A Matter of Adjustment

If you’ve traveled to the Miami area in the past year, and if you were there after a heavy rain (pretty common), did you happen to drive through flooded streets (first picture above)? Been on a drive down through the Keys? Scary, huh? Maybe, you live in New York City and enjoyed the massive flooding, right down into the subway system, after superstorm Sandy in 2012 (second picture above). Or maybe you enjoyed the coastal erosion in the Carmel, California in 2011 (third picture above). How would you like to drive down a stretch of the Highway 1 at Gleason Beach (the big picture above from CalTrans)? 

Today, I don’t want to proselytize over the accelerating devastation in the United States from global climate change based on the masses of photographs of droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, storm surges and flooding from rivers overflowing their banks. If you do not believe that climate change is real or that God would never let that happen, you are a very big part of the problem. If you believe that the trillions and trillions of dollars of real damage are worth paying for indefinitely to support heavy industry and fossil-driven energy – a huge subsidy to industries that we all know are not sustainable – I think that you should be required to double your taxes to help pay for the resulting clean-up, recovery, or downright loss. 

Today’s focus is on one relatively small climate change story, one that seems like a local California tale with little or no impact on most of us. Even the hard dollar cost is relatively minor. But how many of those “little” stories, those “little” inconveniences, are there? The kind that don’t get hurricane or wildfire headlines but are aggregating into “massive.” All this as our infrastructure, without taking climate change damage into consideration, was already passing two trillion dollars just for basic repairs and simple upgrades. And those are the federal government’s conservative estimates. The American Society of Civil Engineers thinks that number is woefully too small; they believe that the nation's roads, dams, levees, airports and water and electrical systems need $4.6 trillion of work – far more than the entire federal government spends in a year. Oh, and we seem to have depleted state coffers and incurred additional federal deficits by the trillions of dollars just to deal with pandemic. More “deferred” maintenance or perhaps an opportunity to invest in infrastructure and alternative energy to help reignite the economy and slow climate change? Depends on whether you are a Republican or a Democrat.

Look at the big photograph above. CalTrans (the state agency in charge of building and maintaining roads) has watched 11 homes fall away and a new guard rail drop into the sea, rather aware that this section of Highway 1 in Northern California’s Sonoma County is just one of so many scenic California highways that are obviously not long for this world. The solution was thought to be simply to rebuild and reinforce what was. Since 2004, California wasted $10 million on that failed band aid approach. The road needs to be moved at least 350 feet inland. They call that a “managed retreat.” That would take a further $73 million, assuming the project stays on budget. Will what you see in the above picture even be there next year if nothing is done?

California realizes that doing nothing is not an option. “The ambitious project — approved this month after more than a decade of planning — comes at a time when city and state leaders across California are waking up to the social and economic disasters of sea level rise. At least $8 billion in property could be underwater by 2050, according to recent legislative reports, with an additional $10 billion at risk during high tides. Heavier storms and more intense cycles of El Niño could make things even worse… In a set of targets guided by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration, many agencies agreed this year to prepare California for at least 3.5 feet of sea level rise by 2050.

“The painful reimagining of Gleason Beach offers a glimpse into the future for other communities now clashing over the costs and compromises of living by the sea. At the heart of this $73-million project is a reckoning over what is worth saving — and what is worth sacrificing — and whether it’s possible to redesign a treasured landscape so that it survives into the future.

“‘It seems daunting; it’s a lot of change to cope with, but it’s also an opportunity for communities to think about: What are the coastal resources we want to have access to 50, 100 years from now?’ said Tami Grove, the California Coastal Commission’s statewide transportation program manager. ‘It gets lost, sometimes, when people are worried about everything that we’re going to lose to sea level rise — but there are things that we’re going to be able to choose and enhance and design into the future if we start planning now.’

“Maintaining this critical stretch of Highway 1 has been a decades-long saga. It is the only evacuation route for many residents, as well as the only way to reach many of Sonoma County’s beaches and sweeping vistas — the economic and cultural soul of the region… Photos from the 1970s show more than 20 bluff-top homes and a wide sandy beach buffering the highway from the sea. But the particularly unstable cliffs in this area have been eroding about 1 foot a year on average, exacerbated by sea level rise and sudden landslides.” Los Angeles Times, November 30th. 

As I said, this is just a little story about one very small stretch of a scenic coastal roadway. Coastal states would seem to more vulnerable… kind of the same assumption that rural states made about the spread of COVID-19. But make no mistake, there isn’t a single US state that does not face billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure damage and costs directly related to climate change. Add to that the private sector economic losses to residents, businesses, employment and natural resources that are likely to be a vast multiple of the damage incurred by governmental entities. Time has run out. Now.

I’m Peter Dekom, and to those who simply say our business world and our tax base cannot afford to do what is necessary to stem climate change damage… I have to ask, can we afford not to?