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I
This week I attended an informative conference on sea-level rise, storm surges and flooding in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, now and projected into the near decades.
Most of the day was spent on projects and interventions for climate change mitigation and adaptation that I knew nothing about, including: a Lake Mendocino water storage innovation, several dredging and sediment projects geared to beneficial uses, several wetlands restoration projects, and a great many planning and feasibility efforts funded with respect to not just sea-level rise, increased storm surges and inland flooding, but also for rising groundwater levels and changing air temperatures affecting major infrastructures differently.
In addition to these specifics, I was told:
- that Bay Area would need some 477 million cubic yards of sediment–the vast majority of which can’t be sourced locally–to restore area wetlands and mudflats;
- It would require an estimated US$110 billion dollars locally to adapt to higher sea levels by 2050, this being based on existing plans in place or used as placeholders for entities that have yet to plan; and
- To expect much more sea level rise locally because of the newly accelerated melting of the ice cap melting in Antarctica and Greenland.
Millions of cubic yards equivalent to over 420 Salesforce Tower high-rises? Some $110 billion which has no possibility whatsoever of being funded, locally let alone regionally? And those massive new requirements posed even locally by the melting ice caps? How are these unprecedented high requirements to be met?
It’s not surprising that the individual interventions presented that day and all the hard work they already required paled into insignificance against the funding and work challenges posed by the bulleted challenges.
What to do? How to respond?
II
These massively large sums (and like figures) are meant to underscore the urgency of the matter, to stir us to action that matches the unparalleled magnitude of the crisis. Such numbers do that for some people, but others instead respond by becoming even more uncertain than they already are. Some of that increased uncertainty is translated into dread over how to proceed (like we saw with respect to nuclear weapons in the Cold War), and dread can also be instrumental in generating action.
More often though, I’ve found that the increased uncertainty generated by category-five sums ends up reinforcing the focus on and approach to projects and interventions already underway. At least we know and can see hard work achieves this!
III
And in that hard work is one answer to why such large numbers, even when they measure true requirements, fall short of the needed analysis.
The problem lies in the estimates of losses (economic, physical, lives, and more) incurred if we don’t take action now, right now. It’s been my experience that none of these estimated losses take into account the other losses prevented from occurring by infrastructure operators and emergency managers who avoid systemwide and regional system failures from happening that would have happened had they not intervened beforehand, sometimes at the last moment.
Why are these uncalculated billions and billions of saved dollars important when it comes to responding to sea level rise, increased storm surges, more inland flooding, rising groundwater levels and other sequelae?
Because it from this pool of real-time talent and skills and practices that society will be drawing for operationally redesigning the inevitable shortfalls in new technologies, macro-plans and regulations for climate restoration and recovery.
IV
We have a pool of such professionals already. They are not being consulted nor is their professionalism adequately recognized for the Anthropocene challenges ahead. Those in infrastructures who are already making billion-dollar saves are going to be needed even if the impossible sums were funded, and most assuredly because they won’t be.
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You’d think that with the catastrophic disaster scenarios the planet is said to face, we’d see more investigations of how large critical infrastructures actually do avoid or avert massive system failures. You’d also think that the costs to society of confronting limitless disaster scenarios is set by the dangers of ignoring disasters, like earthquakes, floods and fires, easier to identify and assess.
So what?
Appeals to processes or state conditions such as “globalization,” “financialization,” “disaster capitalism,” and the like leave us assuming these processes are indeed the peoples’ chronic crises. The latter, though, is the case only if the with-respect-to scenarios detail how these broad processes are chronic because people have failed to avert all their own dreaded events.
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I
Retrofitting a bridge pre-disaster isn’t a chancy wager on what might or might not happen to the bridge later. Retrofitting is managing latent interconnectivities between bridges and other infrastructures that become manifest during and immediately after the disaster. That inter-infrastructural connections will shift and these shifts will involve bridges is far more predictable than this or that bridge will fail, unless retrofitted.
This means attention is crucial to the track record in retrofitting bridges before and after disasters, here and elsewhere. Note the implication: Retrofitting has to occur in order to have a track record to monitor and learn from.
Since there are real material and cognitive limits on controlling inter-infrastructural connectivity at any point in time, doing more by way of managing the pre-disaster latency of interconnectivities is elemental. An interviewee with engineering and management experience told us their city water infrastructure was behind the electricity utility in the adoption of automatic shut-off valves. Bringing water systems up to power’s better practices is a way of managing latent interconnectivity in advance of disaster.
II
In other words, the question we should be asking is more akin to: “What have we learned, here or under like conditions elsewhere, that actually works in better managing latent interconnectivity for post-disaster response and recovery?”
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I
An article starts with: “The climate crisis calls for a massive and rapid retooling of our economy and society.” Yes, surely that and more; but what do we do immediately?
Which means in the US setting, activating a city or county emergency operations center and/or incident management teams at the department level to coordinate immediate response efforts. States also do the same with respect to their own EOCs, IMTs or equivalent.
This activation is done all the time, when high winds, ice storms, wildfires, heat dome effects, flooding and their combinations take down essential services, particularly backbone infrastructures of water, electricity, roads and telecoms.
II
Now the thought experiment: Activate the EOCs and IMTs, or at least the ones which know we are the climate emergency. And who are the distressed peoples and sites? Well, that’s not something you can answer a priori or universally. It’s up to the EOCs and IMTs, who recognize the climate emergency is leaving local people hungry, making local spaces uninhabitable, taking away local employment. . .
In thinking these things through, one rather counter-intuitive implication becomes clearer.
Those oft-mentioned “stop-this-and-that” (fossil fuel, biodiversity loss, and so much more) immediately hit a major obstacle. In really-existing emergency response, fossil fuel is needed to evacuate people, ship goods and services to distressed areas, keep the generators running when electricity fails, and so on. Cutting down trees, distribution of water in plastic bottles, and wide use of readily available gas-guzzling vehicles, in case it needs saying, are not uncommon.
Indeed and more globally, years and years of R&D have gone into studying, prototyping and distributing more sustainable options, like eco-friendly stoves, toilet facilities, renewable-energy generators, and other alternatives. Shouldn’t we then expect and want their increased use in immediate emergency response, especially when (not: “even if”) expediting them to the distressed sites and peoples means, e.g., using petrol to get them there?
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Below in full and without edit is a letter to the editor of the TLS:
Sir, – Unless a substantial proportion of the world’s scientists are deluded and are (innocently) deluding us, articles that blithely project a long-term future extrapolated from a continuing present need to be challenged (see “The last mortals” by Regina Rini, May 17). Or rather the publishing of them. To make predictions based on the present could be an act of climate catastrophe denial, an act that recursively makes the catastrophe more likely. This article is particularly odd in that it posits the exact opposite problem to the one we (almost certainly) face. It’s not how we cope with watching the next generation sail off into immortality, but how we cope with leaving them to face the conclusion of our civilization. Even the most sophisticated actuarial programs would struggle to tell me my grandchildren’s life expectancy, but I’d bet it’s shrinking by the day. A more useful challenge for philosophers would be to ask why environmental and social collapse are increasingly inevitable now, why we don’t care, and perhaps why we seem not to care that we don’t care. Are we incapable of seeing the world as real? Better to deal with these sorts of questions than to go floating off into Elfland.
MARK STEINHARDT
Bedford.
I wonder if Mr Steinhardt and like-minded people fully appreciate the equally strident policy implication that directly follows from the climate emergency being so catastrophic that thinking about anything else is irresponsible?
Namely: Such persons should be publicly shamed and humiliated, if it turns out that, of course the climate emergency is going on and yes, it is disastrous, but that does not excuse humanity from thinking about other existential disasters.
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I
It’s not surprising that those who don’t “give whatever it takes to save the planet” justify doing so by focusing on what they know can be managed or realized for the climate emergency. Consider one such example:
We emphasize the importance of taking political time and maintain that collective social responses to major climate impacts must center actually existing material and symbolic inequalities and place procedural and distributive justice at the heart of transformative action. This is so even where climate change will have devastating physical and social consequences.
https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article/122/1/181/319765/Taking-Political-Time-Thinking-Past-the-Emergency
Note this dissent at least has the merit of recognizing the human devastation entailed in its approach, quite unlike those who insist we must do whatever it takes, full stop. Nor is the quoted passage on its own. Others just as well insist the pre-eminent fact is that “doing whatever it takes” will be on the backs and in the flesh of already poor people and immiserated minorities globally (e.g., https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4416499).
II
So what?
“In your plans for reform, you forget the difference between our two roles: you work only on paper which consents to anything: it is smooth and flexible and offers no obstacles either to your imagination or to your pen, whereas I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is far more prickly and sensitive,” so wrote Catherine the Great to Denis Diderot, the French Enlightener.
How has it come to pass that so many today think they are Enlighteners but act as our Empress?
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 