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All Climate Change Solutions will fail. Here's what will work.

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Scott Baker
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Climate Change is not the only problem.
Climate Change is not the only problem.
(Image by ecotist from flickr)
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Climate change solutions come fast and regularly now. But, unfortunately, none of these will work, at least not in time to head off the worst effects. The reasons why are going to sound very bad at first, but one of the main reasons for failure will actually yield a better, more realistic answer than anything proposed by most activists.

First, fringe solutions won't scale or work. This includes things like artificial meat, which is not happening any time soon, if at all. Most artificial meat companies are going bankrupt or are extending their deadline for breakeven so many decades out that they are irrelevant. It turns that little microbes can not produce meat-like substance - which really doesn't have the feel of meat either - and the remaining companies cheat by adding animal cells into the mix. It's the same extend and pretend for carbon capture, carbon storage (e.g. as bricks), and other sexy but impractical solutions. Either they don't scale, or they're too expensive, or most likely, both.

Exxon recently pulled out of a climate change consortium, either unafraid of pension funds withdrawing investments in them or else deciding that counter-forces from pro-oil states like Texas will tip new investments in their favor. JP Morgan and Bank of America pulled out of other ones. They both decided that the political pressure is going the other way now, in a concerted Republican led backlash. This counter-reaction is gathering momentum, is a core part of MAGA Republican policy and works against the kind of green changes now necessary after all the low hanging fruit of conservation, some switching over to EVs (now not selling well either, since interest rate increases combined with greater range anxiety of remaining potential buyers squashed sales because they also don't live in single family homes with built-in chargers. Wind turbines and solar fields - which wear out after 20-30 years and have to be completely replaced at huge expense & environmental damage - all have fallen short of promises and they need huge subsidies when interest rates climb because of their upfront costs.

Modern nuclear power is multiple times safer than old nuclear plants and can even burn off more waste, but waste is leaking everywhere due to chemical reactions and it's nearly forever. It's too slow to approve new plants and too expensive too, though it can help. Hydropower is nearly tapped out & silting is becoming a major problem on the largest dams. Geothermal shows a lot of promise but is pretty expensive too, outside hot spots like Iceland.

But, none of the above is the real problem. The real problem, as a series of recent reports like this one: The East Coast Is Sinking and several other very well peer-reviewed & authoritative (NASA, USGS, top universities, etc.) show, is that major coastal areas are sinking. This can be due to unsustainable aquifer withdrawals (a major problem barely being addressed that will affect the food supply well before climate change), or from the almost inconceivable weight of buildings in the most vulnerable coastal cities like NYC or Jakarta - which will probably have to be most abandoned. How much sinking? About as much as the mean projection of sea level rise by the end of the century. So, you can take the 2' sea level rise projection from the IPCC and double that to 4'. And 4' in terms of damage from floods, and infrastructure problems like backed sewers (already an issue here in NYC during tidal surges) is not double the flood damage, it's roughly the damage area squared because that's how much more area of problems will be affected from an extra 2' above the 2' IPCC projection.

Farmers are protesting in Europe & soon will be here too. They're also going out of business due to policies favoring the largest, and most polluting, corporate farms. People will not swear off meat and even if they did, they then gravitate towards processed sugar-enhanced foods that add more to illness than climate change ever could.

It also turns out that past a certain early adopter percentage, it's hard to sell EVs. etc. etc.

Now besides the square of damage from floods, square the damage from wildfires - more due to poor forest management than climate change, hurricanes - more due to stupid building locations & watered-down building codes than climate change, and you can see that Climate Change is the least of the problems, at least until 2100 or so when it may flip into the leading problem. But no politician really plans beyond 5 years or so. The COP 20-whatever promises are all conveniently long-term. Most are already not being met. These are empty promises to the plebes and increasingly not even that. This year's COP meeting was blatantly hijacked by oil interests, who made record numbers of deals.

There's yet another long-term problem I won't get into in detail because it's mostly long-term: The Earth wants to warm up. We are actually in an unusual inter-glacial period, barely out of the ice age (8,000-12,000 years is nothing geologically) and the Earth's systems have generally produced a warmer world since life began.

Finally, urban heat island effects will only add to local warming in cities where most people live now, without any contribution from CO2 at all. This last point is not well quantified but could locally be responsible for more hot days in urban centers than the other big two: climate change and subsidence (sinking land).

So, what to do? The only realistic alternative is heavy mitigation. Here in New York City, we are raising downtown Manhattan's coastline by 8-10' in the Big U project. It'll take years & cost billions, but we cannot have more Hurricane Sandy's like we had in 2012. That cost over $20b so far and the damage is not even fully addressed yet. The hurricane damaged the subway and Amtrak tunnels in ways that will take another decade, at inflated costs, to recover from. Some areas of New York City, Jakarta, and southern Florida, won't be able to be sea-walled off and will have to be returned to nature. It's unclear whether we can save most of the Everglades which can't be walled off. And Florida ground is porous limestone, so water will come up from infiltration, even if you dig deep seawalls around the entire state, which is not feasible.

It will be, and already is, cheaper not to build in vulnerable areas, and to stop subsidizing flood prone areas with government FEMA-based insurance, and this change is already happening. When homeowners lose their savings in homes from floods, they'll stop building in vulnerable, uninsurable, areas.

The forests must be regularly thinned and controlled burned to prevent massive forest fires and people who want to live "in the trees" will have to assume huge insurance risks or do without rescue (already happening). Desalination will have to offset unsustainable water withdrawal from aquifers (already happening).

Mitigation will happen because of cost and lives lost, a much more urgent problem than far off projections of an inch or two sea level rise. By the way, this rise too, is worse near the urbanized east coast, due to the "sloshing" from the Earth's rotation. Mitigation will be sloppy, resisted, and hodgepodge, like everything humans do collectively, but we'll get there, maybe after millions of lives are effected or lost.

But that's how we roll.

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Scott Baker Social Media Pages: Facebook Page       Twitter Page       Linked In Page       Instagram Page

Scott Baker is a Managing Editor & The Economics Editor at Opednews, and a former blogger for Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Global Economic Intersection.

His anthology of updated Opednews articles "America is Not Broke" was published by Tayen Lane Publishing (March, 2015) and may be found here:
http://www.americaisnotbroke.net/

Scott is a former and current President of Common Ground-NY (http://commongroundnyc.org/), a Geoist/Georgist activist group. He has written dozens of (more...)
 

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