G. Tracy Mehan III, a frequent contributor to WaterWired, is executive director for government affairs at the American Water Works Association and adjunct professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University. He writes great book reviews and today's is no exception: Jeffrey Peterson's A New Coast: Strategies for Responding to Devastating Storms and Rising Seas
The review will be publsihed in the July/August 2020 issue of the The Environmental Forum. Tracy sent me a PDF of his review. I have included a few paragraphs of his review just to wht your appetite.
A few morsels...
Climate policy focused on federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions
is a hard sell in the United States. From the defeat of the Kyoto Protocol in the Senate 95-0 in 1997, to the failure of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade
bill in a Democratic Congress in 2009, up to and including President Trump’s spiking of the Clean Power Plan and reducing vehicle fuel economy improvements and withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, that dog just won’t hunt.Meanwhile the shale and natural gas revolutions have reduced emissions significantly. States, cities, and many corporations are pursuing their own GHG reduction goals in a civil society movement envisioned by Vanderbilt’s Michael Vandenbergh and Jonathan Gilligan in their thoughtful, hopeful book, Beyond Politics. The Private Governance Response to Climate Change — previously reviewed here. But as noted at the end of that review, “Yet, nowhere in the dozen or so pages of the book’s index will the reader find any references to either adaptation or resilience in the face of climate change.. . . Society, however, may be forced to consider other options given the stark political and economic realities of climate policy.”
Is there common ground left in America to address the impacts of a
variable climate; demographic shifts to coastal zones (doubling by 2060);massive, costly storms, hurricanes, flooding, erosion; and, if you comprehend the arcane art of modeling, rising sea levels that will render storms even more destructive, extend flood zones and move the coastline
further inland due to massive inundation?
Cutting to the chase...
Peterson notes, “Federal supplemental appropriations to recover from the 2017 storms came to $120 billion, and individual major storms have cost tens of billions of dollars.” Moreover, “the Congressional Budget Office estimates future annual property losses of $54 billion and federal government costs of $17 billion annually assuming just existing conditions.” Over and above the money, a proactive policy anticipating sea-level rise would “save lives, sustain coastal ecosystems and protect coastal economies.” Thousands of lives, trillions of dollars saved.
A national planning effort needs to convince Americans to believe in the models predicting sea level rise over many, many decades. But time will tell, and reality will, if Peterson is right, unmute all price signals and concentrate the minds of coastal residents.
One might, however, argue that he is putting too large a wager on a federally led process, given the current distrust of Washington. Trust, in this polarized age, must be cultivated bottom up and top down. The Pew Research Center reports that “Three quarters of Americans say that their fellow citizens’ trust in the federal government has been shrinking, and 64 percent believe that about peoples’ trust in each other.” Only 46 percent view climate change as a toptier problem.
So a collaborative approach tocoastal policy, with ample education and mutual learning, between public and private sectors, will be a necessary condition to overcoming the distrust and the challenges both of government failure or neglect, and that of asymmetrical information, one of the classic causes of market failure.
Worth your time - the review and the book.
Enjoy!
"It is curious--curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and more coral courage so rare." - Mark Twain
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