Now What?

Hurricane Sandy really wasn’t… a hurricane, that is. It started out that way, but somewhere before it hit the Jersey shore, it lost that title, slammed into a Nor’easter and a frigid down-flow of Gulf Stream air, and became a “super storm.” Add a full moon and a maximum high tide, and voila! Death, destruction and merciless suffering. But that confluence of events has to be a rarity, right? We’ve never seen that before. Perhaps, but whatever it was and whatever may follow, we have caught a glimpse of how global warming, how our addiction to fossil fuels, will do us in.

Folks have been talking about the rising sea levels, as if all we will see at worst is a gradual, perhaps unstoppable, rise in ocean waters, a slow recapture of tidal lands as the sea rises to chip slowly away at the earth’s land mass. But global climate change is not a steady, uniform mix. There are tipping points, temperatures above which sea waters become hurricane fuel… and as those temperatures are found increasingly making their way northwards, likewise, mega-storms (whatever you want to call them) will increase, perhaps in frequency but seemingly certainly in intensity. Our seas will test our limits with strong surges, rushing inland depositing untold destruction, then receding to lull us into a sense of calm… so we can say things like “that was a once in hundred year” storm. Heard that a lot recently. Katrina, Irene, Sandy, etc. Until the seas stay… permanently.

For parts of our nation, where barriers to rising tides just don’t exist, where mountains and hills are too far way, the long-term prognosis is lots of recaptured land lost to the sea. Some speculate that as much as a third of Florida, the area around New Orleans, etc. will meet this fate. But after each of these disasters, the pattern is familiar: rebuild, add some token new and improved infrastructure realignment and get back to life as we knew it before the disaster. But rebuilding that which will be subject to repeated threats and destruction seems futile and profoundly wasteful. Yet, having fought wars without new taxes and refunded a collapsed financial industry, this nation is bereft of funding to do what really needs to be done. It will cost about $50 billion to rebuild what Sandy destroyed. It would cost a multiple of that… a vast multiple… to shore up protection for this country’s most valuable coastal real estate.

Another nation faced this devastation before, and spent the money to do what was needed: Holland. “Following the severe flooding in 1953 that killed more than 1,800 people in the Netherlands, the Dutch strengthened their oceanfront defenses to what is known as 10,000-year protection — something that will repel a menace that has a 0.0001 percent chance of occurring in a given year. With climate change rejiggering storm calculations, there is talk of elevating that protection to the 100,000-year level... Not that the Dutch system [pictured above] has an unblemished record of success. Environmental experts point out that by the 1970s, the large-scale building projects had caused environmental damage... More recent efforts to harmonize the defenses with nature leave enormous gates open to allow water to flow. The gates can be shut in the face of a storm.” New York Times, November 3^rd. Yeah, Holland is relatively small and containable... I know.

We have a deficit issue, coupled with massive unemployment, but if we determine that it will cost us billions, maybe trillions, of dollars in not-too-distant damage from storm surges, it would be politically criminal not to do what we need to do, come hell or high water, to protect the people of this great land from those disasters in the future, disasters that would inflict much more damage that any deficit damage that could be done. We need to put America to work – infrastructure is not so easy to outsource – and we have work that needs to be done for us to survive. Somebody please, push the easy button! Now! Before it really is too late.

I’m Peter Dekom, and what about obvious do Americans seem to miss?