elsewhere in the West have already seized on the threat of climate change not as a call for collective action, but as a justification for limiting migration and unraveling globalization. “It’s not hard to imagine a future U.S. administration, rather than denying the increasingly obvious reality of climate change, using it to argue that the country needs tougher immigration controls and fewer refugees,” wrote Keating. “The alternative, they will argue, is to be overwhelmed by the human invaders and see our own natural resources depleted in the way other countries already have.”

Insanely, limiting immigration will not halt warming temperatures and rising sea levels.  All it does is play to the hate and bigotry that are hallmarks of the political right in today's America.

Will the World Wake Up to the Climate Change Threat?

Despite all kinds of scientific evidence that climate change is real, many Republicans and that party's toxic base of support continue to deny climate change is real and that the world is facing an existential threat. With Australia literally in flames, polar ice melting at a rapid rate and record temperatures hitting large parts of the world, the question is whether or not the world and nations like the United States will at last make needed policy changes to lessen the coming climate disaster. A piece in New Yorker looks at evidence that ought to convince anyone sentient that something must be done.  Here are article highlights:

In a Dantean sort of way, Australia’s holiday-season infernos provided a fitting close to 2019, which has been called “the year the world woke up to the climate crisis.” In India this past summer, a heat wave killed more than a hundred people in the northeastern state of Bihar, and in Japan a month later a heat wave sent an estimated eighteen thousand to the hospital. All-time temperature records were set in France, where a high of a hundred and eight degrees was reached in the town of Vérargues on June 28th, and in Germany, where the mercury in the town of Lingen hit a hundred and seven degrees on July 25th.

In Australia, records were broken only to be rebroken. On December 17th, maximum temperatures across the entire country, which is roughly the size of the continental United States, averaged 105.6 degrees. Then, on December 18th, they climbed to 107.4 degrees. The “feeling when you open the oven door” is how one Australian described the heat to the BBC. “It’s like that, but just the whole time.” Globally, it was the second- or third-warmest year since accurate measurements began.

What will the twenty-twenties bring? In geophysical terms, this question is almost too easy to answer. Temperatures will continue to rise. It’s virtually guaranteed that the coming decade will be warmer than the twenty-tens, which were warmer than the two-thousands, which were warmer than the nineteen-nineties, which—you guessed it—were warmer than the nineteen-eighties.

And with still higher temperatures will come still greater damage. Droughts will grow more punishing. (Australia’s horrific wildfires are, in large part, the result of what Australians are calling a “big dry,” which is now in its third year and has forced many towns to truck in water.) Warmer air holds more moisture, so the flip side of drought is deluge. (Last week, as Australia was roasting, flooding in Indonesia killed at least forty people.) Meanwhile, the planet’s ice sheets will continue to melt, leading to ever-higher sea levels, as will the Arctic ice cap. It’s possible that by 2030 the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free at the end of the summer.

Which brings us to the question of what it means to “wake up.” If in the past year (or the past decade) the world began to understand how dangerous climate change is, it certainly didn’t act like it. In the past ten years, more CO₂ was emitted than in all of human history up to the election of J.F.K.

The Trump Administration, which has filed to withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement, and the Morrison government, which wanted to use an accounting trick to fulfill its Paris commitments, were explicitly blamed for the stalemate. Many commentators noted the irony of the situation. A headline in the Guardian put it this way: “AUSTRALIA TOOK A MATCH TO UN CLIMATE TALKS WHILE BACK HOME THE COUNTRY BURNED.”

[T]he twenty-twenties will be consequential in a more or less permanent way. Global CO₂ emissions are now so high—in 2019, they hit a new record of forty-three billion metric tons—that ten more years of the same will be nothing short of cataclysmic. Unless emissions are reduced, and radically, a rise of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) will be pretty much unavoidable by 2030. This will make the demise of the world’s coral reefs, the inundation of most low-lying island nations, incessant heat waves and fires and misery for millions—perhaps billions—of people equally unavoidable.

Really waking up, and not just dreaming to ourselves that things will be O.K., has become urgent—beyond urgent, in fact. To paraphrase Victoria’s fire authority: The world is in danger, and we need to act immediately to survive. 

Trump Rule Would Exclude Climate Change in Infrastructure Planning

As Australia literally burns due to climate change which its prime minister denies is real, the ever toxic Trump/Pence regime is pushing a new federal rule that would bar the consideration of climate change in planning infrastructure construction. The result would be to allow more polluting projects - e.g., pipelines for oil - and pretending that sea levels are not rising. It's true idiocy yet is mainstream Republican thinking (or lack of thinking) and does not bode well for America and the world if implemented. It is but one more reason why removing Trump from office by any means is crucial. Meanwhile, one can only hope that states will enact laws that will hinder the federal effort to destroy the environment.  A piece in the New York Times looks at this latest effort to harm Americans while enriching the fossil fuel industry and other corporate despoilers of the environment. Here are highlights: 

Federal agencies would no longer have to take climate change into account when they assess the environmental impacts of highways, pipelines and other major infrastructure projects, according to a Trump administration plan that would weaken the nation’s benchmark environmental law.

The proposed changes to the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act could sharply reduce obstacles to the Keystone XL oil pipeline and other fossil fuel projects that have been stymied when courts ruled that the Trump administration did not properly consider climate change when analyzing the environmental effects of the projects.

According to one government official who has seen the proposed regulation but was not authorized to speak about it publicly, the administration will also narrow the range of projects that require environmental review. That could make it likely that more projects will sail through the approval process without having to disclose plans to do things like discharge waste, cut trees or increase air pollution.

The new rule would no longer require agencies to consider the “cumulative” consequences of new infrastructure. In recent years courts have interpreted that requirement as a mandate to study the effects of allowing more planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. It also has meant understanding the impacts of rising sea levels and other results of climate change on a given project.

[T]he Trump administration has been aggressive in its efforts to roll back environmental regulations. The 50 or so pages of revisions that the Council on Environmental Quality is expected to make public on Wednesday would not amend the act itself. Rather, they would revise the rules that guide the implementation of the law.

Environmental activists and legal experts said the proposed changes would weaken critical safeguards for air, water and wildlife. The move, if it survives the expected court challenges, also could eliminate a powerful tool that climate change activists have used to stop or slow Mr. Trump’s encouragement of coal and oil development as part of its “energy dominance” policy.

In March, a federal judge found that the Obama administration did not adequately take into account the climate change impact of leasing public land for oil gas drilling in Wyoming, a ruling that also presented a threat to Mr. Trump’s plans for fossil fuel development.

One month later, another federal judge dealt a blow to Mr. Trump’s plan to lift an Obama-era moratorium on coal mining on public lands when he found the administration did not adequately study the environmental effects of mining as required by law.

Michael Gerrard, director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said eliminating the need to consider climate change would lead to more pipelines and other projects that worsen global emissions. It could also put roads, bridges and other infrastructure at greater risk, he said, because developers would not be required, for instance, to analyze whether sea-level rise threatened to eventually submerge a project.

“It has the potential to distort infrastructure planning by making it easier to ignore predictable futures that could severely degrade the projects,” Mr. Gerrard said.

Mr. Gerrard said the environmental review requirements of New York’s state-level version of the environmental policy act had helped to defeat a golf course that Mr. Trump hoped to build in Mount Kisco, N.Y. The Seven Springs golf course would have abutted Byram Lake, a reservoir for drinking water. Mr. Gerrard, who represented opponents of the project, said environmental reviews enabled the community to show that the drinking water supply could have been endangered. Mr. Trump shelved the project in 2004, but his public comments indicate the episode still rankles.

I am old enough that I will not live to see the worse consequences of the efforts of foul individuals like Trump.  My grandchildren will not be so lucky. 

Republican Climate Denial Is Even Scarier Than Trumpism

Living on the sea coast in Southeastern Virginia, one is very conscious of the ocean and sea level - and the rising sea levels.  Places such as Norfolk, Virginia, and Miami, Florida, now somewhat regularly experience street flood at high tide on clear sunny days.  Add a severe northeaster or a hurricane to the mix ad the problems skyrocket. One need not be an oceanographer or climate expert to notice that something is indeed happening. Yet, Republicans representing not only coastal areas threatened by rising sea levels but also mid-west regions suffering from significant changes in weather patterns (and the adverse impact of Trump's trade wars) refuse to utter the words "climate change" or, if they do, it is only in the context of claiming it is a hoax alternately being pushed by scientists with an agenda or, if one believes Der Trumpenführer, China.  In the process, they are threatening both America's log term security but also that of the entire world. A column in the New York Times looks at the corruption and dangerous nature of the GOP in its current form.  Here are excepts:

The most terrifying aspect of the U.S. political drama isn’t the revelation that [Trump] the president has abused his power for personal gain. If you didn’t see that coming from the day Donald Trump was elected, you weren’t paying attention.

No, the real revelation has been the utter depravity of the Republican Party. Essentially every elected or appointed official in that party has chosen to defend Trump by buying into crazy, debunked conspiracy theories. That is, one of America’s two major parties is beyond redemption; given that, it’s hard to see how democracy can long endure, even if Trump is defeated.

However, the scariest reporting I’ve seen recently has been about science, not politics. A new federal report finds that climate change in the Arctic is accelerating, matching what used to be considered worst-case scenarios. And there are indications that Arctic warming may be turning into a self-reinforcing spiral, as the thawing tundra itself releases vast quantities of greenhouse gases.

Catastrophic sea-level rise, heat waves that make major population centers uninhabitable, and more are now looking more likely than not, and sooner rather than later.

Why, after all, has the world failed to take action on climate . . . .  one factor stands out above all others: the fanatical opposition of America’s Republicans, who are the world’s only major climate-denialist party. Because of this opposition, the United States hasn’t just failed to provide the kind of leadership that would have been essential to global action, it has become a force against action.

[C]limate denial was in many ways the crucible for Trumpism. Long before the cries of “fake news,” Republicans were refusing to accept science that contradicted their prejudices. Long before Republicans began attributing every negative development to the machinations of the “deep state,” they were insisting that global warming was a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a vast global cabal of corrupt scientists.

[S]ome of those responsible for these abuses are now ensconced in the Trump administration. Notably, Ken Cuccinelli, who as attorney general of Virginia engaged in a long witch-hunt against the climate scientist Michael Mann, is now at the Department of Homeland Security, where he pushes anti-immigrant policies with, as The Times reports, “little concern for legal restraints.”

But why have Republicans become the party of climate doom? Money is an important part of the answer: In the current cycle Republicans have received 97 percent of political contributions from the coal industry, 88 percent from oil and gas.

However, I don’t believe that it’s just about the money. My sense is that right-wingers believe, probably correctly, that there’s a sort of halo effect surrounding any form of public action. Once you accept that we need policies to protect the environment, you’re more likely to accept the idea that we should have policies to ensure access to health care, child care, and more. So the government must be prevented from doing anything good, lest it legitimize a broader progressive agenda.

[I]t takes a special kind of depravity to respond to those incentives by denying facts, embracing insane conspiracy theories and putting the very future of civilization at risk.
Unfortunately, that kind of depravity isn’t just present in the modern Republican Party, it has effectively taken over the whole institution. There used to be at least some Republicans with principles; . . . But those people have either experienced total moral collapse (hello, Senator Graham) or left the party.

The only way that either American democracy or a livable planet can survive is if the Republican Party as it now exists is effectively dismantled and replaced with something better — maybe with a party that has the same name, but completely different values. This may sound like an impossible dream. But it’s the only hope we have.

Threat of Rising Sea Levels Could Be three Times Worse

Street scene as Hurricane Irma hits the Miami area Sept. 10, 2017.

Living in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia - like many areas on the East and Gulf coasts - where tidal water is everywhere, causes most residents (other than perhaps Trump supporters on slowly drowning Tangier Island) to grasp that climate change and the attendant sea level rise is a real threat to the region's way of live, not to mention property values.  Meanwhile, the Trump/Pence regime continues to roll back regulations aimed at slowing climate change - as well as clean air and clean water protections - to the cheers of much of the Republican Party.  As new studies reveal, while the GOP and its ignorance embracing party base deny that climate change is real, the problems facing mankind are likely far worse than previously estimated.  Here are highlights from a piece in the Washington Post:

Rising seas will be much worse and more expensive to deal with than previously thought, new research finds, not because of faster changes in sea levels but because of an increase in estimates of the number of people living on low ground.

The upshot of the study is that 110 million people worldwide live below the high-tide level — including many partly protected by sea walls or other infrastructure, as in New Orleans. Even under a scenario of very modest climate change, that number will rise to 150 million in 2050 and 190 million by 2100.

If climate change and sea level rise follow a worse path, as many as 340 million people living below the high-tide level could be in peril, to say nothing of how many could be affected by floods and extreme events.

Such figures are three times — or more — higher than earlier estimates.

The reason for the big change is that prior research has relied on data about coastal elevations that comes from radar measurements from the 2000 space shuttle Endeavor mission. But that data set has problems. The instrument detected the height not only of the coastal land surface but anything else that was on it, such as houses and trees. This introduced errors in land-elevation estimates averaging about 6½ feet globally, the new study says.

The new study uses the more accurate U.S. measurements as a guide, training an algorithm to apply similar adjustments to the global data set from the space shuttle. This is where the much higher numbers for exposed populations come from, with the biggest changes in exposure coming for countries in Asia. . . . “We are talking about hundreds of millions of people who will be directly exposed.”

The changes are certainly very large. The study estimates that 110 million people live below the current high-tide level vs. an estimated 28 million for the older data set. About 250 million people would fall below the level of the worst yearly flood, the study says, up from the previous estimate of 65 million.

If key instabilities kick in in Antarctica, 480 million people would be exposed to an annual flood in 2100.

The findings are worst for Asia, notably in China, Bangladesh and India. In the worst-case scenario, 87 million, 50 million and 38 million people in these countries, respectively, would fall below the high-tide level in 2100.

The situation is, if anything, more ominous than these figures suggest, according to the World Bank’s Hallegatte. That’s because in addition to high-tide and annual worst-case flood events, there are major floods from hurricanes and other storms and disasters to consider, even if they do not occur every year. The impact of these severe events will be worsened and affect larger populations as seas continue to rise.

“Most dikes and protection systems have been built for the sea level of 50 years ago or more, and will be increasingly ill-designed to protect people against floods, leading to rapidly increasing coastal flood losses in the absence of large upgrades,” Hallegatte said. “Upgrading those systems will be expensive but is unavoidable if one wants to avoid unacceptable economic losses in large cities.”

“This new study suggests that a lot of the assessments published on climate change risks are underestimated and would need to be revised,” Hallegatte said.

How does one act to make a difference?  The first step is voting a straight Democrat ticket here in Virginia on November 5, 2019.   Virginia can send a shock wave through the GOP - and perhaps be a precursor to 2020 - by putting Virginia Republicans in minority status across the board. 

Could Dorian Be a Disaster for North Carolina?

click image to enlarge.

Like Virginia Republicans who talk about "repetitive flooding" rather than rising sea levels and climate change , North Carolina Republicans are climate change deniers and, as a result, a number of bad policy decisions have been made as scientific and climate experts are ignored.   With Hurricane Dorian likely to make landfall based on the latest track somewhere at the southern end of the Outer Banks, a piece in Slate argues the North Carolina GOP may have set the state up for disaster. Now, with a Democrat in the governor's mansion, some efforts are being made to bring the state's policies into line with scientific reality.  That said, bad decisions of the past by Governor Roy Cooper's predecessor and the GOP controlled legislature cannot be magically undone.  Meanwhile, Dorian may soon visit that state.  Here are article highlights: 

Puerto Rico has escaped the worst of Hurricane Dorian. And it looks like Florida might, too: On Saturday morning, the storm again shifted paths, and it appears likely to skirt Florida’s eastern coast instead of making a direct hit. That doesn’t mean the danger is over for Florida, and it does put the rest of the southeastern coast, especially Georgia and the Carolinas, in harm’s way sometime next week. South Carolina has already declared a state of emergency.

The stakes have grown much higher when a hurricane threatens to hit the coast. There are a lot of reasons for this. As I explained two years ago, “Some are psychological, others are practical, and many are self-inflicted.” Climate change is part of the problem, with warmer temperatures fueling deadlier, wetter storms. Rising sea levels increase the chances of coastal flooding. But it’s also the blind spots that North Carolina politicians have developed on climate change. While seas are rising, these lawmakers have encouraged building in low-lying areas, and in some cases discouraged state law from reflecting scientific realities.

The Carolinas are flanked by low-lying narrow barrier islands that have seen housing and tourist development during the past few decades “in places where it probably should not have been,” according to the Associated Press. Much of that development has been subsidized by a federal flood insurance program that shelled out $1.5 billion to cover flood claims in two dozen coastal counties even before Hurricane Florence struck. Last year, when Florence made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane, it dealt the region $24 billion in damages and 53 deaths. The floodwaters breached hog lagoons and coal ash pits and threatened Superfund sites.

Unwise development isn’t the only problem. As in Florida, North Carolina politicians have also allowed climate change denial to dictate their decision-making.

In 2010, a panel of scientists advising the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission, which guides the state’s coastal development, issued a report projecting 39 inches of sea-level rise by the end of the century. The report triggered political backlash from developers and the Republican-controlled legislature, which preferred that the commission rely only on historical data. The state ended up passing a law requiring a broader range of projections to dilute findings that sea level rise would accelerate. Newer research has found that the sea level is rising even faster along the southeastern coast than global averages. Instead of considering the best science out there, the governor-appointed commission ultimately limited the science panel’s projections to 30 years into the future.

North Carolina’s Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, elected in 2017, has begun to loosen these restrictions on how development plans incorporate the latest science. Last year, a month after Florence struck, Cooper issued an executive order to create an interagency climate change council.  In late September, the Coastal Resources Commission will look at updating the 30-year limit placed on the science advisory panel as it prepares a five-year update to its 2015 report, according to the News and Observer.

Of course, by late September, Dorian may have already come for a visit.

More Storms and Rising Seas: Which U.S. Cities Should Be Saved First?

Flooding area in Norfolk, VA.

While the Trump/Pence regime continues to insist that climate change is not real and, worse yet, is undoing Obama era policies and regulations that sought to slow global warming, communities and those living on the coast can see first hand that the sea levels are rising. Here in Southeast Virginia, every community south/southeast of Williamsburg has areas threatened by rising sea levels and most have not seriously begun to face the financial burden that will be involved to build sea walls and other infrastructure modifications.  As the New York Times reports, the potential partial cost the Virginia Beach is $1.7 billion.  Meanwhile, the city of Norfolk (estimated to need 69 miles of sea walls) is devising a plan where neighborhoods could establish themselves as special tax districts to raise funds to make the needed improvements to face rising waters. The overall problem is staggering and Republicans sticking their heads in the sand is not a solution. Small communities could potentially cease to exist in the future.  For the city of Hampton, the price tag for 68 miles of sea walls is $642.9 million - the fourth most costly in Virginia (look up your city here).  Here are highlights from the Times article:

WASHINGTON — As disaster costs keep rising nationwide, a troubling new debate has become urgent: If there’s not enough money to protect every coastal community from the effects of human-caused global warming, how should we decide which ones to save first?

After three years of brutal flooding and hurricanes in the United States, there is growing consensus among policymakers and scientists that coastal areas will require significant spending to ride out future storms and rising sea levels — not in decades, but now and in the very near future. There is also a growing realization that some communities, even sizable ones, will be left behind.

By 2040, simply providing basic storm-surge protection in the form of sea walls for all coastal cities with more than 25,000 residents will require at least $42 billion, according to new estimates from the Center for Climate Integrity, an environmental advocacy group. Expanding the list to include communities smaller than 25,000 people would increase that cost to more than $400 billion.

“Once you get into it, you realize we’re just not going to protect a lot of these places,” said Richard Wiles, executive director of the group, which wants oil and gas companies to pay some of the cost of climate adaptation. “This is the next wave of climate denial — denying the costs that we’re all facing.”

The research is limited in that it considers only sea walls, and not other methods for minimizing flood risk that may be more practical in some places, such as moving homes and shops away from the most flood-prone areas. The figures also don’t include the additional and costlier steps that will be required even with sea walls, such as revamping sewers, storm water and drinking water infrastructure.

Still, the data provides a powerful financial measuring stick for the tough decisions that countless communities — large and small — are starting to confront.

The cities that are quick to adapt to climate risks “are going to attract the jobs and the factories of the future,” said Eric Smith, president and chief executive officer for the Americas at Swiss Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies. “There’s going to be communities that I think will be left way, way behind.”
 The new research identifies 241 cities of 25,000 people or more that will require at least $10 million worth of sea walls by 2040 just to protect against a typical annual storm.

Total cost of adding sea walls1. Jacksonville, Fla. $3.5 billion2. New York City $2.0 billion3. Virginia Beach $1.7 billion4. Galveston, Tex. $1.1 billion5. Charleston, S.C. $1.0 billion6. Tampa, Fla. $938.4 million7. Barnstable Town, Mass. $889.2 million8. Corpus Christi, Tex. $861.1 million9. St. Petersburg, Fla. $751.4 million10. New Orleans $725.1 million

Many cities, especially small ones, will not be able to meet the costs facing them.  Those that can’t will depend on federal funding. . . . So experts have proposed ways of focusing federal money where it can do the most good — even if that means some places are left out.

One approach would be for the federal government to spend the money based simply on where it would most reduce the future cost of damages, according to Craig Fugate, who ran FEMA during the Obama administration.

He acknowledged that Congress would probably object to that approach, since it would likely mean FEMA would concentrate its resilient-infrastructure funds in just a handful of states.
 Another option would be for the federal government to distribute climate protection money based on a city’s property value, its historical and cultural importance, and how much it contributes to the national economy, said Harriet Tregoning, who was in charge of the housing department’s Office of Community Planning and Development during the Obama administration.

Cities could increase their chances of getting money by reducing their exposure to disasters, perhaps by retrofitting their buildings, implementing aggressive building codes and zoning restrictions, and helping residents leave the most vulnerable neighborhoods, Ms. Tregoning said. And there could be extra points for cities that take in people forced to flee other parts of the country.

Mr. Smith, of Swiss Re, said that cities should take responsibility for protecting themselves from the rising toll of disasters, rather than waiting for the federal government.

In his view, the chief obstacle is the refusal by some local officials to acknowledge what is happening. “The challenge is, we’re fighting about whether or not there’s climate change,” Mr. Smith said. “They don’t want to embrace what’s right in front of us.”

Virginia Republicans have been denying for years what is actually happening choosing to use the euphemism "repetitive flooding" rather than admit sea level rise.

The Coming Climate-Related Business Failures

Recently, Der Trumpenführer set about trying to challenge the findings of the government's own environmental experts rather than admit that climate change is real and that significant policy changes are needed.  Most Republicans in elected positions are little better and continue to bury their heads in the sand.  A piece in the New Yorker argues that it will be private industry which will ultimately force policy changes as the costs of climate change damage the corporate bottom line or force some businesses to file bankruptcy and/or go out of business. The industry that may force the most rapid change is the insurance industry which will either cease insuring certain properties or types of business operations entirely or drastically increase premiums.  Coastal real estate coverage may be one of the first areas where rising insurance costs and increasing storm damage take a toll on property values and savage municipal tax bases.  Here are article excerpts:

On January 15th, the World Economic Forum issued its annual Global Risks Report, which presents the results of a survey of what policymakers and experts perceive to be the world’s greatest challenges and threats. The report categorizes concerns by color: blue for economic risks, orange for geopolitical risks, purple for technological risks, red for societal risks. This year, green, which denotes environmental hazards, was dominant: the top three risks, listed by the “likelihood” that they would occur, were extreme weather events, failure of climate-change mitigation and adaptation, and natural disasters. . . . “Is the world sleepwalking into a crisis?” the report’s authors wrote. “Global risks are intensifying but the collective will to tackle them appears to be lacking.”

The same week, as if to illustrate the point, the California-based utility company Pacific Gas and Electric (P.G. & E.) announced that it would be filing for bankruptcy protection as a result of costs related to recent wildfires in the state. Between June, 2014, and December, 2017, P.G. & E.’s equipment helped start some fifteen hundred fires, according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal. Many were caused by falling trees that toppled power lines, which then threw sparks onto the surrounding grass and forest.

In 2017, seventeen major wildfires in California were connected to P.G. & E.; the fires destroyed 193,743 acres in eight counties and led to the deaths of twenty-two people. The fire season of 2018 was worse; the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection reported it as the deadliest and most destructive season on record. P.G. & E. said that it was facing approximately thirty billion dollars in liabilities as a result of its role in the 2017 and 2018 fires.                     P.G. & E. may be the most high-profile company to date to face collapse for reasons linked to climate change, but it won’t be the last. Coastal real estate is likely to be one of the first sectors of the economy to see values plummet due to rising seas and damage from storms. This hasn’t happened yet, because insurance companies are still willing to insure coastal properties, which means that property owners won’t have to bear the cost of the damage. But this is likely to change in the not-too-distant future. The National Centers for Environmental Information, which tracks U.S. weather and climate events, cited 2017 as “a historic year of weather and climate disasters,” which together cost more than three hundred billion dollars and included three tropical cyclones, eight severe storms, two inland floods, a crop freeze, drought, and wildfires. At some point, insurance and reinsurance companies will decide that writing policies in high-risk areas no longer makes financial sense, which could trigger a sharp decline in real-estate prices. Bruce Usher, a professor at Columbia Business School who studies climate change and investing, told me that he foresees three kinds of climate-related risks that may cause companies to fail in the future: physical risks, policy-related risks, and technological risks. The changing environment may cause damage to property or facilities owned by companies, or it could fuel lawsuits and liability payments related to damage caused by companies to others’ property, as was the case with P.G. & E.

[C]limate change itself will make certain products—most obviously cars using internal combustion engines, which are likely to be replaced by electric vehicles—obsolete. The insurance industry has been aware of these risks for some time and has been conducting studies to try to quantify them. The rest of the business world is increasingly focussing on them as well.

If the coming climate-related business crises will have one positive side effect, it’s that acute financial losses are likely to force policy changes in a way that environmental damage on its own has not. As one commenter on a recent Wall Street Journal article about P.G. & E. put it: “When capitalists decide the scientists are right, then the free market will adjust accordingly.”

What is lacking now, he said, is focus by policymakers in Washington on making changes that could actually turn things around. “People in this field say, ‘We know what the problem is, and we know how to solve the problem,’ ” Usher said. Our politicians, however, “don’t have the willingness to do something. That’s where we are.”

Governors Ralph Northam and Larry Hogan: States Can Lead the Way on Climate Change

Ralph Northam being sworn in as Governor of Virginia.

With the Trump/Pence regime openly attacking environmental regulations and seeking to undo decades of clean water and clean air policies that have greatly reduced water and air pollution, states are increasingly seeking to step in and protect their own environments and the well being of their citizens.  Indeed, 17 governors are now members of the U.S. Climate Alliance which aims to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions consistent with the goals of the Paris agreement.  A joint editorial by Governors Ralph Northam and Larry Hogan of Virginia and Maryland (one Democrat and one Republican), respectively lays out efforts states can take to blunt the damage being done by the rogue Trump/Pence regime and to protect the air and water quality of their states.  Here are column highlights from the Virginian Pilot:  

THE TRUMP administration’s pursuit of policies to reverse or supplant environmental laws that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions has made combating climate change difficult. But where the federal government refuses to lead, state governments will.

For the sake of our future and the future of our children, it is time to put aside partisan interests and get to work.

Today, nations from around the world are in Poland working on a common set of rules that will govern the implementation of the Paris climate agreement and report on their progress. The residents of Virginia and Maryland, as well as all those of other states across the country, have a stake in ensuring that the agreement succeeds.

That is why we support the elected officials and leaders from cities, tribes, businesses, universities, hospitals and churches who represent U.S. support for the Paris climate agreement. Together, this delegation of leaders will make it clear to the world that we are doing our part to keep the United States on track to fulfill the promise it made in Paris.

We are already experiencing the negative effects of climate change, as the recent National Climate Assessment from 13 federal agencies made painfully clear. . . . . This new report from the federal government confirms what we already know: Climate change can hurt public health and cripple our economy.

Our most important job as governors is ensuring the safety of our constituents. So when we face a threat to people’s livelihoods and way of life, showing leadership means acknowledging the risks and addressing them.

This is why a bipartisan group of governors joined to form the U.S. Climate Alliance. After starting with three governors, the alliance has now grown to 17 state leaders who have committed to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions consistent with the goals of the Paris agreement. We are united in our belief that smart, coordinated state action can ensure that the United States continues to contribute to the global effort to address climate change. Together, we are taking action to implement a range of climate policies — such as lowering the cost of renewable energy and promoting the use of electric vehicles.

In our home states of Maryland and Virginia, we are experiencing rising seas, more extreme weather events, regular high-tide flooding and a changing Chesapeake Bay. That’s why Maryland has become a leader in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and passed a law to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 40 percent, creating a model for others to follow. Maryland also has an active, bipartisan Commission on Climate Change and is a leader in climate resilience and preparedness, as well as in championing green infrastructure, open spaces, and a climate academy for local officials and citizens. Recently, the state has announced its intention to ban the manufacture and use of hydrofluorocarbons, a super-polluting greenhouse gas.

And just to the south, Virginia has begun the process to reduce carbon pollution from power plants by 30 percent by 2030 and recently announced its intention to significantly reduce emissions of methane — a greenhouse gas that is more than 80 times more damaging than carbon dioxide in the short term. Virginia also issued an executive order last month detailing steps to address extreme weather, including the creation of a Coastal Resilience Master Plan to protect private property and critical public assets, using nature-based infrastructure whenever possible.

[W]e will make plans to adapt and protect our residents and our coastlines. These steps will help slow climate change, but we need help. We call on leaders of all political persuasions to get to work and cooperate across aisles and across borders — both national and international — to meet the challenge of climate change.

Elections have consequences.  Had Northam not won in 2017, there is little doubt that Ed Gillespie would be taking a very different approach and joining in with the Trump/Pence regime and hastening the willful degradation the environment. 

Waterfront Home Values Fall Because of Sea Level Rise, Flooding

November 6, 2018, is fast approaching and voters have the choice between (i) candidates of a political party that denies that climate change is occurring and that is tearing down environmental regulations that seek to slow the climate change process, and (ii) candidates of the opposing party that see climate change among the most pressing problem facing the federal government.  While sadly a number of local "friends" are falling for the racist, xenophobic message of the climate change deniers, those with waterfront properties might want to rethink who they will vote for on election day.  In Hampton Roads the value of waterfront properties is falling or, at best appreciating far more slowly than the values of properties on high ground away from the water.  The phenomenon not only hits homeowners in the pocket books as their typically biggest investment is harmed, but it also erodes city tax bases.  In short, everyone loses in one form or another -  all so Republicans can pander to an ignorance embracing party base.  A piece in the Virginian Pilot looks at the problem which is not confined to Southside cities.   Here are excerpts:

Waterfront homes used to be the safest investment in real estate, but rising tides have turned a sure thing into a potential liability.

After a review of property value data and a litany of studies, The Virginian-Pilot has found mounting evidence that real estate values across Hampton Roads are being driven down as a result of recurrent flooding and sea level rise.

One couple in Norfolk has had their waterfront house, once valued at more than a million dollars, on the market for two years. They’ve dropped the price to less than $800,000 and are still waiting for a buyer.

And it’s not just seven-figure waterfront homes in Norfolk and Virginia Beach taking the hit. Values of seemingly safe houses several blocks from the water are hurting as well.

Several recent studies have shown that impacts from flooding – from water in the basement to inundated streets – already have hamstrung property prices and cost Hampton Roads homeowners hundreds of millions of dollars in lost or unrealized values.  Homeowners might be surprised by these staggering numbers – in many places where research shows flooding is hurting home prices, city assessments show those values rising. They’re just not rising as fast as they could be.

“Part of the idea of getting these numbers out there is that people may not know they’ve lost value, because the actual value may still be going up,” said Jeremy Porter, a Columbia University professor who worked on the recent study with the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit that pushes for solutions to sea level rise by presenting data.

[R]eal estate agents to academics to homeowners agree that recurring flooding and rising seas are driving down the value of what were once considered desirable investments.

A group from First Street and academics from Columbia University developed Flood iQ, a website that allows people to see how the values of waterfront homes have fared since 2006 when compared to similarly valued homes that don’t deal with flooding.

The Washington Post recently highlighted Flood iQ and two other academic studies that came to the same conclusion: Coastal property values aren’t keeping pace. The First Street group studied the values of homes from Virginia to Florida dating back to 2006 and found they’re worth $7.4 billion less than they would be otherwise.

Three-quarters of that loss was due not to flooding homes, but flooding streets, said Steven McAlpine of First Street Foundation.

Our home is on what was once the premier street in Hampton.  After seeing the value drop during the real estate meltdown of a decade ago, the value has stabilized but has not appreciated as one might expect.  Why?  We are located on a tidal creek with 4.6 acres of creek and marsh - the setting is gorgeous but the threat of flooding only too real.

Hurricane Florence: Welcome to the New Normal

In a post last week I noted how six years ago Republican legislators in North Carolina had rejected the reality of climate change and ignored the recommendations of a non-partisan committee concerning sea level rise and future potential flooding.  The result was more construction on the coastal plain and flood plain areas.  Now, with Hurricane Florence the idiocy of such action is all too apparent.   Meanwhile, the Trump/Pence regime has pulled America out of the Paris climate accord and is actively working to destroy restrictions that would lessen carbon emissions and at least slow down elements fueling climate change.  All pure idiocy that ignores the growing dangers that past foolishness has set in motion.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the new normal and the danger of Trump/Pence policies - the irony, of course, is that North Carolina went for Trump in 2016.  Karma has already slapped the state hard across the face.  Here are column excerpts:

Hurricane Florence has drenched eastern North Carolina with more than 30 inches of rain, an all-time record for the state. Last year, Hurricane Harvey stalled over Houston and dumped more than 60 inches of rain, an all-time record for the whole country. Also last year, Hurricane Maria ravaged the island of Puerto Rico and caused, according to an independent study, nearly 3,000 deaths.

Welcome to the new normal.  Tropical cyclones are nothing new, of course. But climate scientists say that global warming should make such storms wetter, slower and more intense — which is exactly what seems to be happening. And if we fail to act, these kinds of devastating weather events will likely become even more frequent and more severe.

Climate change is a global phenomenon. Authorities in the Philippines are still trying to assess the damage and death toll from Typhoon Mangkhut, a rare Category 5-equivalent storm that struck the archipelago Saturday with sustained winds of 165 mph. Mangkhut went on to batter Hong Kong and now, as it weakens, is plowing across southern China.

Every human being on the planet has a stake in what governments do to limit and adapt to climate change, including leaders who, like President Trump, prefer to believe global warming is some kind of hoax. I doubt the citizens of Wilmington, N.C. — a lovely resort town that was turned into an island by widespread flooding from Florence — feel there is anything illusory about the hardship they’re going through.

The most ambitious attempt to quantify the link between climate and weather — a blue-chip international consortium called World Weather Attribution — has not yet made an attempt to estimate any possible effect that global warming may have had on Florence or Mangkhut. But another group of researchers, the Climate Extremes Modeling Group at the Stony Brook University School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, estimated Sept. 12 that Florence would produce 50 percent more rainfall than if human-induced global warming had not occurred.

We know from direct measurement that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by more than 40 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when humans started burning fossil fuels on a large scale. We know from direct observation that carbon dioxide traps heat. We know from direct measurement that both atmospheric and ocean temperatures have been rising sharply. We know from direct measurement that warmer water takes up more space than cooler water, which is the main reason ocean levels are rising.

We know that warmer water is more easily evaporated, which means there is more moisture available to fuel a storm such as Florence or Harvey — and to be released by such storms as rainfall.

If humankind suddenly stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, we would still have to adapt to the climatic changes we have already set in motion. . . . . We will be coping with massive tropical storms, tragic coastal and riverine flooding, deadly heat waves and unprecedented wildfires for the rest of our lives.

At the very least, we should be trying to reduce carbon emissions and keep global warming to a manageable level. With the landmark Paris agreement, the nations of the world agreed to try. But Trump foolishly decided to pull the United States — the world’s second-biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, behind only China — out of the deal.

The administration has already proposed weakening restrictions on carbon emissions from automobiles and coal-fired power plants. And last week, there were reports that the administration also wants to loosen rules governing the release of methane, which traps even more heat than carbon dioxide.

Another news item from earlier this month should be instructive: A cargo ship is presently making the journey from Vladivostok, on Russia’s Pacific coast, to the German port of Bremerhaven via the Arctic Ocean, rather than taking the usual southern route through the Suez Canal and the Strait of Gibraltar. Until now, the northern route has always been impassible because it was blocked by polar ice. But because of climate change, a lot of the ice has melted.

Climate change is no longer theoretical. It is real, it is all around us, and it is going to get much worse.

Sea level Rise is Already Costing Coastal Property Owners

Coincidentally, as I happened upon this Washington Post article that focuses on Charleston, South Carolina, but which is all too applicable to coastal Virginia, we received the annual flood insurance premium invoice and it's almost as much as I paid for the first car I bought new after graduating from law school.  The premium is  up about 8% over last year's amount and like some of the property owners cited in the article, the value of our waterfront property has plateaued (but, thankfully has not fallen  since the 2008 housing market collapse) due to the increased concerns over rise sea levels and past flooding episodes.  Meanwhile, of course, Republicans at both the Virginia level and Congressional level are claiming that climate change is a hoax and sea levels are not rising.  And meanwhile, many coastal communities are seeing their tax base eroded as properties become more difficult to sell.  Parts of Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Suffolk, Hampton and York County are approaching what is described in the article.  Here are article excerpts:

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Elizabeth Boineau’s 1939 Colonial sits a block and a half from the Ashley River in a sought-after neighborhood of ancient live oaks, charming gardens and historic homes. A year ago, she thought she could sell it for nearly $1 million. But after dropping the price 11 times, Boineau has decided to tear it down.

In March, the city’s Board of Architectural Review approved the demolition — a decision not taken lightly in Charleston’s historic district.

“Each time that I was just finishing up paying off the bills, another flood would hit,” Boineau said.

Boineau is one of many homeowners on the front lines of society’s confrontation with climate change, living in houses where rising sea levels have worsened flooding not just in extreme events like hurricanes, but also heavy rains and even high tides. Now, three studies have found evidence that the threat of higher seas is also undermining coastal property values, as home buyers — particularly investors — begin the retreat to higher ground.

The sea has risen about eight inches since 1900, and the pace is accelerating, with three inches accumulating since 1993, according to a comprehensive federal climate report released last year. Scientists predict the oceans will rise another three to seven inches by 2030, and as much as 4.3 feet by 2100.

Meanwhile, mapping has become increasingly precise, providing near-exact elevations that let researchers predict when individual properties could be underwater.

[R]esearchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Pennsylvania State University found that vulnerable homes sold for 6.6 percent less than unexposed homes. The most vulnerable properties — those that stand to be flooded after seas rise by just one foot ­— were selling at a 14.7 percent discount, according to the study, which is set to be published in the Journal of Financial Economics.

The study found the drop in prices appears to be driven primarily by investors buying multiple properties or second homes. Such buyers tend to be wealthier and better educated than owners who occupy their coastal homes . . . . “Sophisticated buyers . . . demand a discount to bear the risk of future sea level rise,” Lewis said in an email.

The most-studied market has been Miami-Dade County, parts of which have for years been experiencing regular sunny-day flooding. In a separate paper published in April, researchers at Harvard University found that properties at higher elevations were appreciating faster than properties at lower elevations, a phenomenon they dubbed “climate gentrification.”

Last month, the nonprofit First Street Foundation released the first analysis to single out Charleston, a gracious port city founded in 1670. The analysis suggests that exposed homes in Charleston have lost $266 million in value since 2005 due to coastal flooding and expectations of still higher seas. (Using the same method, the First Street researchers found a $465 million loss in Miami-Dade County.)

Home prices on the coast are “going up along with market trends. They’re just not going up as fast as other places,” said Jeremy Porter, a Columbia University researcher who conducted the First Street study with Steven McAlpine, the group’s head of data science.

Boineau put her house on the market last August priced just shy of $1 million, after repairs from two straight years of flooding that had come up under the house but left the interior largely unaffected. Then in September, the remnants of Hurricane Irma inundated the first floor of the house with eight inches of water. . . . .she dropped the price down to $599,900 and went through a lengthy process to get permission for demolition.  Now, Boineau says, a new buyer can build a new elevated property on the lot. When that’s done, her real estate agent, Robin Reeves, said the property should “go for 1.3 to 1.4 million dollars.”

Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg (I) — himself a former real estate agent — said the city is looking for other ways to protect property values. Officials are considering a “comprehensive set of flooding and sea-level-rise strategies,” including improving pumping systems and raising Charleston’s Battery, a sea wall at the tip of the peninsula.

But those are expensive and complex solutions, Tecklenburg said; even if Charleston had the money, designs are not even in place yet for all of the potential engineering projects.

As city officials adjust, so do Charleston residents. Unable to find a buyer willing to purchase and then repair the home, Boineau decided to demolish it and sell the lot in Harleston Village. She is now renting a condo just across the river from the city’s central peninsula in West Ashley, where her new neighbors have assured her there has been no flooding. She hopes to buy there after the Harleston lot sells. “Charleston,” she said, “is still an incredible place to live.”

In our home we have installed three industrial sump pumps and a whole house generator (to the tune of $20,000) and after the 2009 Nor'Ida storm more or less waterproofed the first floor by installing marble floors and non water absorbent wainscoting.  The combined effect?  No standing water in the house and merely mopping out any water that may seep into the house in any future storm.  Numerous homes in our neighborhood are much more vulnerable than our home. Yes, sea level rise is costly.