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Rewind: Saket Soni on the People Who Make Disaster Recovery Possible

Otto Pilot — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 08:01:00 +0000

Rewind: Saket Soni on the People Who Make Disaster Recovery Possible

06/16/2023

As human-driven global warming amplifies the frequency and potency of natural disasters, we are increasingly dependent on one group of workers who live in the shadows: the migrant workforce that arrives to clean up and rebuild.

In his book, “The Great Escape,” Saket Soni tells the personal stories of young men from India who were lured by ads to migrate to America with promises of good salaries and, more importantly, green cards in exchange for working on disaster recovery in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The men had to pay up to $20,000 for this “opportunity” – a not-uncommon part of the deal for such migrants.

“A green card for a migrant worker is the holy grail of immigration, right. But it's not for people who are welders and pipefitters who build refineries who build infrastructure, roads and homes,” Soni says.

What follows is a chronicle of one of the largest human trafficking cases in modern American history. While Soni’s book focuses on the case of these particular men, it showcases the wider inequities and suffering faced by thousands of workers in similar positions.

“They don't want to leave home, but they have to because of economics, because of family security and economic safety,” Soni says.

Yet these are the people doing the hard work of cleaning up as climate-fueled disasters follow one after another.

“I came to understand these workers as the white blood cells of the climate crisis. Each time there was injury these were the workers who arrive to heal.”

Soni is founder and director of Resilience Force, an organization working to ensure a more effective and equitable approach to disaster preparation, response, recovery and rebuilding.

“The challenge the workers face is that this is a deeply subcontracted industry and the rights get lost in the layers,” he explains. “So, there's a worker who’s earning nine dollars an hour on a roof in Florida and if it rains that contractor at the bottom wants that worker to stay on the roof. The worker isn’t documented, doesn't have recourse. If he slips and falls, he'll get injured. So, that's the situation of that worker. But six layers above him, there is a $100 million contract given to an enormous contractor that perhaps has done half a billion dollars of business since Hurricane Sandy.”

Soni sees a future where resilience is an industry like the automotive or steel-making, a source of solid, family-supporting middle class jobs. And as climate disruption brings more severe disasters every year, that resilience corps will become an essential part of our new world.

Guests

Saket Soni

Founder and Executive Director, Resilience Force & Author, The Great Escape

Daniel Castellanos

Director Of Workforce Engagement, Resilience Force

Resilience Force (resilienceforce.org)

The Great Escape (workman.com)

Note: Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the actual audio before quoting it.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Unjust labor has been an ugly part of the American economy since the nation's earliest days.

Saket Soni: Here we are again facing the oldest of problems: captive workers coming to rebuild infrastructure after a climate disaster.

Greg Dalton: Much of that labor is done by immigrants from other countries swindled into work agreements filled with false promises, including getting legal status.

Saket Soni: A green card for a migrant worker is the Holy Grail of immigration, right. But it's not for people who are welders and pipefitters who build refineries who build infrastructure.

Greg Dalton: Yet these are the people doing the hard work of cleaning up - as climate-fueled disasters follow one after another.

Saket Soni: I came to understand these workers as the white blood cells of the climate crisis. Each time there was injury these were the workers who arrive to heal.

Greg Dalton: Saket Soni on the People Who Make Disaster Recovery Possible. Up next on Climate One.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One, I’m Greg Dalton. As human-driven global warming amplifies the frequency and potency of natural disasters, we are increasingly dependent on one group of workers who live in the shadows – the migrant workforce that arrives to clean up and rebuild.

In his book, “The Great Escape,” Saket Soni tells the personal stories of young men from India who were lured by ads to migrate to America with promises of good salaries. And, more importantly, green cards in exchange for working on disaster recovery in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The men had to pay up to $20,000 for this “opportunity” – a common part of the deal for such migrants. What follows is a chronicle of one of the largest human trafficking cases in modern American history. While Soni’s book focuses on the case of these particular men, it showcases the wider inequities and suffering faced by thousands of workers in similar positions. Soni is founder and director of Resilience Force, an organization working to ensure a more effective and equitable approach to disaster preparation, response, recovery and rebuilding.

Soni profiles many of these young Indian men who were swindled into captive labor, including Aby Raju, who was skeptical of the American pitch. I asked Soni to explain the personal family and social pressures that compelled Aby to go against his better judgment and come up with $20,000 that he didn't have for this job.

Saket Soni: Aby is like a lot of young people in India. He went to school up until about 10th grade. And then after that to support his family he got a job fixing roofs for about a dollar a day. He went to Mumbai to the big city for a better job, but that wasn't quite enough. Indian prices were rising just like here, there was the pressure of inflation. His parents were getting old. So, he went out to Bahrain for an oil job. He built an oil refinery. And for a while that money was enough but then that wasn't enough. Came back to India and he now as a young adult, saw his family on the precipice of economic collapse; he didn’t know what to do. So, when he saw that ad for green cards in America, he thought it was a way out. He was initially skeptical, but when he was told it would cost $20,000, when he found the offer credible, he decided somehow to make it work. Because the way he put it to me, you leave the ones you love to help them live.

Greg Dalton: That's pretty powerful. And he is just a typical person. There's many Abys out there, right? Many people making the choices that he made and going down the path that he did.

Saket Soni: Yeah. There are many, many millions of people like him. They think of the only viable career that they will ever have is as a migrant worker. They aspire to be migrant workers. They don't want to leave home, but they have to because of economics, because of family security and economic safety. And the thing that was atypical in Aby's case was a person like him would usually never make it to America. Indian immigration to America, professional immigration has largely been tailored for highly educated people to come into the industries of medicine and tech. Aby is not one of those people. A green card for a migrant worker is the Holy Grail of immigration, right. But it's not for people who are welders and pipefitters who build refineries who build infrastructure, roads and homes. So, that's when an American attorney shows up in India and convinces Aby that it's real. Aby thinks it's a chance of a lifetime.

Greg Dalton: And when he and hundreds of other immigrant workers like him arrived on the Gulf Coast, they could scarcely believe they’re in America. It didn't match their imaginations at all. They were brought to fenced in labor camps. Describe the conditions in these man camps.

Saket Soni: The conditions were awful. Aby and about 500 other workers thought they were coming on green cards for good jobs. But the first thing they learned were there were never any green cards. They came in on temporary visas that let them live and work legally in the United States just for a few months. During that time, they were bound to one employer; they couldn't leave, they couldn't work for anyone else, if the employer was abusive. And they worked round the clock shifts and lived in a labor camp on company property, surrounded by barbed wire fences. For breakfast each morning they were eating frozen rice which they warmed up for themselves, not in a microwave, but by sucking on the rice. That was their only meal to give them the sustenance to do really hard physical labor. So, the conditions were absolutely awful. But the real indignities, the deepest indignities that they faced, I learned about once I started getting to know the workers. So, for example, Aby, one day was 20-feet high on a platform doing really, really dangerous complicated welding work when he got a phone call. He picked up. It was his pregnant wife calling from 10,000 miles away in India. She was about to go in for surgery. And then the phone died. And so, there was Aby wondering when he would next see his son, and in fact he didn't see his son that was born that day. He wouldn't meet his son for another three years. Those were the kinds of indignities that propelled the men to escape from the camp and launch them into their freedom march.

Greg Dalton: These men literally were trapped inside these fences and they couldn't switch employers. At one point, a worker named Jacob says to you, “In Dubai, in Bahrain, in Baku we know how to get free. But how to get free in America?” How did you answer him?

Saket Soni: Yeah, I remember that night very vividly. It was the first time I met Jacob and in his particular English what he was asking was really technical. What he was saying is, “Look, I've been a captive worker in the Middle East. I've been a captive worker in Bahrain or in Baku.” And when you're a captive worker in the Middle East if it gets really bad if conditions are really abusive, there is recourse, there's a way to switch from one employer to another. But what about Mississippi? What about the United States? How do I switch from this abusive employer to another? That's what he was asking. But in his particular English the way the question landed on me it seems like he was asking something far more profound. He was asking a question as old as America. Captive labor has been a problem in American economies since the beginning of America from --

Greg Dalton: 1619.

Saket Soni: Right. Absolutely. From American slavery to American indentured servitude all the way to the American Bracero Program that brought in immigrants. And what he was saying was, look, now at the dawn of the climate era in the most contemporary of times here we are again facing the oldest of problems. Captive workers coming to rebuild infrastructure after a climate disaster.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, the land of the true free thing is -- people are more free in labor markets in Dubai and Bahrain, that's really striking. Aby is just one of many individuals whom you personalize and humanize in the book “The Great Escape.” Who else stands out to you?

Saket Soni: Well, one worker who really stood out a lot was someone I met in the labor camp who became a partner and eventually a brother to me. The person who helped me devise the entire great escape. His name was Rajan. He was from two towns away from Aby. He was the kind of partner a labor leader dreams of. He was someone from inside the labor camp who would meet with me clandestinely and he taught me about welding and pipe fitting. He taught me about the work inside the labor camp, what the company was doing. He also taught me how to cook. And I'd smuggle him Indian spices from outside. He'd take over the cafeteria in the labor camp and cook these meals. And the meals, all that Indian food, was his organizing tool to help the workers, to convince the workers to give me an audience to hear from me about an option outside the labor camp. He was the one who helped me convince 500 workers that they should escape. And when it came time to get them out heist style it was a remarkable event over successive nights with the help of wild turkey whiskey, terrible gas station flavored cigars and a fictional wedding that Rajan and I were putting on at a hotel ballroom. Rajan helped me ferry workers, five, six, at a time over the Pascagoula River to a hotel and that's how we engineered the great escape.

Greg Dalton: Wow, really does sound like a great escape. You’ve said that the hardest thing that you are up against with these workers wasn't their fear, it was actually their faith in America. What do you mean by that?

Saket Soni: Well, when the workers overcame their fear and escaped from the labor camp, they now faced new fear. We were hiding 500 men in a hurricane-ravaged hotel that was in disrepair since Katrina. The only place we could afford to put up 500 people. And the workers were sitting there waiting for the Department of Justice to act on their human trafficking complaint. They filed a complaint against the company, alleging human trafficking and forced labor. And usually in these kinds of cases the DOJ sends an investigator. In this case a week went by and no investigator arrived. So, what the men decided to do was march to DC to the doorstep of the Department of Justice. We set out on a freedom march from New Orleans to Washington. Men carried signs that said, “I am a man” and “Dignity” through Alabama, Georgia, through the vast stretches of the American South. And although they were jeered at and bottles were pelted at them from passing cars, those kinds of blows only increased their faith because in their mind they were walking to Washington. They were walking to the seat of government and they were going to get justice. In fact, they called it the department for justice; it was right there in the name. As soon as they arrived in Washington, they were gonna get justice. So, they had this incredible faith in the American system, a lot more than most Americans, I think. We didn't know that there was a, deep in the federal government, there was a pretty extraordinary advocacy that we would find. But along the way the men had this incredible faith.

Greg Dalton: And how long did it take for them to get justice?

Saket Soni: Well, the great escape took three nights. The hotel hideout was eight days. The march took 14 or 15 days. But the story was three years long. It took three years for Aby Raju to be reunited with his wife and his son. That finally happened at the Atlanta airport when his son was already three. Aby finally reunited with his wife Bincy and their son and started their American lives.

Gre Dalton: We’ll get back to our interview with Saket Soni later in the show, but we wanted to hear firsthand from one of these migrant workers. Daniel Castellanos is director of workforce engagement with Resilience Force. He told Ariana Brocious about his personal experience working in disaster recovery:

Daniel Castellanos: I was brought from Peru, my original country, to New Orleans, Louisiana after the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, me and 300 more workers came to rebuild the city after the hurricane. And we were exploited. They offer very good wages. They said you’re gonna be paid $15 the hour. In regular time, in overtime, a 60-hour guarantee. It was a very good amount of money, but in order to do that, you have to invest $5,000 to get the visa. Basically we came to New Orleans with a big debt. When we arrived, they made us sign papers in English, even though the 300 workers don't speak English. Spanish is my first language, you know, and they made us sign with no read. They said you have to, you want to work? Just sign.

Ariana Brocious: So you're $5,000 in debt just to get there, and then you have to sign away rights that you're not even sure of because you can't understand the language of the paperwork. And then what's the work itself like?

Daniel Castellanos: I am an engineer in Peru, you know, and I speak a little English, you know, and this is the reason that they said you are gonna be the crew leader, and all the people that we hire in Peru, there were people that, that they were working in construction, but when we arrive, even though all the promises that they gave us, they said the money, the 60-hour guarantee of work, a good place to live, they were false, because when we arrived, they said, okay, we don't have the work doing the rebuild. You’re gonna work in a hotel. And we are not paying you the $15 or $16 they promised us. They pay $6.02 per hour. And they don't give us the 60 hours. They give us 20 hours.

Ariana Brocious: So you're getting way less money per hour. You're getting less hours per week. And the work itself is not at all what it was described. What were the conditions like in terms of where you were living and the job site that you were working on?

Daniel Castellanos: The conditions were very, very bad. They put us eight people in a room, in a real tiny hotel room, not in a big suite. Eight people in bunk beds, and they have holes in the ceiling. And I ask the supervisor if we are gonna work here or we are gonna live here. And he said, he said both. We joke, they said, ‘oh, it's a five star hotel.’ Yeah, five star, because this is a hole in the ceiling and you see five stars. This is the joke that we are doing.

And, and actually the conditions were terrible. When you are coming to the United States, you think about the freedom land, you know, the land that you could restart yourself and have a lot of opportunities.But you know, when you come with a visa like this, because I came legal to the United States, brought by a company to rebuild a city, you know, you think it is gonna be better, but it was worse than coming undocumented. When you cross the border, you are free to go to another job. I wasn't, you know, because the name of my owner was in my passport. If I tried to go to another company, they immediately call immigration and I will be deported.

Ariana Brocious: So even though it was legal immigration and you were given a temporary visa, you were definitely exploited as the term you used because you weren't able to transfer employers. You were stuck in that situation.

Daniel Castellanos: The situation was getting worse and worse and worse, because for me, for example, only was the $500, but for the Dominicans, they forced them to sign a paper in Dominican Republic saying that if you don't come back, you lose your home, you lose your house. You know, the first month after a disaster, they said, come in, come in, help, help, help. They don't care about your status. They don't care about who you are, if you are speak English or not. They want help, you know, to clean up the debris, the trees, the blue tarps and all of this. But then a few months after that, they start thinking, oh look, look, these guys are illegal, or they are Mexican, or they don't speak the language, and the police at the same time start chasing you, bothering you, putting tickets for anything, you know, only for racial profile, basically. Because you are driving and you have a Texas plate or Louisiana plate, you know, and they stop you because that, and they say, okay, you don't have a paper. A few days ago, I was going with one with our members to the court because he got a traffic ticket because he doesn't have a driver license from the United States, and he has a driver license for his country. I was waiting in the court and I saw 60 people in the same situation, and all the people were charged $520. So it's a cash cow for the county. They don't arrest them. They put a ticket, continue working, but again, they gonna catch them and put a ticket. This is a process of getting money from them. Part of the things I'm doing now is try to connect the workers with the governmental offices in the local place to raise their standards of them, because right now they're sleeping in the parking lots. They don't have a shower. They were chased by the police.

Ariana Brocious: The work you're doing now, as you said, is to improve workplace conditions for these migrant disaster workers and looking into the enforcement of workplace standards. We know that the climate is accelerating the rate and occurrence of these natural disasters. So, in your mind, what does the future look like for people who are working on these disaster recovery projects?

Daniel Castellanos: There is a lot of room for, for people that are gonna work there because as you said, unfortunately the global warming is real. There is a lot of people that, they're gonna suffer with not only hurricane, you see the wildfire, you see snow, snow storm, you see tornadoes. So that means that the people are coming into this new way to work, but the companies take advantage of the immigration status. And after they deliver the job or they finish the job, they're not paying. And actually that's one of the biggest problems that we are having in any place that we go. You know, and this is a challenge for us, but we try to move forward because they're workers too, you know, and there is a lot of challenge in my job. But, you know, I like challenge and I try to improve the situation for all.

Ariana Brocious: Well, Daniel, thank you so much for sharing your story with us. This sounds like incredibly important work. Daniel Castellanos is Director of Workforce Engagement at Resilience Force. Thank you again for joining us on Climate One.

Daniel Castellanos: Thank you, Ariana.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton, and we’re talking with author Saket Soni about the people who make disaster recovery possible. Given that so much of the disaster recovery work is triggered by burning fossil fuels, I asked him to share his own climate awakening journey.

Saket Soni: I was a labor organizer and my journey started with helping protect workers in what had become the world's largest construction site. The post-Katrina flooding had turned the American Gulf Coast into the largest construction site on earth. And the workers were black and brown rebuilders standing under a 60-foot tall statue of Robert E. Lee. And each morning they’d be picked up by contractors and I get on the buses with them and go out to the distant dark corners of the Gulf Coast protecting them as they rebuilt. Katrina was supposed to have been a once in 100-year event. That's what it was called a hundred-year flood. The truth is, since then there have been over 200 billion-dollar disasters. And as these disasters grew more frequent and more destructive workers would call me from new places from Houston from North Carolina from South Carolina then from the Midwest. And I'd go to these places to protect them. And what occurred to me was that it was the same workers, many of the same people who stood under the Robert E. Lee statue were now fixing newer and newer places after newer and newer disasters. And I came to understand these workers as the white blood cells of the climate crisis. Each time there was injury these were the workers who arrived to heal.

Greg Dalton: You know I've lived through numerous California wildfires that are climate amplified disasters the displaced people. And I've welcomed first responders to stay in my home. I've seen firefighting helicopters fly directly over my home. And yet the people who come afterward were invisible to me until I read your book. I'm somewhat embarrassed to say I'd never thought about the, knew they existed. So, how are the fates of resilience workers intertwined with the circumstances of people who are displaced by climate disasters because those are the people that I see in the media and I thought about, not the workers.

Saket Soni: Absolutely. Look, you know, we spend a lot of time and attention on a disaster for the 48 hours that follow, right. People are coming out of emergency shelters and they’re coming back into their homes. That's when the cameras usually leave. What I see, what my team at Resilience Force sees, is what happens after the cameras leave. And this is what happens. After a flood or a hurricane or a fire a clock starts ticking. The first race is to get people back in their homes. To do that you need to rebuild sometimes tens of thousands of homes so that people can turn the lights back on. The next race is to rebuild the community infrastructure, schools, the hospitals, so that a tax base can stay. Because how do you stay in your home if your child's new school is three hours away, right? And the last race is then the long race to build a viable economy to bring in investment to rebuild economic development to turn this place into an economy that can thrive, right? All of that depends on resilience workers. And in fact, after a hurricane or a flood or fire people are under enormous pressure. Everybody's waiting for the workers. And the workers are waking up in their cars at a Home Depot. That's when the real rebuilding, the real recovery begins.

Greg Dalton: We've been through some dramatic biblical floods in California in recent weeks. What's happening now that those floods killed 22 people, we've seen certain headlines. What's happening outside of the headlines outside of the spotlight in the wake of the California floods?

Saket Soni: Well, you know, we’re still waiting to see what the true impacts of these rains and these floods will be. But what we know now, what we can predict is that huge numbers of homes, streets, schools and hospitals will need to be repaired. Floodwater when it enters a home or school you know what you have to then clean-up is not just the water but everything that was in the water. So, this is a long slog. A lot of workers for a long time will be cleaning up so that people can be safe and healthy again in their homes and schools and in their cities. The other thing that's happening is a lot of working-class people and poor people particularly for example, farmworkers. Farmworkers are working in fields that are flooded. That means they are now out of work. We think of wine country as being inhabited by the wealthy but wine country is also inhabited by the hotel workers the teachers and farmworkers who live there and who serve the area. And all of those people are undergoing enormous economic disruption. That's gonna take a long time to come back. I mean just think about the average American family and how much money they have in their pocket. If you come home to a fridge that doesn't connect to electricity anymore and you lose all the groceries in it that’s $600. Very few people have $600 lying around. So, this is gonna have a huge economic toll that will play out in people's lives for a long time to come.

Greg Dalton: Right. And lot of secondary effects floods, you know, creates mold that's complicated and expensive to deal with. It used to be that most disaster recovery was done by local mom-and-pop operations. Now 17 years after Katrina there are over, you mentioned 20, billion-disasters every year and disaster recovery is big business. What's the scale of this emerging industry?

Saket Soni: Well, you know, when I used to stand in the shadow of that Robert E. Lee statue most of the contractors that would come to pick up workers were small mom-and-pop shops. There was a van or two and some kind of you know ad hoc payroll system. A lot of these construction companies were new. What's happened since then is that an entire economy has grown. There's this $2 trillion resilience economy as FEMA money, HUD money, other public spending, and billions of dollars of insurance money have come in to help prepare to pay for repairs. You’ve had the growth of an economy. So, on one hand, that means the growth of a workforce. The ranks of resilience workers, the legion of workers that arrives to rebuild and repair has grown. So have the companies. These companies have consolidated they’ve merged. Banks will only lend to a certain size company. So, companies have to get bigger. And so, these companies have turned into giants. There is a very mature disaster restoration industry full of enormous companies, many of whom are now owned by private equity investors, private equity companies see the future. They see that profit can be derived from climate disasters. And so, they're buying up these companies. And so, for example, the state of California is a large institutional investor in the disaster restoration industry. There are huge amounts of dollars for --

Greg Dalton: Are there labor protections, I would think with state funding, government funding, that there would be some labor protection so it's not exploited workers from India doing the work.

Saket Soni: Well, we’re fighting for labor protections and some states are better than others. But the challenge the workers face is that this is a deeply subcontracted industry and the rights get lost in the layers. So, there's, you know, that worker who's earning nine dollars an hour on a roof in Florida and if it rains that contractor at the bottom wants that worker to stay on the roof. The worker isn’t documented, doesn't have recourse. If he slips and falls, he'll get injured. So, that's the situation of that worker. But six layers above him there is a $100 million contract given to an enormous contractor that perhaps has done half a billion dollars of business since Hurricane Sandy. So that's the contracting system. And we need to clean this up. Many more workers will work in dangerous, difficult conditions if we don't, that's really some of the work that resilience force is doing.

Greg Dalton: We often hear about a just transition from fossil fuels that includes people marginalized by unbridled capitalism driven by oil, gas and coal. Preparing for our conversation, I learned of a new term: just recovery. Jayeesha Dutta at the University of New Orleans writes that the status quo in this area is “aid, extract and displace” which is we’ve heard some of that from Katrina and elsewhere. And asserts that a just recovery would include respond, recover and rebuild. Can you unpack that vision for a just recovery?

Saket Soni: Absolutely. Jayeesha’s work is prescient and always on point. I completely agree with her. You know what we're focused on is a just recovery with an equity frame and a racial justice frame in which workers are protected and building their own personal economy through a family supporting job building their wealth through this work. And a recovery where residents coming back are gaining from all the dollars circulating in the system. What you have right now for poor people in this country recovery is robbery. It's not just disasters that create inequality. It's importantly, American recoveries. American disaster recovery is based on a midsize Pennsylvania flood that happened in the 90s, which hit mostly insured homeowners. Today disasters are much bigger and they hit the uninsured. They hit renters. They hit people without personal wealth. All of these people spend down their own money trying to recover and the government help doesn't come fair enough or fast enough. That's the equitable recovery we need, the just recovery we need is one that builds worker rights and worker protections and turns resilience into a significant source of jobs for middle-class growth and that helps residents in disaster hit areas keep their health and wealth and build.

Greg Dalton: And I've talked to other guests about how people controlling public dollars want to have the biggest impact for those public dollars to be accountable to taxpayers and that provides a bias toward wealthier neighborhoods with higher property values. So, the people who need it least are gonna, you know, better suited to get the government money because that’s where the property value is. This cycle seems to be repeating itself.

Saket Soni: Yeah, absolutely. And that's why Congress really needs to rewrite the rules of recovery in the United States. The rules are wrong. The way they're written money will always float towards the already wealthy and seep away from those who are not.

Greg Dalton: Right. Money flows toward power. According to a New Yorker article that features your work “chasing disasters requires a labor force that is open to arduous work and is instantly mobile.” So, the big companies rely on ill-regulated group of subcontractors and brokers as you're talking about. The New Yorker goes on to say that after a disaster, a contractor may owe $30,000 to each worker by the time the last paycheck is due and instead of paying, they'll often call ICE or the police. Is that still happening and what's in place to protect those workers?

Saket Soni: Well, payday raids are now widely expected. People hold their breath on payday and don't know if at the end of the day they'll see a paycheck or the inside of a jail. The bigger problem is that we've come to rely on a group of workers that’s so vulnerable with so little protection. And our sense of emergency after disasters lets this become the norm. When I go to sites that are hit by hurricanes or floods and fires. I usually ask for a show of hands. I show up at the Home Depot when people are waking up. I show up at whatever flooded school or home the workers are sleeping in. And we gather people and we ask people how many hurricanes have you worked, how many fires how many floods. Most of the time people have worked at this point, 10, 15 or 20 disasters. So, you've got this extraordinarily skilled workforce. You've got these people who have done it again and again. People who can make miracles happen. I've seen workers rebuild areas the size of football fields in a matter of days. You know, because they can. But they’re vulnerable while they do it. They're not paid enough, if at all. If they report abuse, they face retaliation, threats of deportation. And the other problem is there aren't enough of them. That's why our vision is a protected workforce but also a much more expanded workforce so that America can become climate resilient.

Greg Dalton: And your organization Resilience Force has initiated a number of legal actions against companies that hire recovery workers and then expose them to unsafe working conditions. How do the big companies shield themselves from liability by some of the layering and contracting I guess you mentioned? So, what are the companies doing in response?

Saket Soni: Well, a lot of the companies subcontract in order to avoid responsibility. They don't want to be responsible for workers and their conditions. But I'll tell you a different kind of story. We were in Louisiana after a recent hurricane and met with a group of workers who hadn't been paid from a job they were doing. They were rebuilding about a dozen public schools for a Louisiana school district. And we got into a terrible fight with the contractor. Workers were practically on strike. They were fighting for their paychecks. And we took the fight all the way up to the top contractor. We basically, you know, woke the CEO up on Thanksgiving Day with a letter. And what started as a really tense negotiation between him and me turned into a long-term partnership. This ended up being a very enlightened CEO, a man by the name of Mark Davis, a really great leader in this space who decided to take the workers at their word believe them, poll up the contractor fix the labor dispute pay the workers back out of his own pocket and then we built a partnership to clean up the industry. So, that's an example of a corporate leader who's doing the right thing because he had an enlightened self-interest. He sees that he needs this workforce. He sees that he needs them to be skilled and trained and we can provide that for him. And I think more and more companies will see the light and start doing what he's doing.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, that sounds like enlightened capitalism and seeing workers as allies and partners not just expenses to be….

Saket Soni: That's right as an asset. Yeah, absolutely.

Greg Dalton: …a liability. And how do these conditions compare to you mentioned farmworkers not working and flooded fields. How does this compare to other migrant laborers in other industries such as agriculture?

Saket Soni: Well, you know, the thing that's really stark to see when you're in a disaster zone is you get there and it is dark from miles around. There isn't a stable structure to sleep in. There's nobody around. And so, if you're a worker and you’re rebuilding. There's no infrastructure for you. FEMA hasn't built a camp for you. You know, there isn't a barracks or a trailer park. There isn't a mess hall or a cafeteria. You really are on your own. You're in the dark. You’re sleeping in the car but it's very hard to sleep for weeks in a car so you crawl under the car and you sleep on the floor under that car that’s your cover from the elements. You wake up in the morning, you wash yourself with bottled water, you brush your teeth and then you go to work and work is 12 hours in the hot sun rebuilding roofs. So, it really is the case that there's no infrastructure for these workers. That's part of the thing that political leaders in this country need to change and it would be very easy for governors and for Congress when they send money to rebuild and repair to also say what the conditions should be for the workers; that really needs to change.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. Coming up, the importance of building an industry around resilience:

Saket Soni: I think they'll be a day not long off in America where resilience, like manufacturing and auto work in a different era, where resilience will be the basis of a lot of well-paid middle-class jobs.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. We’re talking with Saket Soni, author of “The Great Escape” and founder and director of Resilience Force. Soni grew up in New Delhi and then studied English literature and theater at the University of Chicago. But then he missed the deadline on immigration paperwork and became undocumented. I asked him how that experience informs his empathy for disaster recovery workers.

Saket Soni: My parents were probably the only parents in the history of Indian civilization who allowed their kid to fly to America to study theater. And that's what I was doing when I missed an immigration deadline. I didn't think it was very serious. I thought it was about as grave a situation as an unreturned library book. It probably would've been but then 9/11 happened. And like a lot of immigrants I became undocumented and I lost my foothold in American life. And so, you know I was in a deeply precarious situation. I was very afraid. I think it's set me up to really understand the fear and pain of these workers. I wasn't like them but we had that common experience and it gave me a basis of empathy. And actually, as our freedom march was coming to DC right at the moment when the workers needed to be the most sturdy, strong and stable. I was at my most vulnerable. I had you know a precarious immigration situation I had to fix. And, you know, and I had to navigate whether to tell them or how to tell them. I think having an experience like that made me especially able to listen with deep empathy to their fears and administer to their fears.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, your situation was you had a lot of privilege relative to them, and yet you were closer to them, than certainly I have been or many people you’ve been closer to their shoes. It was really interesting to hear you talk about the transformation of the CEO who was an antagonist and became an ally. Sometimes these workers help people who wish to see them deported. You write about MAGA supporters in Florida. Have you seen people change or soften their views on immigration after being helped by these immigrant workers?

Saket Soni: You know, I think about this family in Florida. We do acts of service with workers at Resilience Force. Our members on Sundays instead of going to church deploy to some big community service event where they rebuild the home or the church of people who can't afford to rebuild themselves. So, one such Sunday in the Florida Panhandle. We helped rebuild the home of a family that was in a really tough spot. They didn't know if their repairs would be covered by insurance and we just came in and spent the Sunday cleaning up the yard and getting their home back in order. Afterwards we had dinner with them and usually we supply interpreters so that people can form friendships, build bonds. And that was an extraordinary dinner. People talked across language across political divides across stretches of ideology. They talked about food and family and America. And that family that we helped out had a sign they put up after the hurricane that said strangers will be shot. Well, after that dinner they took that sign down. I think they are now more in a position to welcome strangers. And that's the kind of change I see. You know disasters provide an opening unlike perhaps any other in American life for people to solve problems together and build lasting friendships together that can help us face future disasters with greater resilience.

Greg Dalton: The people breaking bread can bring people together and overcome those differences. That’s an uplifting story. Resilience Force created a comic book style manual, teaching workers how to document jobsite abuses. It tells them to photograph the license plates of their employers. What else do you do to help resilience workers assert their power and know their rights under US laws?

Saket Soni: Well, the big thing we do is confer recognition on workers. Like you said before, this has largely been an invisible work force largely unrecognized. You know we've come in and given it a name, called them resilience workers. We've given them an identity. They have ID cards that have their names and pictures but also the hurricanes, floods and fires they’ve worked. We’re working with the administration to confer recognition on the resilience occupation. We’re working with officials for the first time add a series of resilience occupations to the roster of American jobs. And then we’re working in places like the Gulf Coast and California to build training centers so that workers can get trained and upskilled so that we can build this at scale workforce in disaster prone areas. So, I think they'll be a day not long off in America where resilience like manufacturing and auto work in a different era where resilience will be the basis of a lot of well-paid middle-class jobs, but that's not inevitable. It'll happen if these interventions we make turn what are right now bad jobs into lots and lots of good family supporting jobs. That's some of the work we’re doing.

Greg Dalton: And you actually have this vision for resilience corps modeled on the works progress administration of the new deal. So, what’s the grand ambition for that?

Saket Soni: Well, the grand ambition couldn't be simpler, which is that you take every city in America. You can't think of a city in America without a fire station and firefighters. In the era of climate change when climate adaptation has to be our country’s, you know, top security imperative where adapting to the changing climate and preparing for the disasters that could come day after tomorrow that preparation is key to any city’s life. It’s key to any mayor who wants to keep his tax base or her tax base. Then in that kind of era just like firefighters every city should have a resilience workforce. So, in place like New Orleans we built a resilience corps. In Sonoma County we've taken farmworkers and train them to be resilience workers. These are places in America where already resilience workers exist and they’re helping an entire community prepare for the disasters to come and be resilient.

Greg Dalton: And I spent some time in a, part-time in a rural area north of San Francisco and sometimes there is resilience and fire planning. And sometimes that's the only time that certain neighbors talk to each other. Fear can bring people together and planning about something that we know could happen. So, I think it's another way to bring communities together before and after. Many disaster recovery projects are funded through FEMA. The Federal Emergency Management Agency. You've talked a little bit about what needs to be reformed. What particularly with FEMA would you like to see to help protect this vital workforce from abuse?

Saket Soni: Well, you know, FEMA really is doing the best it can. But it really is up to Congress to change the rules. FEMA works within the constraints of something called the Stafford Act, which is the rulebook you know the playbook by which America designs recoveries. The Stafford Act is deeply out of date. It would be as if you put a phone booth in the middle of Silicon Valley. It's that out of date. It's, you know, it’s from another era. It wasn’t written in the climate era. It wasn't built for the climate change era. And it can't solve for the scale and frequency and destructiveness of disasters. If Congress were to rewrite some key rules, you know, I think the top three would be adding worker protections to every dollar that goes to the ground to rebuild and repair so that workers are safe. Technically adding a racial equity lens so that, you know, those dollars specifically, go to Native Americans to black and brown homeowners to people who are renters and not just homeowners. To the elderly to the uninsured. Those are the are the kinds of rules that if Congress rewrote FEMA would be in a better situation to help. And the last thing just is that, you know, right now FEMA isn't allowed to make permanent repairs to homes. You can only make, you know, just think about it your home floods or sets on fire, right. Well, you might repair it just enough to turn the lights back on, but you actually need to pay for a whole lot more repair to make it back to how it was before the flood, let alone built better to face the next flood. That really should be a government expenditure. There has to be a public option for resilience if you’re gonna make poor people resilient.

Greg Dalton: When I started this work 15 years ago, I looked at the McKinsey cost curves and basically thought that once the elites realize what was at risk that there would be some benevolence and awakening. And it’s like, oh boy, we better fix this because it threatens all of us. But hearing you talk about payday raids, which is a new term to me. It just makes me doubt capitalism even more that I've been doubting a lot of unbridled capitalism, not capitalism writ large. So, I’m curious about your journey, you know, about humanity and climate wondering, you know, we’ve seen some better angels rise through these things and we’ve seen some real exploitation. What’s been your personal emotional journey through this?

Saket Soni: Well, what I see all the time is that disasters make people deeply interdependent. They make people rely on each other in new ways or in ways that are newly visible. And so, you know, in Florida after Hurricane Ian, a lot of the business owners and homeowners, poor and wealthy, big and small want the immigrants to stay in Florida who are rebuilding Florida and they want them to flourish. Among the companies, yes, there are the CEOs who won't do anything about labor exploitation, but there are also the Mark Davises of the world who are spending time and energy, not just making sure they are doing the right thing but helping other companies see the light because they need the labor. So, I think we've got an opening after disasters to focus on that interdependence and to make those who want to do it for themselves and are on their own to make them the outliers. I think there's an ecosystem after disasters that you find. People are in the business of solving problems. I think there are more of those than the kinds of people you're talking about who just want to leave everybody behind and fly to the moon.

Greg Dalton: To escape. I sometimes think the disasters bring out the best of us and the worst of us. And you’re saying, I’m often, you know, moved to tears when I see the Cajun Navy deployed and taking grandmothers out of their homes and these are volunteers with their boats just rescuing people they don't know. There’s tremendous humanity and grace that comes forward in these times. And you're saying there's more of that.

Saket Soni: I think there's a lot more of that. I think unfortunately those who have the least are often the most generous with what they have after disasters. That's where you see the best of America. I mean, I have knocked on doors of families living in their flooded homes and I'm invited in and people share the little food they have with me because I haven't had lunch. They’re grateful for the help we’re bringing them. So, I think that makes me hopeful. I think that as these disasters continue there will have to be a new kind of social compact particularly in states like California and Florida where you'll see a much more robust safety net much deeper supports for workers. That just has to happen because otherwise disaster recovery isn't possible.

Greg Dalton: Saket Soni is Founder and Director of Resilience Force and author of the new book The Great Escape. Thank you so much for sharing your insights and these compelling stories who I will say were invisible to me and many others and bringing them their stories forward. Thank you.

Saket Soni: Thank you so much for having me, Greg.

Greg Dalton: Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. Talking about climate can be hard-- AND it’s critical to address the transitions we need to make in all parts of society. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. You can do it right now on your device. You can also help by sending a link to this episode to a friend. By sharing you can help people have their own deeper climate conversations.

Greg Dalton: Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Our managing director is Jenny Park. Our producers and audio editors are Ariana Brocious and Austin Colón. Megan Biscieglia is our production manager. Our team also includes Sara-Katherine Coxon and Wency Shaida. Our theme music was composed by George Young (and arranged by Matt Willcox). Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

16:05 Daniel Castellanos on the conditions he faced as a migrant worker hired to clean up after Hurricane Katrina: “They put us eight people in a room, in a little tiny hotel room... Eight people in bunk beds.….We joked, “oh, it's a five star hotel. Well, five star because there is a hole in the ceiling that you can see five stars.”

36:30 Saket Soni on how experienced and skilled this mobile workforce has become after responding to tens of disasters in succession: “You've got these people who have done it again and again, people who can make miracles happen. I've seen workers rebuild areas the size of football fields in a matter of days because they can. But they're vulnerable while they do it. They're not paid enough, if at all. If they report abuse, they face retaliation, threats of deportation. And the other problem is there aren't enough of them. That's why our vision is a protected workforce, but also a much more expanded workforce so that America can become climate resilient.”

50:22 Saket Soni on key changes Congress should make to improve disaster resilience: “I think the top three would be adding worker protections to every dollar that goes to the ground to rebuild and repair so that workers are safe. Secondly, adding a racial equity lens so that those dollars specifically go to Native Americans, to Black and brown homeowners, to people who are renters and not just homeowners, to the elderly, to the uninsured….And the last thing just is that right now FEMA isn't allowed to make permanent repairs to homes.”

Labor and the Climate Crisis

6 Episodes

Play

Two Hemispheres, One Story: Reporting on Rising Seas

Otto Pilot — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 07:01:00 +0000

Two Hemispheres, One Story: Reporting on Rising Seas

10/21/2022

An undeniable reality of the climate crisis is that poorer countries in the Global South are experiencing climate-induced disasters first and worst. That doesn’t mean that wealthier and whiter countries in the Global North are free from climate disruption. But wealthy countries have far more resources available to adapt and recover when disaster strikes.

In a collaboration with Covering Climate Now, we invited two award-winning journalists to share their reporting on climate change in their part of the world and how journalism can help bridge the disconnect between the industrialized north and developing south. Lauren Sommer is a correspondent for NPR, and Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson is a reporter for the Guardian and host of the three-part podcast series An Impossible Choice, which won Covering Climate Now’s Journalism Award for Radio Podcast Series. Having grown up in Samoa, Jackson understands this global inequality all too well:

“Pacific Islands are only responsible for 0.03 of emissions globally yet stand to lose entire nations as a result of it. The responsibility lies in the Global North. And ultimately the role of the journalist is to really highlight these issues.”

Lauren Sommer sees the same injustices play out, even in the generally wealthy Bay Area., “I think the data is very clear. Disaster after disaster, people who have the means are able to put their lives back together. It's painful, but you know they can do it.”

Loss and Damage - the idea that the companies and countries most responsible for emitting climate changing pollutants should have to pay for the damages caused by climate disasters – is sure to be at the center of this year’s UN climate summit, known as COP27. Those in the most affected areas have been advocating for loss and damage payments for years. But Jackson believes that the ability to put those policies into practice is out of the hands of those in the Global South, “Unfortunately the decision-makers are not those who … have to pay for it in terms of lives lost, or identities lost, or islands lost.”

Both Jackson and Sommer hope their work might help the public understand that what’s happening to others around the world isn’t that different from what’s happening in many of their own communities. “As journalists, that's what we’re trying to share with the world, that maybe it's not you this time but it's a very good chance it could be you in the future, no matter where you live because these are becoming much more common events,” says Sommer.

Jackson agrees, “I love hearing Lauren’s reporting because I feel like the impact of the climate crisis has finally reached those with the means to do something about it.”

Related Links:
An Impossible Choice
What Can We Do About Rising Seas? East Palo Alto Has a Few Great Answers
Who Will Pay to Protect Tech Giants From Rising Seas?

Guests

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson

Reporter for The Guardian, Host of An Impossible Choice

Lauren Sommer

Reporter, NPR

Note: Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the actual audio before quoting it.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Twenty of the world’s richest countries – mostly in the Global North -- are responsible for 80 percent of the carbon pollution that’s driving extreme weather and supercharging natural disasters. Yet poorer countries in the Global South are experiencing climate-induced disasters first and worst. Wealthier and whiter countries in the Global North are being hit by climate disruption as well, but they also have more resources to adapt. This dichotomy underlies this year’s climate summit in Egypt, where loss and damage payments are expected to be a key focus.

In a collaboration with Covering Climate Now, we invited two award-winning journalists to discuss reporting on climate change in their part of the world and bridging the disconnect between the industrialized north and developing South. Lauren Sommer is a correspondent for NPR, and Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson is a reporter for the Guardian and host of the three part podcast series An Impossible Choice.

The series explores climate disruption the Pacific Islanders are facing. This year it won Covering Climate Now’s Journalism Award for Radio Podcast Series. Jackson opens the first episode with a gripping personal story about delivering her child during a cyclone.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Growing up in Savaii, Samoa cyclones and extreme weather events are very much a part of our lives and our existence. So, when I was brought on to host An Impossible Choice, I was asked to share my personal story like any journalist who wants to remain objective and just tell the story. I didn't necessarily want to share my story because I didn't feel that I should be part of the story. But in having conversations with my editors at the time, you know, they really did say well, actually you are part of the story and so you should be part of that narrative. So, even though it was hard for me professionally to center myself within the story I was very much aware that I was both a survivor and an eyewitness to the climate crisis in the Pacific. And then that's how my birth story came up of how my daughter was born in between storms in Samoa. And the fears that come as a new mother as you know, having a child for the first time and then a cyclone we just survived Cyclone Evan which you know displaced over 5000 people in our villages. And then another cyclone was due on the very evening that my daughter was born. So, to be able to tell that story and then hear from audiences how they resonated with it and also just connecting the fact that hardships, that lives of Pacific Islanders continue irrespective of the extreme weather events that people continue to live their lives even with the climate crisis and all of the issues that bring. So, it was, as a journalist, a very challenging time in centering myself in that story, but at the same time, it is the strongest piece of work I've ever done on climate change, and I used different approaches to try and reach international audiences on climate change. And this was a story that resonated: putting myself in it and telling the story of the people on the ground who are directly impacted by climate change and continue to be impacted by it. I really did make a difference.

Greg Dalton: And how have you experience climate change since then?

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Well, climate change is very much a part of our lives, you know, and extreme weather events such as intense cyclones flooding that something that happens on an annual basis. So, for us in Samoa, the change in the way that our livelihood options are available to us. So, seasonal crops variations have really impacted the way that we have access to food and have changed the diet. Storm surges have increased in coastal areas and then the availability of certain ocean-based food sources have also been a problem. So, this continues to be something that we deal with on a daily basis. Professionally going to town to do an interview and it be flooding is one of those, like immediate kind of climate change impacts that one experiences on the islands.

Greg Dalton: Thank you for sharing that. Lauren, you're in the Bay Area and produced an in-depth report on how communities here are preparing for future sea level rise. What does climate disruption feel like to you personally here living on the California coast?

Lauren Sommer: Yeah, I think it’s an interesting moment because obviously wildfires have gotten extreme, have affected many people in the West. But some of the decisions that people make every day are climate decisions and we don't always call them that. And I think where people are building where they live and decisions to build more in risky areas, those are all climate decisions, but they're happening in city councils they’re happening in kind of communities. And a lot of times aren’t kind of connecting the dots in those moments when they make those decisions about who's gonna be there in the future and might be at risk. And so, I think those are the types of stories I tend to gravitate to which is like we know a lot about the science now we know what sea level rise might do and who might be at risk and what the impacts might be. But is that really trickling down to the decisions we make every day that are gonna matter? I'm not sure it is.

Greg Dalton: Right. They’re kind of separated. Climate still in that far away future frame for a lot of people. Lauren, your work focused on the question of who should pay for climate resilience and protection, especially in a place where tech giants have established their headquarters. Tell us a little bit about what's at stake for the communities here like East Palo Alto and the wealthy ones nearby.

Lauren Sommer: Yeah, a particular story is kind of an interesting microcosm of this big question of fairness climate change. Like who should pay, who should pay for the damage that have been done and who should pay to protect people in the future. So, in particular, Menlo Park, which is in kind of in Silicon Valley in the Bay Area, you know, it has Facebook or Meta as it’s called now at their headquarters. They've spent a huge amount of money building a massive campus right on the waterfront there in an area where it's very clear that, you know, even by midcentury, there’ll be risk from storm surge and sea level rise. It’s also right next to East Palo Alto, one of the last kind of low-income communities of color kind of left in Silicon Valley, which is extremely expensive area to live. They are also right on the waterfront, they also need protection. And so, as the community in general is looking at what do we build do we build a levee do we build some sort of protection. This question of who should pay what's fair is really kind of it's coming up. It's causing a lot of tension in the community and it's kind of right on the forefront of like a lot of places haven't quite figured this out yet.

Greg Dalton: Right. And Cherelle, does that come up also in Samoa that, you know, what Lauren’s describing within one county basically is a microcosm for what's happening globally between the North and the South. Your reaction when you hear about these fights.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: It’s like the constant fight at climate negotiations. It's very interesting because among Pacific Island leaders and communities. Our cultures are not based on confrontation so it's very rare to hear a Pacific leader really confront the you know high emitting nations on the problem that they caused and were paying for. But what you do hear among Pacific Island leaders is accountability and the need to own up to their responsibility. And this is very much the case when we’re calling Australia to account for their role in the problem. My work has been focused internally on creating awareness among Pacific Islanders that it's not our fault. You know that this is the problem caused by others, and that our communities are suffering as a result. Because what you'll find and what you’ll hear especially if you’re listening in local languages is that Pacific Islanders some of them are taking this personally as our responsibility and our fault that the earth is suffering. So, it's very interesting that those who have done the least are also taking some responsibilities morally for what has happened and for the climate crisis.

Greg Dalton: Lauren, do you find that, you know, the sort of accountability recognition when you’re, we’re talking obviously a very different scales or we’re talking with Cherelle about a very human scale. And Lauren your work is with like zillion dollar corporations although run by humans, but are you hearing acknowledgments of accountability?

Lauren Sommer: Yeah, I think you know the project that they're trying to build there in that particular spot, you know, it’s gonna be expensive. I think the early cost estimates are probably underestimates. So, you have Meta-Facebook putting in some money and then East Palo Alto putting in almost exactly the same amount of money and then they’re hoping that the bulk of it is coming from the federal government to build it. And so, I think that's been a major source of tension, you know, and this kind of other question which is, you know, East Palo Alto, is a community that's been there a long time. Facebook is a place that built knowing that sea level rise was gonna be an issue more recently, and so that's where some of these tricky issues come in which is, is everyone on the waterfront equally responsible when you built, does that, you know, impact how much you should pay and how much risk you took on knowingly. That’s the really kind of thorny issues, especially if the costs you know end up being much more of an expected, which is happening with a lot of these huge climate adaptation projects right now.

Greg Dalton: What did you find, Lauren, among the people you talked with in terms of how they feel about these threats. I’m thinking about Mayor Carlos Romero, for example.

Lauren Sommer: Yeah, you know, he's been very outspoken that you know these companies kind of, they’ve come into these communities, you know, there are definitely been tensions about the way the communities have changed and the influence of gentrification as a result of kind of this kind of Silicon Valley boom. So, there was already kind of a little bit of history there. But he’s been very outspoken that you know they should be paying their way within their means which would mean he wants to see them do more than they’re doing right now. And I think he wants to see kind of more of a structure where if you're gonna build you’re gonna make a decision to build in a risky area that there's something baked in that you're taking responsibility whether it's a development fee whether it's more taxes whether it's something that’s gonna help pay for all this infrastructure in the future. But that's a really tough case to make for a lot of cities and communities because they want development, they want housing, they want jobs, they don't want to be doing things that discourage that type of development. And so, that's where the real tension comes in.

Greg Dalton: Cherelle, I know that it’s important to talk about Pacific Islanders not only as victims that there's leadership there's adaptation happening. In particular I'm interested in the former Tuvalu Prime Minister, Enele Sopoaga. Can you tell us his story and how he's seen as someone who came from that region and really made an impact and made people heard?

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Sure, Greg. Enele Sopoaga, former Prime Minister of Tuvalu is really one of these amazing - I like to call him a quiet hero because he's very humble and he's from one of the smaller atoll nations in the Pacific Islands. Like if you think Pacific Islands are small, Tuvalu is very small. And to have a leader from a country such as Tuvalu rise to the level of global leaders and stand side-by-side with US, UK, European leaders in the climate platform and in the climate negotiations, has really been quite inspiring. And that’s really driven from the fact that Enele Sopoaga is intrinsically or rather that his experience as a Pacific Islander in an atoll nation is really raw. Having grown up in Tuvalu and educated in Australia he not only intellectually understands the issue, but also has firsthand experience of the suffering that his people have gone through. For some context, Tuvalu experiences king tides annually. And king tides are basically an abnormal high tide which causes storm surges and because it's an atoll nation it floods the majority of the islands. And you'll see on an annual basis Tuvaluans holding up their like fridges holding up fridges holding up pigs holding up children so that they don't drown every time the waves hit. So, it's a normal occurrence for them except it's becoming frequent and it's becoming normalized. So, the fact that former Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga raised and brought a very key, he had a very key role in negotiating the Paris agreement, you know, is something that is not just monumental for the Pacific Islands, but globally. It's very significant to have, let’s be real here, a very insignificant country, an island, play a role in that way in negotiating one of the most significant agreements of our time on the climate crisis.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton.We’re speaking with journalists Lauren Sommer of NPR and Langipoiva Cherelle Jackson of the Guardian. In both their reporting, the people they speak with don't want to be forced to leave their homes, even when faced with increasingly dangerous conditions. Let's hear a bit of Lauren Sommer’s story of East Palo Alto residents Leia and Heleine Grewe, a mother and daughter who live in a flood zone and are concerned about losing their community because of climate disruption.

Lauren Sommer: Because they’ve seen how other disasters have hit communities of color, you know, like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. A lot of people were displaced and just didn’t return. And that’s Leia’s fear.

Leia Grewe: They'll move us out to, like - sorry. I didn't want to think about it. But we'll get moved out to, like, Stockton, Sacramento.

Greg Dalton: Lauren, what comes up for you when you hear that person, the Grewes, saying that and what they’re facing.

Lauren Sommer: Yeah, it’s very real for that family because their house is a kind of one of the first that you see before San Francisco Bay before all the water. And so, her daughter when she was in high school started learning about climate change and sea level rise and she was coming home and saying, mom, we gotta pay attention to this and got her mom involved. And their goal is really to get their community much more involved. You know, their family is from Tonga, there's a large Samoan population in East Palo Alto. There's a lot of people that really care about living there and being together and not being moved as she said. You know what she was talking about is you’re talking about two, you know, with traffic maybe three hours away from where they are right now where you can still find somewhat affordable housing in the Bay Area. So, it's not like they're moving to the town next door, you know, it would be a full displacement. And the communities already faced a lot of gentrification pressure with Silicon Valley growing the way it has. They have a lot of friends that have been priced out that have left the neighborhood, you know, or when their kids grew up they couldn't afford to live there, their parents. And so, I think they, you know, seeing kind of what happened with Hurricane Katrina where you just had so many people who are already kind of vulnerable or on the edge just not being able to kind of rebuild in place and have to move elsewhere. I think that's their fear is that one disaster one flood would be that thing that would be kind of the disruptive force that would kind of break their community apart.

Greg Dalton: And I’m curious, Lauren, when you’re reporting this, you know, talking about people in this very wealthy state and this very wealthy country being flooded out. Do you ever think about or did others mention Pacific Islanders or these small nation states their whole country are facing what you’re reporting on, on a neighborhood scale?

Lauren Sommer: Yeah, my colleagues at KQED in San Francisco did some reporting that was great, which was they spoke to someone in East Palo Alto who had come from Samoa and was very familiar with extreme storms and flooding. And in Palo Alto there have been floods already, especially when there's really intense rainstorms there's flooding kind of along this river in this Palo Alto. And so, the interview was fascinating because they'd move somewhere where they thought maybe that they were in different circumstances and they were like this is way too familiar that we’re dealing with this all over again.

Greg Dalton: We’ll play a clip of that and then we’ll get Cherelle to respond. So, this is KQED reporter Ezra David Romero talking with two Samoans in East Palo Alto.

Female Speaker: Anytime there’s a tsunami at home, all of our emotions rises.

Male Speaker: My wife has decided to leave because it’s too much. And then we come here to America and here it is --

Greg Dalton: He trails off there but they come here, it’s just the same thing they have been facing at home. Cherelle, your response to hearing, you know, people who leave Pacific islands, come to America and face the same thing.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: I was actually smiling at that soundbite because it's the way that one would translate. I could just hear that in Samoa they were like literally translating that in English and it's a really frustrating tone that they’re using. It’s like okay so we've moved the whole entire nation thinking that we’ll do better and yet here we are facing the same crisis. There is this perception that you know if you move to a developed country, you’ll be safer and you can seek refuge elsewhere. And I can just imagine that couple you know thinking okay we don't need to live on the beach anymore in Samoa and suffer this. This is the strongest way that we have captured the experiences of the climate crisis in Samoa in the Pacific is really speaking to the people who lived in coastal communities and are impacted directly whether it be their homes, you know, inundated or taken down because of cyclones or their livelihood options been impacted directly as a result of the climate crisis.

Greg Dalton: And Cherelle you say the choice whether to stay or leave is one of every Pacific Islander has to deal with whether now or in the future. And, you know, of course that’s difficult for anyone yet the connection to homeland is particularly strong in Samoa like the word per placenta and land I think are the same. And it’s tradition to bury that on your land, and when a family member passes they’re also buried on the property. So, can you tell us about for those who don't fully understand, most Americans don't have that kind of connection with land. We've lost that. Can you tell us a little more about your personal struggle in deciding whether to go or not in connection to that land.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Well, all across Polynesia and in many Pacific cultures we are intrinsically tied to land as we say and, in the podcast, I do explain this. Fanua is the word for the placenta or the afterbirth and fanua is also the land itself. So, it's the same word and you'll see I think in Maori language it’s the same as well. So, across Polynesian cultures this is tied and culture and land and environments are very much tied, so without a healthy environment or an intact piece of land you also lose a lot of the languages and cultural references that we have. So, in the birth story of a Samoan, first the afterbirth is buried on your land marking where you stay and this is your ancestral land. And then the umbilical cord of the baby once it drops off is also buried on the land, usually with a tree. And then when you die you will also be buried on that land and you'll often find in Samoa and in other Pacific Island countries that we sometimes bury our dead in our homes because the homes are open, you'll see like graves within the front porch of the house. Because we’re still related, we’re still very much a part of the family whether or not you died a hundred years ago 50 years ago or yesterday. That people are still very much a part of that land. Now where this becomes a climate story is that for atoll nations such as Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Tokelau, when they are forced to leave because there will be no more land or it’s fully submerged or it's no longer inhabitable. You cannot just up and leave a piece of land as you would say in the states in the US where you’re like okay, I'm in apartment here I own a home I can go buy a home somewhere else. No, this is something that your ancestors grew up in, you’re born into this land, your children, your children's children are supposed to be on this land forever, irrespective of where you go in the world. For my children they will always have land in my home village. Our ancestral land that we will always go back to. Like infinity and beyond. Like it's always going to be there. So, to then say to a Pacific Islander this is no longer yours because the ocean has taken over. That's essentially saying cutting off it's almost saying you’re cutting off the rest of their lineage. And lineage is very much a part of our upbringing. So, the way that we frame this podcast is to really to ask those hard questions of the people that do stand to lose their entire nations. I’ve interviewed communities in Fiji where the whole villages were wiped out by Cyclone Winston in 2016. And they’re like, yeah, we’re gonna rebuild right here, which ties to Lauren's point of you do have some responsibility on where you build; it's a climate decision. But when it comes to islands and you don't have any other choice of location you rebuild there because culturally that's where you are and where you will always be. It’s almost in a sense it's not even a choice; you just stay.

Greg Dalton: And Lauren, in your reporting there's other forces at work more commerce than culture. There’s a central tension between cities that you write about that want development and tax revenue. Yet, they’re on the hook for protecting those developments from rising waters and lack the resources to pay for that. Can you share some of what you learned about these decisions with big tech firms, Google, Facebook, in terms of how that's playing out for them shaping their decisions about where they’re locating and how long they’re staying there.

Lauren Sommer: Yeah, a good example I reported on was down a little bit further down San Francisco Bay in a town called Sunnyvale. And that’s a spot where Google has bought a huge number of properties just in recent years. So, they bought this big area of parcels just right on the water and it's an area that the city is really interested in having development. And Google is very interested in developing more sustainably. So, more walkable neighborhoods, more green spaces, more housing because obviously housing is a huge demand in the Bay Area. But of course, it's right on the shoreline. it's protected by a levee that you know is not adequate. It's not up to federal standards, it would not protect that area. And so, there's a real kind of conundrum which is like well okay do we let people put housing there and people who will live there before a new levee would be built because it's you know it's extremely long and expensive process to get these big projects built. Do we let people live there before we know it's protected? Do we wait till a project like that is built before we let them come in. I mean, that's a really tough call in a place where housing is in such short supply. But, you know, like once something is there it’s really hard to undo. Like if you pour concrete and put homes there and those decisions last you know, decades, centuries. And so, that moment that that decision is made is really important when it comes to climate change.

Greg Dalton: And one of the people, A.R. Siders says this behavior is kind of foolish, putting people at risk.

Lauren Sommer: Yeah, I mean she kind of in her research has really looked at you know this kind of pattern where we keep growing and expanding into risky areas. And then the really tough choices of what do you do in those communities if people do need to move. And so, I think you know from her point of view if you don't have to think about managed retreat as it's called, right, of actually having to relocate people and buy them out or find new places to live like that's the best case scenario, you can avoid those tough decisions by not building homes there in the first place, with what we know today.

Greg Dalton: Cherelle, I’m wondering just hearing these stories of a place that you know the states, you were in the states recently. How you view these kinds of conversations compared to when the resource disparity is so great.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: I love hearing Lauren’s reporting because I feel like that's the impact of the climate crisis have finally reached those with the means to do something about it. And then the impacts of reaching those with means, means that they'll finally understand the plight of Pacific Islanders. And it's sad that it takes a firsthand experience of you know, the West and of the Global North for them to understand what Pacific Islanders have been going through for many, many years and have been trying to raise attention to it.

Greg Dalton: It’s interesting because, you know, fascinating your reporting with worlds apart and yet there’s an interesting strand that connect them. Some of the onset is fast, some of it slow. There's a lot of wealth there's less material wealth a lot of cultural wealth. Cherelle, your reporting covers some of the day-to-day struggles of Pacific Islanders already facing because of warming temperatures. In particular you share the story of Vanessa, your friend, who experienced sudden flooding during a storm when a wall of water rushed down around their house where she lived and her husband and four kids. Let’s hear a bit of that story.

Vanessa: So, my husband, he said to me, get the kids, get the kids grab the kids. And I quickly ran in; he came as well. And my baby was sitting on the toilet at that time. I grabbed him by the shirt and he didn’t even have time to pull his undies up because the water was already rising, it was getting to our knees. So, by the time we got out of the house, we were already struggling. That’s how quick the water came.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Their first plan was to get in the car and drive to safety. But once outside they realized the car had been washed away. The water was rapidly rising.

Vanessa: We’re already struggling. I had two kids with me, both hands, we have two kids. And there was a point where we were looking at each other like we’re struggling. Are we going to make a decision to let one of them go. At one point we didn’t really have the choice. The water was really strong and it’s hard to hold on with our hands with the kids, all of us would be gone. So, it was the most scariest day ever.

Greg Dalton: Thankfully they all survived there. But that just gives me chills, Cherelle and Lauren, as a parent thinking about having to let go one of your children or to hold on or else the whole family might go under. How did you deal with hearing that and also the aftereffects of these experiences?

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Vanessa’s story is one of the most heartbreaking I ever had to report on. As a mother and her village was five villages away from mine, you know, and her children are around the same age as mine. So, to hear her say, well there was this point where I was gonna have to choose which kid to carry up it stays with you. And the thing with Vanessa’s story is it's one of many stories. It's just one story and it doesn't belittle it, but what it does do is it really elevates the fact that there are people who continue to face these existential issues in the Pacific and on a regular basis. I have reported on these issues for many, many years and to hear Vanessa’s story is to really hear about the climate crisis on the ground. And I want to go back to the issue of resources and the disparity between how the poor and how the rich experience climate change. For this particular story Vanessa and her husband owned a business. There were two buildings. They could climb up and save themselves. Eventually they did, thankfully, on top of the warehouse that they owned. Everything was gone and wiped away. But what of the families who didn't have that? And many throughout the years have died because you had no place to go when your home is wiped. So, it is something that as a journalist we do need to look into further – the disparity between the experiences that those with the means have and those without the means. Because when a wealthy person suffers climate, they can build higher. They can build somewhere else. They can afford the Metas and the Googles can do this. The Tuvalus and the Tokelaus they have no choice. They cannot build a new island. They cannot afford to do that. So, this experience of climate change when you have the means to save yourself afterwards is so very different to the plight of Pacific Islands where you just simply don't have the land or the resources to continue having the life that you've always wanted to lead as a Pacific Islander. Now, I just like to share the story of how you know I have survived many cyclones in the past, but the most recent cyclone, Cyclone Evan. My mom and I were in my house in town which is on stilts. And I remember the first day of the cyclone my mother saying, my mom is a high chief and she survived a whole lot of stuff growing up. And she said, it's very quiet, like the cyclone is very quiet. And I’m like what do you mean? She said you don't hear the sound of the wind and that's because the house is a western styled house it had walls, windows, doors. It was well protected. But our earlier experiences of cyclones were in open valleys, traditional huts, and you hear the wind it's like right in your face and you have no choice. So, for me that was like this picture of how you know resources can protect you from extreme weather events. And that's really for me very interesting to hear Lauren’s reporting compared to how I've reported as well. And that disparity between those with the means and without.

Lauren Sommer: And that’s, I mean those stories you know, I mean I live in California. I've lived here a long time and covering wildfires 10 years ago. I would be so surprised when I would need a family that had to evacuate quickly, you know, I would be really shocked. Covering the wildfires in the last few years I barely even have to have one conversation before I hear a really harrowing scary story about family, you know, let’s say two summers ago, yeah, a family who like they once take both their cars they threw their kids in one, they were had to have their kids like huddle in the center of the car because the flames were so hot on the sides of the road that they were getting burned through the windows as they were trying to escape. And it’s, you know, I think as journalists, like that's what we’re trying to share with the world that you know maybe it's not you this time but it's a very good chance it could be you in the future, no matter where you live because these are becoming much more common events for many parts of the world.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Living through climate disasters is becoming increasingly common across the globe. Beyond physical and property harm, surviving them can take a toll on mental and emotional health. In some cultures, the language for trauma as we think of it doesn’t really exist. Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson helps us understand how trauma is processed in her culture.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: We don't have a word for trauma in Samoan in a way that translates to the way we deal with trauma in that we deal with it with humor. And which is very intriguing when you're covering climate change and you're trying to relay the seriousness of the situation, you know, internationally --

Greg Dalton: You have some really dark climate jokes?

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: So dark. So dark that inappropriate when translated into English. So, as a journalist from the islands straddling that divide between how my local audience has received climate change news with international audiences is always been quite intriguing because I know that when I translate to English and I report say previously for The Guardian that, no, I shouldn't be mentioning the funny story of my uncle hanging onto the roof of the house while trying to hold his skirt on and how that has always been hilarious for us. But when you're writing for an international audience who should be sympathizing or who should be made to be aware of the seriousness of the situation, relaying those humorous stories is not necessarily the best way to report the climate story from the Pacific. So, it's very interesting and that really ties to the issue of trauma. And I've done some work with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. We brought them into Samoa to talk to journalists who are reporting on climate change and extreme weather events. And just because we don't acknowledge it culturally nor do we have the language to relay what trauma is or understand it, doesn't mean it's not happening. Because journalists who cover climate stories who are first on site who are there with the first responders do experience a lot of trauma anywhere in the world. And so, dealing with that means that we can, you know, assist journalists in better reporting and perhaps even having a more hopeful lenses in reporting on climate change.

Greg Dalton: How was that related to the language and culture around race, and the sense of self?

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: So, in Samoa and again in many Pacific Island countries, the self is we and the self is collective. It's not about you it's about your family, your village or community. So, you'll find that the experience of climate change is not about the individual losses but rather the collective losses. And that's really why this issue is so severe for the Pacific, culturally, and as communities and as families because the loss is not choked up to one family. It is the loss of the whole community. And with that is kind of like I guess in American's terms; it would be like institutional knowledge. So, it's the historical oral history and everything that comes with it. It's the collective. So, trauma is experienced not just by the self, but also collectively as a family. Your experience as one person reflects on your family. So, if one family is experiencing, flooding, or they lose . Their home. We consider that a loss of by the entire village.

Greg Dalton: So, we've been talking about this on so many different levels. And as we’re at this moment, looking ahead for COP 27 in Egypt, loss and damage who pays is a big part of the conversation as it always is. So, I’m curious about this particular moment we’re having increasing awareness, increasing experience of these climate impacts. How you work and help frame the conversation around who pays equity and justice both within neighborhoods and globally. Lauren.

Lauren Sommer: Yeah, I think coming into this COP, I mean just look at what’s happened this summer alone. You got the flooding in Pakistan. You've got heatwaves in India. The number of just really incredible devastation that’s happened recently. these aren’t just one offs anymore, you know, like and this is billions of dollars that it's gonna take for people to rebuild. So, I think yeah, this is going to be an interesting COP potentially because obviously last year there was a ton of frustration over loss and damage. You had a lot of, you know, countries coming forward saying like we can’t keep ignoring this. This is something that every single year starting to happen.

Greg Dalton: Lauren, you covered Mia Mottley’s gripping speech from last year's conference.

Lauren Sommer: Yeah. And I think the momentum has built even since then, about what are the ways that countries can actually make this a reality. You know there's a lot of countries that are really have a huge amount of debt as a result of disasters and other things, right. Is it kind of a debt forgiveness mechanism is what she's bringing up to say that's how you could help countries deal with these kinds of damages and damages going forward. So, there’s a lot of frustration because there is a lot of reticence on the part of richer countries to take on anything that looks like liability to say like, it’s our fault and that maybe they feel like would open the door to more and more costs in the future. So, it’ll be interesting to see what kind of progress is made. I think it really is gonna be the flash point of this COP is what I think is gonna happen.

Greg Dalton: Cherelle, your thoughts on going into COP 27 in Egypt with this issue of pay equity and loss and damage.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Pacific Island leaders have been bringing up this issue for many, many years and it's made very little advancement at the negotiations. Loss and damage ultimately is a conversation that has to unfortunately the decision-makers are not those who are, you know, have to pay for it in terms of lives lost or identities lost or islands lost. So, in a way it continues to be a disempowering conversation for Pacific Islanders because they are not necessarily the ones who have the sway in the poll to advance the conversation in loss and damage. You know, ultimately, the Global North and high emitting countries do have to own up their responsibility but as we all know that blockades and you know they will continue to block this. So, a lot of Pacific Island negotiators are not hopeful moving into COP 27 that there will be much change but it doesn't mean that they go in without hope. Pacific Island negotiators met just last week as part of the preparatory meeting towards COP 27 where Pacific Island negotiators come together to consolidate their joint oppositions moving into COP 27. And you know this is it continues to be an issue for the Pacific and it feels like a long, long road ahead before anything is done for Pacific Island Nations in the climate front on loss and damage.

Greg Dalton: Covering climate now is a collaboration of over 460 news and media partners aimed at driving a public conversation that creates an engaged public. And we’re collaborating with Covering Climate Now in producing this episode. As we draw to a close here, I’d like to think about how your work centers on power and equity at the core of your reporting and how you try to bring that out and how you think about power and equity in your telling of these climate stories as they unfold.

Lauren Sommer: I mean I think the data is very clear disaster after disaster people who have the means you know are able to put their lives back together. It's painful, but you know they can do it. The folks that don't have the means, don't have the insurance, didn't have savings that didn't have the kind of like social structure around them to kind of rebuild and stuff. It's very clear that the kind of devastating impact these disasters have. Like we see it over and over and over with disasters. And so, I think you know that's kind of the thread of every climate story now that I try to do, right, is whatever inequity already existed and whatever part of society you’re looking at. I mean climate change is the added layer that's gonna make it worse.

Greg Dalton: Right. And Cherelle, your thoughts on that and also the potential for collaboration. You’ve spoken eloquently about the collective and is there a need for more collaboration in climate reporting and media where there tends to be kind of competitive in spirit.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: So, in the Pacific media we’re not necessarily competitive, we're very collaborative naturally. It’s when we veer into international media that it becomes a dog eat dog world as I unfortunately experienced. So, first of all I just want to mention that covering climate now has been a game changer for climate journalism globally and they have not only elevated climate change as a news beat in the US but also globally. I have a small news organization in Samoa that has benefited from the content shared by Covering Climate Now. That collaboration that spirit of sharing free content of highlighting stories from under covered areas is key in not just understanding climate crisis as a global issue, but also increasing the capacity of journalists in the Global South and then also the exchange between Global North and Global South journalists. On the issue of equity, I want to talk about the responsibility. Pacific Islands are only responsible for 0.03 of emissions globally yet stand to lose entire nations as a result of it. The responsibility lies in Global North. And ultimately the role of the journalist is really highlighting these issues, highlight the fact that you know there are those who are responsible and those who are paying for it who are suffering as a result of it. So, to come back to the issue of the value of climate journalism in highlighting these issues, Covering Climate Now has been instrumental in changing that.

Greg Dalton: Thank you. And I should also mention that Cherelle, your reporting won in the category of radio podcast series for the Covering Climate Now journalism words. And Lauren’s reporting earned recognition as a finalist. So, congratulations to both of you on that. So, as we wrap here how are you personally navigating the stay or go? I have personal impulses of like moving from the Bay Area moving north then I’m like okay calm down, Greg. How do you personally navigate that, Cherelle, you’re laughing so I’ll go with you first.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: I laughed at the calm down, Greg, reference. Okay. So, for me personally, I will never leave my land. My family will never leave the land. We will stay there because the bones of my mother, my father, of my ancestors are there. So, we’ll sink with it. At the same time, I do have children who want to make a difference in the world. So, realistically speaking, there should still be a future that’s secured for them, whether it be in Samoa or in the developed country where they may be safer on higher ground.

Greg Dalton: Lauren, when you're doing your reporting do you ever have thoughts of like, oh, I got to get out of here while I can.

Lauren Sommer: I mean, yes, I always like to look at maps of California because if you map the wildfire and the flood and all the disaster and drought I don't know where you would go necessary to avoid it completely. But no, I think I mean I honestly do think a lot about there’s so many people living in places that’s gonna be hit with something whether it's a flood or a fire. And the thing I think most about is evacuation, honestly. Like people have to be able to get out safely and that's the thing we all need to work on in addition to, you know, the decisions that are tough building decisions in the future.

Greg Dalton: Lauren Sommer is a correspondent for NPR. And Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson is the Climate Collaborations Editor for the Associated Press and host of the Impossible Choice podcast for The Guardian. Thank you so much for sharing your stories and the people you've talked to.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Thank you, Greg.

Lauren Sommer: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Greg Dalton: On this Climate One... We’ve been talking about sharing the stories of those affected by the climate crisis in the Global North and South. Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson’s series An Impossible Choice won Covering Climate Now’s Journalism Award for Radio Podcast Series. It will be featured in Burning Questions: Covering Climate Now premiering October 25th on public television's WORLD channel.
Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. To hear more, subscribe to our podcast on Apple or wherever you get your pods.Talking about climate can be hard-- but it’s critical to address the transitions we need to make in all parts of society. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review if you are listening on Apple. You can do it right now on your device. You can also help by sending a link to this episode to a friend. By sharing you can help people have their own deeper climate conversations.

Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Our managing director is Jenny Park. Our producers and audio editors are Ariana Brocious and Austin Colón. Megan Biscieglia is our production manager. Our team also includes consulting producer Sara-Katherine Coxon. Our theme music was composed by George Young (and arranged by Matt Willcox). Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

Play

Risky Business: Underinsured Against Climate Disaster

Otto Pilot — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 07:01:00 +0000

Risky Business: Underinsured Against Climate Disaster

09/30/2022

Home and property insurance is complicated and typically boring – until a disaster happens to you. In recent years, hundreds of thousands of people in high-risk disaster areas across the U.S. have been dropped from their insurance policies, leaving them both physically and financially vulnerable. At the same time, premiums have sky-rocketed, putting home and business coverage out of reach for many.

Junia Howell is an urban sociologist on the faculty of the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research has found that FEMA disaster recovery payouts tend to increase inequity.

“We have a very needs-based aid system, meaning we have to establish the need in order for our government to say, ‘yes you deserve this aid.’ And because people have to establish need, they bring their inequality, the inequality that exists already in the world, into the system,” Howell says. That means that someone with a higher home property value will get a higher payout than someone with a lower-priced property.

FEMA's own analysis shows that after a disaster strikes, low-income survivors are less likely to receive money to repair damage and pay rent. In November 2020, FEMA released an internal study finding that “many FEMA programs do not consider the principle of equity.” Howell says while we may think equity should be baked into federal programs: “There's always been a preference for economic development, for basically helping those that we think are not only going to help themselves but help the community. And that has never included people who are racially marginalized migrants or others who are socioeconomically disadvantaged.”

But there are ways to deliver better disaster aid. One possible option could be as simple as cutting flat checks to everyone hit by a disaster, similar to how the government distributed COVID relief payments. That would have the added benefit of getting money to people sooner. The slow pace of payouts in our current insurance and federal relief systems slows recovery and compounds economic insecurity following disasters, says Carolyn Kousky, author of Understanding Disaster Insurance: New Tools for a More Resilient Future.

“If you have huge expenses you can't pay, you don't have the savings, you don't have a loan, you don’t have any way to handle it, then people can really start to spiral into really terrible financial situations.”

“It's not just about reimbursing damages but it's about having the financial resources that you need for whatever it is to get back on track,” Kousky says. “And maybe that's rebuilding your home, maybe that's replacing lost income, maybe that’s covering somewhere safe to stay. And maybe also in some of the sort of even more cutting-edge applications of insurance, it's providing the funds before the disaster even hits so that you can invest in protective measures to lower the damage that actually ends up occurring.”

Parametric insurance – where the payout is tied to specific parameters, like high winds speeds or temperatures – can also provide more equitable, transparent and quick financial relief, says Simon Young, senior director of the Climate and Resilience Hub at Willis Towers Watson.

“It’s fully objective. It's an independent measurement effectively of the wind, and the payment can happen very, very quickly. The value of having that money in a week or 10 days against three months to six months, let’s say if it’s coming in from FEMA, is huge,” he says, because it means the recovery process can be community driven as opposed to waiting for outside help.

As climate risk increases, these conversations will become even more important, says Vox climate and covid reporter Umair Irfan.

“There are places that are at higher risk, but there's very few places that are at zero risk. And that's the difficult thing, the needle to try to thread in terms of messaging to convey to people that the very infrequent, the very rare event is still a possibility and you have to take measures now to prevent it or to cope with it.”

Related Links:
Understanding Disaster Insurance: New Tools for a More Resilient Future
As Disaster Costs Rise, So Does Inequality
The $5 trillion insurance industry faces a reckoning. Blame climate change.

Guests

Junia Howell

Urban Sociologist, University of Illinois Chicago

Dr. Simon Young

Senior Director, Climate and Resilience Hub, Willis Towers Watson

Umair Irfan

Climate and Covid Reporter, VOX

Carolyn Kousky

Associate Vice President for Economics and Policy, Environmental Defense Fund

Eric Letvin

Deputy Assistance Administrator for Mitigation, FEMA

Note: Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the actual audio before quoting it.”

Greg Dalton: Do you have enough insurance to see you through the climate crisis? This is Climate One, I’m Greg Dalton. Home and property insurance is complicated and typically boring–until a disaster happens to you. Hurricane Fiona just flooded Puerto Rico with heavy rain and high winds, knocking out power to the entire island, before moving north to become the strongest storm in Canadian history when it hit the coast of eastern Nova Scotia. As of this taping, Tropical Storm Ian has already brought historic flooding, damage and power outages to Florida, and is expected to strengthen back into a hurricane.“As of this taping, Tropical Storm Ian has already brought historic flooding, damage and power outages to Florida, and is expected to strengthen back into a hurricane.

In recent years, hundreds of thousands of people in high-risk disaster areas across the US have been dropped from their insurance policies, leaving them both physically and financially vulnerable. At the same time, premiums have sky-rocketed, putting home and business coverage out of reach for many. And federal insurance and relief programs have come under scrutiny for payouts that contribute to inequality.

Junia Howell is an urban sociologist on the faculty of the University of Illinois-Chicago. Her current work focuses on policies and practices within housing and disaster relief. She spoke with Climate One’s Ariana Brocious.

Ariana Brocious: You’ve made the case that FEMA payouts tend to increase inequity and that FEMA's own analysis shows that after disaster strikes low-income survivors are less likely to receive money to repair damage and pay rent. How do you know that?

Junia Howell: Yeah, this is a great question and has actually caused a lot of uncertainty and kind of uproar when we first started doing this work. In fact, when I first started finding results that FEMA aid was actually increasing inequality people in my own team didn't believe me. And they wanted to like get behind-the-scenes and get on the data with me because they’re like there's no way that this is true. In particular, the thing that felt so shocking to myself and others is that individuals who had lived through disaster were actually making money, making wealth, ending up better than their counterparts who didn't live through a disaster, but only if they were white and educated homeowners others who were privileged in society. While their neighbors who were people of color who were renters ,who were less educated, had other forms of marginalization. They were not only losing out compared to their wealthy neighbors who live through disasters they were doing worse than their counterparts who didn’t live through a disaster. So, that the way that FEMA aid was being distributed actually was increasing this inequality after disasters.

Ariana Brocious: Right. And when lower-income people do receive some of this federal assistance, they often receive less than perhaps their wealthier counterparts and why is that?

Junia Howell: Yeah. This has been something that has been personally as like a human a little disheartening, right, to look at the numbers and to realize like oh my gosh, these numbers are starkly different. But if you start to unpack why it is, it makes sense given our system. So, first of all aid after disasters isn't just given out like a check. You know, actually very rarely has our government just given flat checks. Now the big exception of this would be recent years with COVID but pre-COVID most of the time if you needed something you have to establish why you need it. And so, with FEMA after disasters establishing that need is establishing everything from my property actually got damaged and I need a new roof and the insurance isn't covering it, so I need you to step in. Or I need a house or a hotel room for the night because I have nowhere to go or my car got flooded and I need transportation to work and I need to have some kind of down payment to buy a new car, right. We have a very needs-based aid system, meaning we have to establish the need in order for our government to say yes you deserve this aid. And because people have to establish need, they bring their inequality, the inequality that exists already in the world into the system. So, if I come in with a property that has been damaged and my property is worth half a million dollars and the roof has been swept off and half of the rooms have been completely damaged such that they need a rebuild. The dollar amount that FEMA is going to assign to my need is gonna be a lot higher than my neighbor whose house might be only worth $80,000 and who's had similar or even greater proportion of damage, but their house is seen, their property is seen as worth so much less then dollar amount becomes unequal. That's also what goes to all these other components, right, if you need a hotel room if you need rental assistance, etc., because the ways that we’re establishing that need are based on an unequal system then when individuals are asking for need they’re only getting back according to what their situation is suggesting they need.

Ariana Brocious: So, let's take this from the individual out like a community level. These FEMA payouts can take a long time that can be really challenging for low-income people who are just trying to survive day to day and maybe don't have additional resources to help them out. So, what are the long-term effects on a low-income community when they aren’t able to get relief quickly or perhaps at all?

Junia Howell: Yeah, as you kind of insinuated there first of all, the effects on individuals and their families can be really detrimental, right. If you can't get a place to stay tonight or tomorrow night or if you can't get a car and lose your job and that cascades into other issues waiting for aid needing aid can be extremely detrimental to an individual family. But if you are in a situation where your neighbor’s okay and you can rely on them and your cousin got some resources and you can rely on them. That's one thing. But if you and all your network are all waiting for aid then mutual support of each other becomes a lot more challenging. And so, this works its way up structurally, both because of those interconnections and networks, but also because of things that are geographically situated. So, if the school in your neighborhood is also struggling and the roads are flooded and no one is able to get out and everyone's waiting for a new roof and there's no housing on the street that is inhabitable and it's going months of not being inhabitable then you get other issues of the vacancy and animals or other humans coming in and using that space in ways that it wasn't intended or built for. So, just like all kind of things social when you have a concentration either in your network or geographic space of people who are struggling with the same thing. There is a lessening of how those individuals can support each other and it exacerbates the issues that they're struggling with.

Ariana Brocious: In November 2020, FEMA released an internal study finding that “Many FEMA programs do not consider the principle of equity.” Why would they not consider that?

Junia Howell: It’s easy I think sometimes to feel like equity just should be something that every program in the US should value. And sometimes it feels start and like what decade are we living in that our government agencies aren't even thinking about questions of equity. But when you think about particularly FEMA the history of FEMA goes way back to the very first Congress. So, we’re talking late 1700s, and that's not the actual agency but the precedent, the legal precedent of giving aid after disasters goes all the way back to there. And there's these like interesting legal nuggets from there to the present where it is repeatedly noted that age should be given to business leaders to upstanding citizens to individuals in the society that are basically going to build the society back up. There's always been a preference for economic development for basically helping those that we think are not only gonna help themselves but help the community. And that has never included people who are racially marginalized migrants or others who are socioeconomically disadvantaged. In fact, if you trace it disaster after disaster after disaster again pre-our current bureaucratic responses there is an enormous rich historical data about how we have repeatedly given more to those who already are privileged after disaster and less to those who are marginalized. So, in many ways it can feel stark that it took till November 2020 for them to formally say, oh, we’re not wrestling with equity, but in other ways, it is the very foundation of how we define deservedness and how we think about how we should respond to disasters and that continues today even after that report almost 2 years ago now.

Ariana Brocious: Has any other research that you've done or your colleagues have done look at what might be the impact were disaster aid to be distributed completely equitably regardless of you know level of damage or property value if it was more like the COVID payments, which were basically just a flat amount. Does that have the possibility of improving these outcomes?

Junia Howell: To my knowledge, no one has explicitly modeled or tried to estimate if you gave everyone the same what would be the implications after US disasters. That would require looking really specifically at every household’s like need and what might happen if they got a flat amount. However, myself and others have advocated for such an approach based on other studies, and other kinds of disasters and other countries that have taken that kind of approach and had really positive impacts. And again, I think the COVID aid is a great example of while not perfect, well how it addressed some of these concerns by making the aid come a lot faster and a lot more equitably across by just cutting a flat check. Now again that would still means graded, right, it was still you had to make under a certain amount which we could do with disasters as well. But I would advocate for some level of giving aid to everyone who's lived through extreme disasters in the area without having to nitpick exactly not only did they have damage but where that money is going. Another component of this that we haven't touched on is much of the money has a lot of strings. And if an individual spends some of the money, they received on an account that is not what it was intended for. So, for example they use some of the money that was supposed to be spent on rent to help get their car, even though they’re also qualified for car aid if they use the money in the wrong place they can be disqualified from any money. And there's lots of reasons that people do that: it's because the other money isn’t coming and they need it now or there is a misunderstanding where that money is coming from, etc. So, streamlining the bureaucratic process and making sure that everyone not only receives something, but that it was less tied up into particular accounts there's a lot of reason to believe that could help with a lot of the issues.

Ariana Brocious: So, referencing that 2020 finding by FEMA about there not being focused on equity. Have there been changes, policy changes within FEMA to address that since then?

Junia Howell: Yes and no, like most things. So, the new leadership at FEMA has been very concerned with addressing these issues and putting it front and center in different ways. And that has led to some smaller and some larger policy changes around bureaucratic processes. So, who qualifies for which titles or other documentations are needed to be able to access certain kinds of aid, etc. etc. I deeply appreciate and I'm grateful for those efforts. I know that they are not, these aren't things that get fixed overnight. These aren’t things that are easy to fix, and I know they're working really hard on them. As an academic and sometimes as an idealist, I still hope for more and more quickly. Many of the current approaches are kind of massaging the current system to be a little less unequal. Okay, we’ll include that kind of deed record so that you can still get aid even if you don't have the “proper deed” or we will make sure that this piece also includes a different kind of temporary housing that's more common in a certain region. All really important components, but I've seen way less and maybe it's just behind the doors that I'm not behind but I’ve seen way less of extremely creative and maybe even radical thinking. Like could we just give everyone aid after disasters. What would that look like? Could we pilot that? Could we start creating a kind of card or banking system where people have points that they’re collecting and they can redeem them if they are living in a certain area after disaster. And I’m throwing out really big ideas with no specificity right now and obviously those specificities need to be flushed out. But for an issue that is centuries old and is increasingly a problem because of climate change, if we aren’t thinking extremely creatively I fear that we are too many decades behind to actually get to the level of solution that we need to if we’re going to deal with this in our lifetime, or even our children or grandchildren's lifetime.

Ariana Brocious: FEMA has several community resilience projects underway. Are you seeing any of those funds to help better protect low-income communities?

Junia Howell: I think that it is a little too early to estimate to what extent they are actually productive. I do fear that they are not quite enough to really rethink some of the fundamental issues that are going on here. I would argue that the deeper issues when it comes to how we are responding to disasters be it via private or public. So, private insurance or public insurance public aid is the ways in which we are conceptualizing how much property is worth how we actually value different communities. These bigger theoretical questions that actually have really practical implications that matter a lot when it comes to distributing aid. And until we start wrestling with those questions I fear that our approaches of targeting particular communities that have been disadvantaged, while needed, are still not going to be enough to address the issue that we have created inequality from decade after decade after decade. And that inequality is so baked into the system that without rethinking the system all the little approaches are really just your band-aids trying to hold together a much bigger and a much more broken bureaucracy.

Ariana Brocious: Junia Howell is an urban sociologist and faculty at the University of Illinois Chicago. Junia, thank you so much for joining us on Climate one.

Junia Howell: Thank you for having me.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton, and we’re talking about insuring against climate disaster. If you missed a previous episode, or want to hear more of Climate One’s empowering conversations, subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your pods.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is responsible for helping Americans respond to and recover from disasters. As we heard before the break, the agency has faced scrutiny in recent years for the way it distributes aid. Eric Letvin is Deputy Assistant Administrator for Mitigation with FEMA. He spoke with Climate One’s Ariana Brocious about the steps the agency is taking to change their programs to better match the growing needs.

Ariana Brocious: FEMA's national flood insurance program was established in 1968 in response to the lack of availability of private insurance. Today, if your home is located in a FEMA special flood hazard area, you have to have flood insurance, but FEMA maps rely heavily on historical data. With quickly changing and unpredictable weather patterns. How much can people rely on that data to inform how resilient they need to make their homes or whether they should even live in an area to begin?

Eric Levin: Well, we like to say at FEMA, where it rains, it can flood. So the, the flood maps are used to help mortgage lenders determine the insurance requirements and they do help communities develop strategies for reducing their risk. If you're in a mapped area or unmapped area, insurance is still the best measure of protection to make your, your home, your family more resilient. So we, we certainly with climate change and sea level rise, encourage individuals to understand what their risk is, to look at the maps, but also look at some of the supplemental information some of the sea level rise viewers that are put out by NOAA. Some non-governmental organizations and really understand what your flood risk is and take whatever appropriate actions to protect your property and your family.

Ariana Brocious: So, as an example of this increasingly unpredictable climate that we're living in, most of the land that flooded in Eastern Kentucky over the summer, wasn't in a FEMA flood zone and only about 2% of the people there had flood insurance. Those that were impacted by the flood. What happens in that case? Can FEMA step in and help them rebuild? Do they have other options to recover those losses?

Eric Levin: Yeah. So what happens there and that, and that's very common. If you live in the 1% annual exceedance area or more commonly referred to as the a hundred year flood plain, that is the area where the mandatory purchase requirement happens. And we, we saw in Kentucky and we've seen Hurricane Harvey in Houston, almost half of the flood insurance claims come in areas that are not mapped. So if you have a catastrophic event, events that are certainly gonna occur more frequently from climate change, it can certainly flood well outside of the map area. So that's why we say take a look at the maps, but also look at other information,to understand your flood risk. If you're right on the edge of a flood map, that doesn't mean that the flood waters are gonna stop at the edge of that map. The challenge is when you have areas that have what we call a low penetration rate of flood insurance, like in Kentucky, what happens typically there is, yes, there's assistance that's available to them. They would typically go into our individual assistance program that average payout is somewhere around $7,000 or $8,000, you know, roughly from disaster to disaster. So there is funding available. We saw after Harvey though, that the homeowners that did have flood insurance, the average flood insurance claim was over a hundred thousand dollars. So when we talk about community resilience, a community that does have more flood insurance policies, wildfire insurance, if they're better insured, they're gonna be more resilient and able to recover,

Ariana Brocious: It's good to hear that there is some insurance money available for those who maybe aren't carrying flood insurance. Although as you point out, seven or 8,000 in the face of a big flooding event in your home is probably not gonna go very far. It sounds as though your recommendation is to have people get insurance and be insured, but we've seen with the national flood insurance program recently adjusting its rates, accounting for these climate change risks, that instead of seeing more people buy insurance, we're seeing hundreds of thousand people, hundreds of thousands of people let their policies lapse, meaning that they are now unprotected. Between 2014 and 2018, FEMA assessed its own data and found that after disasters, low income homeowners received about half as much to rebuild their homes as higher income homeowners. Other studies have shown that those in minority neighborhoods are less likely to receive FEMA grants for repairs. And after Hurricane Harvey, bankruptcy rates in one part of Houston, went up by almost 40% in non-white neighborhoods. Why did that happen?

Eric Levin: So we're, we're taking a look at that. The way our programs are run, both pre-disaster and post-disaster, meet different statutory requirements. So for example, our hazard mitigation grant program that by law, the governor of that state, he or she sets the priorities in terms of where those dollars go, which communities would receive those assistance. So there's been some excellent academic studies recently, some media on this particular area, and we are taking a look at our programs and saying, ‘are we delivering our programs to communities that most need them?’ Do they have to, you know, they shouldn't have to hire a consultant to write a grant. And so are our programs being distributed equitably. There's an executive order 14, 0 0 8 called Justice 40 and two of our grant programs fall under that, which directs 40% of our grant funds go into those disadvantaged communities. So we are very much supporting those initiatives and taking steps to ensure that our programs are delivering all the citizens that need them.

Ariana Brocious: You mentioned the Biden administration's Justice 40 program addressing environmental equity. What challenges has FEMA faced in trying to actually implement some of those changes, addressing inequality? I imagine it's not easy to rewrite your policies overnight.

Eric Levin: Yeah, the challenge there is providing the right assistance. So, um, we call it direct technical assistance. We started with 10 communities, the first year of our grant program, uh, building resilient infrastructure and communities. We went to 20 the following year and we want to keep really doubling that every single year, in the near future so that we can provide more. So we know the need is there, it's a matter of finding those resources, working with nonprofits, working with universities and building our capability to deliver the kind of assistance those communities need to help them better access our programs.

Ariana Brocious: How can FEMA, the way it's currently structured, handle disasters at the scale that we're seeing now, and we anticipate seeing in the future.

Eric Levin: Well, that's always a challenge.We know with climate change, emergency and disaster declarations have definitely increased. So the challenge is going to be not just with FEMA, cause really I think, it is a whole of community, whole of government approach. FEMA can't solve these problems on our own, I mean, FEMA doesn't issue building permits. Those are done at the local level. Um, hazard mitigation planning is done at the local level. So it's really a partnership between local governments, federal, or state governments, federal governments, the private sector, NGOs, various organizations to really help identify the hazards, and take the appropriate action. Whether it be catastrophic bonds or insurance or projects, what actions can be taken to reduce that risk in the community?

Ariana Brocious: Eric Letvin is deputy assistant administrator for mitigation with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Greg Dalton: The standard model in the insurance industry simply wasn’t set up to account for climate change, which is increasing the frequency, scale and severity of disaster claims. And as we’ve heard, the need-based requirements for proving loss before payouts arrive can really hurt recovery and relief. From flooding in Appalachia to fires in the Pacific Northwest, we’ve seen frequent and fierce weather take lives and devastate communities all across the country, and many more extreme weather events are coming our way. So who will pay to protect and rebuild communities? And what policies can help the insurance industry stay afloat? I invited three guests to discuss how insurance could better respond to a disrupted climate.

Carolyn Kousky is Associate Vice President for Economics and Policy at Environmental Defense Fund, and author of Understanding Disaster Insurance: New Tools for a More Resilient Future. Umair Irfan covers climate change, energy, and Covid for Vox. Dr. Simon Young is a Senior Director in the Climate and Resilience Hub at Willis Towers Watson, an insurance consulting company. I asked Carolyn Kousky when people end up living in disaster prone areas, who should pay when their home floods or burns?

Carolyn Kousky: Typically, homeowners might turn to their homeowner’s insurance to help cover losses that they sustain from a big disaster event. But what we’re seeing repeatedly is homeowners learning in the aftermath of one of these weather-related extremes that they might not actually be covered for that disaster or they might not have as much coverage as they thought they did and they end up getting less. And when they don't have the insurance then things can be very financially challenging for households. Many people don't have enough savings to cover these damages on their own. They might not have access to loans or credit and we know that federal disaster it can sometimes just be insufficient and too delayed. And then people must turn to different types of coping mechanisms that can be really costly for the household.

Greg Dalton: And Umair, we’ve seen COVID present all sorts of interesting opportunities to understand and relate with risk. You cover both COVID and climate. How has that work informed how you think about people approach risk?

Umair Irfan: Well, one thing that’s become clear is that people as individuals don't gauge risk well. Most people have a very binary understanding of being at risk or not at risk. If you tell somebody that there are less at risk of contracting COVID many of them parse that as saying they're not at risk, particularly younger people. But we’ve clearly seen that's not the case that you know even though they maybe have lower rates of getting ill that, you know, many of them can instill suffer and die. And similarly, with climate -related risks we’re seeing across the country, you know, there are parts of the country that are far more vulnerable to flooding, sea level rise, wildfires and other risks that are exacerbated by rising average temperatures. But there's no part of the country that's out of danger. You know, the US National Climate Assessment said that every part of the country is going to be affected by the impacts of climate change. And so, we’ve seen flooding that’s very far in land across the Mississippi River and parts of the Midwest. This year we’ve seen, you know, other kinds of like wildfires as well break out in parts of the country that typically don't see such big fires as well. So, there are places that are at higher risk, but there's very few places that are at zero risk And that's the difficult thing the needle to try to thread in terms of messaging to convey to people that the very infrequent, the very rare event is still a possibility and you have to take measures now to prevent it or to cope with it.

Greg Dalton: And COVID risk is very direct and personal, right? Whereas climate is more indirect, right?

Umair Irfan: Well, I mean I would say that there's elements of both of the individual and the collective risk. I've personally never contracted COVID, but I've been affected by it because my workplace closed. Many of my packages have a hard time getting here. I have family members who can’t send their kids to school. Similarly, with climate change in a way we’ve seen like disasters occurring in parts of the world that's disrupted shipping that's disrupted supply chains that’s disrupted things like you know, grain yields, that’s gonna be a big issue this year, you know, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine affecting global grain supplies. And so, while we may as individuals have this risk at different levels when we work in a global economy and like in an interface society, we’re all affected by these risks.

Greg Dalton: Simon, I know most of your work is around the world, not necessarily in the US, but we definitely see that in the US 40% of the population lives in coastal areas another 10% in floodplains. We’ve seen wildfire areas spreading. But a lot of those people aren’t generally covered by basic home insurance. So, what does this mean for homeowners?

Simon Young: Some of the work that I've been doing in the Global South, Greg, has revealed that insurance has a probably a bigger role to play as these risks materialize more across a broader swath of the population and in different ways or new ways. And some of the tools that we've been developing I think are going to have use in the Global North in the US and Western Europe. And those tools simplify I think the insurance process that they make a much more direct link between what's happened to you in terms of you know the amount of rain that’s happened or the flooding that you’ve experienced and getting some money. It might not be all the money that you need but you can get that money very quickly.you know, a few days rather than waiting months for traditional insurance payouts.

Greg Dalton: So, later down we’ll get to, you know, what can the North learn from the South, and the parametric piece. So, Umair, as a commercial enterprise, insurance pays out to people who can pay premiums. What about the people who can't? What about the renters, the underinsured and the uninsured who simply can't afford any insurance?

Umair Irfan: That’s a difficult question to resolve. And we've tried to come at this in different ways in different policy regimes across the US and across the world. And all of them have their drawbacks. So, in the United States, for instance, we have the National Flood Insurance Program, which is a program to cover flood risk because most private insurers won't cover it. But because it's federally subsidized it helps reduce the cost of it, but it ends up creating something of a moral hazard where we have people in very high-risk properties continuing to stay there. So, in the NFIP this program about 1% of properties account for 25% of payouts. So, you have these very high-risk properties continually being flooded over and over again. And at the same time, they have to continually update the maps and the risks as sea levels rise, as average temperatures rise and there's a lot of resistance to doing that. So, now the NFIP recently did evaluate and reevaluate their risk maps and they raised the rates accordingly. And what happened in response? A number of people just let their policies lapse because they couldn't afford it anymore. So, now we’re in a situation where rather than having the subsidized protection that’s leading to a moral hazard, you’re in a situation where people are at high risk and not protected at all. And so, there's these two extremes, both happening with this similar program. And similarly, with wildfires for instance, that’s almost entirely a private-sector enterprise. There are some state-level regulations on that but we've seen in recent years, particularly in California many homeowners have been kicked off of their policies. They’ve been paying premiums diligently and even though they want to continue paying, the insurance company saying this risk is too high, we think the payout risk is too high and we just cannot afford to insure you anymore. So, it's not just the people being able to afford it. It's also the insurance companies’ willingness to bear that risk that's playing out right now.

Greg Dalton: Right. And this is where we get into the what's the role of the private sector, what’s the role of government. Carolyn, California's Insurance Commissioner imposed a series of moratoriums barring insurers from dropping policies in wildfire prone areas. Though those are critical for those affected, but are they sustainable because they are forcing companies to stay in markets at prices that aren’t economic for them.

Carolyn Kousky: Yeah, those moratoriums are a legislative mandate and they've been used in other states post disaster and they can help stabilize the market in the aftermath of a big disaster. But what we’re seeing in California is not just a reaction to one big fire, but the reaction to the reality of ever-growing risk. And that's a very different type of environment and so small fixes aren't gonna cut it, right? And I think to come back to some of these questions about the private sector it’s important to realize that as these risks are escalating, it becomes harder to offer insurance by the private sector or the public sector at a price that's still profitable and that people are able and willing to pay.

Greg Dalton: Right. And Simon, what I see is risk being pushed onto public balance sheets. In California, earthquakes, private insurers said, oh, that’s too big, so the state came in. We’re almost at that point for wildfire where will the state come in and do things because companies don't want to recant at an affordable price. Are we seeing this huge transfer of risk to public treasuries and what does that mean for ultimately taxpayers?

Simon Young: I think we are, absolutely. And I think the potential upside of that is that it will make it real to the public sector to the public purse and that should promote better planning, better regulation to building floodplains to building coastal areas or retreat away from those areas where possible. So, I think there is a potential for some of these issues to become more real and therefore for policy to start to be made actually addresses some of the underlying root causes.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Let’s get back to my conversation with Simon Young of insurance consultant Willis Towers Watson, Carolyn Kousky with the Environmental Defense Fund and Vox climate and covid reporter Umair Irfan. The National Flood Insurance Program has run up tens of billions of dollars in debts, and efforts to overhaul it haven’t gotten very far. I asked Umair Irfan about the political prospects of a real policy solution to such a vital risk management instrument.

Umair Irfan: Yeah, it's been sort of a botched job here just sort of ad hoc extensions of the program and as you note, yeah, the program’s been in debt like they aren’t balancing their sheets they’re charging their customers less than the risk that they actually bear and ultimately that's distributed across every taxpayer. And there's this sort of like inconsistency about what we want to do with price as a signal. Now, that's one instrument, but if we raise prices the idea is that perhaps people respond accordingly by, you know, buying homes in less risky areas. But you know as we've seen again with the insurance premiums going up with the National Flood Insurance Program people just let them lapse because it's difficult to move your home. And there's other reasons why people want to stay in one place rather than move. And so, that becomes a very thorny political question like how do you go to a community and tell them we need to pull up stakes and move to a place that we think is safer versus saying that okay, maybe we need to issue a bond or raise taxes to build a seawall or defensible perimeter around you. There's no easy solution and there's no cheap solution.

Greg Dalton: Right. And there's a lot of people who have a second house in the woods that may be what's at risk for them, and others who might be, you know, low income people who can't afford to move. Carolyn, there are some who would say that buying insurance is like betting against the house. Insurance companies are in the business making money they have actuarial that know the math better than we ever will. So, what do you think of that argument that the insurance companies always know the math better than consumers

Carolyn Kousky: Yeah, it’s important to understand the role of insurance in someone's life. And the idea is that you make small regular payments that’s your annual premium, when things are going well and you can afford that. So, that when things don't go well and you face a very huge expense you get access to the funds needed to pay for that. And in that arrangement, you're actually paying more than the actual cost if you were to smooth those all over time for that service. You have to pay for the administration and the transactions and the profit loading. So, it's not like trying to make money on something you're not going to come out ahead. But most people want that financial protection and they're willing to pay for that financial protection because being stuck with hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage that you can't pay for is not a position anyone wants to be in. The challenge is that the prices that you're paying have to be as we've all been talking about related to that underlying risk and that's really challenging for some people. And so, some of the policy solutions that have been talked about, to come back to say the flood insurance program, is for explicit means testing in our assistance. So, we don't need to suppress prices across the board. We could provide targeted assistance at people who can't afford a policy to cover some of those costs for them in the way we do with other goods and services for lower-income households for example. And that would be an important policy change because those are also the houses that need this protection the most because they are also the ones who don't have savings who can't access credit. And so, for them the insurance is even more important than for say, more affluent families. But I’ll also say that the way the US has approached disaster coverage is not the only way to do this. And there are other countries around the world that have taken more comprehensive and inclusive approaches. So, several countries, for example, mandate that insurance companies include all natural hazards in your standard homeowners’ policy. Now the challenge is that when that big one hits like we're just talking about the claims in California from the wildfires, it could bankrupt insurance company. So, they don't want to just offer that, right? And so, in those countries, the public sector steps in and says for those really extreme events where you might go bankrupt it’s so big that's where we come in. That’s where the taxpayer, that's where the government comes in and will pick up those losses.

Greg Dalton: Umair, you reported that in 2012, North Carolina's Coastal Resources Commission found that over the next century water levels along the coast could rise by as much as 39 inches. And coastal property developers didn't like the sound of that and they pressured the state government to outlaw policies that incorporate that agency's findings and Stephen Colbert made fun of his home state outlawing sea level rise. How are the battle lines drawn between property owners, government and other stakeholders here that might know this information and be threatened by it?

Umair Irfan: Yeah, you know, this is again getting to the political problem of this. Like it's not simply a matter of how much we expect sea levels to rise, but like to what benchmark do we prepare for. Do you want to have properties insured to the level of 2050 or 2100? How much turnover are we respecting in our housing stock? How much more do we expect the population to grow in this area and how many more resources are we willing to devote to keep people here. Those are all questions that we also have to answer at a holistic level and you really can't answer them piecemeal. And yeah, and again, like the North Carolina example illustrates that you know there are some pretty powerful lobbying groups that are pushing back against these more accurate risk assessments. You know, I talked to a climate scientist a while back who said, you know, if you don’t want to believe the climate scientists believe the insurance companies because they have a financial stake in this, and they're the ones that are looking at the risk. And they 100% believe that climate change is real and it’s caused by humans, and it's going to get worse over time.

Greg Dalton: Carolyn, we’re talking about this and I can't help but mention some of the horrifying images we’ve seen from Pakistan. It's hard to imagine anyone there has insurance. So, how did you respond when you saw what happened in Pakistan? It didn't get a lot of coverage, perhaps the coverage it deserved in the United States.

Carolyn Kousky: No. I agree with that and it's the really sad thing right is that this is just one in a series of these types of global catastrophes and they’re becoming so frequent now that they’re not getting the attention they deserve anymore. I think because we’re seeing floods and fires and all sorts of things play out around the world and these disasters cause enormous costs for households that aren't just the property damage that we tend to focus on when we think about the United States, but they completely disrupt people's well-being and way of life. And the question I think there gets to what role can and should insurance play in that broader conversation of recovery that isn't just about rebuilding a structure, but getting people's lives back together. So, that it's not just about reimbursing damages but it's about having the financial resources that you need for whatever it is to get back on track. And maybe that's rebuilding your home, maybe that's replacing lost income, maybe that’s covering somewhere safe to stay. Maybe that's relocating and maybe also in some of the sort of even more cutting-edge applications of insurance it's providing the funds before the disaster even hits so that you can invest in protective measures to lower the damage that actually ends up occurring.

Greg Dalton: So, Simon, let's talk about innovative approaches. What could help people in Pakistan or future incidents like we’ve seen in Pakistan?

Simon Young: So, Carolyn mentioned some work that’s going on anticipated reaction and what we call full cost space financing. And that’s using a, I would say, a quantitative approach to be able to trigger funding to flow in advance of let’s say a flood, a large flood like on the Indus in Pakistan which, you know, works its way down from the Himalayas in the Hindu Kush town through Pakistan north to south. And that takes weeks to a couple of months actually, rather than you know it isn’t something that’s happening immediately. And so, there is a window there if you can get money into those communities to help them prepare. In this case, it's really difficult to imagine how you can do anything much more than rely on individuals and families and households and community’s resilience to get through this in the short term. So, and certainly preparedness can help but most of my work has been on trying to get resources to those households as soon as we can after that immediate impact has passed and hopefully you know they’ve survived, but they haven’t got any assets. If they had built assets then they’ve usually gone or certainly been damaged significantly. But even more fundamentally it maybe, you know, not fixed assets it was crops in the ground for example, or livestock in drought-prone areas like the Horn of Africa or the Sahel. And it’s actually the weeks and months right after that disaster they’ve put everything into surviving, but then they’re faced with no means of income no means of getting back on their feet in any meaningful way. And that's really I think where the potential impacts of what we've been trying to do in terms of developing kind of innovative insurance tools to try and get that funding into those, all the way down to the individuals if possible in the households at the time that they really need it, which is as soon as they start to get back on their feet after the immediate impact.

Greg Dalton: Umair, I've heard of things where actually they are even trying to, we’re talking about the release of funds and the timing of funds like we know something bad is coming. Can people get help before it hits for example, if there is a weather forecast of extreme heat for a number of days that cooling centers that money starts to flow before people go into the ER from heatstroke. Is that discussion starting to happen and is that broadly being discussed?

Umair Irfan: It’s starting to come up more I mean, and from a public policy standpoint we tend to be generally reactive in every aspect of how we respond to disasters both the public and the private sector. And mustering the resources ahead of time before the disaster happens in anticipation of things that may or may not even occur at all. Like I mean that’s one tough political sell and it’s also a tough sell to customers. Like how do you tell somebody that you know a flood that you've never seen before could still happen here to your home and your property. And so, one, there needs to be sort of a sales job as far as like convincing people that these risks are worth planning for and it's worth making the upfront investment so that you don't have to pay with interest down the line. And it's starting to happen now I think certainly as all these disasters are concurrently happening around the world. I think it's help make this a little bit more tangible for a lot of folks who didn't realize where these risks are and how severe they could be. But it's something that we will need to lead with going forward. I mean if we constantly stay in a reactive mode, you know, then we’re always going to be responding to disaster rather than trying to mitigate the losses ahead of time which in general is probably gonna be the better strategy as far as reducing the overall harm to individuals and to society writ large.

Greg Dalton: Yeah. We’re not so good at that as humans and as a society. Carolyn, historically marginalized communities have received the least amount of relief and the most amount of harm from climate impacts. So, how can policy open up insurance to those currently not being served?

Carolyn Kousky: Yeah, I think that's an excellent question. As we were talking about some of these communities are just not getting access to the resources they need after a disaster. And to Simon’s point not nearly fast enough. Some of the sources of financing that might come into a community or like government assistance or access to loans. And we see that on average those can take months to get to people. And for particularly low-income households months matter. And if you have huge expenses you can't pay, you don't have the savings, you don't have a loan, you have any way to handle it then people can really start to spiral into really terrible financial situations. And so, there's a number of these models that are starting to be developed and as Simon said, bringing some of the knowledge from the Global South to the Global North to help these populations. So, some of these are and what are thought of as micro-policies like super small policies so they cost less, but you also get less payout but they can be paid really quickly and help get people sort of out of that downward financial spiral.We’re seeing other models where intermediaries might sometimes play a role. Sometimes there are NGOs or even local governments or other types of organizations that are thinking that way. And they might be the ones to harness insurance and then be the ones to help distribute the funds to those in need. And so, we want to have trustworthy insurance systems in place that people get the money they need quickly. And some of this comes back to an underlying structure of insurance companies which is that you pay in your premiums hoping to get a payout and at that moment when the insurance company is supposed to give you a dollar back every dollar back, they give you is less profit for them. So, there's this inherent, you know, tension in the insurance model that is really problematic for people and I think develops distrust among consumers. And so, there's also interesting ways around that these policies that Simon and I have been mentioning around parametric get away from that because they’re just set payouts based on the disaster itself so, there's no arguing over how much you are owed.

Greg Dalton: Speaking of parametric, Simon, traditional insurance pays out when there is loss or damage. Explain what parametric insurance is and how it could be a benefit in what we’re talking about.

Simon Young: So, fundamentally it's the same, but we don't need to wait in parametric insurance, we don't need to wait until the full knowledge of what the loss is and it's been what we call adjusted. So, you know, you’ve had someone visit and assess what the loss is from the insurance company and they’ll pay you and then they’ll try and reduce that as Carolyn was just saying. With parametric insurance the payout that you get is effectively pre-agreed and is relative to the parameter of the hazard. So, let's say the wind speed during a hurricane is a good proxy for how much damage is going to be done to a particular home or community or whatever it is. And so the insurer promises to pay if that windspeed happens not on the basis of what's happened to the properties that were in the way of that wind. And so, in that way we can get a much cleaner, more transparent process. It's fully objective, it's an independent measurement effectively of the wind and the payment can happen very, very quickly. the value of having that money in a week or 10 days against three months to six months, let’s say if it’s coming in from FEMA is huge. It’s huge for the household, it's also huge for the community as well because it means that the recovery process could actually be embedded within the community rather than coming from the outside, and that helps to the overall economic benefit of the community.

Greg Dalton: Carolyn, I can see how that benefits sellers of insurance, but as a homeowner I don't know what a 90 or a 95-mile wind, is that gonna tear off my roof like who can make those decisions about what a certain number translates to their real life, their home?

Carolyn Kousky: Yeah, this gets to the really important challenge of how we’re communicating and talking to households about risk and that’s your insurance company but it's also your realtor and your local government and we could get into these other things. But for the insurance products we’re seeing some interesting examples. For example, where talking about these parametric products in particular, you might be shown past disasters and storms and see what payout you would've gotten under different choices so that you have sort of a more intuitive understanding of like this type of disaster results in this much payout. That’s one example of the ways to do it. But we do see that with standard homeowner’s insurance policies for example, what everyone has to buy if you have a mortgage. There's so much fine print that consumers never understand. Unfortunately people don't even realize those are in their policy until they go to rebuild and it's like oh, oops, you're not gonna get enough for that. So, we have a lot of fundamental challenges with communicating in our standard insurance models as well. And I think to circle back on this topic of communicating risk to some of our earlier conversations about how risk is increasing from climate change and that it’s gonna have to increase insurance prices and that that could be some sort of financial incentive for communities for households to think about building and locating differently. In order for that incentive to work people have to know about it. And right now, it's hard to get an estimate of your current insurance premium before you move in somewhere let alone the trajectory of that over time. And we don't have good ways to tell people hey, this is your rate today this is where your rate is going in five or 10, 20, 30 years. No company wants to communicate that. The government doesn’t want to communicate that. And so, we have a real mismatch in the information people are getting and what they need to be making these longer-term decisions.

Greg Dalton: Right. And if we had that we might not have people moving into high risk areas. So, we’ve been talking a lot about processing risks, how people perceive risk personal risk the systemic risk as climate impacts accelerate. To sum up in just a sentence or two. What needs to happen to make insurance policies affordable and available for everyone. Umair, what would you like to see?

Umair Irfan: I think I’d like to see a larger expansion of the risk pool and make sure that more people are chipping into this. Because as we’ve learned you know very few parts of the world are going to be immune from climate change. So, it behooves everyone to contribute to some sort of risk management system such that they will be covered should like a catastrophic risk occur. And I'd like to see more policies that help make that easier that facilitate that but also a greater recognition and education effort so that people can get the resources to cope with disasters after they occur and also prevent them or mitigate those risks before they occur.

Greg Dalton: Simon, a couple sentences: what would you like to see in a better balance climate risk?

Simon Young: You know, I view insurance as a, you know, in some part a societal construct where you're just kind of formalizing what would normally be you know family risk sharing neighborhood risk sharing. But it becomes particularly relevant where the risk could happen to all of your neighbors, all of your family all at the same time. And many climate risks are like as we’re seeing in Pakistan with the floods. Whole communities, almost the whole country, is being affected by single event. And so, that traditional kind of sharing of risk, you know, if you're having a hard time this week then we can help you and you’ll help us next week when we’re having a hard time. That does not apply for climate risk. So, we have to think about insurance as actually formalizing some of this informal structure so that they are fit for purpose for this for the climate risk that are emerging.

Greg Dalton: Carolyn, what would you like to see to balance this economic reality with the growing need for insurance and climate disaster.

Carolyn Kousky: Yeah, I think we need some deeper partnerships between the public and private sector and deeper engagement across those sectors. I think that the public sector needs to define its roles and disaster insurance and for me, one of the biggest ones is supporting the challenge with affordability and actually providing assistance to people with the cost of disaster insurance to make sure that people are covered. The private sector needs to in my opinion, sort of deep in their commitment to supporting risk reduction and climate adaptation and climate policy with sort of very serious models that move the needle on actually lowering the risk in partnership with the public sector. And then continuing to think about an expansion beyond our traditional view of insurance as indemnity policies for property and you know structured firms in a certain way to thinking about some of the innovative products we’ve talked about, but also new structures for companies the role of nonprofits of captives of local and state government and playing in the space. So, sort of a dose of creativity.

Greg Dalton: Umair Irfan is climate and COVID reporter at Vox. Carolyn Kousky is Associate Vice President for Economics and Policy at the Environmental Defense Fund and author of Understanding Disaster Insurance: New Tools for a More Resilient Future. And Simon Young, a Senior Director of the Climate and Resilience Hub at Willis Towers Watson and Insurance Firm. Thank you three for joining us and sharing insights into this really important and interesting and complicated question.

Umair Irfan: Thank you for having me.

Simon Young: Thanks, Greg.

Carolyn Kousky: Thanks, Greg.

Greg Dalton: On this Climate One... We’ve been talking about insuring against climate disaster. Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. To hear more, subscribe to our podcast on Apple or wherever you get your pods.Talking about climate can be hard-- but it’s critical to address the transitions we need to make in all parts of society. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review if you are listening on Apple. You can do it right now on your device. You can also help by sending a link to this episode to a friend. By sharing you can help people have their own deeper climate conversations.

Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Our managing director is Jenny Park. Our producers and audio editors are Ariana Brocious and Austin Colón. Production Manager Megan Biscieglia co-produced this episode. Our team also includes consulting producer Sara-Katherine Coxon. Our theme music was composed by George Young (and arranged by Matt Willcox). Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

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Managed Retreat: When Climate Hits Home

Otto Pilot — Thu, 23 Dec 2021 08:01:00 +0000

Managed Retreat: When Climate Hits Home

12/23/2021

When it comes to rising seas and other climate threats, how do we figure out when to stay and when to go?

The concept of managed retreat – essentially abandoning homes or towns – is unpopular, but it’s gaining momentum, particularly in places facing increased climate disruption such as floods and wildfire.

Southeast Virginia currently experiences the fastest rate of sea level rise on the Atlantic coast. And that’s only projected to accelerate over the next several decades – to the point where neighborhoods could be lost to flooding.

As Sam Turken reports, the common response to the rising waters in Southeast Virginia has been to elevate homes, install flood pumps, and heighten sea walls. But in some cases, cities are already telling the sea, “Hey, you can have this land.” Turken covered the complexities of voluntary buyout programs and the equity issues they raise in a series for WHRO in Norfolk, Virginia, funded by the Pulitzer Center as part of their Connected Coastlines Reporting Initiative.

Turken reports that local governments have limited funding to put toward buyouts, and even with growing flooding risks, many people are reluctant to take the offers.

“People love their neighborhoods, and even if you may be trying to help them and get them out of harm's way, you're stripping them from something that is really part of their heart,” Turken says. He says you also have to consider where people go if they take a buyout, at a time when housing is in short supply and prices are on the rise.

“Unless we build more affordable housing in the decades to come to prepare for something like this – affordable housing in safe areas – we’re gonna have a lot of people who, even if they're leaving, they’re stranded, because they have nowhere else to go.”

Insurance and reinsurance companies were among the earliest corporations to ring the alarm on climate. They know the damage and risk numbers better than anyone else. Kia Javanmardian is a senior partner at McKinsey & Company where his focus includes advising insurance companies on climate risk.

He says while insurance companies typically have the ability to reprice every year, some have moved away from certain markets entirely, driving up prices. He says that’s one factor to consider as climate disruption accelerates.

“There are just some places where, despite what you build a building from, how high you put it above the ground, it still might not make sense to actually be building there,” Javanmardian says.

While some places look to retreat, other cities are doubling down, with investments in more resilient and flexible design. Amy Chester is managing director of Rebuild By Design, a firm working to help cities and communities build climate resilience.

During Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the southern tip of Manhattan was without power, shutting down the New York Stock Exchange and causing patients to be evacuated from hospitals. Chester says Sandy revealed that more needed to be done to respond to and plan for future climate threats.

“Since Hurricane Sandy we've been focused on our shorelines to ensure that when we have three to six feet of sea level rise in New York City and increased storms, that the storm surge doesn't wipe away communities. What Hurricane Ida showed us is that every single community in New York City is vulnerable,” she says.

Chester says investments in climate resilience have to include community involvement and a focus on equity to serve their communities in the best way possible. And there’s no time to waste.

“Communities are suffering and we all collectively have a responsibility to do something about it,” she says. “We’re gonna have to decide together: which are the neighborhoods that we want to fortify and where are the neighborhoods that we want to retreat? And if we retreat, where are our community members gonna go, and how do we ensure that when community members move upland that they're not further gentrifying communities?”

Related Links:
At A Crossroads
Rebuild By Design

Guests

Sam Turken

Reporter

Amy Chester

Managing Director, Rebuild By Design

Kia Javanmardian

Senior Partner, McKinsey

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. I’d like to hear your comments on the show, topics we should cover, and guest suggestions. You can reach me at greg@climateone.org. As climate threats intensify and sea levels rise, coastal communities are some of the first to face hard questions about relocating.

Kia Javanmardian: There are just some places where despite what you build a building from, how high you put it above the ground, it still might not make sense to actually be building there.

Greg Dalton: Some cities are doubling down, with investments in more resilient and flexible design:

A.R. Siders: “For every dollar we spend on managed retreat, the estimates are that you save four to eight dollars. So that’s a pretty incredible return on investment financially in terms of avoiding those losses.”

Greg Dalton: But even voluntary managed retreat raises a slew of questions about equity:

Amy Chester: If we retreat, where our community members gonna go and how do we ensure that when community members move upland that they're not further gentrifying communities.

Greg Dalton: When Climate Hits Home. Up next on Climate One.

Greg Dalton: When it comes to rising seas and other climate threats, how do we figure out when to stay and when to go? This is Climate One, I’m Greg Dalton.

Greg Dalton: The concept of managed retreat--essentially abandoning homes or towns--is unpopular, but it’s gaining momentum, particularly in places facing increased climate disruption such as flood and wildfire. Axios recently highlighted how several big corporations are responding: a healthcare facility on the Charleston peninsula announced a $500 million plan to move inland after repeated bouts of flooding; similarly, both Hewlett Packard and Spirit Airlines have announced plans to move operations inland in Texas and Florida, respectively, due to flooding and hurricane risks.

Greg Dalton: Southeast Virginia currently experiences the fastest rate of sea level rise on the Atlantic coast. And that’s only projected to accelerate over the next several decades -- to the point where neighborhoods could be lost to flooding. Sam Turken is a reporter who recently produced a series at WHRO in Norfolk, Virginia, funded by the Pulitzer Center as part of their Connected Coastlines Reporting Initiative. We’re featuring two of his stories today on Climate One. As Sam Turken reports, the common response to the rising waters in Southeast Virginia has been to elevate homes, install flood pumps, and heighten sea walls. But in some cases, cities are already telling the sea, “Hey, you can have this land.”

[START PLAYBACK]

Sam Turken: There is something unique about the Fernwood Farms neighborhood in Chesapeake. Most of the suburban area is like any other -- dozens of street-lined homes neatly next to each other. But the Elizabeth River runs along part of the neighborhood. Get closer to the water, and suddenly the area looks gap-toothed --- with several empty lots.

Robb Braidwood: “So this is one. Property two is here right in between two homes.”

Sam Turken: Welcome to Ground Zero in Chesapeake’s quest to retreat from flood-prone land. Rob Braidwood’s our tour guide today. He’s the city’s emergency services coordinator.

Robb Braidwood: This is four.

Sam Turken: “Five. Six.”

Robb Braidwood: “Yeah.”

Sam Turken: Once homes, they’re now grassy fields. Some have signs along the street -- “No dumping. Keep Chesapeake beautiful.” This area used to be a swamp before the city developed it in the 1960s. Now, the water’s taking it back. King tides a few times a year can turn streets into lakes. Bring in a Hurricane or Nor’easter? Living rooms become swimming pools.

Rob Braidwood: You can feel how wet this ground is under foot.

Sam Turken: Yeah and it’s not like it’s really rained in the past few days.

Rob Braidwood: No it hasn’t rained for a couple days.

Sam Turken: Braidwood says Chesapeake’s been buying out homes around here since 2005 -- all voluntary. Here’s how it works: The city goes to someone whose house floods and says, “Hey… you keep paying for expensive repairs and the government’s helping because you have federal flood insurance. What if we buy your home for fair market value...

Robb Braidwood: Tear this building down. No one ever builds here again.

Sam Turken: Convert it to green space... It’s a win-win, saving you money.

Robb Braidwood: So I would love to buy every house that floods. Let’s use this and see if we can reduce the risk of the entire community.

Sam Turken: Citywide, Chesapeake has done it over 40 times -- with more planned. Braidwood says people usually take the deal when they’re sick of the flooding and fear sea level rise.

Sam Turken: Hi.

Creekmur: Come on in. Hello.

Sam Turken: Like the Creekmurs.

Sam Turken: How are you doing?

Kim Creekmur: I’m good. How are you?

Sam Turken: Gloria and John Creekmur -- their daughter Kim and Precious, this fluffy pomeranian mix -- they’ve lived in this two bedroom condo in Chesapeake for the last five years. It’s cozy -- velvet furniture, paintings of flowers, some potted plants out front. But it’s not where they thought they’d be. Ya see back in the 60s, John and Gloria built themselves a red-brick ranch-style home in Fernwood Farms -- with big windows, a huge yard.

Gloria Creekmur: It was like we had birthed the baby before we had children. We were very prideful about our home.

Sam Turken: But it was near the Elizabeth River and started flooding a lot. They’d repair, then there’d be another flood -- Over and over again... It ultimately added up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. Kim says Hurricane Isabel in 2003 was especially bad.

Kim Creekmur: There were fish and crabs from the river in our house.

Gloria: I just fell in a chair and cried.

Sam Turken: When Robb Braidwood came around several years ago, they couldn’t turn down his offer. They sold. Kim pulls out her iPhone and plays a video of the excavator demolishing the house.

Gloria: I feel a little sadness, but can’t live in the past. Still, I keep the memories -- the sweet memories -- of a beginning of a dream, a dream home. Our first home.

Sam Turken: These decisions -- retreating from flood-prone land -- they’ve happened tens of thousands of times nationwide in recent decades… New York after Superstorm Sandy…. Charlotte. Houston. It’s up to the city or state to offer buyouts. The federal government can help fund them. In coastal Virginia, this has traction. Newport News has acquired nearly 80 properties -- the most in the state. Virginia Beach and Norfolk have been slower to embrace it -- opting instead to elevate vulnerable homes. But now they’re planning for more buyouts -- a key step, according to climate adaptation experts.

Sam Turken: Would you call yourself like a managed retreat cheerleader

A.R. Siders: Hahaha. Can I go with advocate? I’ve never really been a big cheerleader.

Sam Turken: A.R. Siders is a professor at the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center. She says look -- in some areas, other resilience efforts -- like higher sea walls -- could work. But in the most at-risk neighborhoods, it’s futile. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasts sea levels could rise another seven feet this century around coastal Virginia. So why spend money on defenses over and over again if the property will inevitably go underwater and become worthless?

Siders: For every dollar we spend on managed retreat, the estimates are that you save four to eight dollars. So that’s a pretty incredible return on investment financially in terms of avoiding those losses.Siders says that money can instead go to developing new, safer, communities -- maybe inland. Still, there are several barriers to buyouts. Your house likely has to have flooded in the past. Funding is limited. And it can take years to deal with government bureaucracy -- a complicated process.

Siders: So a number of programs describe people who are initially interested in the buyout but then they stop being interested six months later.

Sam Turken: There’s also politics. Some places don’t want to do it. Gloucester County used to buy out homes -- 29 actually. Then, some new members took over the board of supervisors -- and ended the program in 2018. Phillip Bazzani led the revolt.

Phillip Bazzani: We don’t want to get involved in any kind of real estate ownership. We don’t want to do that. I’m a conservative libertarian, so I want the government to just leave me alone.

Sam Turken: The other challenge is remember -- this is voluntary. And that makes things really tricky in a region where folks enjoy fishing and kayaking from their backyards. Take Addie Redd.

Sam Turken: What is the flooding in your yard like?

Addie Redd: Sometimes if there’s a high tide and a lot of rain. It’ll come up to about here.

Sam Turken: So this is like half your backyard.

Sam Turken: Redd and her husband have been here on the Elizabeth River in Norfolk’s Ingleside neighborhood for about two decades. A few years after buying their house, a bad flood inundated the crawlspace, destroying their floor. 30,000 bucks in damage -- a lot of which was covered by flood insurance. Then, a second flood ruined her washing machine and dryer. Another couple thousand dollars. Now, projections show her house underwater by 2060 -- at the latest. And yet, she has no plans to say goodbye.

Addie Redd: Any water you move to in the area is gonna be the same thing at some point right?

Sam Turken: Well, what if you just don’t live right on the water?

Addie Redd: We want to live right on the water.

Sam Turken: I know but this is a coastal region. There’s water everywhere. What’s a 15-minute drive?

Addie Redd: No.

Sam Turken: Climate adaptation experts say many properties don’t need a buyout immediately. But it’s critical that governments at least have a plan for what to do with them. Because if not, someone will eventually end up stuck with a home that’s worthless.

[END PLAYBACK]

Greg Dalton: That was Sam Turken, a reporter who produced a recent series on sea level rise and buyout programs. Climate One’s Ariana Brocious spoke with him to learn more about his reporting.

[START PLAYBACK]

Ariana Brocious: Southeast Virginia currently experiences the fastest rate of sea level rise on the Atlantic coast. And in one of your stories you report that climate adaptation experts say many properties don't need a buyout immediately, but I'm curious what the timeline is here and how much longer people can afford to wait.

Sam Turken: Well, it depends on the area. So, you have some areas of our region that if you look at the flood projection map and the flood projections, they could very well be underwater in the next two decades. Some areas some neighborhoods it's not as much of an immediate risk, but others climate adaptation experts, local experts say they got to get moving. And even if you don't buy them out right now at least have a plan for what to do with those houses in the future, you know, do you introduce some type of easement, or come to an agreement with the homeowners that they're not gonna sell in the future if they decide to leave the home.

Ariana Brocious: So, as you cover in your story the voluntary nature of buyouts complicates achieving maybe a more systemic approach to floodplains. Are there concerns about the uneven pattern that that creates?

Sam Turken: Yes. And this is where some of the equity issues come into play because there's only so much money to go around right now. Buyouts are funded in multiple ways, you know, it’s usually through federal funding, through FEMA and HUD. And then localities can also contribute with their own money. If you’re a locality and you're trying to decide okay I have these areas that are at risk, these areas at risk. Some homes are more valuable than others. How do I decide with the limited amount of money that I have who I’m gonna offer those buyouts to. And what ends up happening is these localities offer buyouts to lower value homes because they can buy out more homes with that money if they're buying out less valuable homes. And the other issue is that the federal red tape is pretty strict and basically if a home is worth more than $276,000 then there has to be this complicated benefit cost analysis where you have to prove that the home has suffered flood losses and damages worth more than the actual value of the home. And, you know, again it’s voluntary so you have a lot of people who just don't want to buy out right now.

Ariana Brocious: An analysis of FEMA's voluntary buyout program a few years ago found that wealthier and denser counties had been more likely to implement buyouts, but they were often focused in relatively poor areas of those counties kind of what you're just describing. So, tell us a bit about what your reporting found in Virginia and the way people feel about what this uneven pattern of the voluntary nature, what it does to their communities.

Sam Turken: Yeah, that's the ironic thing, right. These analyses have shown that bigger cities more wealthy cities can afford to get this program up and running because they have the resources to do that. They have the staffing power, smaller cities don't have that ability to work with the federal government to make that happen. And then at the same time in these bigger cities you see them offering buyouts to lower income neighborhoods. So, in Newport News, Virginia, for example, they’ve bought out about 80 homes, which is more than anywhere else in Virginia. They have this program where they basically allocate $200,000 of their own budget to fund this program. And in Newport News there's this predominantly black area and there is a creek running through it. And the creek is called Salters Creek and about 20 years ago city officials they had this problem, you know, homes were flooding and Salters Creek was a big issue because basically the water was just rising up the creek. So, what they started doing is offering buyouts to people along the creek. And if people agreed the city would come in, tear the house down and basically convert the lots to green space and really build a marsh on those properties around the creek. The people still living in that area, you know, hate the creek, they hate the marsh, they call it a cesspool. They say it’s a mosquito haven. But then you have other flood prone homes in the neighborhood that aren't along the creek. And what the city has done with those other flood prone homes is they've bought them out as well and then they've done something a little bit more common with buyouts which is to just basically leave the lot vacant. So, it looks like this empty field in fact, nearly half a block is this just big empty field. And the Dickens family lives right across the street from it. You have Verileen Dickens [ph] who’s been there for nearly 50 years. Her son Derek lives with her and this is what they had to say.

[START PLAYBACK]

Verileen Dickens: You making this place a ghost town. It’s sad. It’s not a happy neighborhood like it was when there were houses over there. So you want to see people, you want to see houses. Yeah, it’s like we’re living in a run-down neighborhood.

[END PLAYBACK]

Sam Turken: So, basically what this shows is that people in this neighborhood they like their neighbors. They want people around them. Derek Dickens was like can you at least build a park here. Can you do something for the kids. We walk out every day and we see this empty patch of land right in front of us. It's lonely. We don't like this.

Ariana Brocious: Are there any efforts to relocate the whole streets or like micro communities together in these areas and try to get everybody on the higher ground?

Sam Turken: So, that's really hard because again, this is all voluntary. And the way it works in Newport News is basically people are supposed to come to the city. City officials acknowledge that they haven't done as good enough a job as they can communicating with people about this program. So, there are a lot of rumors about the buyouts again this is a predominantly black neighborhood and residents there are like look, if this was a white neighborhood these lots wouldn’t be vacant. Or they tell me, this is valuable land it’s right next to downtown the city wants us out of here once we’re out they’re gonna redevelop the land. Now, Newport News has an ordinance saying that they can't redevelop that land, but because this program has been going on for so long and the communication hasn't always been there things are getting lost and rumors are spreading. And, people don't want to leave some people don't want to leave the neighborhood, even if they don't like what's happening. This is where they've been forever and there are plans to pass it down to next of kin.

Ariana Brocious: So, you've touched on the sort of the feelings of the residents and how they feel, possibly you know treated differently or that they are being targeted in some way. Maybe because of the value of their home, or perhaps their ethnicity or their race. Did anyone you talk to suggest a view on whether we should be targeting lower income areas, specifically from an equity viewpoint trying to help those people who perhaps have lesser means and are less able to move?

Sam Turken: So, that's where it’s really tricky, right? Because from an equity perspective from an equity standpoint, you would think that buying out people who live in less valuable homes who may be lower income getting them out of harm's way first is the right thing to do considering that they may not have the financial resources to respond if there is a big disastrous flood. But the flipside of that is you look at this Newport News neighborhood and some people don't see it that way. Some people see this as you're coming in, you’re buying out properties you’re depressing our property values basically giving us no choice but to also take a buyout in the future. And they don't really see the flooding as that big risk, you know, they know flooding is happening they know it’s a problem but those who haven't had water in their home for example, may not see it as a big of a threat as it is. So, Elise Zavar is one of these climate adaptation experts who’s studied buyouts. And what she told me is that specifically in communities that may be historically black or maybe they’re an ethnic enclave. Their neighborhood is that safe space for them. That's that space where they feel comfortable practicing their culture, cultures that the broader community may not practice. So, as you start to buy people out, a neighbor starts to leave, you lose that sense of place you lose that culture. People love their neighborhoods, and even if you may be helping them even if you may be trying to help them and get them out of harm's way, you're stripping them from something that is really part of their heart. Part of what's been a part of their life for so long maybe their entire life. And it’s not that easy to just take that away from them. So, the other thing that you also have to consider and this is one thing that I'm looking into is where people supposed to go once, they take the buyout. Even if people do get that money for their home, they have to find somewhere else to live. And that new place they may have to pay more in taxes right now, especially housing prices are up. And there's also just a shortage of housing around this country. So, unless we build more affordable housing in the decades to come to prepare for something like this affordable housing in safe areas, we’re gonna have a lot of people who even if they're leaving, they’re stranded because they have nowhere else to go.

Greg Dalton: Sam Turken is a reporter who recently produced a series focused on retreat from coastal areas around Eastern Virginia, as part of the Pulitzer Center’s Connected Coastlines Reporting Initiative. Later in the show we’ll hear another of his stories, bringing us two different perspectives of people choosing whether or not to relocate.

Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about managed retreat. If you missed a previous episode, or want to hear more of Climate One’s empowering conversations, subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your pods. Coming up, an insurance and finance expert says we increasingly have to talk about whether it makes sense to rebuild in some places:

Kia Javanmardian: An extremely emotional and personal topic, but in our estimation, there's gonna have to be a bit of that or else we’re going to have this constant churning of rebuilding, devastation, rebuilding, devastation.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton, and we’re talking about managed retreat.

Greg Dalton: Insurance and reinsurance companies were among the earliest corporations to ring the alarm on climate. They see and know the damage and the risk numbers better than anyone else. Kia Javanmardian is a senior partner at McKinsey & Company where his focus includes advising insurance companies on climate risk. I asked him how they are pricing current and future climate risk into their business.

Kia Javanmardian: There are kind of two schools of thought on this. One is insurance companies typically have the ability to reprice every year. So, they're not locking it in for years and years. So, some have moved away from certain markets frankly, and it’s sad we don’t know what's gonna happen and so, we’re gonna remove our balance sheet from that. What that does is it drives prices up for insurance. Others are limiting how much exposure they want to take and so that also drives prices up or some are creating a buffer in their pricing to be able to deal with it. And frankly, in some situations even after all that the risk is not worth the reward from a pure economics perspective. So, it can be pretty challenging.

Greg Dalton: Right. And we’re seeing that certainly in the West where people are losing their property insurance because of wildfires. That's happened to me I think appropriately, so and I have to change carriers and the price went up. I think that's correct. But broadly, that leaves a lot of uninsured property owners who then are vulnerable or if it’s a second home, perhaps they can afford that but then what happens to that risk it often goes on to the taxpayer’s balance sheet some kind of the state steps in. So, are we seeing a transfer of risk from corporations to government?

Kia Javanmardian: Yes. The nature of that is still fluid, right. The best example, corollary example is the flood program. It’s been around for a long time. It is essentially the government subsidizing premiums. And so, we wouldn’t be shocked if you start to see more and more of that because frankly what people can afford for insurance and the risk it just doesn't clear the markets.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, so what that means is and the national flood insurance program is famously broken and underfunded and is kind of this risk that’s just kind of pushed into the big hole of the federal government and as that grows I mean Congress tried to fix that once and homeowners and voters screamed and they rolled it back. So, as this risk accumulates on the balance sheet of I guess it's federal and state governments how much debt how much risk can be loaded on there? What’s our breaking point there?

Kia Javanmardian: It’s a great question. There hasn't been yet. But your question is an interesting one because if you were to ask the question what’s best for the state, the country and what's best for the individual. There might be very different points of view on that. So, there are parts in the United States, take the flood example where they've been flooded multiple times in the past two decades. And yet people still rebuild in those areas. And so, that's a little bit of what we think the challenge is which is if you've grown up there, if you have a community there, people don’t wanna leave. But at the same time a lot of you know the floods and a lot of the fires might not be going away anytime soon it might actually be getting worse. So, therefore you know what do you do?

Greg Dalton: You've written that you know some companies are considering more proactive approaches. Does that mean weighing in on policy, the risk here is bigger than any individual carrier, even bigger than the insurance industry as big as it is. What's the industry doing to address this macro systemic risk. Is it weighing in on policy in Washington certainly it’s super powerful there?

Kia Javanmardian: Look, we often forget this but insurance companies were some of the biggest catalysts for fire codes for a century ago. And the reason was not too far from what we see today which is you'd have blocks of buildings burning down in cities. And so, part of the policy was new codes in terms of sprinklers but also materials how buildings were constructed. And so, we definitely see the possibility of that occurring in this context. We think part of it is there just some places where despite what you build a building from. How high you put it above the ground. It still might not make sense to actually be building there. And, you know, with all the codes also comes an expense. So, when you rebuild it's gonna be more expensive than it was before. So again, we absolutely think that there is a proactive stance that can be put forth. But it's still pretty complicated right because, again, you're not talking about the multimillionaires, you're talking about people who are you know middle of the pack in terms of economics. And all of these things come with a price that someone's gonna have to pay.

Greg Dalton: So, what specific policies do you see insurance companies pushing for in the near future and is that at the state and local level, which is where most building codes happen?

Kia Javanmardian: Yeah, look there's a few examples. One is around policies on construction and maintenance around property. So, think brush and think about you know how removing brush around neighborhoods can protect it somewhat. The other are the building materials that make roofs less flammable or less susceptible to fires that's another example. And then the third is that you know we've seen executives from insurance companies really working with local government officials on things like forest management. So, as an example in some parts of the country it was not allowed to clean up the brush in a forest and now people are saying well maybe we should rethink that. Because if we get rid of some of the dead brush the probability or the severity of big fires happening might be mitigated. So, it's both that you know the super local kind of where and how you construct, but also more in the surrounding areas of how do you maintain those surrounding areas to limit some of the aftermath that we’ve seen post-fires, etc.

Greg Dalton: How do you think about outdated FEMA maps and how they underpriced the risks of accelerating climate disruption? When people look at risk coastal risk in particular, is there adequate information about what's happening in the future and how that may be different from a straight-line projection of the past?

Kia Javanmardian: I think the things we are confident in is the past is not representative of the future. We’re very confident in that. We’re pretty confident that it's not linear as well so things don't get incrementally worse, a little bit over time they get exponentially they can get exponentially worse than, I heard an executive describe it as you know if the human body temperature optimize 98.6. When you go down to 90 you're not 10% worse, you’re dead. And so, that weighs on our minds quite a bit, not just for insurance but also humanity, right. There's a bit of how bad is it gonna get and by the time people wake up is it too late to be totally on this. So, to answer your question given a lot of those maps are historically based they are by definition inadequate.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, so how can insurers get ahead of these risks by incentivizing adaptation and resilience or even a managed retreat, which I think is being rebranded as resilient relocation.

Kia Javanmardian: And look, this is got to be part of our equation given our previous conversation around does it make sense to rebuild or not. An extremely emotional and personal topic, but in our estimation, there's gonna have to be a bit of that or else we’re going to have this constant churning of rebuilding devastation rebuilding devastation. And, you know, and that’s a hard thing to combat in the near-term in some locations. The other thing is it's not just the flood map it’s, you know, back in the day the flood in Miami was pretty unrelated to the fire in California. If you have the same underlying reason driving both hypothetically or not hypothetically, it becomes very hard to manage risk. Because if you’re an insurance company or society at large you can deal with one disaster, two disasters in different parts of the country every year. What if there were 10, and they happened pretty concurrently?

Greg Dalton: Yeah, I get chills hearing this because we’ve lived this in the West where we have wildfires and then power outages. So, that's cascading systems failure where people are fighting fires and then the power goes out and people's food goes bad in the refrigerator all businesses are disrupted. That's where you start to get into a dystopian Hollywood like whoa this is starting to really get wobbly.

Kia Javanmardian: Yeah, totally I mean look at what happened in Texas with the supply chain for the power utilities. I think it's going to really pressure test some of the assumptions we have on what it takes to operate in different parts of the country and the world frankly.

Greg Dalton: Right. And we have in California they’ve been prevented from raising prices which is not tenable because they are being forced to underwrite uneconomic policies. Some experts are calling for disaster declarations in advance of disasters. Typically, the model is a flood happens, something happens, disaster declaration money is released. Is that viable to happen? What do you think of that?

Kia Javanmardian: I think it could be near-term helpful to get money in communities faster relative to disasters happening. I don't know if that really solves the underlying problem which is if you have these communities that are continuously going to be pummeled by different disasters. Whether you get the money out a week before or two weeks after won't change the underlying quagmire we have, which is should they be there in the first place.

Greg Dalton: So, as we wrap up here, I’m just thinking about all this sort of individual entity company specific incentives and how it's a lot of that is to push risk to another time to another place and how we can change those incentives. And I know a lot of the risk we’re talking about is what's already built, but there also is new construction happening in harm's way. So, it gets my question about the professional liability of architects, builders who build things in a place that they should know is in harm's way is a risky place and then they walk away. What would it mean to have architects have some future liability if they build something in a place where we know it's going to be damaged and there’s gonna be a claim to an insurance company and people and owners are gonna get hit.

Kia Javanmardian: Yes, so typically the architect is not liable I’m not architect so it’s easy for me to say, you know, hold them liable. I think the way the system works today is the people who choose to buy those properties and the banks who choose to finance those properties are liable.

Greg Dalton: Buyer beware. Okay.

Kia Javanmardian: But also, the banks you look at, you know, if you’re putting a 30-year mortgage on a property where you can only guarantee insurance coverage for one year. Whoever's owning that loan at the end and the collateral underneath it should be as scared as the consumer.

Greg Dalton: But the banks write those loans and then package them and resell them to some greater fool.

Kia Javanmardian: Yeah, so that’s why I said the end holder of that security who I don't pretend to know who it is or have an opinion on it. But both the investors the end investors holding that plus the homeowner that's where the liability lies today.

Greg Dalton: Well, Kia Javanmardian thank you for joining us and sharing your insights. Kia is a senior partner at McKinsey & Company where his focus includes advising insurance companies on climate risk. Thanks for coming on Climate One.

Kia Javanmardian: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Greg Dalton: For centuries, the water bodies around Eastern Virginia have helped it grow and thrive. Now they’re a threat. Reporter Sam Turken has been speaking with people about their experiences living in the most flood-prone areas of this region for a project at WHRO in Norfolk, Virginia. He brings us this audio postcard from two families deciding whether to stay or go -- including one that’s already rebuilt their home after a devastating flood.

[START PLAYBACK]

Margaret Buxton: My name is Margaret Buxton, and this is my husband,

Bobby Buxton: Bobby Buxton.

Margaret Buxton: And we live at

Bobby Buxton: Dinwiddie Street, Portsmouth, Virginia. We've been here for about 30, what 30-something years?

Margaret Buxton: 38.

Mark Chorik: My name is Mark Chorik. I live at Messick Road Poquoson Virginia. I moved out here in 1986.

Margaret Buxton: Our house is located right on the Elizabeth River. We have a fantastic view to the water. Our grandchildren now come over and they play outside. We love the convenience to downtown and to the interstate, and we love the people in the area.

Mark Chorik: It's a fishermen town. You go up to the end of Messick Point. You got the wooden boats. You become friends with all your neighbors. Everybody knows everybody.

Bobby Buxton: People older kind of enjoy walking in the fall -- the leaves changing and the scenery and all that kind of stuff.

Mark Chorik: All around us, it's all marshland. So we're all surrounded by water. You can see it's a quiet place. You hear owls hooting at nigh-ttime out here. It's marvelous. I mean, there'll be over there. It'll be over here and I'd be talking to each other. I hoot at them, and it seems like they shoot back. I go, 'Hoo.' You know, they'll be like, 'Hoo, hoo.' You know,

Bobby Buxton: All this stuff that makes up a good lifestyle was here until the flooding seemed to have come and decided to destroy the whole picture.

Mark Chorik: This will flood back here. It just all backs up and comes in. So you live out here, it's like, you really watch the weather. You watch the tides.

Margaret Buxton: It backs up in the street. It appears as though that this is the lowest part of the city and all the water drains faster than it can go down. So that's causing the backup.

Mark Chorik: I've been standing in my garage when nor'easter comes through, and I could see the water coming across the street. And I'm like, 'Oh, here comes, here it comes.' And then it starts trickling in. There's nothing you could do.

Margaret Buxton: It's been in the house at least three times. We've had to replace floors, carpet -- you know, all of that. And in addition to that, it damages the foundation. It keeps the ground wet.

Bobby Buxton: In 38 years, we probably have spent close to $270,000 in repairs. Flood insurance on this piece of property -- it went from $4,000 a year to almost $13,000 a year. I've lost three cars. I had two that was damaged.

Margaret Buxton: A couple of friends have lost their cars in front of the house. We were like 'Oh my gosh, I didn't even know it was flooding...'

Bobby Buxton: They didn't even know it was raining, and when you look outside the car is underwater.

Mark Chorik: It's like walking on glass cause you got all these hurricanes out there.

Bobby Buxton: Isabelle was bad.

Mark Chorik: Oh, Isabelle. Isabelle was the worst. It got as high as a chain-link fence. There was boats floating down the street.

Bobby Buxton: This area was underwater for about three days. That's the -- the water just sit there. It didn't go out to the bay.

Margaret Buxton: It smells.

Mark Chorik: The house was built in 1917. I was remodeling it for 18 years. I just was in the process of putting a new porch on. I always wanted a front porch, you know what I mean to sit on. But when all the water got in the house, the floor caved into the center of the house. So it was not feasible to rebuild the house. We had it to torn down. It was devastating. So I thought about it while I said, 'You know what though, I guess we'll stay because of we're neighbors. We got such a great relationship.' So that's what we stayed here. Matter of fact, I think I was the first house that was built after Isabel.

Margaret Buxton: This is all part of the same issue. The walls are cracking. You see that crack right there? It separates the wall from the structure of the house. This part of the house is sinking. So the house is going down this way. So it's causing the whole house to tilt in that direction because the ground is always wet. If we don't do something, it's going to continue and we will not have a livable property.

Mark Chorik: Been here for years, and I'm just tired of it. Me and my wife are getting up in age. The kids are grown up. You know, they left the house. That's why I'm in the process now of fixing the house up. I'm painting the decks and everything and I'm going to put it on the market.

Margaret Buxton: It's been for sale.

Bobby Buxton: But then, you know, the price, the asking price that we asked for -- nobody wanted to pay it.

Margaret Buxton: And then we would get offers that would say, 'OK, we'll pay that, but then we need you to fix this, fix that.' So if we're going to fix all that, we might as well stay here.

Mark Chorik: Later on in the future, what are they gonna do with this? You lose, right? One day, there's gonna be water here, and you're not going to be able to live here unless you get by boat, because this global warming, it's serious. So that's why I'm looking to move on, get out of here.

Bobby Buxton: Our first option would be repair and stay longer and rebuild. And enjoy the leisure of what we have around here.

Margaret Buxton: The city just needs to let us know what direction they're moving in. Twenty years from now, hopefully, they have put in enough pipes and pumping stations to circumvent that water, to go out to the river and not come down the streets. If going forward it may not be that, you know than we would have to consider probably selling it at some point through the years.

Mark Chorik: I did raise my family here and it's going to be hard. I'm going to miss it, but I'm not going to regret it.

[END PLAYBACK]

Greg Dalton: That was Mark Chorik in Poquoson and Margaret and Bobby Buxton in Portsmouth discussing their experiences with flooding. This story was produced by Sam Turken. You're listening to a conversation about managed retreat. This is Climate One. Coming up, building resilience in the Big Apple.

Amy Chester: Since Hurricane Sandy we've been focused on our shorelines to ensure that when we have 3 to 6 feet of sea level rise in New York City and increased storms that the storm surge doesn't wipe away communities. What Hurricane Ida showed us is that every single community in New York City is vulnerable.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. During Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the southern tip of Manhattan was without power, shutting down the New York Stock Exchange and causing patients to be evacuated from hospitals. Amy Chester says Sandy revealed that more needed to be done to respond to and plan for future climate threats. She’s managing director of Rebuild By Design, a firm working to help cities and communities build climate resilience.

Amy Chester: So, Rebuild By Design started as an initiative of the federal government. President Obama's Hurricane Sandy task force was created to respond knowing that this wasn't going to be the last time that communities around the United States were hit with climate surprise. So, they created Rebuild By Design, which took the form of a competition an international interdisciplinary competition that goal was to bring the best minds of the world and connect them to the best minds in the communities and local governments on the ground to rethink large-scale infrastructure thinking about the future, not just putting back what was there before. The government is so worried that folks are going to kind of one up in their disaster reimbursements that they had a very narrow definition of what it could be used for. So, we were able to turn that on its head working with very smart lawyers in the White House and HUD. And what they enabled it to happen was that this would be under the America COMPETES Act. So, it had to be a competition and there had to be a competition that was locally led. So, a call out for design teams went out for interdisciplinary international design teams that would be headed by a local firm. And that would have all different types of experiences that would be really helpful in this new setting that we were about to embark on.

Greg Dalton: Hurricane Sandy happened in 2012; design began as you mentioned, 2016. Construction started in ‘19 still ongoing. Meanwhile, storms continue to occur. Hurricane Ida flooded the New York subways and caused fatalities and extreme flooding in New York and New Jersey. Do you worry that the pace of your work is kind of falling behind the accelerating extreme events?

Amy Chester: I only wish it could be done faster. But we can only go as fast as government will allow, and government will prioritize. We saw a huge prioritization after Hurricane Sandy where communities and government were really excited about putting on their thinking caps and coming up with innovative solutions to respond to what they saw. And as time goes on as you see in many circumstances it became not the top issue for our elected officials. Luckily, but also not luckily it has become a forefront issue because of Hurricane Ida in New York City. Now, Hurricane Ida was a rain event. It wasn't the same as Hurricane Sandy, which is a storm surge event. So, since Hurricane Sandy we've been focused on our shorelines to ensure that when we have 3 to 6 feet of sea level rise in New York City and increased storms that the storm surge doesn't wipe away communities. What Hurricane Ida showed us is that every single community in New York City is vulnerable. Communities are suffering and we all collectively have a responsibility to do something about it. So, what we need to do is to figure out how we want to do that. And we have a number of choices and we’re gonna have to decide together: which are the neighborhoods that we want to fortify and where the neighborhoods that we want to retreat. And if we retreat where our community members gonna go and how do we ensure that when community members move upland that they're not further gentrifying communities.

Greg Dalton: And isn’t kind of given that the wealthy neighborhood are gonna protected because that's where the higher property values are? And if the lower income disempowered communities probably of color are gonna be the ones that are asked to move?

Amy Chester: I’m so glad you asked about that because one of our projects, which is called the Big U which has been divided into multiple projects during the implementation which New York City is responsible for is imagined as 2.4 miles of integrated flood protection where communities who live adjacent to those structures in lower Manhattan will codesign their multiple benefits. And it's very interesting that in this project we were asked by the government to focus in on the area that has the lowest-income New Yorkers. These are areas that are adjacent that have thousands of public housing what we call NYCHA apartments in this area. And we did and that's where the project has broken ground. And ultimately, this will be over a $2 billion project, but the area that is most adjacent to public housing is gonna have over $1.5 billion in that piece of it.

Greg Dalton: So, it’s not always the case that the poorer areas get shafted. There’s still a lot of building, you know, Hudson Yards, the west side there’s a lot of new buildings going in there. Is there some hubris or denial in humans physically building up the shoreline when we know that the conditions are likely to grow more extreme?

Amy Chester: Yes and no. I mean we can continue to build on the shoreline if we bring our infrastructure up to those levels as well. If we don't then we can't. So, for instance we need to be thinking about how people are going to get to work how they're going to get home. Where are they going to drop their kids off during an emergency. And what we can’t expect is that everybody is going to evacuate because when we start flooding more and more often maybe twice a month during full moons then New Yorkers aren’t gonna evacuate they’re gonna stay where they are. And we need to think about how are we going to ensure that we are not creating islands of protection where emergency services can't reach those tall buildings that you know maybe climate proof in their developer’s eyes. So, we need to do that through a series of infrastructure changes. We need to really double down on green infrastructure and turn New York City into a sponge. We need to ensure that our roads are being lifted so that our emergency vehicles can get in and out. We need to make sure that people are gonna have access to food. So, none of these things are impossible, but without a comprehensive plan we’re just never going to get there and we don't have one yet.

Greg Dalton: The Living Breakwaters Project kind of incorporates natural systems, oyster beds, etc. So, how does nature fit into this rebuilding back the way not only adding what was there but adding a layer of nature to it?

Amy Chester: So, Living Breakwaters is a project that consists primarily of 2400 linear feet of near shoreline breakwaters. Breakwaters are designed to reduce the impact of climate intensified weather events on the low-lying coastal community of Tottenville and Staten Island. So, it's not gonna necessarily stop flooding, but it takes out the force of those waves that really contributes to the wave action and to the erosion. And that was most damaging in that area during Hurricane Sandy and that led to the tragic loss of life. However, what these new breakwaters will do is create these structures that are built of stone that are ecologically enhanced concrete units that break the waves, reduce the wave erosion on the beach and provide a range of natural habitats for oysters, finfish and other marine species while creating educational and recreational opportunities. You’ll actually be able to kayak to them, which sounds really fun to me.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, kayaking in the east river on New York City that sounds really cool. This episode of Climate One is focused on managed retreat, sometimes we brand it as resilient relocation. It typically involves actually moving people or cities from vulnerable lands but mostly your projects are focused on improving the resilience of New York City rather than relocating people. Do you ever think about there’ll be a time when relocation will happen, do you think about yourself moving out of New York?

Amy Chester: Well, I don’t think about myself moving out of New York because I happen to live in higher ground. However, I have family that lives in low ground. My aunt and uncle live in Rockaway and their house was very much affected by Hurricane Sandy. My mother in Sheepshead Bay had fish swimming in her basement. And there are a lot of communities that are asking for buyouts even after Hurricane Ida. We heard this from communities in Southeast Queens that have repetitive flooding. So, I really believe that communities are actually ahead of our government on this and I think communities are willing to have this discussion, but government isn't yet. And I think that if we work directly with communities and we ask the communities what would you need in order to be bought out what timescale would you work on because not everybody is gonna want to leave at the same exact time but we need to ensure that it works well for the city because you can't continue to have a police station or a fire station or school for a shrunken population. However, I do think that when communities that live in a floodplain that are getting repetitive flooding are already thinking about this and they're going to make their own decisions to leave after their mortgage is paid off, or after their kids go to school and we’re gonna start seeing this happen piecemeal if we don't create a comprehensive plan to do it together.

Greg Dalton: It's interesting that you say that the communities are ahead of the elected leaders on this. Is it possible that part of that is the language that you use, you know, managed retreat doesn’t make a very good campaign slogan or bumper sticker. You work for Mayor Bloomberg and I’ve worked in the City Council of New York. Is the branding of this the language of this and obstacles we’re having an honest conversation about it, because retreat sounds like weakness and something that no politician ever gets elected, promising to do.

Amy Chester: It's an interesting question, and there's actually been studies about this that show that there is no one way to brand this concept. However, you can work with the individual communities to brand it in ways that they feel comfortable with.

Greg Dalton: And your organization has worked with other cities on resilience projects. Tell us about some of that other work outside of New York.

Amy Chester: We did a competition on the same size and scale in the Bay Area called Resilient Bay Area which was not about building back after a disaster but for resilience planning before a disaster. And we worked with the nine counties and many cities to come up with innovative proposals just like we did in the Sandy region. However, we didn't have the disaster funds to dangle in front of the communities. That being said, a lot of those projects are inching forward as well. So, we're quite excited about that.

Greg Dalton: Right. I’ve been to Crane Cove Park which is kind of an old port area of San Francisco. You can see there’s a long ramp that goes into the water that I can tell in a grass that I can tell it’s designed to flood sometimes it kind of, you know, gradually go away as sea levels rise. That’s just one little piece of shoreline but I can see how that's a vision of the future.

Amy Chester: And what I think is key is designed to flood. And we can have infrastructure that floods that's completely okay we need to learn how to live with water. It's a lot of what we’ve learned from the Dutch. What we can’t have is infrastructure that's not designed to flood. So, when there is a flood, you're no longer able to use a park or a sports field for a period of time. However, if we created that same sports fields using salt tolerant plants and different infrastructure that would actually absorb the water that same sports field can actually absorb the water for the neighboring area too.

Greg Dalton: Right. But this is kind of a whole different mentality, that idea of it's okay to flood sometimes. That’s happening along the Mississippi it’s happening in different places, but it requires a mental shift doesn’t it to sort of like oh like that’s not a failure, someone failed if an area floods.

Amy Chester: Absolutely. And we’ve learned so much since Hurricane Sandy. I remember Mayor Bloomberg saying we're not going to retreat from the shorelines of Manhattan. And I think he might think differently now maybe not on the shorelines of Manhattan but the idea of just saying we’re not going to blank because we need to be open. There's got to be a lot of different solutions that come out of our toolboxes and what I think is key is that we create the solutions to match the communities because they are the ones that are going to make or break whether or not they’re successful.

Greg Dalton: And when you say that community input, I often think of the urgency of climate change and I guess I think of community input as being a slow process because lots of people have a say and they argue over this or that detail. Can community involvement be fast enough for climate? I hear you saying it’s smart and it’s in some ways ahead of the politicians but communities move quickly because this climate is coming at us fast?

Amy Chester: Absolutely. Communities understand time bound processes and they want to come to the solutions as fast as we do. So, I think if you say up front with the community here is how many months we're gonna spend on it. For instance, Rebuild By Design had a three-month research phase and a four-month design phase. That's pretty quick thinking about it right after a disaster. So, if you are able to say up front what the parameters are for your process with communities and say hey this is how much time we have. This is the budget we have. Here's what we’re willing to do and here's what's completely off the table, communities understand that and they can work within those parameters. They may have questions about why but if you have good reasons as elected officials or government officials, they will understand that. And we need to start having a lot more faith in communities.

Greg Dalton: As we think back to Sandy, there’s this very natural human impulse to want things the way they were. I want my life back. I want my house back. I want my neighborhood back before the disaster. What I hear you saying is that people are learning and understanding that the waterfront is gonna be kind of permanently temporary. It's going to change over time and our relationship with that waterfront is going to change. And it sounds to me is it true that people are accepting that they can’t always just have it the way it was. We have to let go of the past and walk into a flexible, uncertain future.

Amy Chester: I think they're both true. And it really depends on the moment. Right after a disaster like Sandy, like Ida, people want to go back exactly to what was before the disaster because they want control over their lives. So, in those situations we can all understand that. I’ll give you an example, you know, in my family, my aunt, uncle that live in Rockaway the first floor of their home was damaged and destroyed, and they put everything back exactly like it was before, except instead of having carpet they put in tile. So, a little bit different, right, but they’re regular people just like you and I would've probably done the same thing. However, over time they are thinking about it a little bit differently and start seeing that the waves are a little bit different and the temperature of the Atlantic Ocean is rising and start really understanding that this is gonna happen more often. I believe that when communities are not in a time of struggle or a time of surprise, when they can take a step back and actually learn what's coming at them, they will make the right decisions. We need to give them the space to do that. And what's really exciting about some of the infrastructure bill is that it is for the first time putting a lot of money into the programs that help people make decisions before they suffer.

Greg Dalton: Amy Chester is Managing Director of Rebuild By Design, a lifelong New Yorker who’s staying there. Thanks, Amy, for coming on Climate One.

Amy Chester: Thank you for inviting me. It’s been a lot of fun.

Greg Dalton: On this Climate One... We’ve been talking about the weighty decisions of individuals and communities around relocating because of growing climate threats. Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. To hear more, subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your pods. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. It really does help advance the climate conversation.

Greg Dalton: Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Ariana Brocious is our producer and audio editor. Our audio engineer is Arnav Gupta. Our team also includes Steve Fox, Kelli Pennington, and Tyler Reed. Our theme music was composed by George Young (and arranged by Matt Willcox). Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

Play

Water and Civilization: Resilience and Collapse

Otto Pilot — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 08:00:00 +0000

Water and Civilization: Resilience and Collapse

09/10/2021

Surprising Connections

Water is essential for life, and throughout human history we have sought to control and make use of it. As Giulio Boccaletti explores in his new book, Water: A Biography, that relationship with water has underpinned human civilization, forming an integral part of society, government and land use systems. But despite humanity’s accomplishments in “replumbing the planet,” we remain at its mercy, whether we think so or not, Boccaletti says.

“Today we operate under the illusion that water on the planet is nothing more than a backdrop to human events. Humans create systems to control water, forget its power, and then relearn it again when their systems fail. The cycle repeats,” he writes.

Until the last 60 or 70 years, he explains, most people encountered water and its variability on a daily basis, “and therefore adopted strategies to be resilient.”

Throughout his book, Boccaletti offers many different stories of the rise and fall of civilizations across the globe, and how some of that drama is tied to our dependence on water and climate. He says it’s important not to be overly deterministic about that connection, however, even in our modern era:

“You hear in the news the story of how droughts have exacerbated conflicts and have driven people to war, etc. But dictators have a big responsibility in the collapse of their states. [President Bashar al-]Assad bears a lot of responsibility for what happened in Syria. We can't say it was water scarcity that created the crisis,” he says. “But it’s certainly the case that in a vulnerable or fragile state, environmental stresses, particularly for agrarian societies, become very powerful stresses.”

We’re seeing some of those stresses this year. Climate disruption is making floods and droughts more severe, creating water whiplash between too much and too little.

Hurricane Ida killed more than 50 people, many of them drowning in cars or basements, and more than half a million people were without power more than a week after it hit. We’ve seen the first official cuts in the Colorado River supply after Lakes Mead and Powell dropped to historic lows. Arizona will see its Colorado River supply cut by 30% next year, and yet Phoenix just overtook Philadelphia as the fifth most populous city in the nation due to booming population growth.

But access to water has never been equal or entirely fair, despite its essential nature.

Sara Aminzadeh is vice president of partnerships at the U.S. Water Alliance, a group of public and private water entities. Her organization works to help communities access water and adapt to climate change, including advocating for necessary investment in water infrastructure.

“The essential guidance for water utilities I think anywhere in the country to adapt to our climate reality and our climate future is really a diverse portfolio approach: so, not relying on any one supply too heavily,” she says. And there are essential environmental justice considerations to keep in mind, including ensuring water access for low-income communities regardless of whether they can pay for it or not, Aminzadeh says.

Her group is optimistic about the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill, which promises to make the largest investment in clean drinking water and wastewater infrastructure in American history.

“From my perspective, the funding that will become available through the water infrastructure package should be prioritized for communities who need it most,” she says.

Guests

Giulio Boccaletti

Author; Honorary Research Associate, University of Oxford

Sara Aminzadeh

Vice President of Partnerships, US Water Alliance

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Many modern humans have lost connection with the essence of life: water.

Guilio Boccaletti: In the last 60-70 years, not more than that people have sort of been living under this illusion that water comes out of the tap, that's its origin, and that you know it's perfectly normal to leave your home and not have to wade a stream, right. That hasn’t been true for 10,000 years. Most people most of the time encountered water and its variability on a daily basis and therefore adopted strategies to be resilient.

Greg Dalton: How can we rethink our relationship with water and build resilience into our systems as we experience increased climate disruption?

Sara Aminzadeh: For a long-time water was sort of unseen and not thought about. You know everyone uses water of course, but it wasn't thought of as something that we needed to prioritize and elevate and talk about and think about. And so, the One Water Movement seeks to change that.

Greg Dalton: Learning from our water history. Up next on Climate One.

Greg Dalton: What can the past teach us about living with water? Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. I’m Greg Dalton. As the Glasgow climate summit approaches, we are taking a look at what’s on the agenda, and who’s at the table. There’s a growing push among environmentalists to “decolonize” climate negotiations such as COP26. Such groups say western countries’ monopoly over the climate agenda smacks of colonial hangover and will force those least responsible for the climate crisis to pay the costs of it first. Climate One correspondent Aman Azhar explains.

Aman Azhar: Who is responsible for the climate crisis? And who owns the climate debate? Do people from the global South have a say in setting the climate agenda? Grassroots activist groups are planning to make these questions front and center at this year’s COP26.

Basav Sen: More than half of the world's population lives in developing countries, in the global south. They have been responsible for far less of greenhouse gas emissions than wealthy northern countries. So, the countries who disproportionately caused the problem of climate change to begin with, should not dominate the discourse.

Aman Azhar: That’s Basav Sen, director of Climate policy Program at the Institute of Policy Studies. He says unless the industrialized countries disinvest from their fossil fuel-based economies and start treating developing countries as partners, the demand for ‘decolonizing’ climate summits such as COP will only grow louder. Because developing countries are most likely to bear the brunt of climate inaction sooner, and suffer more because of it.

Basav Sen: The realization that the COP needs to be decolonized has certainly sunk in with grassroots social justice movements worldwide. But obviously, much more needs to be done in terms of pressure from the grassroots, for governments in the global south to really assert their rights, and for governments in the north to realize that they need to accede to the very justifiable demands from the global south.

Aman Azhar: Sen says that even the choice of venue for a global climate summit like COP--often hosted by European nations--can be a first step in creating a meaningful engagement across the North-South divide.

Basav Sen: The choice of venue sends a political message, because the host country for the COP has a role in determining the agenda, in determining the entire atmosphere in which the talks happen. If a country that is severely impacted by climate change in Africa or in the Pacific were to host a COP. That would be a very different environment for the negotiations than if it were to happen in one of the wealthy countries.

Aman Azhar: Gregory Jenkins, a professor in the department of meteorology at the Penn State University, says overcoming the North-South divide on climate action will be difficult, and will take the efforts of many.

Gregory Jenkins: It would be a real miracle if it could be decolonized because I really think about all the things that need to be done on the ground, and the discussions that need to happen at the National, regional, and local levels. And people have to organize at that scale, to do something that is meaningful to offset this climate crisis.

Aman Azhar: Jenkins says the concerns of the developing world and disenfranchised are not high enough on the COP agenda.

Gregory Jenkins: There would have to be sessions that address the inequity that is currently occurring on the planet, as it relates to social injustice, or environmental degradation that are impacting people from a day to day basis. Or the impacts, the floods, the heat stress, the heat waves that are impacting so many people around the globe. That would have to be an open conversation with policymakers listening, and not necessarily dictating what's next.

Aman Azhar: Basav Sen says the COP leadership of industrialized nations is aware of this push for inclusivity from the grassroots climate movement. But it’s less clear whether they are prepared to recalibrate the present North-South imbalance that colors climate talks.

Basav Sen: They likely know what they're doing, but they are in some sort of denial about it because it's not politically convenient for them. But the realization certainly exists on the part of grassroots people's movements. And we will certainly not hesitate to voice those demands in the most assertive way possible.

Aman Azhar: As the conference in Glasgow draws nearer, environmental and rights groups are getting ready for worldwide rallies to push world leaders to decolonize the climate debate -- along with decarbonizing the global economy -- before it’s too late. For Climate One in Washington D.C., this is Aman Azhar

Greg Dalton: Our focus today is water: it’s essential for life, and throughout human history we have sought to control and make use of it. As Giulio [ju-lio] Boccaletti explores in his new book, Water: A Biography, the distribution and control of water has underpinned human civilization, forming an integral part of society, government and land use systems. Climate One’s Ariana Brocious spoke with Boccaletti about the lessons from history that matter today.

Ariana Brocious: So, I'd like to start by asking you about the fact that flood origin stories are common across a lot of cultures. I found this really fascinating in your book. Can you tell me more about that?

Giulio Boccaletti: Sure. It turns out that most societies have water somewhere at the hearts of their origin. And in the British Museum there’s a very famous cuneiform tablet that was found in the royal library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, the modern-day Iraq it was found in the 1870s. And what’s remarkable about that tablet is that it tells the story of a man who's told by god to build a boat and put all the animals on it and then escape a massive flood and float for days and days and days and nights, nights, nights until he sends off a dove to find land and eventually the dove comes back and then he lands on this mountain and the dove stayed with him and the flood passes and life begins again. Now, that story was of course you know those of us who know the biblical texts the Abrahamic religions will recognize it as the story of Noah. In fact, predates the writing of the Bible by about 1000 years and it’s the story of Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh. And it turns out that there’s quite a lot of literature wondering whether there was in fact an event that all these civilizations are remembering. I think my conclusion from reviewing the literature is that it’s probably not a single event, but it's true that all societies have this memory of wrestling with water. Same story, right, over and over and over again. Everywhere you go you find the story. And so, what’s going on? Well, turns out that the planets were last glaciated about 20,000 years ago, right. And then after 20,000 years ago ice started to melt. Now, we, society in general, we have complex societies around 5,000 years BCE, right, so 7,000 years ago. So sometime between 20,000 years ago the last glacier maximum and 7,000 years ago when the large complex societies rise, some time in that moment we became sedentary whilst the world around us was changing, you know, was deglaciating. And that really is the root of the story.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah. Well, so obviously as civilizations did develop, they became somewhat more complex, and thus their ability to control and manage water grew. So, I’m wondering about some of the more dramatic cases maybe of this controlling, efforts to control water in some of the earlier history that you came across.

Giulio Boccaletti: Well, the drama in truth comes with the failures to control, right. So, the sort of control is one that sort of gets more complicated, you know, essentially societies are able to produce surplus and with surplus you can feed administrators and you can feed an army. And we now have to be careful, Ariana, not to be overly deterministic about the story, right. It’s that the distribution of water caused the rise of these societies but of course as they developed, this relationship with water shaped their journey. Drama comes in when these solutions fail, right. And one of the most important ones even for us today because I think it's an archetype of the situation the predicament, we find ourselves in is the failures that happens at the end of the Bronze Age. So, we’re talking about the 12, 13th century before common era. When you had essentially around the Mediterranean a fairly sophisticated system of regional trade. People would have heard of the Hittites and the Egyptians and the Mycenaeans. And it was a fairly integrated global system in a way it was globalization for the Bronze Age. And we have remarkable you know palaces and great surplus and wealth and people traded from Scandinavia all the way to the Black Sea, right. And then the climate changed. And we know that from some independent palaeoclimatological records. And what happened then as has happened many times since, is that the most important, the most salient changes were not necessary the biggest physical changes. But the changes that happen to the most vulnerable people. That's where really the crisis and the kind of ultimately, the collapse happens. In this case, pastoralists that lived in the Northern Balkans were particularly hit hard by a dryer colder Mediterranean; they started moving southward. And that migration southwards, which then became known as the migration of the Sea People was then responsible or probably responsible for the cataclysmic collapse of the Hittite Empire for the complete disappearance of Hugaret, for the destruction of Jericho for you know the invasion of Egypt and so forth so on. So that's an example of a pre-dramatic events in the story of water.

Ariana Brocious: Right. Well so, climate, yes, as you mentioned has changed and caused a lot of ramifications over the course of our human history. So, specifically you write about ancient Egypt and I'm wondering if you can describe how you think climate factored into the fall of ancient Egypt.

Giulio Boccaletti: First I should say the Egyptian state in some form or another was the ancient Egyptian Kingdom. The three kingdoms were around for the better part of 3000 years and ultimately was invaded by Octavian, right. So, narrowly speaking what caused it was they were invaded by somebody else. That said, there's no question, I mean, Herodotus described Egypt as the gift of the Nile and indeed it was, right. I mean it’s sort of remarkable that this land, which is in the Nile valley just below the cataracts, which is fed by waters that come from Lake Victoria and the Blue Nile on the Ethiopian mountains is incredibly rich, right. To the point that this narrow strip that runs along the desert you know at the time at the height of the middle kingdom was capable of feeding probably a third of the world’s population, right. I mean it was incredible productive capacity, right. And so, it’s not surprising that Egypt was this extraordinary magnet for immigration this sort of extraordinary beacon of wealth in the Mediterranean and beyond. And Egypt was susceptible to changes in the flow of the Nile but of course one of the things that’s interesting about the Egyptian story is that they were some of the first to build really sophisticated institutions to overcome the variability of the flow of the Nile. Occasionally would fail, right, occasionally they wouldn’t be able to store enough water enough food to ride periods of scarcity. But all in all, they lasted for longer than any of our civilization, you know, they lasted for 3000 years.

Ariana Brocious: Right. And so, what happened with the climate? What changed there?

Giulio Boccaletti: Well, you know, there have been changes all through those 3000 years. Towards the end of the period we’re now talking about when, for example, Cleopatra was around; this is Cleopatra of Caesar, Roman times. There appear to have been significant reductions in Nile flow, which then had an impact on the crop production which then created social strain. And, you know, with the surplus of crops you pay for military, you maintain administration so when you have less of that your things will fall out of control. But again, it’s important to highlight the sort of role that these environmental stresses have on an already vulnerable society. By that point Egypt was already diminished, right. And the reason I emphasize this over and over again is because we tell the same story about the modern Arab spring or about the Syrian crisis, right. You hear in the news the story of how droughts have exacerbated conflicts and have driven people to war, etc. etc. Dictators have a big responsibility in the collapse of their states. Assad bears a lot of responsibility on what happened in Syria. We can't say it was water scarcity that created the crisis. But it’s certainly the case that in a vulnerable or fragile state, then you know environmental stresses particularly for agrarian societies become very powerful stresses.

Ariana Brocious: Do you think we have those same vulnerabilities today?

Giulio Boccaletti: Of course, we do. Well it depends who “We” is. “We” in the US or “we” in the UK don’t necessarily because of course we have the resources to withstand the variability of nature, we can come back to that. Incidentally, you know, the United States, the Mississippi basin is the modern-day equivalent of the Nile, right. The Mississippi basin is the most productive landscape on the planet. It could support 3 to 4 times the population of the United States, right. And there's a lot to be said about what that does to the capacity and wealth of the nation. But there are plenty of parts of the world where that vulnerability is real today. I mean, I worked for a number of years in Ethiopia. There was a time when you could track the GDP growth of Ethiopia with rainfall, right. If you don't have infrastructure, if you don't have ways of capturing water when it comes down and releasing it when you don’t have any then you are at the mercy of what comes down from the sky and there are many least developed countries in the world that are in that predicament.

Ariana Brocious: Right. So, in a chapter on Rome’s water market you describe the transport of grain and how it was essentially the transport of water. And that pattern continues today of course, for example, Saudi Arabia has depleted a lot of its own groundwater and there are companies now buying up vast tracts of Arizona desert to grow alfalfa to export to feed dairy cows in Saudi Arabia that's grown obviously with Arizona water. So, what do you make of that?

Giulio Boccaletti: Well, in some ways it’s not surprising. Trade can be an effective way of optimizing the allocation of resources. And so, trade in general is you know is way in which the whole Middle East survives. If you think about the United Emirates, you know, the carrying capacity of the UAE is maybe 20,000, 30,000 people. But 10 million people live there. And the reason is they import food from all over the place because it can’t be grown there with the amount of water that they have. And, you know, they’re essentially living off somebody else’s water, right. And that’s what the Romans did and that's what they do today. So, it’s not surprising that it happens but because food is a heavily distorted market in many ways, right, partly for good reason, because we need people to be able to afford food. So, cheap food is not a bad thing certainly for much of the world, right, if food fully reflected the cost of producing it lots of people would go hungry, right. But because of those distortions you end up with distortions also in the water space. And so, for example, you end up with these situations where the full cost of using water from deep down in the aquifers below Arizona is not really borne by the farmers and the products that then get sold. And so, you have this, you know, it’s subsidized production, which on the one hand you know may be good for the farmers but on the other hand, for the collective vulnerability to scarcity is a problem.

Ariana Brocious: So, you write that modern water infrastructure has replumbed the planet and the story of water is not technological, it’s political. Humans have organized society around water for their own mutual benefit. So, one example I was curious to have you explain further, is how the early water history of the United States actually set the stage for our Constitution.

Giulio Boccaletti: Yeah. Well, that’s an extraordinary story and I should also say that in many ways the story of water in the United States became the archetype water story for the 20th century. So, in a way the world looks like it does because of the way in which the United States developed its water resources. The origin of that story is indeed around the time of the Constitution. It's an interesting story, right, because America sort of grew by accretion, right. And one of the first moments in which this becomes apparent is, you know, immediately after the Revolutionary War then, you know, states of the independent, newly independent states were tied together by the Articles of Confederation had also inherited essentially the Ohio Valley on the other side of the Appalachians, right. And George Washington, who is a remarkably astute investor, not just a great commander, had an interest in the Potomac because he had acquired lands on the other side of the Appalachians in Ohio quite a lot of land actually. And the problem was that the Spanish owned New Orleans at the time. And so, you know the only way to extract production from the Ohio Valley was to bring it eastward. And in order to bring it eastward you need some fluvial transport bringing it by road would have been completely uneconomical, right. And so, the question was, could we build a canal, an artificial canal that would allow through locks and the likes to pass the mountains, get on their side and then bring back the crop production. So, you know, Washington has this bright idea and then he has of course a problem which is that the Potomac goes through several states. And so, he had this issue of, well, if each of us is gonna tax the passage of these goods as they move from the Ohio Valley to the eastern seaboard, we’re gonna make the production completely uneconomical. And so, we need some mechanism to negotiate how we’re gonna be taxing together, how we’re gonna run this interstate commerce, right? And so, he convened a meeting at his state of Mount Vernon and it becomes a compact which essentially a commercial agreement on the fluvial infrastructure. Now it turns out James Madison was observing this with an interest so goes the story and inspired by the success of getting through three or four states to agree on a regime a trade regime for the Potomac. He then said, well, let's try and replicate that with all of the states in Annapolis. So, he convenes a meeting in Annapolis, it was successful enough that they concluded that they needed an actual convention. And so, that's what they ended up doing in Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Convention of course which by that point had become a constitutional convention. And actually, I don’t wanna overstate the case, right, this is not obviously just about the trade between states. But it is sort of interesting that essentially the problem was you have these independent states there’s a set of, you know, Articles of Confederation, which was essentially a monument to libertarianism. So, they have no mechanism, there was no federal infrastructure to speak of, right, you need consensus and everything. And what they recognized was they needed an institutional architecture to manage this problem of commerce across rivers if these 13 states we’re gonna ask to work together and take advantage of the vast landscape that sat to the west of them. And so, they ended up with of course, you know, you’re American obviously I’m not as you can tell from my accent but, you know, you ended up with the American Constitution. But if you go and read the debates during the convention this issue of the compact comes up over and over again. And people point to it as an example of why and how you can still work together as states.

Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a conversation between Climate One’s Ariana Brocious and Guilio Boccaletti, author of Water, A Biography. Our podcasts typically contain extra content beyond what’s heard on the radio. If you missed a previous episode, or want to hear more of Climate One’s empowering conversations, subscribe to our podcast on your favorite app. Coming up, will our current water structures survive a changing climate?

Giulio Boccaletti: We're in a situation where barring some surprise, you know the Western United States has to confront these questions. The good news is there’s many answers, the bad news is, somebody will bear some significant costs and whether those costs will be borne fairly, that's really the question, and it's an entirely political, entirely human question.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton, and we’re talking about the hubris of controlling water with author Guilio Boccaletti. Let’s rejoin his conversation with Climate One’s Ariana Brocious.

Ariana Brocious: The American West represents a good example of our hubris to control water for civilization. There's a story of John Wesley Powell, who traveled through, one of the first people to travel through what's now the West and he came back saying that the development of that territory would be hindered by water supply and that we should be planning accordingly. So, can you explain this path that the United States took, you write the United States had set itself up to become the most radical architect of water geography in human history. Give us a sense of sort of how significant that was and how it differed from what happened in maybe other parts of the world.

Giulio Boccaletti: Well, it's interesting I mean a lot of points to come back to but just to say that in the end it didn’t differ that much because most people ended up copying the United States, right. So, that's kind of an interesting story in itself. But to me the expansion of the West is fascinating story and it’s a political story. Again, it shows why this is fundamentally a political issue, right? So, the Western expansion one can debate this kind of underlying politics you know and how colonial it was or wasn't. Fact of the matter is that once the United States acquired all these lands all the way to the Pacific coast it had been this fundamental political problem of representing those states in the federal system. And in order to represent the states in the federal system we need people who live there and those people need to have political agency. Hence the need to move people right and so you end up with these successive ways of attempts at settling. It was an arid climate as there are others on the planet and it was simply impossible to do without federal underwriting of large scale infrastructure. Now, today we judge that infrastructure with the eyes of the 21st century and we judge it for its failures. But we shouldn’t forget that it was an extraordinary success for the politics of the time and for the objectives of the time. People moved to the West in droves. The West was able to successfully support you know an exponential growth in the population. And all of this was in the back of the building of this large infrastructure. And to give you a sense of scale when this process started, so in 1904, the largest dam in the world was the lower Aswan High Dam on the Nile and had been built by the Brits during the protectorate in Egypt, right, it was made of bricks. We essentially, at the beginning of the century, captured nothing of what came down from the sky anywhere in the world. Then starts the buildout of the United States West. By the time that runs its course in the 1960s and 70s the world catches a fifth of anything that comes down from the sky, right. That's the replumbing of the planet and that starts when the federal government decides that it’s gonna build Hoover Dam and then Fort Peck and then Bonneville and all this infrastructure that captures water. And today we of course we judge it harshly and by the way it appears to be insufficient and possibly failing, right.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah, we’ll get into that.

Giulio Boccaletti: Yeah, exactly. So, the solution that was good then may not be good now but it was an extraordinary transformation of a very large part of the planet in a way that had never been seen.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah, and I think for anyone who has been to Hoover Dam or some of these things even today, looking at the scale of the concrete and imagining building them with like early 19th century tools it is really staggering. Of course, we do want to acknowledge that when the West was expanding there were already people here, lots of indigenous people whose land was taken and the people being enfranchised were white settlers.

Giulio Boccaletti: White male settlers as a matter of fact.

Ariana Brocious: Correct. Yes. So, along with this in this early part of the century early 19th century, dam building, I'd like to talk about the Tennessee Valley Authority because getting into hydropower and what sort of remarkable transformation occurred there again with this federal backing of a project, that it sought to accomplish a lot of things at once. Can you explain that?

Giulio Boccaletti: Yeah, I mean the Tennessee Valley Authority is just a remarkable story of both hubris and hope in a way and it had enormous impact, right. And if you read what people at the time wrote about it, it was a really hopeful time, right. And interestingly it has resonance with some of the arguments that people make today, you know, follow the science, you know, plan for the future. It was a positivist attempt at essentially scientific management of the environment, except that with the science of the 1930s, right. So, what happened was this, by the time Roosevelt gets into office. Most people living in cities have access to electricity, but people living in rural areas largely did not. And one of the problems was that because transporting electricity long distance was impossible. The cost that the people in the rural areas faced to get electricity was extremely high and it was set by private companies who effectively had a monopoly, right. Now, remember that at this time, the largest and most scalable technology for the production of power was hydropower, you know, the big thermal power plants that we kind of came to rely on came later in the 1950s and later. So, this time you have hydropower as the principal power technology and you didn't have much transmission which meant that rivers were the blueprints for everything for industrialization for power production, energy production, right? Now, the Tennessee Valley was the poorest part of United States one of the poorest parts in the United States. And Roosevelt comes in and he has this vision of creating four great utilities, one in each corner of the country, starting with the Tennessee and then the St. Lawrence and then Colorado and then the Columbia River to essentially create federally subsidized power that would set a benchmark of what the price should be for electricity. Starts with the Tennessee, the Tennessee Valley gets created and it gets created on the principles of scientific management. So, the issue wasn't just creating hydropower it was protecting people from floods. It was actually interestingly reforesting the basin. The basin was completely degraded and so there’s a lot of conservation. And so, the Tennessee Valley Authority becomes this huge development project which has essentially Roosevelt described it as with having the authority and power of the public sector, but cloaked with the tools of a private corporation. And it was at some level incredibly successful, you know, if you look at the all development indicators in the Tennessee Valley they shot up, there's no question that the regional investment had enormous impact. Now, there was however a problem which is it was an extraordinary display of executive power, the TVA could exercise eminent domain. They were essentially the manager of the landscape. People started noticing this is a massive overreach of executive power. And you know Roosevelt was never able to replicate the TVA anywhere else in the United States. But the kind of conclusion of the story which is kind of interesting is whilst the TVA was not replicated at home. It was amply replicated abroad when Truman came in, he then created this thing called the four-point strategy which is essentially a strategy of internationalization of the technical knowledge of the United States. And so, the world is strewn with Valley authorities. So, it’s a really important story for better or worse. I mean it’s, you know, it’s the way in which the American ideals of modernization replumbed the planet.

Ariana Brocious: Right. Right. Yeah, and I wanna move to one of the other river systems you mentioned that’s of, you know, a special focus today which is the Colorado. Obviously, this year we've seen the Colorado River reservoir decline to historic lows, which is threatening agriculture and hydropower and there seems to be, Arizona has already taken a significant cut or well, starting next year more may be imminent. Are we reaching the limits of some of these human systems maybe in the American West?

Giulio Boccaletti: Yes, I mean some would argue we already passed them. I mean in some ways what’s happening now is not terribly surprising to anybody who's looked at the situation in the basin. I mean there was a study on the supply and demand in the Colorado Basin from five or six years ago that showed that we’re already past the point of which demand intersected to the ability to supply. Now, there is some fuzziness in these numbers and so you can sort of operate for a while on a hope and a whim but the reality is, we have far exceeded the capacity of the basin. Now, the thing that's important here though is that and that’s why again I come back to this point which is the story of water is a political story. Really, the fundamental debate is not about, you know, do we have enough dams, do we have enough reservoirs but really is what we do with water. What vision of society do we have because that’s not fixed right that's susceptible to our decisions as citizens? So, one of the things that irritates me to no end is that we end up you know, having conversation about water that frame the problem is consumers. This is not a consumer problem, this is a citizenship problem. What do you want your home to look like because once you've decided that almost everything follows? If you decide that your arid landscape needs to have verdant hills well then that tells you something about what kind of water supply you're gonna need. That’s not, you know, it’s not necessary, certainly it’s a choice. And it’s by the way a viable choice but one that has enormous costs. So, I think we're in a situation where barring some surprise you know the West of the United States has to confront these questions. The good news is there’s many answers, the bad news is, somebody will bear some significant costs and whether those costs will be borne fairly, that's really the question, and it's an entirely political, entirely human question.

Ariana Brocious: You write that water is the ultimate public good, a moving formless substance that defies private ownership is hard to contain and requires collective management. But yet we’re seeing private markets at work in the water world today and in some places, they’re actually reshaping who owns water, who controls water to a large degree. Does that worry you?

Giulio Boccaletti: Well, yes and no. I mean I think that you know water can't be owned but what those markets are trading is not actually really water is access and that's a slightly different thing. It sounds almost the same, but it’s completely different because you don’t actually own the molecule. What you own is access to water for some time while you use it for whatever it is that you’re using it. And then the water actually evaporates and goes somewhere else. Sometimes the framing of markets is deceptive because people get in the heads that we’re talking about something like oil markets. But water, it evaporates it comes back down; the amount of water on the planet has been fixed ever since it appeared aside from some small electrolysis. So, it's not quite the same story as others sort of, you know, nonrenewable resources. So, am I concerned that there is a market for access? Yes and no. No, because in principle markets have to be regulated. The markets exist because somebody regulates them. You know it’s an illusion to think that markets is just the sort of the self-expression of a free for all. If you don’t have legal recourse if you can’t sue people when they do a tort if you can't, nothing works, right. So, you need the implicit underwriting or a sovereign to make a market work right. And they can be extraordinarily effective at allocating resources because they can be extraordinarily effective at allocating information, right. It’s harder for a central planner to know what goes on than it is for people operating the market. Now with that said, however, one of the big problems just because you are trading effectively, not quite but effectively, trading access, not the stuff what you're really trading on is access that's delivered by the infrastructure that was paid by somebody. And the markets don't actually the price that typically comes out in these markets doesn’t actually pay for the infrastructure. And so, I’m worried if people think that markets are gonna be the silver bullets to allocating resources efficiently, right. And then secondary problem which theoretically is a huge problem in practice it depends is this issue of the creation of monopolies. Markets tend to create monopolies and so there's a risk that somebody starts acquiring more and more water. In truth, I worry less about that in a place like the United States where there is a very sort of vibrant political infrastructure than I do in a place like say Chile or in other countries where there are trading systems, but the power of the citizens is far diminished, compared to the power of the corporation.

Ariana Brocious: So, as we get toward the end here I want to kind of come back to some of the central themes of your book which have to do with this idea that humans have created somewhat of an illusion for ourselves that water is not a force to, you know, that kind of forms as you write I think a backdrop to human events and that we sort of put it aside, we control it. But then we learn the lesson over and over again when these systems fail that it is an incredibly powerful force. So, we've seen really catastrophic floods this year, you know, kind of indicating some possibilities for what climate is gonna be bringing to us. Are the systems we created in this modern world going to be sufficient to serve us in controlling water as the climate becomes more disrupted?

Giulio Boccaletti: Look, the answer is likely no. And the problem is that most people don't realize this. The issue is not so much that we have to wrestle with water. That's been true for 10,000 years and we've managed to create incredible things over the course of the journey, right. So, by itself that’s not a particularly surprising statement. What's odd is that in the last 60, 70 years not more than that people have sort of been living under this illusion that water comes out of the tap that's its origin, and that you know it's perfectly normal to leave your home and not have to wade astream, right. That hasn’t been true for 10,000 years. Most people most of the time encountered water and its variability on a daily basis and therefore adopted strategies to be resilient, right. And therefore, made choices informed by the knowledge of the statistics, right. So, even if it's not raining today you have enough experience to know that it will eventually rain and maybe flood and so you don't build your house on the floodplain because it might get you know you might get the river coming through your living room and moving the piano as Faulkner used to say, right. So, for most of our history that's how we approached this we were humble you know in our sort of dance with the environment. And people should remember, you guys have tragically now seen the impact of Ida in this last couple of weeks. A hurricane like Ida, if you think of it as a thermal engine pretty much cycles through over its lifetime more less the same amount of energy that the entire world economy uses, right. Now, that’s not the energy it uses to do work it’s not just the effect of wind it’s the entire energy cycle of the hurricane. But that just give you the sense of scale that one single system is as powerful as everything that the modern economy has been able to move, all the heating all the power industry, right. So, we’re talking about a planetary force that dwarfs anything we could conceivably do even in the next hundred years. Even if we go to Mars, right. So, we have to realize that we’re gonna have to wrestle with this force and the most worrying thing about it is not that we have that’s the facts of life, but that people don't realize it. And when they don’t realize it they’re not expecting it. And when they don't expect it they don’t plan for it. And when they don't plan for it, catastrophes happen. Water matters and water matters even today even if we all have an iPhone. The boring old technology that’s been around for 10,000 years of catching and conveying water all over the place shapes reality and it still matters.

Ariana Brocious: Giulio Boccaletti is author of Water: A Biography. A really fascinating look at human’s history with water since basically it started. Thank you so much for joining us today on Climate One.

Giulio Boccaletti: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Greg Dalton: You're listening to a conversation about what history portends for our water future. This is Climate One. Coming up, what the “One Water movement” seeks to accomplish:

Sara Aminzadeh: To really cultivate appreciation for the value of water, to recognize instances where we’re in danger of losing water, to acknowledge and support communities who don't have access to water, and to really advocate for the level of investment in our water infrastructure and in our water community that is really needed.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. We’re talking about stories of water collapse and resilience. Climate disruption is making floods and droughts more severe, creating water whiplash between too much and too little. Hurricane Ida killed more than 50 people, many of them drowning in cars or basements, and more than half a million people were without power more than a week after it hit. On the too little side, we’ve seen the first official cuts in the Colorado River supply after Lakes Mead and Powell dropped to historic lows. Arizona will see its Colorado River supply cut by 30% next year and yet Phoenix just overtook Philadelphia as the fifth most populous city in the nation due to booming population growth. Sara Aminzadeh [aaah min za dah] is vice president of partnerships at the U.S. Water Alliance, a group of public and private water entities. I asked her how serious the current western water stress is and whether people are grasping the gravity of the situation.

Sara Aminzadeh: The water stress is very serious and I think people are grasping the water stress situation. I think what people don't know is quite what to do about it. In other words, if you plan to move to Phoenix or other places in the West. If you live in California you see the wildfires, you see that there are water cuts and shortages, but people don't know how to change what they're doing in their daily life to adapt essentially. And I think that's the gap that we as water nonprofits have to try and fill is to help people understand how to live and how to be sustainable in this current climate.

Greg Dalton: And we come across this in climate conversation. People want to do something, well if I go vegan or you get an electric car that's important, but it’s so big. So, you know, how important is individual conservation? We often hear in California 80% of the water is ag. So, you know, brushing your teeth and shorter showers yeah that's nice, but does it really add up?

Sara Aminzadeh: It does really add up. During the last drought in 2012, we saw a tremendous improvement in our water conservation in communities all across California just by people making those simple personal decisions. You know, stopping watering their lawns, stopping washing their cars. Shorter showers and things, you know, daily decisions really did make a difference. And then on top of that there are deeper cuts and adjustments people can make they can permanently remove thirsty landscaping. They can upgrade their appliances to be more efficient. These things make a difference at a residential level and of course also at a corporate level even more so.

Greg Dalton: A town in Utah has banned future housing developments connected to the municipal water supply because they simply don’t have enough water. How common do you think that will become in the future where just water is not available?

Sara Aminzadeh: I think it could become common. We've seen a similar issue here in my hometown of Marin County where there's a question about whether there is enough water for new housing that’s planned. But you raise a good point about finding a balance between what is the personal sort of burden or impact that people face due to water shortages and what other deeper reforms that we can and need to make in agriculture and in other industrial uses, and other corporate uses as well. And so, I think that's a big place to potentially look.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, one thing that is generally true that when something becomes in shorter supply or less predictable supply prices go up. Are we gonna see water prices go up and how should that be handled because I know one of the missions of your organization is preserving affordability?

Sara Aminzadeh: Yeah, it's a great question. I think you know we saw in the last drought in California that the pricing and budget structures of water utilities did need to change. Many or most of current water utilities are based on a financial model, whether selling water of course which is a disincentive to conservation and efficiency in some ways. And so, we've seen some utilities do some really clever restructuring of their budgets so that we’re not incentivizing you know waterways, especially during times when water is scarce. At the same time as you point out, there are essential environmental justice considerations to keep in mind. We have to ensure the human rights, water for all and that necessitates you know some thoughtful programming around ensuring water access for low income communities no matter whether they can pay or not.

Greg Dalton: Right. And water occupies this unique space and you've written about human rights and climate change. Water is a human right as you noted but it's also a commodity that is bought and sold. So, how do we balance that particularly in a time of stress when certain people can afford water bill increases, but other people we know that climate hits the most vulnerable. So, how do you balance that human right and that commodity aspect of water?

Sara Aminzadeh: I saw some really innovative approaches during the last drought where there was tiered approach, a tiered rate approach where those who are using the most water, we might think about in our minds a really large property with tons of landscaping and very thirsty in general. So, we might think about a pricing approach that charges more once you use more than a certain amount of water per day, but ensures very affordable water for those in the lowest tier who might be in apartment building and are clearly not using a large amount of water. So, there are a lot of innovative pricing structures that we can think about using and that people have used.

Greg Dalton: Sara Aminzadeh is Vice President of Partnerships with the US Water Alliance, a group of public and for-profit water companies. Explain the One Water Movement and what it seeks to accomplish.

Sara Aminzadeh: So, integrated One Water Management is an approach that recognizes that all water has value and that we can manage water in a manner that provides for an essential service while also building strong communities, vibrant economies and healthy environments. So, the One Water Movement is you know what we are seeking to build across the country. We’re looking to continue to cultivate and support a diverse network of community-based organizations, artists, farmers, water utility leaders, neighborhood activists, the private sector, academic institutions. It’s really about thinking about the rich and diverse community of people across the country that are affected by water and water infrastructure which arguably is every single person in the country and can really have a stake in what our water future looks like for our country. And I think for a long-time water was sort of unseen and not thought about you know everyone uses water of course, but it wasn't thought of as something that we needed to prioritize and elevate and talk about and think about. And so, the One Water Movement seeks to change that, you know, to really cultivate appreciation for the value of water to recognize instances where we’re in danger of losing water to acknowledge and support communities who don't have access to water and to really advocate for the level of investment in our water infrastructure and in our water community that is really needed.

Greg Dalton: Right. And climate disrupts that because we’re seeing with climate change the dries get drier and the wets get wetter. So, our water systems are built on this kind of reliable predictable delivery from snow down through mountains and rivers. And we’re seeing epic storms where like weeks of water are coming down in hours or days. So, is the water system gonna be built to accommodate too little and too much?

Sara Aminzadeh: The essential guidance for water utilities I think anywhere in the country to adapt to our climate reality and our climate future is really a diverse portfolio approach so, not relying on any one supply too heavily. And Tucson actually is an example of this. The US Water Alliance is actually awarding the city of Tucson with our One Water prize this year in 2021 for their work to develop a comprehensive program over the past 10 years, reduce their reliance on groundwater and the Colorado River and create a really robust renewable water portfolio. So, you know, the utility invested $2 million in conservation education initiatives. They’re using recycled water to return flow to the river. They passed a green stormwater infrastructure fee. As we’re seeing this Colorado River cuts come through. They are in a solid place and that's really laudable, but it took a lot of time and planning, and it took an investment from the utility and from the community.

Greg Dalton: Right. And I think Los Angeles is also in a pretty good shape after decades of learning lessons of the past and investing a lot of money and putting systems in place. We’re talking about integrating stormwater, freshwater rainwater, etc. Energy is a big part of water as well, often thought of as a separate system. So, how can we decarbonize the movement of water. A lot of energy is spent pumping water over hills and around Western states and open canals.

Sara Aminzadeh: That's right, the water and wastewater services account for 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. So, if we can really look at how to change that. How to get to net zero is the new term of art that the sector is using, that would make an immense difference. The US Water Alliance actually recently launched the imagination challenge to really accelerate what we consider water's role in the race to zero emissions. And to really think about what can we do as a sector both public utilities and private companies to get there sooner. What can we do as we see stimulus funds coming through as we’re rebuilding and retrofitting our infrastructure. How can we do that in a smart way that really cuts emissions from the water sector.

Greg Dalton: Well, on that point the White House says the new infrastructure bill makes the largest investment in clean drinking water and wastewater infrastructure in American history on the order of $55 billion. What's in it? What's that going to do? How you evaluate that bill?

Sara Aminzadeh: Well, we’re thrilled. On the one hand, it's less than half of what the President originally proposed in this package. So, you know, notably a big cut there. But on the other hand, we're gonna see hundreds of thousands of water infrastructure projects roll out over the next five years that will make meaningful changes to communities who really need it. Specifically, about half the money will go out as grants and then half the money will go out as loans. So, that will be a big determinant in terms of who is able to access those resources. Some communities and utilities can afford to take out a loan and then pay it back and some cannot but we’re excited about it. There’s gonna be a huge variety in the types of projects that get funded. And it’ll be really be up to the states to determine how those funds are spent through their state revolving funds program. So, I think generally we can expect that the way that certain states have been spending their money ranging from you know pure concrete and channels and gray infrastructure to the kind of green infrastructure projects that we really like to see that offer multiple benefits. There will be a huge variety. We’ll also see a number of projects for lead service line replacement. And so, that'll be really important to reduce contamination for many communities. And then there's also a not insignificant chunk about 10 billion to address contaminants of emerging concern in drinking water, including PFAS.

Greg Dalton: In a previous Climate One episode we spoke with Bidtah Becker of the Navajo Nation about the legacy of structural racism that has prevented that tribe from having access to clean, reliable drinking water. How do you think that should be addressed and what funding or business model can bring water to historically disenfranchised communities?

Sara Aminzadeh: It absolutely needs to be addressed. We also see a lack of running water in other communities of color. There is absolutely a tie between structural and institutional racism and a lack of access to water. From my perspective, the funding that's becoming available, will become available through the water infrastructure package should be prioritized for communities who need it most and we would urge strong criteria through the state revolving fund program to allow for that. I think the five-year rollout of funds also positions us better to work with communities and organizations who may not have capacity to apply and receive and allocate funds immediately, but who we can work with over time to say okay what do we need to do over the next two years to get community input on what's needed, develop a project that people feel good about, then apply and receive funds. So, the longer time horizon that we have the five years is actually extremely significant in attempting to address equity and to ensure that the funds are distributed more equitably. We do see too often that in the wake of natural disasters I'm thinking of Houston, for example, that federal funding that comes in disproportionally goes to white affluent neighborhoods. So, it's something we need to watch and track very closely and advocate against that dynamic at every stage of the process to ensure that communities of color who have been without basic water and wastewater services are getting this funding first and are getting this funding as soon as possible.

Greg Dalton: During the hot summer months, it can be easy to worry about water supply, especially in the arid West but there’s many other climate challenges related to water like contamination from runoff from wildfires, more extreme storms. I don’t think a lot of people associate forests with cleaning their water for them but what are some other challenges or water managers dealing with the extreme events we’re seeing now and preparing for the future?

Sara Aminzadeh: Wildfires are certainly top of minds in California not only the contamination associated in an area after a burn but also the water needed to put out and manage a fire. We’ve seen mudslides in different areas of the country which cause obvious problems for water quality water access. We see flooding in the wake of a hurricane or an extreme storm that can leave communities without access to water. And earlier this year of course we saw some extreme winter storms that left communities in Texas and Mississippi and elsewhere without water for months. So, all of these pieces pose serious threats to access to water and we must begin to anticipate these events and be prepared to support communities in the immediate wake of extreme weather so the people aren’t going without water for weeks and months on end. It’s really unacceptable.

Greg Dalton: Yeah. Sara Aminzadeh is Vice President of Partnerships with the US Water Alliance. Thanks for coming on Climate One again, Sara.

Sara Aminzadeh: Thanks for having me.

Greg Dalton: On this Climate One... We’ve been talking about water and civilization, lessons of resilience and collapse. To hear more Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast on your favorite app. Talking about climate can be difficult, and kind of a downer. The trends are scary, but talking about it helps advance understanding and connects us to each other. Progress on climate will only happen if we talk and work with each other. Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Ariana Brocious is our producer and audio editor. Our audio engineer is Arnav Gupta. Our team also includes Steve Fox, Kelli Pennington, and Tyler Reed. Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

Play

Flooding in America

Otto Pilot — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 23:30:17 +0000

Flooding in America

08/14/2020

“We had one of the snowiest winters on record in Lincoln and Omaha,” reports Martha Shulski of the Nebraska Climate Office. She’s describing the weather conditions and events that led to what has become known as the “Great Flood of 2019.”

“2019 was actually one of the wettest years on record for the upper Midwest,” Shulski continues. “Snowpack sitting on the ground, lots of ice in the rivers. So the conditions were ripe such that when we did get that strong storm system move across the country...the setup was there.”

The Missouri River and its tributaries swelled above their banks throughout Nebraska, Missouri, South Dakota, Iowa and Kansas, setting record levels in 42 locations. Over a million acres of farmland were flooded, and the cost of damages and emergency response mounted into the billions.

One lesson that could be taken away from that disaster is that our aging dams and levees were woefully unprepared for such vast amounts of water. And climatologists predict that there’s more climate-related precipitation to come. Is America’s infrastructure ready for the next Great Flood?

“It’s absolutely going to fail for future climate events,” Shulski warns. “If you're not planning for the climate of 2040 or 2060 then there's going to be failure. There's going to be impacts in a very extreme way perhaps.”

Tracking floods, hurricanes and other volatile weather events in order to prevent future destruction may seem like the province of data scientists and weather nerds. But those with a stake in planning next season’s harvest have been doing this work for generations.

“When you ask a rancher or farmer how they make year to year decisions, they will go and bring out a notebook with all the detailed notes about weather and climate on their farm or ranch,” says Julia Kumari Drapkin. After 15 years as a climate reporter, Kumari Drapkin noticed “the disconnect between people’s every day daily experiences and what the climate models were telling folks.”

Kumari Drapkin created ISeeChange, a website that allows people to contribute observations about climate change in their communities, “to kind of create a mechanism for people’s every day experiences to inform models and vice versa.”

Ed Kearns is a data scientist with First Street Foundation, which maps flood risk throughout the country.

“Most neighborhoods today may not be aware of what their flood risk is; most of them aren’t aware of the adaptations that surround them,” Kearns says. “By making the flood risk information available to everyone freely we’re hoping to level that playing field.”

Betsy Otto, Global Water Director at the World Resources Institute, studies what happens on the other end of the spectrum: when there isn’t enough water to sustain people or crops. “Water is essential to all life and yet we underprice it,” says Otto. “In part because we see it as a human right. But unfortunately that means we then allow it to be used for any purpose at an extremely low or no cost.”

Additional interview:
Jack Mulliken, farmer in Northeast Nebraska

This program was recorded on July 28 and August 4, 2020, and is generously underwritten by the Water Foundation.

Guests

Julia Kumari Drapkin

CEO and Founder, ISeeChange

Ed Kearns

Chief Data Officer, First Street Foundation

Martha Shulski

Director, Nebraska State Climate Office; Nebraska State Climatologist

Betsy Otto

Global Water Director, World Resources Institute

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. On today’s program - lessons from the Great Flood of 2019.

Martha Shulski: We had one of the snowiest winters on record in Lincoln and Omaha. 2019 was actually one of the wettest years on record for the upper Midwest. Snowpack sitting on the ground, lots of ice in the rivers. So the conditions were ripe such that when we did get that strong storm system move across the country...the setup was there. [:18]

Greg Dalton: Those conditions led to catastrophic flooding along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers throughout the year. Decades-old dams and levees contributed to the devastation - over a million acres of farmland destroyed, billions of dollars in damage. What does this mean for America’s crumbling infrastructure?

Martha Shulski: If it's going to fail for current climate events, It’s absolutely going to fail for future climate events. [:06]

Greg Dalton: Flooding in America. Up next on Climate One.

---

Greg Dalton: Is America ready for the next Great Flood?

Climate One conversations feature energy companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats, the exciting and the scary aspects of the climate challenge. I’m Greg Dalton.

Greg Dalton: Rising seas and hurricanes along the coasts tend to make the splashiest headlines. But last year, the midwest and southeast states grappled with torrential rains and flooding that ruined crops and caused billions in damages. And according to climatologists, there’s more where that came from.

Martha Shulski: We can only expect it to get wetter, more extreme precipitation events...if you're not planning for the climate of 2040 or 2060 then there's going to be failure. [:11]

Greg Dalton: Tracking floods, hurricanes and other volatile weather events in order to prevent future destruction, may seem like the province of data scientists and weather nerds. But those with a stake in planning next season’s harvest have been doing this work for generations.

Julia Kumari Drapkin: When you ask a rancher or farmer how they make year to year decisions, they will go and bring out a notebook with all the detailed notes about weather and climate on their farm or ranch. [:10]

Greg Dalton: On today’s program, we’ll talk about how both data science and lived experience can help us prepare for too much water. Later, we’ll look at the other extreme, when epic droughts cause people to move from their homes because crops fail and taps run dry. This program is generously underwritten by the Water Foundation.

Joining me now are Martha Shulski, Director of the Nebraska State Climate Office, Ed Kearns,Chief Data Officer for First Street Foundation, which is mapping flood risk around the country. And Julia Kumari Drapkin,CEO of ISeeChange dot org. Drapkin created ISee Change after spending more than a decade reporting on natural disasters and climate change. She herself experienced an extreme and unexpected weather event first hand while growing up on Florida’s gulf coast.

PROGRAM PART 1

Julia Kumari Drapkin: I woke up in the middle of the night and we came downstairs and the Gulf of Mexico is in our living room, an unannounced guest. And I was 12 and the idea that we could have such a catastrophic flood event without any warning was shocking.

I created ISeeChange though, after many events memorably like I spent 15 years as a climate science reporter and saw the disconnect between people’s every day daily experiences and what the climate models were telling folks. And the disconnect both in terms of how people were experiencing events and their inability to relate it to the bigger picture data as well as the bigger picture data often being wrong about their experiences in real time. And so feeling the need to kind of create a mechanism for people’s every day experiences to inform models and vice versa we created ISeeChange which gathers and mobilizes community stories and micro data about climate impacts in real time. So I do wonder what would have been like if I had ISeeChange when I was 12 to talk about those events the no-name storm of 1993 which I think a lot of people on the West Coast of Florida will always remember.

Greg Dalton: Ed Kearns you grew up in Miami. Tell me about your early relationship with water and how that relates to the relationship now with water in Miami.

Ed Kearns: Yeah, I did grow up in Miami, Florida and grew up fishing in Biscayne Bay and in Florida Bay. And I love physics and the ocean and ended up pursuing a career in physical oceanography which has been tremendously rewarding. And after doing all sorts of different kinds of research I got the chance to come back to Florida to be a Professor at University of Miami. And then after that, worked at National Park Service in the Everglades working on the Everglades restoration project there. And just in the time between growing up there and coming back and working there, you know, to me it was obvious to see the sea level had changed there in Florida. But yeah, it is a gradual change but if you are used to being in the environment and fishing at shorelines in particular, you just can’t miss it.

But then part of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Program of course the focus on water and water budget and where water is where it isn’t and the timing of all that water. These are also things that we need to bring into the planning process and that was one of the things that really in that project and working with the government to try to figure out how to incorporate climate change into that restoration effort was one of the things that really brought climate change and water together.

Greg Dalton: Martha Shulski, the floods of 2019 were historic and unprecedented. Tell us about the scale and impact for people who didn't experience them or may have forgotten that they happened, 2019 was really an epic year in flooding particularly in the Midwest.

Martha Shulski: Yeah it sure was Greg, it was a record-setting year and timing was everything with this particular event. And I’m from Nebraska originally and I’ve lived out here different times in my life and we all know that we do have wild weather in the Midwest and things like this do happen. But the scale of 2019 was just epic. And what led to it, the antecedent conditions, the conditions in place when the storm did come along, that had a lot to do with the scale of the impact. We had a cold overall and wet winter. We had one of the snowiest winters on record in Lincoln and Omaha, frozen soils, saturated soils. 2019 was actually one of the wettest years on record for the upper Midwest. And snowpack sitting on the ground, lots of ice in the rivers.

So the conditions were ripe such that when we did get that strong storm system move across the country, which is not so uncommon to have a storm of that proportion, but the setup was there. And to have that rapid snowmelt we’re just not able to handle the water at one time that it did come. And so the spatial and temporal scale of this was quite large.

Greg Dalton: That period was January to May of 2019 was the wettest on record in the United States, causing floods as you described. One of the farmers whose livelihood was threatened is Jack Mulliken, who lives in Northeast Nebraska just outside the town of Nickerson. He farms, corn, soybeans and this year as he tried to recover even a little bit of hemp. We asked him to talk about what happened and what he thinks can be done to protect farms like his in the future.

[Start Playback]

Jack Mulliken: About half our land is in rolling up land so the flooding usually doesn’t involve that but the rest of us down the Elkhorn River Valley bottom and the Platte river bottom. We had a lot of snowfall in February and then about the middle of March, 13th of March to be exact, we had a 70° day. Everything started to melt. This hillside is full of terraces and of course they’re full of snow so the water just went right over the terraces and I went out and started cleaning them out with a loader and try to stop it but it was too late. We had 600 acres we couldn’t plant because it was just totally devastated. It’s taken until this spring to get things finished. It's just been very difficult.

I don't think you need any big flood control measures taken. The chance of an event like that happening again I think is pretty rare. I don’t believe it’s man-made climate change, it's just the way things are. You just have to adapt to it. And that’s the way we live out here, we just deal with whatever comes at us. The big thing is like on the Missouri River we have all those dams up and down that river. And the Army Corps of Engineers needs to rewrite their playbook on that a little bit because we get into the problem with environmentalists lying to keep a certain amount of water in these dams so to protect these fish and these birds and the snails and whatever else they’re worried about. And then when something like this happens, it's out of the Corps hands. They can’t release the water over the winter when they need to, to prepare for this snowmelt in the spring. They put those dams in to help with flood control. Well now it's turned into recreation and environmental issues. I don't know how to fix that because it’s such a powerful political movement. I don't know who can get in the way of it and turn it around.

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Greg Dalton: That was Jack Mulliken a farmer who lives outside Nickerson, Nebraska. Julia Kumari Drapkin, if you ran into a chance to meet Jack Mulliken, what would you say to him?

Julia Kumari Drapkin: Oh, I would sit down with a coffee with Jack and talk. One of the things that I think when it comes to understanding flood risk or climate risk what it requires is time. Iterative dialogue over time and deep listening. Deep listening amongst all stake holders. Farmers, fishermen, the people that we associate potentially in kind of the way that we have paritied the climate conversation. We say, oh they are climate deniers, they don’t believe in science. A farmer or a fisherman knows more science than any climate modelers sitting in front of their computer who hasn’t been outside in a long time can. The idea of it that farmers and ranchers don’t understand what’s happening in the environment is completely and totally flawed. It’s the lens in which they are seeing and understanding those changes and the way it’s been politicized.

So if there was an opportunity to sit down with him as well as some of the members of the Army Corps who are doing flood control, we can have a really great conversation and understand the different, the math and the calculations going into a lot of these decisions. And that’s why we’ve created ISeeChange which is its own social media platform for communities to gather their stories and their data so that they can have their own evidence of how change is happening year to year so it’s much more legible. And we actually developed that from ranchers in Colorado who don’t believe in climate change. Because when you ask a rancher or farmer how they make year to year decisions, they will go and bring out a notebook with all the detailed notes about weather and climate on their farm or ranch. And when you sync that to a much more community pool of knowledge wherein potentially someone from the Army Corps who’s talking about a water level controls can actually converse, you know, talk about what their concerns are for that particular year. Then you have a deeper empathy and understanding and more nuanced understanding of year to year risks.

Greg Dalton: Martha Shulski, you go around and talk to farmers and Rotary clubs in Oklahoma. So how do you have these hard conversations with people that are in a very different place coming from perhaps the lived experience that they had that maybe not quite the same as an academic scientist?

Martha Shulski: Oh I think how you frame it and how you talk about it makes a big difference. And the content doesn’t necessarily have to be different but how it is presented does make a difference. So I tend to do my research and do background and understand about the group that I’m talking to and frame the message such that they do care about it, you know. What does that group care about? Let's connect those dots to climate change, because climate touches everything it touches all of us.

And in some cases maybe you don’t even talk about climate change. So this person maybe you talk about risk management and profitability and decreasing soil erosion and making sure their farm ground is up out of the river bottom so that’s less likely to be vulnerable to these large-scale flooding events.

So in certain settings there are angles that you can take that is not controversial like your health, like extreme weather events. I can't feel that average temperatures in Nebraska have warmed about a degree and a half. But what I can feel is the number of 90 degree days are going up or those dewpoint temperatures are going up or we got a lot of heavy rainfall recently. And I try and remind people that weather events that’s how climate change is manifested. So those are the ways that you make it tangible and local and relevant.

Greg Dalton: Ed Kearns, how many Americans are facing the risk of floods driven by human caused climate change and don't realize it?

Ed Kearns: Unfortunately, too many. And so from the First Street Foundation viewpoint so our foundation was created to communicate this climate change risk. And we picked flood for the first risk to consider because it's the most expensive, most pervasive across our country. And so one of our challenges was to do a current risk assessment for today to see, you know, let everybody know what the risk is today and what it's gonna be in the future.

So I kind of equate it to walking into the middle of the movie, right, and so climate change is the movie. So the first thing we have to try to convey to folks is what's going on what’s the plot how do we get here? And then we’re gonna tell them about where this movie is going where the plot is gonna go and how the movie is gonna end. And so taking a communication approach that’s focused on the individual to try to make all this complexity of climate change climate models and hydraulic models and storm surge and all these different kinds of flooding that are combined for a total flood risk to try to get that information down to a consumable level for the individual is a challenge.

And at first what we try to do is boil all that information down all that risk assessment down into one number between 1 and 10. One being minimal risk, 10 being extreme risk. And to let the individual property owners so our, the First Street Foundation flood model has created a flood risk assessment for every single one of the 142 million properties in the contiguous U.S. today. And we’re targeting through flood factor.com that individual that needs to understand at their property at their home what’s the risk today and what it’s gonna be in 30 years. And boil that down, that cumulative risk and severity down to a single number. The idea is to wake them up to this reality and then urge them and point them to resources where they can find out more about their local community, their local situation, their local flood risk and really start to understand it. And then take steps to mitigate that risk

Greg Dalton: Julia Kumari Drapkin what do you think about the First Street model you think you have questions or concerns about its accuracy or what’s under the hood?

Julia Kumari Drapkin: Oh always, I always wanna look under the hood of a model. Because when you sit with a modeler and you sit with ISeeChange data you add granularity and what I mean by that is you add details that allow the model, you know, models make assumptions about risk and they’re averaging large amounts of time and space and intersections and they can’t always really account for your true risk.

And so what we, our approach to modeling whether its flood modeling or heat modeling or climate modeling is to take community knowledge about those particular places paired with observation over time about impact. And then compare it to the model and integrate it with the model to validate it. We call it validation, model validation. In some places FEMA has like New Orleans or Miami spent more time because of repeat loss. And so there’s a little bit more of mapping in certain places, where Ocean City, New Jersey where we have a very active community on ISeeChange.org documenting both rain and tidal flooding. They haven’t had good mapping in a long, long time and First Street Foundation has provided added service.

So I think what we are looking for in the age of models or ads or here’s flood risk on a phone is to interpret data as a conversation where community members have very much a role to play in annotating that data and making it more correct. In fact, in creating incentive structures for communities to invest in adaptation and infrastructure improvements. Because when we’re using an AI or a model or an algorithm to tell us about flood risk and that’s fixed and that becomes like fixed knowledge that is immutable then there’s no incentive for the city of Miami or Miami Beach to invest in the infrastructure and get the value that they’re looking to achieve with it, let alone a homeowner. So we added that kind of the value add, that context, the annotation, the validation of a flood model. We also add impacts that you can’t see from a flood model when it comes to there’s pollution in my yard and my kids can’t play from all this flooding. Or I can’t get to work or the bus stop is running.

And then we also create room again for people like Jeff in Nebraska to add his detailed knowledge. Because one of the things about all these folks who are being impacted in Midwest down south in a Mississippi Delta in the Gulf of Mexico is that there is so much knowledge about how an environment behaves that if we create a system in which a flood modeler, FEMA, First Street Foundation, the Army Corps of Engineers can actually generate knowledge through dialogue with community members then they won't feel like as if they are prisoners to math, math that is often wrong.

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Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about harnessing knowledge and experience to battle climate change.

Julia Kumari Drapkin: We’re actually up against our own brains a little bit in terms of how we understand change over time....you can remember last year's weather and you can remember this year's weather. But five years ago can you tell me what the winter was doing? [:11]

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

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Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton, and we’re talking about the increasing threat of climate-induced flooding. My guests are Julia Kumari Drapkin, founder of ISeeChange, Martha Shulski, Director of the Nebraska State Climate Office and state climatologist, and Ed Kearns,Chief Data Officer for First Street Foundation, which is mapping flood risk throughout the country.

When cities spend big bucks to arm themselves against climate risk, they naturally want the best return on their investment. In many cases, that means prioritizing the protection of wealthy neighborhoods over the less privileged.

PROGRAM PART 2

Ed Kearns: Yes, so a lot of cities as they’re trying to make these decisions about where to armor their cities perhaps from the sea where to install levees or pumps these large adaptation features that we mentioned, these are enormously expensive infrastructure to put in place. And so yeah a lot of the financial models may include neighborhood values in order to figure out where to move the infrastructure here or there. So one of the things that First Street is very adamant about is democratizing the information. So that we’re moving the asymmetry and the information that’s available to these communities in these neighborhoods, right. And so most neighborhoods today may not be aware of what their flood risk is; most of them aren’t aware of the adaptations that surround them. It’s one of the things that we take for granted that many of our cities are very well engineered great civil servants that are, you know, have worked hard to protect our neighborhoods. But with that comes a lack of awareness. And so by making the flood risk information available to everyone freely we’re hoping to level that playing field.

On top of that what First Street Foundation has created something we called the flood lab which is a group of researchers, we have about 100 researchers now that are now actively using our data and they’re looking at societal and economic questions such as that. Are there disadvantaged communities that have more flood risk than we understand, what is their flood risk can we quantify that. Can we start to through the power of data communicate what the actual risk is for these different situations and arm the decision-makers with the right information they need to make the right decisions.

Greg Dalton: Julia you live at sea level near water in a swampy area of New Orleans. How do you feel about that and New Orleans spent tens of billions of dollars recently after Hurricane Katrina to armor the town. Is that holding up?

Julia Kumari Drapkin: We’re still here, right? I bought my mortgage in 2013. I think communities like mine Miami, Norfolk, Charleston, Ocean City, New Jersey, always shout out to them communities in the Midwest. If you are experiencing persistent flooding or if you’re experiencing risk, then we are learning fast and first. We are a first community if you are First Street Foundation in terms of understanding these events and details and adapting to them, innovating around that, understanding what mechanisms we need to use. The impacts of those of federal policy the impacts of investment and understanding the impacts on every level of our community. And also understanding that our environment is not just the natural environment.

I live on a swampy area, I learned early in coming back to New Orleans having started ISeeChange in rural Colorado that living close to water in New Orleans is actually a great idea. Because we are subsiding by not having saturated hydrated soils in a swampy environment you actually are gonna be in low ground. Living closer to the water puts you, you have elevation you have a natural elevation. So I’m at zero but my neighbors across the street are -3, -6, -7. And that happens in the Midwest in terms of being on a river and having that natural levee plane and how that natural levee plane works. So there is this -- and to be able to adapt to climate change we need to understand the natural environment in which your city exists. And again we try and encourage that conversation and dialogue in ISeeChange about that. But it also means understanding the built environment and the social environment. Because all of those combined create risk and remember only looking at the flood models or like an economic valuation of what is value in terms of what to protect then we’re making mistakes.

So in New Orleans we are protecting the city but when we don’t invest or prioritize infrastructure to protect communities of color then we are actually not valuing the cultural and social fabric of the city. A city that before COVID had 13 million visitors to come and eat our food and enjoy our music and enjoy our culture. And by pushing those folks out then we are pretty much doing economic damage to our city over time. Same with the folks who are fishing in the Louisiana coast who for the last three years because of flooding and rain in the Midwest we’ve had our flood infrastructure the Bonnet Carre Spillway opened for the last three years. Historic, this thing is never been opened like it was opened twice or three times in the last century but it’s been opened three times in the last three years. And that freshwater coming into the system with nitrogen and fertilizer from Midwestern farmers has devastated the oyster men and the shrimpers. And I promise you they’ve been talking with the Army Corps of Engineers about this for decades. And that information could have been reacted to decades ago, we could have planned for this economically, socially, culturally. So I guess in the map of where infrastructure is placed and what it protects and how it is valued, there needs to be a consideration for the things that are not easy math. And that really is how we truly understand, you know, there's a new way of doing economics. And I think that’s very lofty but it plays out functionally in very real ways for communities every day.

Greg Dalton: Martha Shulski, speaking of infrastructure there's a lot of dams in the Midwest, that a lot of people live within 20 miles of a flood control dam. Many of those dams are nearing the end of their useful life just as the states are expected to experience more intense rain events. So are those dams safe and how’s that gonna play out and should we maybe rethink the way water is controlled and dammed in a world that was built in a world that was very predictable in terms of precipitation and now we have this very volatile world.

Martha Shulski: I mean the short answers will be no and yes. Taking a look at dams as well as other infrastructure in the cities and how our cities are built. Are they able to sustain these high-intensity precipitation events? If it's going to fail for current climate events it’s absolutely going to fail for future climate events. I mean we can only expect it to get wetter, more extreme precipitation events. And so certainly our planning efforts if they're not incorporating these climate projections, if you're not planning for the climate of 2040 or 2060 then there's going to be failure there's going to be impacts in a very extreme way perhaps.

So I worked on a few projects not dams specifically but I worked with cities across four states in the Midwest on how best to incorporate climate change into the planning efforts. And learned a lot about that and developed a tool in a participatory way with these cities to make something that is useful to them and that they will take to their city council or to their mayor or this information kind of distilling these climate projections in a way that they can put it into actual planning efforts. Not something that as climatologists we think is important, but something that from the planning perspective that is useful and usable. So absolutely it's critically important.

Greg Dalton: Ed, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently just in June of 2020 unveiled a plan to protect Miami-Dade County from hurricane storm surges over the next 50 years with floodgates across rivers, mile-long flood wall on its upscale waterfront, cost nearly $5 billion. I know this is a bit off the edge of your modeling but where is all the money going to come from and what are we looking at in terms of the price tag to protect American property from the floods that we know are coming?

Ed Kearns: Yeah, well where the money will come from is, you know, from of course from our taxes. But these are gonna be some really important decisions for communities to make with the federal government. The federal government in this case is putting a solution on the table, a plan on the table asking for comment. And as Julia was saying there’s a lot of wonderful people in Miami a lot of great water engineers and a lot of civil servants that care very deeply about this and they’ve gotten lots of great feedback going into the core process. So it’s gonna take some number of years to go through this but it is the community’s decision about how the city is going to be protected. The technology is there but these investment decisions are gonna have to be a community effort. And so I would just urge everybody in Miami especially to participate in that process.

Greg Dalton: But we’re just not gonna be able to afford to protect and defend every piece of property from either coastal, you know, ocean sea level rise or from flooding rivers. Managed retreat implicitly means that some people are not gonna be protected. People are gonna have to be bought out, moved. There's a story there is it Julia, to say how that’s gonna play out?

Julia Kumari Drapkin: Well, I think that managed retreat which is very challenging. And a lot of folks are assuming that these conversations are data-driven. I think it goes back to what we were been talking about earlier. If you march into my community and show me a map where everything is red in 2050 or 2070. That is a paralyzing experience. That does not actually generate the kinds of impacts that you would like to see which is community members having conversations about what to do. It actually is a conversation ender.

So when you create space for residents to really have conversations about what they’ve been seeing over time and how it is impacting them and what they want to do about it, that's when you can get into okay does it make sense for us to figure out a way for us to move. Nobody has figured that out. We are being asked to do that kind of work in terms of having community members use ISeeChange to have those very complicated and nuanced dialogues. But there's no singular recipe for success on it so much as it is a community dialogue and decision. It will happen naturally over time as people face persistent risk and choose to leave a place. And if there needs to be policies in place there needs to be planning in place for which communities are going to grow adjacent to those communities that are retreating. There's gonna be really interesting questions and conversations about how to undevelop the coast. And there'll be innovations and opportunities therein.

Greg Dalton: Ed Kearns, I looked up the National Mall because there’s some suggestion that the Potomac River is gonna you know, encroaching on this iconic place in our country’s history or national capital. What are some of the places that are really iconic in the American mind like National Mall that are at risk?

Ed Kearns: Well, I haven’t gone through and looked at all the different places but a lot of that area of course was a wetland when it was created way back when. As Julia mentioned before the main thing to get across is that, you know, this idea of stationarity is dead that 10 years from now is not gonna look like today and it certainly not gonna look like it was 10 years ago. And this goes for all these things that, you know, for national monuments and these kinds of parks landmarks that we've all taken for granted. These things with rising tides with increased rainfalls heavier rainfalls these are things that change is coming. And it kind of shocks us alright, because climate change is not intuitive back to like Martha’s point. You have to explain it in a different way even for a scientist, we’re still human, it’s still not intuitive to us either that’s why we lean on the science and we lean on the probabilities we lean on the numbers. Because this is telling the story that as humans we have a hard time grasping because in our lifetimes we’re used to seeing change with our eyes at a certain rate in a certain scale. And climate change is just different it’s at scales of time and space that is hard for any one individual to understand.

Julia Kumari Drapkin: And also remembering it, because the human brain is really binary in the sense that you can't remember -- you can remember last year's weather and you can remember this year's weather. But five years ago can you tell me what the winter was doing? We’re actually up against our own brains a little bit in terms of how we understand change over time. The social science suggests that we adapt and we've been working with social scientists to kind of analyze our data on ISeeChange about how people describe these events over time and it’s actually its own quantitative data. But the human brain adapts within a window of two to eight years, right. Suddenly there are people in Ocean City, New Jersey who’ve been flooding since the 90s who stopped considering that a special thing and they stopped posting about it on social media. But on ISeeChange we prompt them, hey, we heard about flooding and there's a tidal event there’s a rain event check your rain gauge show us which intersection. And over time we have that accumulated data for people to see the extent changing the subtle changes over time. Because two to eight years when we have 10 years to actually do something about this problem isn’t gonna fly. Our greatest asset, to adapt, is also our greatest vulnerability.

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Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. We’ve been talking about growing floods turbo charged by a climate that is destabilized by burning fossil fuels. In the future, scientists say we can expect wet periods to be wetter and dry periods to be drier. Coming up, the dry side of that equation - managing water scarcity.

Betsy Otto: The problem with water is we treat it as if it’s, you know, inexhaustible, right, we can always find it or we can always move it from somewhere else.

Well that game is really starting to be up.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

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Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. We’re discussing the resource that makes life on earth possible - fresh water.

Joining us now to talk about how that resource is managed throughout the world is Betsy Otto, Global Water Director for the World Resources Institute. Water insecurity is already a huge problem in many parts of the world. But the current COVID-19 pandemic, with its ubiquitous refrain of “wash your hands,” has added another level of urgency.

PROGRAM PART 3

Betsy Otto: About 3 billion people, 40% of the world’s population don’t have adequate water in their households to wash their hands to the degree for 20 seconds that most of us are just accustomed to be able to do when we turn on the tap, imagine that.

Greg Dalton: And so what are those people doing what are the accommodations and are they getting sick more because of their lack of access to water

Betsy Otto: Well, you know, no doubt they’re at far greater risk. And whether or not they’re getting sick more is hard to actually say, it’s hard to imagine that they are not and that they are certainly more vulnerable. A lot of countries are doing everything that they can especially in the developing world where a lot of these folks live in various crowded circumstances to provide hand washing stations and so on, it’s of course difficult then to socially distance in those places. But we’re talking about places where people have multiple generations living in a single small household maybe a space in one or two rooms. So social distancing is already very difficult, you know, for those folks. It’s a very challenging thing.

Greg Dalton: And we think of this as a, you know, developing country problem but also even in California there are people who do not have reliable access to drinking water. So how much of this is actually in the United States?

Betsy Otto: It’s a pretty significant issue in the United States too. I think it’s been a hidden one for a long time. People might have known about some of the challenges that Flint, Michigan faced with lead in service lines and lead poisoning that happened for specially children, terrible story. But there’d been shut offs, water shut offs in cities for a long time for poor people who weren’t able to pay their water bills. Other areas in California where there just isn’t good access even to piped water. So that’s a problem as well. But in places where city water utilities are really gonna be struggling, a lot of water utilities depend on for their income commercially uses of water for example, restaurants, hotels etc. And so, you know, industries that have been either shutdown or much reduced in schedules. So it’s really challenging for them to have enough money just to run their own systems. And of course in the U.S. our water infrastructure systems have been run down for a long, long time. So it’s a kind of perfect storm of a lot of challenges.

Greg Dalton: Right. And we have aging infrastructure whether it’s bridges or just about everything else in this country. We have underinvested in our infrastructure compared to other economies and now with spiraling national debt, you know, trillions of dollars being run up on our kid’s credit cards are we gonna have money to invest in water infrastructure for the future?

Betsy Otto: I think it's a scary question it’s a scary prospect that we won’t. I mean if you think about something like $10 trillion has already gone out from the world's economies just to address the immediate impacts of the COVID pandemic. That’s not even speaking about what’s gonna be necessary to invest in recovery economies going forward. So we’re thinking about serious money real money and of course we spent a couple of trillion in this country alone. I think the key question is here too is how to build back better. As we think about where we invest whether that's in renewable energy and the energy side the kinds of things that we can deal with respect to water infrastructure what can we do to ensure that our systems can operate more effectively that they’re more resilient to the kinds of climate shocks that we’re likely to see in the future. And that includes things like investing in forest and watersheds which are 60% of our drinking water in the U.S. comes from forest and watersheds. We don’t even think about those as being infrastructure but in fact they’re super important green infrastructure.

So there are things that we can do differently just first of all ensure that we have more resilient systems in the first place, and then water utilities are really gonna have to take different approaches in many ways on how they manage their systems going forward. We kind of got used to over years not doing adequate operations and maintenance all the way along. And those customers who can afford to pay are gonna need to be willing to pay more. We’re certainly paying more for other things like our cellphones and so on. We’ve got used to paying very low rates honestly in many places for water and that can’t necessarily continue.

Greg Dalton: Water is a human right identified by the United Nations and it’s also a commodity that’s bought and sold. And there’s, you know, gazillion number of bottled water sold every day, every year. So should water prices go up to better reflect its value to us? Water is life and it’s really underpriced.

Betsy Otto: It’s absolutely true. I mean the paradox of water and diamonds, right. Diamonds have no real intrinsic value except for a couple of very small purposes because they’re so hard and yet they’re worth so much, right. And water is essential to all life and yet we underprice it. In part because we see it as a human right. But unfortunately that means we then allow it to be used for any purpose at an extremely low or no cost. California is a great example of that. There's essentially no cost for water that’s used other than the cost to pump it and to move it around, treat it and so on. And that’s really not tenable. It ends up creating all kinds of perverse incentives to spend our precious water on things that don't necessarily make sense or that don’t have economic value relative to the value of that water. So we need to start to get those price signals in place better.

A lot of cities actually had inclining block rates; they increase rates for water use beyond basic household needs. So if you want to use a lot of water for example, to irrigate and water your landscapes. Then you should pay a lot more money for that. So there are ways to do this. There are ways to actually direct the price signals in the right way to get people first of all to invest in conservation and efficiency. And secondly not to use water for example, to grow alfalfa in the desert which makes no sense but we do it all over the place.

Greg Dalton: Alfalfa, yeah, ships to Japan to feed cows. There’s questions on those things. Although, you know, some people will argue that, you know, almonds get a bad rap in California that they’re actually justified that they are higher-margin crops higher value-added crops, right, that those actually make sense according to a capitalistic economy.

Betsy Otto: Yeah, that’s a tough one that’s a complicated one for sure. But I mean I think you need to take into account all of those different factors. What is the value added to the crop that’s being grown or the product that’s being produced with the water that goes into it. But the other thing that’s really important here and it’s a big part of what we look at WRI, World Resources Institute through our Aqueduct tool is to understand the playspace nature of the water demand and supply. So alfalfa grown in the desert makes no sense. Alfalfa grown in very water rich areas, well, you might argue that that makes more sense, right. So you need to think about the context in which water is going into a pound of beef or, you know, a bale of cotton. And that’s a really important component to this picture as well.

Greg Dalton: And do you think government should come in and say you can grow this there and that there?

Betsy Otto: I think we should at least be sending the right kinds of economic and price signals so that those kinds of decisions are being made more readily. We use the example of Australia which in its Murray-Darling a river basin which is a primary water source for a lot of the country’s agricultural areas and for its cities. It actually set up a water trading approach when they said this is how much water is available we allocate it to all the different users. And then if there’s a use that’s of a higher value that you want to trade your water to there’s a means by which that kind of movement of water can happen allocating it more to higher value basis.

So the government set up that system they don't necessarily tell people what they can and can’t do with it. They’ve created a market system that allows for that to happen more efficiently. I think we need to create more systems like that but we need to do the precursor steps of that, you know, if we were gonna have for example climate change, cap and trade for example or a way of saying we want to limit greenhouse gases to X amount, you have to have a cap first.

The problem with water is we treat it as if it’s, you know, inexhaustible, right, we can always find it or we can always move it from somewhere else. Well that game is really starting to be up. And I think that people are starting to understand that’s not true anymore. But you first need to understand what’s a sustainable yield California is actually starting to look at this with respect to ground water. It's a very complex, you know, issue. But that’s what you need to do first and then within that under that cap then you can start to think about how you’re allocating water more efficiently.

Greg Dalton: How is climate disrupting freshwater access? We’ve heard earlier in this program about too much water floods. And also know that there’s gonna be more extremes; not enough water. How is climate gonna drive water scarcity and what parts of the United States?

Betsy Otto: Well, certainly in the desert southwest and to some degree in California we already seen the kinds of extreme droughts that California recently went through. We’re seeing much reduced rainfall and a lot of the climate models have predicted that and in fact that's what's coming to pass so we’re seeing decreased snowpack in the mountains and decreased rainfall. But what we see actually in a lot of places are just incredible disruptions to what had been the sort of normal hydrology the normal precipitation patterns in a given place. So we’re seeing more extremes. We’re seeing water come in a form of more extreme intense storms in places and then long droughts often in the same places. So where I live in the Washington, DC area we’ve experienced that many, many times and those extremes are getting more extreme. And this is true the world over. So we’re seeing real differences in when the timing and the amount of precipitation that’s arriving. So it’s very difficult to plan and it’s very difficult to understand how you manage a water system in those kinds of circumstances.

But we’re also seeing this is a very important point it's not just climate change it’s also the demand for water is increasing in a lot of places. So it’s that demand and supply relationship. In fact we’ve done some analysis and we projected at 2030 and what the climate impacts could be in much of the world. The primary driver of water stress that is the water scarcity, associated with supply versus demand is driven by demand. People eating more beef using more water more electricity of course power plants require and electric power plants requires huge amount of water for cooling. Hydropower plants use a lot of water, a lot of it evaporates in the reservoirs behind the power dam. So all those kinds of factors are also part of what we’re seeing in these we can call them climate disruptions but there are other factors at play though.

Greg Dalton: How big a risk is that to corporations? A lot of water is used to make textiles, Coca-Cola. Is corporate America looking at water risk as something that they need to manage beyond the fence lines in their factories?

Betsy Otto: More and more. And in fact it’s interesting in some ways it’s the private sector that has awakened more to the question around water stress and water risks than in other sectors government has been slower to respond. Companies, because they always have to be thinking about material risks to their businesses and they have experienced the impacts of disruptions where they couldn’t get water or there was too much water from flooding, understand what that's like. So they've been doing a lot of analysis many, many companies to try to understand where in the world are they facing those kinds of risks. Again, many companies are using WRI’s Aqueduct tool to do that. So we work with a lot of companies and investors are also starting to ask very tough questions of companies.

I’ll give you an interesting example of this. We did some analysis in India where we looked at all the power plants in India. And we show that in 2016 I think it was they lost 1.6 TW of generating power just because of water shortages. A billion dollars in just direct revenues that they weren’t able to generate from those power plants, not even all of that multiplier effects and that loss of power, right. That was enough to run Sri Lanka for a year. That woke policymakers up. We were able to do that analysis at an asset power plant level and then aggregate it up to companies and investors paid a lot of attention to that. So investors are now starting to seek this information.

We just did some recent work with BlackRock where we looked at real estate investment trusts or they did using some Aqueduct data. And they found that I think it was two thirds of all of U.S. real estate investment trust properties are at high risk of water stress by their estimation by 2030. In other places in the world almost all of those real estate properties in real estate investment trusts are at very high risk of water stress. Now of course there’s also very high risk in many of those places of flooding and catastrophic flooding too. So they’re being really hit by both sides of that. So there's a lot of attention being paid to this in a private sector.

Greg Dalton: Right. And I read some of your work, I read a turn that I’ve never seen before that is quite interesting. Water bankruptcy which really kind of has a resonance, right, because we think of water, well, yeah, there’s droughts and you kind of certainly living in California you tighten your belt a little bit you get through it then you relax your belts a little bit. What is water bankruptcy and where is that happening?

Betsy Otto: Well, I think, you know, where there are not systems in place which fortunately California does have frankly a fairly good and robust water planning system where in bad droughts you do start to tighten your belt and you do start to change where water can be allocated. And it’s quite remarkable how well California as an economy did during that four, five year thousand year drought; in many parts of the world that doesn't exist. And so India for example is a frightening case. India has very little in the way of surface water that’s not already over tap. So it is gone to groundwater stores to, you know, for industry to grow cultural products and so on. And if you look at many of its groundwater basins it’s really depleting them at rates that are really, really scary when you consider that they have over a billion people and a rapidly growing economy. So they could hit water bankruptcy. A couple of years ago the major national planning agency for the government of India basically said that this was their existential crisis. That if they don't solve this if they don’t find ways to do that they will be in serious trouble.

Greg Dalton: Are there bright spots in water? Where do you see bright spots in the way that we’re managing and valuing water properly.?

Betsy Otto: Yeah, I’ll name a couple. Corporates are one, we’re seeing some really exciting work being done. I’ll mention Cargill, big agricultural firm based here in the U.S. operates over the world, one of the largest firms in agricultural production. And they’ve actually set some targets that are based in the context of the places where they’re operating where water is an issue in those places to actually try to reduce their overall footprint and even replenish some of the water in those areas. And that we’re seeing more and more companies wanting to do that in the same way that maybe they’re setting greenhouse gas targets, where they actually wanna be even net negative. And so I think water is the next frontier in that. I see that is a really positive outcome. They see themselves as, you know, that’s important for their business but also as actors within communities if they want to continue in those places.

I would say another place that we don't hear much about is in Ethiopia. Second largest country in Africa rapidly growing very young population very rapidly expanding economy at eight and 10% growth rates. And a number of years ago if you have to go back probably several decades ago during a previous regime that was in command in power in Ethiopia. There was an area in Northwest Ethiopia called Tigray which was a kind of a moonscape. People had cut down on the trees, they had just depleted the soils people were leaving because there was nowhere to stay. And water was a huge issue there. And so as a community in this area in part because they were also fighting it’s guerillas against the government Marxist regime. They by hand created, they did tree planting, they put in sort of wells to sort of catch rainwater and infiltrate water into groundwater. And it is now an area where people move in, they migrate into Tigray. And one of the primary benefits of this when soil fertility increased agricultural yields increase businesses-based on agricultural production have grown up. So it’s a kind of somewhat rare but a very replicable example of what we can do more of. We can go in and restore landscapes and we can actually improve our water systems.

---

Greg Dalton: You’ve been listening to Climate One. We’ve been talking about managing water resources globally and right here in America’s heartland. We just heard from Betsy Otto, Global Water Director at the World Resources Institute. My other guests today were Julia Kumari Drapkin,CEO and Founder of ISeeChange dot org, Ed Kearns,Chief Data Officer with First Street Foundation, and Martha Shulski, Nebraska State Climatologist.

This program was generously underwritten by the Water Foundation.

Greg Dalton: To hear more Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your pods. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. It really does help advance the climate conversation.

Greg Dalton: Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Tyler Reed is our producer. Sara-Katherine Coxon is the strategy and content manager. Steve Fox is director of advancement. Anny Celsi edited the program. Our audio team is Mark Kirchner, Arnav Gupta, and Andrew Stelzer. Dr. Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

Weather Whiplash

10 Episodes

Play

Fire and Water: A Year of Climate Conversations

Otto Pilot — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 15:27:18 +0000

Fire and Water: A Year of Climate Conversations

12/07/2018

From fires and floods to hurricanes and hot temperatures, 2018 put climate on the front page in ways it hadn’t been before. Yet amidst the disruption, clean energy prices continued to fall, climate-conscious technologies continued to progress, and people living on the front lines of climate change found ways to adapt and thrive. Join us for a look back on some of our most memorable conversations of 2018.

Guests

Lizzie Johnson

Staff Writer, San Francisco Chronicle

Scott Stephens

Professor of Fire Science, University California, Berkeley

Francis Suarez

Mayor, Miami, Florida

Steve Benjamin

Mayor, Columbia, South Carolina

Sylvester Turner

Mayor, Houston, Texas

Solomon Hsiang

Associate Professor of Public Policy, UC Berkeley

Katharine Mach

Associate Professor, Marine Ecosystems and Society, University of Miami

Arlie Hochschild

Professor Emerita, University of California Berkeley

Eliza Griswold

Journalist, The New Yorker

Debbie Dooley

President, Conservatives for Energy Freedom, Co-Founder, Tea Party Movement

Christine Pelosi

Executive Committeewoman, Democratic National Committee

Christiana Figueres

Former Executive Secretary, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

Roy Scranton

Author, We're Doomed. Now What?

Davida Herzl

CEO and Co-Founder, Aclima

Gabriel Kra

Managing Director, Prelude Ventures

Mike Selden

CEO and Co-founder, Finless Foods

Patrick O. Brown

CEO and Founder, Impossible Foods

Sanjay Dastoor

Co-Founder, Boosted Boards and CEO, Skip Scooters

Megan Rose Dickey

Senior Reporter, TechCrunch

Announcer: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, the economy, and the environment.

In 2018, climate broke through the headlines... with fire and water.

[Newsclips]

Announcer: And conversations about how to adapt – and thrive – became more important than ever.

Lizzie Johnson: It’s really hard to rebuild a normal life when your job is disrupted. You don’t have housing. You’re trying to rebuild but the resources aren’t there.

Sylvester Turner: What we are needing now is funding to build a much more resilient city because there will be another storm, okay. Climate change is real.

Announcer: A Year of Climate Conversations. Up next on Climate One.

Announcer: I’m Devon Strolovitch. Climate One conversations – with oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats – are recorded before a live audience, and hosted by Greg Dalton. On this special episode we look back at the climate stories of 2018 by listening to excerpts from a year of climate conversations – beginning with the fires in the American West.

[CLIP]

Higher temperatures and lower humidity, brought on by climate change, are whipping up hotter and bigger wildfires, taking damage to property, people, and ecosystems to a new level. In September, Greg spoke to Lizzie Johnson, a Staff Writer at the San Francisco Chronicle, where covering wildfires is now a full-time, year-round beat, and to UC Berkeley Professor of Fire Science Scott Stephens, who’s written about managing fire and forests in a changing climate. They began their conversation by hearing from Catlin Tucker, a part-time teacher who survived the 2017 Tubbs Fire north of San Francisco which killed more than 20 people and destroyed nearly 3000 homes, including her own. Tucker described what it was like to grab her kids and run for their lives in the middle of the night.

Catlin Tucker: There was no warning. The power had gone off our fan had stopped working. It was warm in our bedroom I thought that was odd but I knew it was windy and went back to sleep. And I woke up the next time around 2:30 and my husband had heard something outside and it was a policeman driving up our road yelling “You need to get out of your houses a fire is coming.” I have two kids. My daughter is 11 my son is 9. So my heart was pounding and as we put them in the car it was almost like snow. The ash was thick already the smoke was so thick already. I think I was in shock about the whole thing when you don’t have any warning that there could be a fire and then you're evacuated and you're worried about losing your home it’s just so surreal. I mean I’ve obviously heard of people losing their homes in fire. I remember the fire up in Lake County a couple years before. The fire is now part of my story and I definitely still have trauma, are we building in the same place and that gives me some anxiety. People keep saying things like isn’t crazy this has happen like so unusual and I can’t believe this is happening. And now I feel like because of the choices we’re making in terms of our climate, I just feel like stop saying this is crazy, this is so typical like this is the new norm. I think the new norm is gonna be one thing after another and that’s what really scary to me is that I know how hard it is to lose a home and have your entire life disrupted because of that.

Greg Dalton: That was Catlin Tucker. She’s currently living in the town of Sonoma while her family rebuilds their home in Santa Rosa north of San Francisco. Lizzie Johnson, let's hear about another victim, Ed Bledsoe, 76-year-old man. Tell us his story.

Lizzie Johnson: Yeah so Ed Bledsoe lives at near Redding with his wife and their two great grandchildren. And during the Carr Fire it swept him really suddenly he had just gone down the street to pick up a check from his doctor and, you know, all he was gone for those 15 minutes his wife and those little kids they were 4 and 5 years old they both burned in their home. And it shocked a lot of people just because it came out of nowhere and they were two little kids and they were some of the first victims of that fire tornado.

Greg Dalton: And Scott Stephens, one reason that Ed Bledsoe didn't take those little kids with him that day, it was 113°. So tell us how the high temperatures and a low humidity is kind of amplifying these fires we've seen recently in the West?

Scott Stephens: Yeah we have temperature like that and humidity. What it does is it just sucks out moisture out of fuel. So dead fuel certainly gonna get drier and we know that’s happening already just because of climate change and warming. And even the green fuels can have impact from drought. So if you actually make fuel drier, you’re just gonna be able to burn it easier and have higher intensity more flame lengths.

Greg Dalton: So climate is making it drier, hotter more, you know, amplifying these fires. Set the stage for us Scott Stephens in terms of the records that we’re seeing. Are there really more fires or is it just our perception is it just because they’re hitting urban areas. Because nationally there’s actually fewer acres burned this year than last year.

Scott Stephens: I hear this a lot like, you know, fire areas up and things of that nature. I think fire area in California is somewhat variable certainly. I don’t think there’s a big increase in trend may be starting to see a trend on that but as you said, we’re seeing fires impact people. So when fires impact people and communities and kill people as we just heard, we’re talking about major impacts. So that I think elevates the whole discussion that happens around fire and there’s no doubt fire season is getting longer because of climate change, more variation, precipitation we can have fires on the ground longer that's absolutely true. But it's really impacting people's lives more and I think that’s what happened with the conversation.

Greg Dalton: And so why are fires coming to people now more than in the past. I mean what is it about the last couple years that suddenly, now I’ve been covering climate for 10 years and kind of knew about fire, but it's really become kind of the headline issue the last couple years.

Scott Stephens: I think there’s a couple of things. One is just bad luck, you know, we’re getting fires in places where it is having them run at communities 100,000 people, 50,000 unfortunately and then they’re hitting communities. The other part still is we’re building in areas that are just more vulnerable. A great example, Napa Valley had a fire in ‘81 that actually burned maybe 50, 60 houses. The same perimeter 2017 burned 600 in that realm, you know, so you’re seeing so many more people living in places that are beautiful, but they’re fire places. So we’re seeing them really have vulnerabilities and fires hitting them.

ANNOUNCER: Scott Stephens, Professor of Fire Science at UC Berkeley. While epic wildfires raged in the West, the southeastern part of the country was hit by ever-more powerful Atlantic storms. In September Hurricane Florence brought heavy rain and extensive flooding to the Carolinas, and in October Hurricane Michael became the third most-intense Atlantic storm to make landfall in the contiguous United States.

In February – well ahead of hurricane season – Greg Dalton welcomed the mayors of three cities on the frontlines of these mega-storms: Sylvester Turner of Houston, where Hurricane Harvey had recently dumped an unprecedented fifty inches of rain; Steve Benjamin of Columbia SC; and Francis Suarez of Miami. Greg asked Mayor Suarez, who had just been elected Mayor the previous fall, about his victory speech the night he won, in which he talked about jobs, transit, crime, housing... and climate.

Francis Suarez: We are Ground Zero for resiliency and climatic events that affect our quality of life. And I think what we’re seeing is other parts of the world and other parts of the country are using that as sort of a counter brand against the city of Miami. And so they're saying, you know, yeah the city is great the low taxes, whatever, but don't go there because you’re gonna be underwater. And so as mayor and as a father, you know, I have a four-year-old and a baby girl that's on the way, you know, certainly it's a concern that, you know, that impacts us on the short-term and impacts us in the medium-term, and certainly of course you wonder and you worry about the existential threat to the long-term viability of the city. So I sort of we passed right in my election what they call the Miami Forever bond which was in part a resiliency bond where our voters did something very unusual, they voted to tax themselves. Because the issue is so acute and it's so macro that, you know, they voted to create $200 million of resources for us to begin meaningfully dealing with our climatic events which include a range of things from king tide flooding to tidal surge during hurricanes to annual rainfall that is significantly greater than what we've experienced or what we have a capacity to experience. So I think any mayor responsibly should have made this and should make this a major priority, particularly if you’re the mayor of Miami.

Greg Dalton: Mayor Benjamin, tell us how climate is it only sort of these frontline cities that are thinking about climate change Miami, Houston, you know. As we look around the country, where does climate rank in terms of traditional concerns for mayors, potholes, jobs, housing?

Steve Benjamin: It ranks very high. Climate mayors caucused, well over 300 mayors signed up. I’m also helping lead as one of the co-chairs of the mayor of Salt Lake City and the mayor of San Diego and Mayor Suarez is a former neighbor, the former mayor of Miami Beach, Philip Levine, mayors for 100% clean energy, those of us who are committed to clean and renewable energy. We’ve been joined by 200 of our colleagues all across the country who recognize that Washington DC may dilly dally at times and some of that dysfunction has the state government policymaking or the lack of policy-making. But mayors have to get the job done every single day and that’s regardless of party, regardless of geography. In my city, our council voted unanimously, we vote unanimously on almost nothing I might add, unanimously to invest in new storm water infrastructure, $100 million to address our top problem areas in our city. We’re gonna issue our very first green bond, you know, in the heart of the old south a deep red state. And I would tell you that our citizens are a lot smarter than people think they are, a lot more engaged and certainly care a great deal more about preserving the earth that we've inherited, but as Mayor Suarez mentioned, protecting it for our children yet to be here.

Greg Dalton: Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston. I have to admit I was surprised when I saw that you are leading a group of mayors supporting the Paris climate accord being, you know, Houston, oil and gas companies, a lot of those oil and gas companies are trying to slow down the transition to a clean energy economy. So why are you back in Paris?

Sylvester Turner: Well number one it’s the right thing to do. That’s number one. And number two, we all want to leave a world better than the world that we inherited, okay. And so that's important. The science is real. We do need to make changes. And coming from Houston, the energy capital of the world, you know, we recognize that you can’t just continue to do things the same old way and expect something different. That's not going to take place. And so it’s in all of our best interest. And quite frankly, when you look at renewable energy and solar there are more jobs created in that arena than in the old traditional arena. And then when we look at the fact that we all are trying to build a more resilient city, what we want in the city of Houston, we want a stronger and more resilient city. And I don't think there's a better place to be able to make the argument that you can be the energy capital of the world and you can also place a great deal of emphasis on recognizing that there is climate change and looking at alternatives and making your city stronger and resilient. And the two don't necessarily have to be at odds with one another.

ANNOUNCER: Houston mayor Sylvester Turner on how his city is recovering, rebuilding, and preparing for the next mega storm. Although these hurricanes are economically devastating to the people and places they hit, in some parts of the world rising temperatures and seas will produce more moderate weather and even economic gains. In May, Greg Dalton asked about who wins and who loses in a warmer world with Katharine Mach, a Senior Research Scientist at Stanford, and Solomon Hsiang, Chancellor's Associate Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Greg asked him about the economic cost of a hot day.

Solomon Hsiang: What we found is that a hot day, over the whole 24-hour cycle is above 85 Fahrenheit. We see that people earn roughly $20 less at the end of the year, okay. Now that’s just from the temperature there’s nothing else, that’s not related to anything else and that’s per man, woman and child. So the analogy is okay every time it’s a hot day I take 20 bucks and I just throw it away right because I’m just not gonna earn that money at the end of the year it starts to accumulate. And then you say okay well next year is gonna be just hotter and hotter and hotter and all that money that you could've been putting in the piggy bank, right and accumulating interest over time is all gone.

Greg Dalton: Katharine Mach, speak more to that inequity that's happening where the poor who contributed least are getting hit first and worst.

Katharine Mach: Yeah. So this question who’s most at risk it comes down to a lot of different things when you're in a low income country context without the state support capacity there on the ground or the level of economic development to keep things chugging ahead. But I think this question of inequity is also really, really important. What a lot of social scientists like to say is that first of all, not all poor people are vulnerable and not all vulnerable people are poor. And the flipside of that is that wealth is not necessarily protection. So if we think about what's unfolded here in the U.S. whether it's the fires in Northern California, Sandy in 2012 in New York City or all of the cyclones striking the gulf coast over the past year, even within the city going block to block. You can have very different outcomes depending on are the elderly and infirm are the people who are most marginalized able to access resources from cooling centers to medical attention when systems start to fail in tandem.

Greg Dalton: And some of those systems to the point of breaking down. It’s so hot in Phoenix that airplanes could not take off. It gets so hot that train tracks subways have to slow down. At what point we’re gonna get to infrastructure just literally melting?

Katharine Mach: Melting or collapsing I think there are many profound ways where we have built our societies for stasis and stability and now we’re in an environment of change. So what is that look like across the U.S. in Alaska for example, the ground is melting, right. The permafrost is thawing and whether it's pipelines or roads or buildings literally the ground is collapsing. And that’s something we can see already there are astounding pictures of buildings tipping into the sea as you have the Arctic sea ice thawing, waste coming on shore. I think this question of heat is a really important one and that we certainly haven't designed everything for 118°F in Arizona come July, what have you. And that plays out in many profound different ways in particular in these environments where we've got transport and tight interconnection with electricity and tight interconnection with communications. And when you get a failure in one of those oftentimes it reverberates.

Announcer: Katharine Mach from Stanford University on winners and losers in a warmer world. You’re listening to a Year of Climate One conversations. Coming up, we’ll hear from more of Greg Dalton’s guests, and the many ways they can help us respond to the climate crisis.

Christiana Figueres: I realized my commitment and my task here is to change that global mood. And of course I can't change the global mood before I change myself, because as we know all change starts with self.

Announcer: Adapting and thriving – when Climate One continues.

Announcer: We continue now with a look back at A Year of Climate One Conversations. From fires and floods to hurricanes and hot temperatures, 2018 put climate on the front page in ways it hadn’t been before. It also forced people living on the front lines of the brown economy to confront what Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls the Great Paradox: people in need of help from the federal government, but who are deeply distrustful of it. Hochschild’s most recent book is Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. She was joined on the Climate One stage by Eliza Griswold, a journalist at The New Yorker and author most recently of Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America. Greg Dalton asked Arlie Hochschild about ways to get around the Great Paradox in order to reach people whose lives have been impacted by America’s craving for energy.

Arlie Hochschild: In writing Strangers, I met an extraordinary person. His name was General Russell Honoré. And he was a rescuer in 2005 of the victims of Katrina and he now has become an ardent environmentalist. He’s leading the environmental movement. And I watched how he talked to non-environmentalists and he did not by arrogantly kind of disregarding the values and symbols of the people he is talking to but by acknowledging them and doing what I would call a symbol stretch. I’ll give you an example. He was talking to a group of Lake Charles’ businessmen whose mantra was freedom, freedom. They didn't want anything to do with environmental regulations. So freedom to invest your money. Freedom to make a lot of money. Freedom from onerous regulations. Freedom. And so he is talking to them. They don't like environmentalists, don’t even like the word. And he says this, I woke up this morning and I looked out at Lake Charles, I saw a man in a boat and that man had his fishing line out. But that man is not free to lift up an uncontaminated fish. I thought, you genius. Oh, I followed him around for the next day, you know, just how do we do that. We need to do that with patriotism, not to say oh you’re silly to be patriotic. No, of course not. We’re patriotic too but what does patriotism mean. Doesn't it mean a free press, doesn't it mean an independent judiciary, doesn't it mean democracy. I mean you start with the symbol and you apply it more broadly.

Eliza Griswold: I think that's brilliant. I also think, you know, that one of the ways to do this is through a conversation about rights. In the book these two heroic husband-and-wife lawyers who are no environmentalists, I mean Kendra and John Smith. Kendra is a corporate defense attorney for railroads. She mostly deals with asbestos cases. And they take a case that defends Stacey and others against the companies and against the Pennsylvania against the government itself all the way up to the State Supreme Court. And they're trying, what their argument is they know they’re gonna face a conservative Republican bench at the State Supreme Court level and they know that the argument that's going to work is what are our God-given rights. Right, these are all inalienable rights and in Pennsylvania, one of the rights in the Constitution is the right to clean air and pure water. And that has been on the books since the 70s, but it's largely been decorative it hasn't had any teeth. And because of the Smiths’ case and their apt argument about our right to clean air and pure water the conservative Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court found in their favor. These are just terms to change.

Greg Dalton: George Lakoff is a Berkeley linguist who also says that purity is a key to unlocking to finding common ground using that conservative frame.

Eliza Griswold: So is the idea of conservation. Prudent use of resources for the next generation is a much better thing than liberal -- also here’s something you might not think about for people who are living in rural places who hold conservative values. For people who live in cities to come out to them and tell them about the environment they’re just gonna flip you the bird because oh you are so divorced from the land you care so much about the land that you live in New York City, what a joke. That’s their understanding and just I mean another way to just flip the script and see that for a second that’s the understanding.

Arlie Hochschild: And it’s not that they’re against regulation just to follow this out. For example, Ducks Unlimited that's regulation, but because they love hunting and know every kind of duck and what kinds of birds and, you know, what number of days and what month. They don't mind that regulation at all.

Announcer: Arlie Hochschild and Eliza Griswold, authors of two books that paint an honest portrait of a misunderstood America. The deep divisions in our country are often at their most visible in Washington DC. Yet Republicans and Democrats are not always as divided on climate as Washington politics makes it seem. In February Greg Dalton welcomed two guests from opposites side of the aisle who’ve found common ground advocating for clean energy. Debbie Dooley was one of the original founders of the Tea Party and is a staunch supporter of Donald Trump. Christine Pelosi, daughter of Nancy Pelosi, is Executive Committeewoman of the Democratic National Committee. They agree that being good stewards of the environment should not be a partisan issue. So Greg asked Debbie, who used to be on the board of the Tea Party Patriots, whether she gets any flack from her Tea Party friends as she advocates for climate-friendly choices in energy markets.

Debbie Dooley: No. I mean, you know, to be honest no. But I can remember during, I think it was President Obama’s last State of the Union address. He kind of referred to me, you know, when he said, “Hey, in Georgia, Tea Party members agree with me on energy.” And he talked about green eyeshade, and I had a text message on my phone “President Obama just was talking about you in his State of the Union address” no because when you stop and think about it the key is education. When people find out the facts, oh they’re totally on board. They don't like electric monopolies. If you go into a conservative or Tea Party meeting and you make the big corporations or the electric monopolies, the bad guy instead of the Kentucky coal miner the bad guy. You’re gonna have a much more receptive audience. I’m having great success among Tea Party activists.

Greg Dalton: On the impacts of fossil fuels. You grew up in Louisiana, Deepwater Horizon. Tell us, you know, what’s happened. Louisiana is feeling a lot of impacts with coastal erosion, sea level rise. The move has the news has moved on from the Gulf Coast from 2010, but its impact still being felt there with the people you know?

Debbie Dooley: Well just recently there was a bipartisan group of elected officials in Louisiana that are suing the big oil companies over erosion of the marshlands. And the reason marshlands are important in Louisiana is because when a hurricane comes slamming in from the gulf, you know, the marshlands are a buffer they kind of help slow the hurricane down. So people are deeply concerned because there is if you look at the map satellite images you can't say that the marshland and coastlines aren’t evaporating. So, you know, people are waking up, it’s taking them time but conservatives are waking up when it comes to that.

Greg Dalton: Why is there such a gap between the Republican rank-and-file in the country and their elected leaders. We heard that the Trump voters support research into renewable energy want to attack carbon pollution, and yet that's not what people in Congress and even the administration are doing.

Debbie Dooley: Follow the money.

Christine Pelosi: I think she's right. I would echo that on the Democratic side before you get to me. Same thing, follow the money because I think that our activists are against fracking. The strangest thing a few years ago in 2014 when I came out against fracking, I actually got death threats on Twitter, who threatens to kill somebody over opposition of fracking? But it was interesting because as it turns out, you know, where California, we’re San Francisco, earthquake country, hopefully not during this broadcast. But when you look at the earthquakes that are happening the USGS studies that earthquakes are happening in Ohio, they're happening in Oklahoma and that do have a connection to fracking. Again, follow the money. We only really won the rhetorical point when the head of Exxon as it turns out opposed fracking on his block because he just bought a new house and he didn’t want to contaminate his drinking water. And so he said see, alright now there's a market-based solution for you but it’s still there. So I do think you have to follow the money in both parties and say if you took out the big money and you took out the money that's funding the think tank based studies and you just looked at the facts, I would bet you most of the decisions would be made closer to where the people are which I think there is a climate action majority in the country.

ANNOUNCER: Christine Pelosi, Executive Committeewoman of the Democratic National Committee, and daughter of Nancy Pelosi. You’re listening to a Year of Climate One Conversations. Trying to build coalitions between Republicans and Democrats is one thing; what about trying to find common ground among 195 countries? That was the task for Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. She led the negotiations at the Copenhagen summit in 2009, which failed to yield a comprehensive agreement, and the triumphant Paris Summit six years later. In between she found herself exhausted, emotionally drained, and ready to pack it in. At a Climate One event in September, Greg Dalton asked Figueres when she felt she’d hit bottom, and how she got back up.

Christiana Figueres: I do remember the first press conference that I had when, you know, we were all still writhing from the pain of Copenhagen. And I was asked by a journalist and I had not done my press training so my press team was sitting there, you know, going like, oh my God, what is she gonna say. Because the question was, so Ms. Figueres when do you think we’re ever, you know, do you think we’re ever gonna be able to reach a global agreement? And the first thing that came out of my mouth was, not in my lifetime.

Really helpful. And my press team was like frozen over there. Let’s get her some press training. But Ihad never thought about the consequences of not having a global agreement. And the moment that it came out of my mouth, I kind of looked at myself, you know, when you have a distance, hold it who is that person who just said that because that is so irresponsible and is so unacceptable. And that’s the moment when I said, right; my commitment here is to change that because I think I had voiced the global mood on climate change. And I realized my commitment and my task here is to change that global mood. And of course I can't change the global mood before I change myself because as we know all change starts with self.

Greg Dalton: But a few years into the job you were having a difficult personal time. Tell us about that.

Christiana Figueres: Also, yeah, I mean, everything comes together, right. It’s a wonderful package that life gives you. The United Nations terms, at least for the climate convention, a three-year term, and at the end of my first term I was asked by the Secretary-General will you do a second one. And I was like, can I think about that because I was having a traumatic situation in my personal life. I was exhausted from working 27 hours a day, eight days a week. And I just thought, you know, this process really need someone who can come with just incredible strength and renewed vigor. And I was seriously thinking of saying, thank you but, you know, let's find someone else. And as life would have it, my brother and sister who have lived in Costa Rica their whole life expressed their interest in celebrating my sister’s 50th birthday that was August of that year by coming to Europe to see a glacier for the first time in their life. And I thought, wow, that’s so beautiful, right. So I said, my treat, you come up, I will organize the whole thing. So they came over and we went up in the gondola in Austria. We went up in the gondola. And I remember coming to the point in the gondola where you begin to see the top of the mountain and I just totally lost my breath because there was nothing like white. There was no ice. It was a completely brown bare top of the mountain. So, you know, a completely iceless glacier is not what you expect. And the impact was so deep on me that I remember stepping out of the gondola with my brother and sister and just falling to my knees right there and saying this is a lesson learned. It doesn't matter if I’m exhausted. It doesn't matter, you know, if I’m in full pain, I just gotta do it. So after we got down I called the SG, the Secretary-General, and I said, sir three more years of service, here we go. And sometimes you just really need those knocks to understand that we’re not here to just embark on the easy stuff, I mean, honestly, right, how boring would it be if you're just here for the easy stuff. This is something that needs to be changed and it is going to be changed. How exactly, we never know at the beginning. But you’ve got to say this situation is unacceptable. It is morally unacceptable. It is financially stupid. It is environmentally terrifying. It is humanly unacceptable.

ANNOUNCER: Former UN climate negotiator Christiana Figueres, refusing to give in to climate or personal despair. But is despair necessarily a bad place to be? As a soldier in Iraq, Roy Scranton taught himself to meditate as a way of accepting the possibility of his own death, so that he could then tell himself okay that's done, now what do I do? His recent book, We’re Doomed. Now What? Is a similar mediation on what he sees as the death of our way of life. Earlier this year Greg Dalton asked Scranton whether a change of consciousness could help us come to terms with climate despair.

Roy Scranton: The question that sort of sits with me and that I can't stop thinking about is why are we so afraid of letting this go. This is all gonna change and that's manifest. And yet we cling to it desperately. We refuse to accept its passing. We can walk up to the precipice and think about it for a moment and then we have to do something. We have to get up we have to go fix something, we have to coordinate, we gotta do something because this is really -- it can't happen like that, right. We’re not going out like that, right. We’re a better nation, we’re a better civilization, we’re a better species, we’re better beings than that, right. We’re not just gonna let this happen to us. And then we go back, right, we go back right into the same things we were doing the day before, right. We have a feeling and then we react to it and we’re stuck in this cycle of emotions and reactions, right, because we keep denying denial. We keep saying no, I'm not gonna think about what it would mean for all of this to go away. I'm not gonna think about what it would mean to my family or my friends, because it's scary and it makes you sad and there's no good solution at the other side, right. This is all just possible and in fact inevitable, right, we’re mortal beings, right. Loss is just a part of being human. And that this world and this way of life is evanescent, right. We’re a growth of carbon scum on a rock in the middle of space, right, which is beautiful what we've done, right. And there in that space of negativity, right, in that meditation on the nothing, right, and on letting all this go, going through the process of willing to just let it all wash away. Then in that space I think something new might emerge. That space is where new thoughts are possible, right, new visions of the future that aren’t just reactions to another vision we don't like, right. I think going into the hard dark difficult thing and staying there, right, as much as we can, is the only way I think that we’re gonna come up with something new, some new way, some better way to deal with the realities of the situation, right, to deal with what is going to be objectively a difficult time, right, for everybody. So I'm all for despair. I think it’s a good place to be.

ANNOUNCER: Roy Scranton, author of We’re Doomed. Now What? You’re listening to a Year of Climate One Conversations. Coming up, we’ll cure the climate blues with some techno-optimism as Greg Dalton asks about climate-friendly innovations from for getting around town, powering your cell phone, and eating meat without animals.

Mike Selden: What we’re doing is taking what was previously medical technology like 3-D organ printing and applying it to food. So the technology exists it’s just a matter of dropping the cost to the point where people can afford it.

ANNOUNCER: Cool clean tech and more – when Climate One continues.

Announcer: You’re listening to A Year of Climate One Conversations. In May, Greg Dalton welcomed three members of the new generation of entrepreneurs who are fighting global warming by advancing clean technology. Gabriel Kra, Managing Director at Prelude Ventures. Lidiya Dervisheva, an Associate at G2VP. And Davida Herzl, co-founder and CEO of Aclima. Greg began by asking Davida how Aclima is using hyper local data to better understand our environment.

Davida Herzl: Last year we published the results of a major study in partnership with our partners at Google, the Environmental Defense Fund and the University of Texas, where we proved that our methodology where we take our sensing platform what we refer to as our environmental intelligence platform instrument vehicles and then drive around communities and cities to be able to take a snapshot of pollution sort of the urban scale, but at hyper local resolution so we can understand emissions down to the scale of a parcel. We can understand risks to pollution exposure down to that level.

Greg Dalton: And do some companies who are emitting pollution are they trying to push back against because that kind of transparency hasn't been available before, right? So are polluters pushing back?

Davida Herzl: So, you know, I think what's happening is that industry is really coming to terms with the fact that these new technologies are becoming broadly available. And instead of pushing back what we're really seeing is one, a hunger and a desire to really understand this data because in many instances, it can actually help companies reduce their own emissions. But also I think there's been a massive gap in the marketplace for this kind of environmental risk data, right. Environmental risk is now financial risk. Not just to society at large but to a lot of these companies and the emitters themselves, who now are embracing this development and really engaging in conversation with us. That's the approach that we’re taking and seeing.

Greg Dalton: Gabriel Kra, you invested in a company called Ripple Foods by a couple of veteran entrepreneurs. Tell us what they're doing trying to do Ripple Foods.

Gabriel Kra: Well Ripple Foods makes pea milk and a lot of other non-dairy products. The two founders, each of whom were successful entrepreneurs, took a look at how dairy is produced. Milk, yogurts, cheeses; it turns out there's a lot of carbon embedded in that production ecosystem. Raising cows takes a lot of energy and carbon and then cows produce a lot of methane in how they digest their food. So if you can just take cows out of the dairy equation then you can actually save a lot of energy and impact climate change. But you're not gonna do that just by telling people to drink something that doesn't taste good. So Neil and Adam make a delicious frothy nutritious milk product that is made entirely out of plant protein. And so this thing, this company it impacts tons of people's lives. We get calls we get testimonies from parents who are saying, “Wow, my kids couldn't drink milk and now they have a delicious product that they want to drink.” But we don't want to just go after the part of the market that was already drinking dairy alternatives. We’re going after the mainstream market and we now have traditional milk or unsweetened milk, we have chocolate milk we have vanilla milk. We have yogurts that are launching, we have half-and-half and not only are we selling this but we’re saving CO2 and we’re making a bunch of money. So it's kind of for us the best kind of thing the best kind of company to invest in.

Greg Dalton: Lidiya Dervisheva, lot of wealth is expected to be created in this transition from fossil fuel economy to a cleaner economy and yet Silicon Valley kind of walked away from clean energy. Tell us about that.

Lidiya Dervisheva: Sure. So the fund that I work for is called G2VP, G2 Venture Partners. And we spun off from the Green Growth Fund at Kleiner Perkins what used to be the clean-tech fund started back in 2008 at the dawn of clean-tech when everybody was investing in solar and new biochemical biofuels and that was kind of where all the hype was. And what ended up happening is that a lot of these investments didn’t really transform into these, you know, unicorns that everybody was expecting; not everybody made their returns in fact, many people lost a lot of money. And that sort of led to this second-generation the Cleantech 2.0 movement that’s one way to call it which is sort of like a new way of thinking of what clean-tech means and what you can perceive as clean-tech. So it’s not only the way we generate energy. So it’s not only, you know, solar, wind, tidal and fusion and so on but it’s actually the way we use energy the way we conserve energy. The way we figure out better ways to use the resources that we currently have. And that's where a lot of new interesting business models come in. And that's where what we are focusing on G2 is how do we leverage these new business models. How do we, you know, create new exciting startups out of technologies that already exist, but apply them in a new creative way with, you know, amazing teams and scale these companies.

ANNOUNCER: Saving the world – one clean-tech start-up at a time. Ripple Foods isn’t the only company trying to reduce the carbon footprint of our diets. This summer Greg Dalton spoke to Mike Selden, CEO and cofounder of Finless Foods, a startup that’s developing a way to make tuna that comes from a lab, not the ocean. And Pat Brown, founder and CEO of Impossible Foods, maker of the plant-based Impossible Burger. Greg began by cutting right to the chase.

Greg Dalton: Mike Selden, how are you gonna make tuna without a fish?

Mike Selden: Cutting right to it, yeah.

So saying entirely without a fish is not a hundred percent what we’re doing, right. We are taking a small sample of meat from a real fish but the idea is one sample from one fish once. Pulling it out of that fish just isolating the cells that grow the fastest and then growing them up in large quantities in the same way they grow inside of the fish. So these cells already exist inside of the system that we are taking them from and in the system they already do this function, which is to become meat. We’re just taking this process from inside of the fish and replicating it outside of the fish. So it is in every way replicating the same sensory experience of meat because it is really fish meat.

Greg Dalton: And what stage is your company and when will there be products available. I think you're gonna start with little pieces of sashimi, right. When are you gonna be out in the marketplace?

Mike Selden: Yes, we’re a very young company we just started last year. We've already made some good progress but we’re still in an R&D stage we’re doing some initial sampling last year in September we had the first ever tasting of fish created without needing to kill any fish. And that was like really exciting. So since then we've moved over to Emeryville just over the water and we now have a lab and a staff and we’re moving forward in order to basically drop our costs because really what we’re doing is taking what was previously medical technology like 3-D organ printing and applying it to food. So the technology exists it’s just a matter of dropping the cost to the point where people can afford it. And so we intend tto have a product ready for market by the end of 2019. But we’ll probably see it actually available in mid-2020.

Greg Dalton: Pat Brown, your company is more mature. Tell us about your journey from Stanford medical professor to entrepreneur wearing a hip-hoodie and –

-- you change your white coat for a green hoodie.

Patrick Brown: Yeah, so for most of my adult life I worked as a basic research scientist microbiologist. I was at Stanford medical school for about 25 years as a professor and loved that job and had zero interest in business and very little interest in food. I mean, I like to eat food but I don’t think about it when I’m not eating it, but I had a sabbatical little over eight years ago that gave me time to sort of step back from what I was doing, which was, you know, basic molecular cell biology and genomics and cancer research and stuff like that. And try to think of what's the most important thing I can do given the things I'm capable of doing, which is limited set of things. How can I have the highest positive impact on the planet and I very quickly realized that the use of animals as a technology for producing food is by such a humongous margin, nothing comes close, the most destructive technology on earth. Probably the most destructive aspect of it is that right now it occupies about 50% of earth’s land area either grazing or feed crops, cows outweigh every wild animal, every wild vertebrate left on earth by a factor of 10. And we are very and the total number of living wild animals on earth according to the World Wildlife Fund has dropped by half in the past 40 years. There’s half as many wild animals on earth today and that's pretty much across-the-board mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians. And it's almost entirely due to our use of animals as food. And what I realized was, you're not gonna solve the problem by telling people to change their diets. And the only way to do it is to beat the incumbent industry in the market, develop a better technology that's much more sustainable but it has to also produce more delicious, more nutritious, more affordable food because that's how you win in the market. And I was sure that that was doable although I didn't know how to do it at the time but I felt like it. Nobody else was really trying and so I would just go all in on it and I founded this company and start putting together the just by far the best R&D team ever to work on food and studying meat as if it were a disease. I mean just the way that we would study cancer in my old lab trying to understand the fundamental mechanisms that underlie the flavors and textures and juiciness in biochemical term so that once we understand the mechanisms we can find plant derived proteins that are more sustainable that have the same salient properties and make a product that outperforms meat in the ways that consumers care about.

ANNOUNCER: Pat Brown, creator of the meatless Impossible Burger. Another sector where old behaviors and technologies are being challenged is transportation. Electric scooters, skateboards, and bicycles have been sprouting on sidewalks and in parking spaces all around the country. Greg Dalton talked about these new wheels in town with Megan Rose Dickey, a senior reporter with TechCrunch, and Sanjay Dastoor, cofounder of Boosted Boards and CEO of Skip Scooters. Greg asked him why this is all happening now.

Sanjay Dastoor: It's a few things. So I think there's broadly this push towards the bike lane being a way to solve a lot of the transportation needs, especially the density or a campus or a dense neighborhood. And I think a lot of that comes from whether the car lane is serving us better over time, or worse. And I think there's a lot of evidence that suggest that the car lane is less and less of the best solution for certain types of trips, especially in cities. And as cities get more dense and as, you know, e-commerce delivery trucks are blocking lanes or as Lyft and Uber cars are pulling over there's a sense of well is the car lane really the fastest, most effective way to get around. And so the bike lane has seen a growth in popularity. So if you look at the even long-standing programs like Citi Bike in New York using ridership grow and the popular to the program increase. And then separately there's a technology component to this. Now everyone has a smartphone, they can hail a car just, you know, by pushing a few buttons on that phone. You can embed those same phone components into a vehicle for very low cost. And now these vehicles can have GPS, they can have sensors to detect if they fallen over or not. They have full time, you know, SIM card, cellular connection to the Internet that's all been brought about by smartphones. And so if you look at the cost of building something comparable to the Segway from 15 years ago in performance it’s much less expensive today. And then it's also being used in a way where people feel oh this is actually a better solution for me than the car that I used to use.

Greg Dalton: Megan Rose Dickey, transportation is a big sometimes number two expense for some people after housing. Is scooters and bikes kind of making mobility more affordable and accessible for low-income communities?

Megan Rose Dickey: I would definitely say more affordable but accessibility kind of depends on the company itself. And like one example so with Jump bikes which sold to Uber, they first launched in a low-income area in the city of San Francisco to just to kind of more deliberately say like, hey we want to make sure that this is accessible to low income people from the get-go. And then once we know that that's going to work there then we'll kind of broaden out the like the pilot program essentially. And that is part of the requirement for San Francisco’s permitting process to show okay how are you gonna make sure that your that this form of transportation is accessible to underserved communities.

Announcer: Thoughts on the new urban mobility. Now, no Climate One retrospective would be complete without a quick tour of the Lightning Round. That’s the part of the show where Greg Dalton puts his guests through the gauntlet with a few “hard-hitting” true/false or word-association questions. It’s a chance for the experts to throw caution to the wind – mostly.

Greg Dalton: We’re gonna go to our lightning round in which we ask quick questions and quick answers. The first one for Debbie Dooley. A liberal you'd like to go out drinking with.

Debbie Dooley: Al Gore.

Greg Dalton: Okay. Christine Pelosi, a conservative you’d like to go out drinking with?

Christine Pelosi: Debbie Dooley.

Debbie Dooley: Can I change my answer to Christine?

Greg Dalton: Sanjay Dastoor. What comes to mind when I say scooter-bros?

Sanjay Dastoor: Unfortunate.

Greg Dalton: Megan Rose Dickey. Zombie cars.

Megan Rose Dickey: Dramatic.

Greg Dalton: Pat Brown. Grass fed beef.

Patrick Brown: Clean coal.

Greg Dalton: Mayor Turner. South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster.

Sylvester Turner: Oh, that’s Mayor Benjamin’s problem.

Greg Dalton: Mayor Benjamin. Suppose a relative bequeathed you $1 million. Would you spend it on an oceanfront condo in South Florida?

Francis Suarez: You couldn’t get one for a million dollars.

Greg Dalton: Debbie Dooley, a liberal you'd like to take sport shooting at a firing range.

Debbie Dooley: Probably Bernie Sanders.

Greg Dalton: He’s, yeah, gun state, Vermont. Christine Pelosi, a conservative you'd like to introduce to dreamers in their home.

Christine Pelosi: Well, provided that ICE wasn't far behind, Mike Pence.

Greg Dalton: Lidiya Dervisheva. True or false. Venture capitalists are not as smart as they think they are?

Lidiya Dervisheva: False.

Greg Dalton: Davida, you have a fully stocked earthquake disaster kit in your home. True or false?

Davida Herzl: False. I like risks.

Greg Dalton: True or false. Katharine Mach, many natural scientists need to learn how to speak plain English?

Katharine Mach: True.

Greg Dalton: Sol Hsiang, true or false. Economists are people who don't have the personality to be accountants?

Solomon Hsiang: True.

Greg Dalton: Mike Selden. True or false, fish is your generation’s cigarettes?

Mike Selden: True. And I say that all the time. Did you take from one of my talks?

Greg Dalton: Yeah, when we talked on the phone.

Mike Selden: There we go.

Greg Dalton: Sanjay Dastoor. True or false, one day a big automaker will buy an electric scooter company?

Sanjay Dastoor: True.

Greg Dalton: Last one. True or false. Megan Rose Dickey, you recently visited a tooth straightening startup and found out you needed a root canal?

Megan Rose Dickey: Yes. But what does that have to do?

Greg Dalton: I don’t know. I just saw it on your Twitter feed so I figured --

Megan Rose Dickey: Yeah, root canal is done I have my crown. It was a whole thing but, yeah.

Greg Dalton: Things you do for your job. Let’s give them a round for getting through that lightning round.

Announcer: Just some of the unfiltered truth and bare-knuckle journalism that went on at Climate One in 2018. We hope you’ve enjoyed this look back at a Year of Climate Conversations with some incredible speakers. To listen to any of the complete programs, visit our website, climate one dot org, where you’ll also find photos, video clips and more. And be sure to subscribe to our podcast to hear more conversations about energy, the economy, and the environment.

Greg Dalton: Climate One is a special project of The Commonwealth Club of California. Kelli Pennington and Sara-Katherine Coxon direct our audience engagement. Tyler Reed is our producer. The audio engineers are Mark Kirschner and Justin Norton. Anny Celsi and Devon Strolovitch edit the show. I’m Greg Dalton, the executive producer and host. The Commonwealth Club CEO is Dr. Gloria Duffy.

Climate One is presented in association with KQED Public Radio.

Annual Reflections

6 Episodes

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Weathering the Storm: Mayors of Houston, Miami and Columbia

Otto Pilot — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 00:01:00 +0000

Weathering the Storm: Mayors of Houston, Miami and Columbia

02/08/2018

2017 brought a raft of extreme weather disasters costing the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars in damages, including hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria. And those are just the ones with names – other areas of the country were hit by floods, fires and drought. How do we fight back? The mayors of three cities on the frontline of climate change – Houston, Miami and Columbia, South Carolina - discuss what their cities are doing to recover, rebuild and prepare for the next mega storm.

Guests

Steve Benjamin

Mayor, Columbia, South Carolina

Francis Suarez

Mayor, Miami, Florida

Sylvester Turner

Mayor, Houston, Texas

Announcer: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, economy and the environment.

Today, we hear from the mayors of three cities that are coping with the environmental and economic fallout caused by extreme weather events.

Francis Suarez: Eighty percent of the city was without electricity after Irma…you know, on day nine it gets real. You know, I mean it’s like the program Walking Dead.

That’s Miami mayor Francis Suarez.

U.S. cities were pummeled by hurricanes, floods and fires last year. As federal disaster funding is stretched to the limit, cities are left to pick up the slack. But Houston mayor Sylvester Turner has a message for congress:

Sylvester Turner: Don't just provide us with enough funding to put us back where we were prior to Harvey. What we are needing now is funding to build a much more resilient city because there will be another storm, okay. Climate change is real.

Announcer: Weathering the storm. The mayors of Houston, Miami and Columbia. Up next on Climate One.

Announcer: Climate change is wreaking havoc on our cities – how can we fight back?

Welcome to Climate One – changing the conversation about America’s energy, economy and environment. Climate One conversations – with oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats – are recorded before a live audience, and hosted by Greg Dalton.

2017 brought a raft of extreme weather disasters costing the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars in damages, including hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria. And they’re just the ones with names – other areas of the country were hit by floods, fires and drought.

On today’s show, we’ll hear what the cities of Houston, Miami and Columbia are doing to recover, rebuild and prepare for the next mega storm. Our guests are mayors of three cities on the front lines of the new economic and environmental normal. Steve Benjamin is mayor of Columbia, South Carolina. In 2015, historic floods hit the Columbia area, killing 19 people and causing more than $1 billion in damage.

Francis Suarez is the newly-elected mayor of Miami. He took office in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, which devastated South Florida and caused more than 100 deaths. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner was in the national spotlight when Hurricane Harvey dumped an unprecedented fifty inches of rain on the city.

Here’s our conversation about steering America’s cities into the future.

PROGRAM PART 1

Greg Dalton: Mayor Turner, let’s begin on August 25, 2017 when a mega storm is making landfall in Texas. You're facing decisions to evacuate or not, you have to be thinking about the ghost of Katrina. So take us back to that day and what you are thinking about and just where you were on that day.

Sylvester Turner: On August 25th, I was at HEC, Emergency Center, our command post. In fact we were watching, monitoring the storm very, very closely. A couple of days before we didn’t quite know where it was going to hit. And then they informed us that it was going to hit not along the Houston area, but further down South. And it was not going to be the hurricane hitting Houston, Harris County area it was going to be a water event for us. A lot of rain but didn’t really anticipate how much. It was no time to try to evacuate anyone. When the city did evacuate back in 2005, number one if you’re gonna evacuate there’s a lot of preparation that you have to take into a place, you gotta make sure that there’s adequate fuel supply along the evacuation routes. When we did it in 2005, about 120 people died on the freeway because the freeways were like parking lots you literally could go and get you a hamburger, come back and you were still in the same place.

So we decided to keep people in place but we have some pre-position shelters just in case we needed them. On Friday, the hurricane landed by 10 PM. On Friday, things were good in Houston, Harris County. On Saturday, things were still pretty good. On Sunday at about 5 PM the national weather report indicated to us there were three bands coming in and each one of those bands would carry anywhere between 7 to 9 inches of rain. That's when we knew things were going to get bad. And so it was at that point in time we started getting people out of the low-lying areas and getting them into shelters. The first band came through; they were right, 7 to 9 inches. Second band came through, another 7 to 9. The third band came through and that's when water came out of all of the bayous and that’s where the heavy flooding took place.

Greg Dalton: And were you thinking about climate at that time or you didn’t have time to think about why, you’re just thinking about boy, we gotta to deal with this water and these people. Was there a climate connection to it at that point?

Sylvester Turner: Yeah, there’s a climate connection. Just to start there, I mean, you know, anybody who’s, I mean, keeping up with all of this knows that we have a climate problem, you know, it’s real, the science is real. So it didn’t just become real on August 25th it was real before. Bear in mind in the city of Houston we flooded in 2015. It was the Memorial Day flood. And then on April 17th of 2016 --

Greg Dalton: Flood Day.

Sylvester Turner: It was the Tax Day Flood. And then this one here on August 25th of course was Harvey and more rain fell on the city of Houston and the region than in any other city at any point in time in United States’ history. And it ended up being the second most costly storm, natural disaster for the country.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, it’s tied with Katrina I read.

Sylvester Turner: Right.

Greg Dalton: Mayor Suarez, you came into office in November and in your victory speech the night you won election you talked about jobs, transit, crime, housing and climate. I don't think many mayors mention climate in their victory speech.

Francis Suarez: Yeah, you know, we are Ground Zero for resiliency and climatic events that affect our quality of life. And I think what we’re seeing is other parts of the world and other parts of the country are using that as sort of a counter brand against the city of Miami. And so they're saying, you know, yeah the city is great the low taxes, whatever, but don't go there because you’re gonna be underwater. And so as mayor and as a father, you know, I have a four-year-old and a baby girl that's on the way, you know, certainly it's a concern that, you know, that impacts us on the short-term and impacts us in the medium-term, and certainly of course you wonder and you worry about the existential threat to the long-term viability of the city.

So, you know, for me I felt and I sort of we passed right in my election what they call the Miami Forever bond which was in part a resiliency bond where our voters did something very unusual, they voted to tax themselves. Because the issue is so acute and it's so macro that, you know, they voted to create $200 million of resources for us to begin meaningfully dealing with our climatic events which include a range of things from king tide flooding to tidal surge during hurricanes to annual rainfall that is significantly greater than what we've experienced or what we have a capacity to experience. So I think any mayor responsibly should have made this and should make this a major priority, particularly if you’re the mayor of Miami.

Greg Dalton: Mayor Benjamin, tell us how climate is it only sort of these frontline cities that are thinking about climate change Miami, Houston, you know. As we look around the country, where does climate rank in terms of traditional concerns for mayors, potholes, jobs, housing?

Steve Benjamin: It ranks very high. Climate mayors caucused, well over 300 mayors signed up. I’m also helping lead as one of the co-chairs of the mayor of Salt Lake City and the mayor of San Diego and Mayor Suarez is a former neighbor, the former mayor of Miami Beach, Philip Levine, mayors for 100% clean energy, those of us who are committed they’ll be ready for 100 by 2036. I see the crews here with us here tonight. We’re making commitment to clean and renewable energy. We’ve been joined by 200 of our colleagues all across the country who recognize, you know, the reality what you hear from Mayors Turner and Suarez is that Washington DC may dilly dally at times and some of that dysfunction has the state government policymaking or the lack of policy-making. But mayors have to get the job done every single day and that’s regardless of party, regardless of geography.

In my city, our council voted unanimously, we vote unanimously on almost nothing I might add, unanimously to invest in new storm water infrastructure, $100 million to address our top problem areas in our city. We’re gonna issue our very first green bond, you know, in the heart of the old south a deep red state. So mayors are working across party lines, arm in arm to try and deliver solutions and trying to put some of these major challenges in people speak every single day. And I would tell you that our citizens are a lot smarter than people think they are, a lot more engaged and certainly care a great deal more about preserving the earth that we've inherited, but as Mayor Suarez mentioned, protecting it for our children yet to be here.

Greg Dalton: So 2017 was the most expensive year in U.S. history in terms of major events driven by climate change. Former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman joined me on stage and she said that cities and states may not be able to rely on the federal government for disaster relief funds.

[Start Clip]

Christine Todd Whitman: Uncle Sam is out of money and we have a federal deficit that was going out of sight. So we are already in that position. I mean we do have to start looking at our priorities again and assessing where it is we’d want to spend money; what are the things for which the federal government is responsible. What’s gonna fall solely on the states and what’s gonna be up to the individual and local government and the individual. But as far as when do we run out of money, we’re there.

[End Clip]

Greg Dalton: That’s former New Jersey Governor and former EPA chief under President George W. Bush, Christine Todd Whitman. Mayor Turner, Texas still wants, I think, $61 billion from the federal government to rebuild after Hurricane Harvey. What’s the status of that and what are your comment to Governor Whitman saying Uncle Sam is not gonna keep writing these big checks.

Sylvester Turner: Well, to keep from writing big checks it’s important for cities to be built stronger and more resilient, otherwise whatever funding you get you’re providing funding for failure. There's no question right now what the Senate passed out today a package of $89 billion, but I think that's for California, Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. So that’s not nearly enough when you divide it up. Let me just say for us and what I've said to people in Congress is that don't just provide us with enough funding to put us back where we were prior to Harvey. What we are needing now is funding to build a much more resilient city because there will be another storm, okay. Climate change is real. We faced a 500 flood in ‘15, ‘16 and ‘17. So there will be another storm. What we are needing now is to make sure that our city is more resilient. We are built on the bayou city and so we have to provide more capacity on our bayous, we have to put more detention bases in place. There is a need for example, a third reservoir in parts of Houston.

If the hurricane had hit Galveston Bay and there had been a huge storm surge then that water would've come back up into the city of Houston and it would have been horrific. The Port of Houston, for example, is not just important to the city of Houston, or the state of Texas, but is important to the country as a whole. You know, a large percentage of the fuel that's refined that comes out of the port supplies areas throughout the country. So it’s important and we are advocating for what we call the coastal spine something that they put in the Netherlands that would help to prevent the storm surge. It is a huge cost, it’s about a $12 billion item but assume that the storm hurricane had hit Galveston Bay it would've been exponentially more.

And so if they simply provide enough funding to put us back where we were prior to Hurricane Harvey then you’re providing funding for failure. One example, there is a multifamily unit that’s built on the bayou. It caters to low income tenants. It flooded in ‘15, the owners went to HUD, they got funding it was rebuilt. It flooded in ‘16, owners went to HUD; it was rebuilt. It flooded in ‘17 they are going to HUD and I've put a tag on it saying it makes no sense to provide funding that benefits this developer when you’re serving low income tenants they are the ones who are displaced but the owner of it is not losing out on anything. So that's funding for failure. So there are things that need to take place to make us more resilient. And I don't want to necessarily hear all the language about running out of money. What did they just do a couple of months ago?

Greg Dalton: Added $1.5 trillion to the national debt.

Sylvester Turner: To the national debt. But I think if you recognize that the climate is changing so on the Houston level locally, what are we doing? Houston purchases more solar power than any city in the country. We are going to meet that goal of hundred percent on renewables, we’re looking at additional --

[Applause]

-- we’re looking at additional ways more parks and green space. All of those things are critically important that would have a significant impact. I've said to developers we’re not going to continue building in the city like we've done before.

This is a new day and so doing the same thing and not expecting people to flood makes no sense. So we're changing that. And we’ll have a serious debate on that before the month is over. But the federal government has a role to play. You stop the cities, you stop the country.

Greg Dalton: I spoke with Rolling Stone contributing editor Jeff Goodell about the financial impact sea level rise will have on communities and danger zones.

[Start Clip]

Jeff Goodell: The thing about sea level rise is it doesn't have to be gargantuan to have enormous problems with beaches washing away, with roads eroding. The costs for communities to deal with this, property values declining at exactly the time when they need to spend more money on adaptation. The economic kind of downward spiral that can be caused by even modest amounts of sea level rise is hugely consequential and will begin to play out long before these big numbers get hit and even in the next few decades. Even now we’re seeing it in places in Florida where, you know, they’re spending instead of $10 million every two years to replenish the beaches they’re spending $50 million. Where is that money coming from?

[End Clip]

Greg Dalton: That's author of the book called The Water Will Come, Jeff Goodell from Rolling Stone. Mayor Suarez, you mentioned that your residents have taxed themselves for 200 I thought it was 400, that's still a drop in the bucket. Where is the more money gonna come from to replenish the beaches and as Jeff Goodell said when property prices start to go down that hurts your tax base just when you need it most.

Francis Suarez: Sure. And, you know, we’re already living with some of these climatic events. And so for us it's not about a debate as to whether sea level rise is a true or not true phenomenon or to what extent it's going to affect us. We have a very porous subsoil. So we have water that percolates upward in king tide flooding.

Greg Dalton: So a levee is not an option -- seawall is not an option for this.

Francis Suarez: Seawall alone is not an option. I think, you know, what happened in Miami Beach did a fairly good job, but I think they did it under what I call sustainability 1.0. We’re sort of learning from Miami Beach. They did some things that we think are replicable and some things that we think were mistakes. And so, you know, you have to learn from that. I think everything in life and dealing with a problem, a macro problem such as this, happens in phases. So we’re blessed to get from the legislature a little over $1 million to update our storm water master plan to take into account sea level rise. That was sort of the first thing that we did. And then we got our resiliency -- it was a $400 million package but it was not all dedicated to resiliency. It was 200 for resiliency, a hundred for affordable housing and a hundred for cultural facilities, which are part of really the resiliency concept it’s not just a climatic concept. It’s a concept of having a city that is more resilient to all kinds of shocks. You know, one of the things that we saw during Hurricane Irma was just how fragile our electrical grid was. And I mean obviously, you know, when you see what's going on in Puerto Rico, you know, where they have, you know, been without electricity for months. The city of Miami 80% of the city was without electricity after Irma. And it took about 12 days for us to get back to about 90%, 95%.

But, you know, on day nine it gets real. You know, I mean it’s like the program Walking Dead. I mean, it’s really, really, people are at each other, you know, by that point food has spoilt. If you don’t have a generator and a lot of our poor areas, you know, people don't have generators; I mean I gave my generator away to a public housing project where they'd relied on electricity to power their wheelchairs to get to the third-floor apartment. So, you know, for us we’re dealing with this phenomenon, but I do agree that $200 million is a starting point.

And I think, you know, when we start analyzing this problem in a way that is reflective of the fact that other cities have begun trying to address this issue, we realize that it's a much more pervasive and comprehensive problem which is gonna require much more comprehensive solutions. We, after Hurricane Andrew, I always say, you know, we became, we gave the world the gift of wind resiliency after Hurricane Andrew. Hurricane Andrew had sustained winds in excess of 200 miles an hour. And we changed our building codes and all our buildings built post-Andrew can sustain, you know, incredible wind loads. But our new challenge is to be the most water resilient city on the planet. And I think you know post Irma we saw tidal flooding or tidal surges that went 4, 4 and a half, 5, 6 blocks and with 3 and a half foot of flooding. Now, the good news was that a lot of that water receded fairly quickly. But it still highlights how dramatic the problem can be and how much damage it can cause to your city.

Announcer: That’s Miami mayor Francis Suarez. You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about how America’s cities are facing up to climate change.

Coming up, getting past the politics.

Steve Benjamin: We have to keep pushing because some of the dysfunction we’re seeing in Washington…is really seeping down in our state government.

Announcer: Up next, when Climate One continues.

Announcer: We continue now with Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking with three mayors who are steering their cities through stormy waters following a year of extreme weather. His guests are Steve Benjamin, mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, Sylvester Turner, mayor of Houston, Texas, and Francis Suarez, mayor of Miami, Florida.

PROGRAM PART 2

Greg Dalton: So Mayor Benjamin, let’s talk about the political level of this, you know, how does the conversation that happens, you know, in your city compare with statewide? It wasn’t your state but it was a state nearby that tried to outlaw climate change famously once. So how does it trickle up to the state level?

Steve Benjamin: Well, every state is obviously different. It's fantastic when you sit here and you listen to these two men and I will tell you it's consistent across the country. And you talk about these major issues you don't know if you’re talking to a Republican right now, okay. Because mayors are just about solving the problem that's what we do we solve problems. We solve them differently in 2018 than we might have 20 years ago, but what you hear here is you hear depth of experience from experienced state policymakers and local policymakers who are just about getting the job done.

I want to step back just for about 20 seconds to your previous question you asked, Mayor Turner. 85% of all the people in this country live in cities in metropolitan economies, 89% of all jobs. 91% of America’s nearly $20 trillion GDP is created in cities and metropolitan economies. Mayor Turner boasted a GDP larger than that of the country of Sweden. Francis Suarez, Miami has a larger GDP than Hong Kong, okay. I mean we’re talking about the mayors that we have out here this week interfacing with the tech community represent 10% of America's GDP I mean in one room. So when we go to Washington, that’s a long way of saying, when we go to Washington and we’re talking about repatriating tax dollars back home -- because that’s what we’re talking about.

This is not going to Washington asking for money to come back to save Houston. Houston sent that money to Washington. We’re not talking about asking Tallahassee to send money back to Miami. Miami is driving the Florida economy. I mean, so we’re talking about how do you make smart investments and now while we’re out here we’re talking about how do you invest in true urban resilience that helps us respond to and recover from but even more importantly, how do we start using this incredible focus on, I mean, we’re in this bubble in Northern California right here we’re talking about the bill to use real data and predictive analytics and just the advent of AI. What can we start doing together to help us all make smarter, strategic investments on the front end to help prepare for and respond to these things on the backend. But it's important to note that the resources, as I had to tell a senator from another southern state just a few months ago, the money is not falling from Washington DC like manna from heaven. It got there because our taxpayers sent it there and we want it to come back home.

[Applause]

And to use it in a way that’s smart. But this dialogue is happening with mayors all across the country of all stripes, all shapes and sizes, partisan backgrounds. And we have to keep pushing because some of the dysfunction we’re seeing in Washington, some of the bad policymaking is really seeping down in our state government. But when you have events like this regrettably, when you have events like we all have had, it starts pushing some people in our state capitals. Our City Hall is four blocks from our state capital. They start thinking a little more wisely because obviously their constituents our mutual constituents are feeling the pain and they’re pressing them to make better policy.

Greg Dalton: Let’s ask that. Mayor Suarez, Rick Scott, you know, known to doubt climate science apparently said, didn't want the word mentioned in state official documents. What kind of movement has there been among the Republican delegation in Tallahassee or in Washington on climate after Irma?

Francis Suarez: You know, from my perspective I was sort of pleasantly surprised that the Republican legislature did fund our upgrade to our storm water master plan. And that it survived the veto plan. I was frankly a little shocked, pleasantly shocked. But it allowed us to begin the planning process of how do we spend these dollars in a way that is the best expenditure because obviously we have a fiduciary duty also to our residents to make sure that we spend dollars effectively and efficiently to deal with and address these issues. But as Mayor Benjamin was saying, you know, we just don't have the luxury of looking at the world that way. You know, for us it's really problem solution and so my responsibility as a Mayor is to go up and educate the state legislature or the governor whomever the governor or legislators are and tell them these are our problems. We are major tax generators and we deserve an investment.

And I think the other thing is that a lot of these climatic issues are changing the conversation because it's an economic conversation. And I think once you make it an economic conversation I think you depoliticize it a little bit, you departyize it a little bit and you make it about return on investment and you make it about what are the risks, the economic risks involved. When we’re growing at the level that we’re growing, we’re talking about $1 billion of new real estate a year for the last few years. So that is, I mean, that’s the exposure on that kind of, those kinds of assets, you know, should worry any conscientious-elected official.

Greg Dalton: Mayor Turner, you came from the state legislature in Texas. You know, how has Harvey changed the conversation. Greg Abbott the governor of Texas is not particularly inclined to talk about climate change. Do you talk about it in different language as Mayor Suarez was saying?

Sylvester Turner: I don’t know if we talk about it in different languages. I think climate change has a way of making things bipartisan. And what I mean by that when we flooded in 2015, there was certain geographical areas that were flooded primarily in your poorer areas. The Tax Day Flood on April 17, 2016 same, about the same. And so there were other areas that were still high and dry, but Harvey said, let me be indiscriminate. And so when Harvey came and 51 inches of rain fell. If you were in poor neighborhoods, you were already on the margins you got pressed down, you’re flooded. If you were in the affluent communities, you’re really flooded. So from the northwest to the northeast side of town, you’re flooded. It didn't say you are a Republican neighborhood, so we’re gonna bypass you. It came down. And so now you have all of these families and all of these neighborhoods that have been adversely affected and they don't want to flood again. And then you want the city to continue to grow. You want people to continue to be proud of where they live. You want people to come. Houston is the energy capital of the world, a lot of oil and gas companies. But at the same time, you have a lot of oil and gas companies in the city of Houston that recognize that we need to focus now on renewables.

That we need to do some other things to be more resilient because we still want people to come and be a part of our city. And that's a good thing. So from my vantage point, what I say to people and to the, you know, yes, city of Houston is a blue city, but if you take the blue city out of the red state then you come to a standstill. And we have to focus on results. It’s all about results and meeting people's needs. So I think the reality is because of Harvey on so many levels people recognize that you cannot ignore things any longer. Their constituents are not going to allow them to ignore things and we have to build a much more resilient city. And if they don't help us to build a more resilient city, it’s their constituents that’s gonna hold them accountable for that.

Greg Dalton: I spoke to a former president of an energy company based in Houston, very large, who did not vote for you, but said he probably will next time because of the way you handled Harvey.

[Applause]

We’re gonna go to our lightning round. It’s time for our lightning round, a series of short questions with shorter answers. And the first round is association. I’ll mention a name or a person and just get your first reaction, unfiltered with complete disregard for what people might think about. So first for Steve Benjamin, the first thing that comes to mind when I say Florida Governor Rick Scott.

Steve Benjamin: It’s Francis’ problem.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Mayor Turner. South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster.

Sylvester Turner: Oh, that’s Mayor Benjamin’s problem.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Okay. Mayor Suarez. EPA administrator Scott Pruitt.

Francis Suarez: Never heard of him.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Mayor Turner. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, former governor of Texas.

[Laughter]

Sylvester Turner: Former governor.

Greg Dalton: Mayor Benjamin. Dreamers.

Steve Benjamin: Make America great.

Greg Dalton: Mayor Suarez. Muslim ban.

Francis Suarez: Terrible.

Greg Dalton: Mayor Turner. Offshore oil drilling.

Sylvester Turner: Not good for the future.

[Applause]

Greg Dalton: This is a yes or no portion for our three mayors. Mayor Benjamin. Yes or no. Coal is dying a slow death?

Steve Benjamin: Yes.

Greg Dalton: Mayor Suarez. You support efforts by New York and other big cities to divest from fossil fuel companies?

Francis Suarez: Absolutely.

Greg Dalton: Mayor Turner. You support divestment from fossil fuel companies?

Sylvester Turner: Yes. By the way, I think coal is dying fast death, not a slow death.

Greg Dalton: It’s tough for those companies for sure; it’s tough for those workers. Mayor Suarez. Yes or no. Climate change is a moral issue?

Francis Suarez: It is a moral issue.

Greg Dalton: Mayor Turner. Yes or no. The Texas Legislature is famous for not doing much?

[Laughter]

Steve Benjamin: I’ll take that answer. You can either confirm or deny though. It’s gotten a lot less productive since he left, I’m sure.

Greg Dalton: They actually like it that way. They don’t mean often, it’s a point of pride.

Sylvester Turner: That one is relative. That’s relative.

Greg Dalton: Mayor Benjamin. Suppose a relative bequeathed you $1 million. Would you spend it on an oceanfront condo in South Florida?

Francis Suarez: You couldn’t get one for a million dollars.

[Laughter]

Steve Benjamin: Let the record reflect that I don’t own anything, my wife owns everything.

[Laughter]

And I’ve gotten used to it. I got used to it. But I would tell you South Florida is her happy place.

Francis Suarez: By the way he would vote for me if he did buy a condo.

Steve Benjamin: I would.

Greg Dalton: Mayor Suarez of Miami, would you rather have an oceanfront home in South Carolina or Texas?

Francis Suarez: I don’t know. I wouldn’t know the difference. They both sound like wonderful places.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Okay last one for Mayor Turner. The best place in the country to have an oceanfront home is California?

Francis Suarez: False.

Sylvester Turner: Well, I'm here in California of course. Yes.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: So you’re saying that’s right. That ends our lightning round. Let’s give them a round of applause for making it through the gauntlet.

[Applause]

Announcer: You're listening to a conversation with three mayors on the frontlines of climate change. When we come back, how their cities are preparing for a clean energy economy.

Sylvester Turner: We do need to make changes. And coming from Houston, the energy capital of the world, we recognize that you can’t just continue to do things the same old way.

This is Climate One.

Announcer: You’re listening to Climate One. Today, Greg Dalton is talking with Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, Miami Mayor Frances Suarez, and Columbia, South Carolina mayor Steve Benjamin. Let’s continue with their conversation about building climate-smart cities and greener economies.

PROGRAM PART 3

Greg Dalton: You’re here three mayors of Columbia, South Carolina, Miami and Houston, meeting with tech companies. Mayor Suarez, the future of cities is in flux right now with all this talk of autonomous cars clogging our streets. Silicon Valley wants us to think it's gonna be utopia, it’s gonna be wonderful, it’s gonna reduce pollution and we’ll have more time. How are you thinking about the future of Miami in a world with robotic cars running around?

Francis Suarez: I think that's the tip of the iceberg in terms of the disruptions that we’re feeling as cities. My personal belief is that we are in a very near-term future, every car is gonna be electric. I believe that. I think most if not all cars will be autonomous and I also think that a lot of, some of the problems that have plagued us for many, many years the solutions will be things that we don't really particularly anticipate. For example, we have 2.8 million people in Dade County, 2.1 million have driver’s license and each person with a driver’s license basically has a car on average in the city. What I think is gonna happen in Miami is people are going to start working either from home or from a co-working space near home. So they probably won't have to get in a car to go to work to begin with. That decongests our road significantly. Certainly it improves our carbon footprint dramatically.

But I think when you consider the fact that we’re gonna have electric vehicles I’d say in the next, you know, predominantly in the next 36 to 48 months and we’re gonna change the way that we behave in terms of where we work. I mean, the most ubiquitous thing every person in this room I promise you, has the ability to teleconference from their phone. Every single person in this room, there’s not one person in here that cannot do that. So to me it seems almost irrational at this point that we all get up in the morning, get in the car and drive at the same time to a place of work. I mean, it almost seems like a very rational decision. But I really think that in the near future we’re gonna radically change and I think that's only gonna make cities more vibrant. I kind of agree with Mayor Benjamin and certainly Mayor Turner that, you know, the vibrancy of cities is what's propelling this national economy. And I don't see threats I think I see opportunities.

Greg Dalton: Mayor Turner. Houston is a city built on sprawl obviously energy capital, a lot of oil and gas there. Is the car the future and how is Houston gonna be more or less car centric city? That's a pretty big transformation of land-use and everything else.

Sylvester Turner: Right. We made some choices in the 1990s that we are having to deal with today. In the 1990s we decided we were going to build roadway capacity and we did. And if those who are familiar with city of Houston the 610 loop and then there's the Beltway like a loop and then there’s the Grand Parkway. And as we have built them they have come and the congestion is still there. What we've decided now and is a part of climate change and flooding and everything else is that the transportation system now has to change. And when I came into office in January of 2016, I said we needed a paradigm shift. And so the focus now has to be on multimodal form of transportation. We have to provide people with a lot of different options. We have to be much more aggressive and whether it is light rail or BRTs or you name it. We have to move in that direction. We have to design and construct a city that’s more walkable, pedestrian friendly. So we have to change the design on how we’re approaching things.

We just had an announcement the other day, Monday, with regards, for example, to the high speed bullet train going from Houston to Dallas. And so we're moving forward and the construction is scheduled to start in 2019 on that. So the reality is that we have to make some changes not just for transportation, but so much of transportation is tied to how we develop and how we deal with the issue of drainage and flooding and whether or not we're going to be a stronger and more resilient city. And so that's important. We still want people to come. We are a growing city. We want to continue to grow, but instead of sprawling, you know, we’re looking at doing some other things. And like I said in terms of how we’re going to develop and build in the city, those rules are now changing as well.

Greg Dalton: Mayor Benjamin of Columbia, South Carolina. Density is good for reducing greenhouse gases, reducing traffic, but getting to density it means getting across NIMBY. We know people don't like high-rises in their neighborhood. So how do you convince people that density is good when they don't want more people in their neighborhood, they don't want high-rise blocking their light that sort of thing. That’s a tough sell.

Steve Benjamin: You know, I think this is one area in which mayors are uniquely able to dialogue with our citizens. You know as I visit our friends in Washington where I know all three of us spent a great deal of time on a regular basis, sometimes it seems like the discussions they are just removed from reality. I see our citizens in church and when we visit a synagogue or a mosque, I see it at the grocery store; it’s a traffic light I get advice and counsel from our citizens. The ability to talk about tough issues is sometimes lost in some of our federal representatives. I can talk to our citizens about hundreds of thousands of new jobs and clean energy. I can talk to them about how we help their children deal with asthma, the opportunity to lower their power bills by dealing with solar energy. We can talk about the benefits of vertical development and what it means in terms of tax base that this one building, this one 300,000 square-foot building downtown produces more tax revenue than a 300-unit subdivision in the outskirts of town without the environmental disruption, physical disruption to build infrastructure to get there. And by the way 63 cents of every dollar that comes in goes to the school district to help provide opportunities for kids all across our city.

There’s an argument around about urban smart sound, dense urban development surrounded by strong neighborhoods and in cities like ours in 15 minutes you could be in the rural hunting for boar or fishing for bass if you want to. But these are arguments to be made, but that's a face-to-face conversation that mayors have every single day. And I think we tend to be uniquely qualified to have those conversations.

Greg Dalton: Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston. I have to admit I was surprised when I saw that you are leading a group of mayors supporting the Paris climate accord being, you know, Houston, oil and gas companies, a lot of those oil and gas companies are trying to slow down the transition to a clean energy economy. So why are you back in Paris, supporting the Paris climate accord that the U.S. is now trying to walk out of?

Sylvester Turner: Well number one it’s the right thing to do. That’s number one.

[Applause]

And number two, we all want to leave a world better than the world that we inherited, okay. And so that's important. The science is real. We do need to make changes. And coming from Houston, the energy capital of the world, you know, we recognize that you can’t just continue to do things the same old way and expect something different. That's not going to take place. And so it’s in all of our best interest. And quite frankly, when you look at renewable energy and solar there are more jobs created in that arena than in the old traditional arena. And then when we look at the fact that we all are trying to build a more resilient city, what we want in the city of Houston, we want a stronger and more resilient city.

And I don't think there's a better place to be able to make the argument that you can be the energy capital of the world and you can also place a great deal of emphasis on recognizing that there is climate change and looking at alternatives and making your city stronger and resilient. And the two don't necessarily have to be at odds with one another. And that's what we're trying to demonstrate in the city of Houston.

Greg Dalton: Mayor Suarez, a lot in your Party, Republicans are doubting Paris, trying to pull out of Paris. Where are you on Paris and how is it relevant to Miami?

Francis Suarez: I'm very much in favor of being a completely energy independent city. I think that we’re going there irrespective of what anyone believes. And the reason why is because before it used to be sort of an existential environmental argument, and I think now it's becoming an economic argument. I mean, you have a situation where the largest power plant in the solar system is the sun, and so, you know, our ability to harness that power is becoming so inexpensive that it would be foolish for people not to do it. I mean, at this point, you know, and then by the way not only that, but I supported a program in Miami called the PACE program which allows you to do energy-efficient retrofits to your home and put in your tax bill and it pays for itself. So you put solar panels on your home, we’re a very sunny city obviously so, you know, I can't speak for every city in the United States. But you put solar panel in your home and you are almost essentially off the grid. And that's irrespective of the fact that there is no battery capacity right now.

I mean once battery technology, you know, comes on board and you can store energy in your home, I mean, it's game over. I would not be investing in gasoline companies or oil companies, I wouldn't. I would not advise anybody to invest any money with all due respect to my mayor. I just think it's not even about at this point fortunately or unfortunately, however you want to look at it. It just so happens that it's a great environmental argument, but the economics of it are so dramatic that I really feel that -- and so I think it's a beneficial thing because obviously we as a city and I think as a country and as a world want to be harnessing energy that is renewable and harnessing energy that is not gonna negatively impact our ability to live. So we’re trending in the right direction and I'm in favor of it, of course.

Greg Dalton: We are talking about climate change in American cities at Climate One. I'm Greg Dalton. My guests are Sylvester Turner mayor of Houston, Francis Suarez mayor of Miami and Steve Benjamin mayor of Columbia, South Carolina. Let’s go to our audience questions. Welcome to Climate One.

Male Participant: So I'm David Capelli. I actually am from Miami-Dade. I served the county mayor, Carlos Gimenez on his board of millennials policy board; I wanted to ask each of the mayors here. How are you engaging and working with diverse millennials on these poignant issues so that we have more diversity and actually solving these problems for the most vulnerable populations in each of your cities?

Greg Dalton: Who would like to tackle that first? Mayor Suarez.

Francis Suarez: I’ll start. I was actually invited by the conference a couple weeks ago to speak on a millennial mayor’s panel so I didn't realize that I was still a millennial. I’m 40. So I don’t know, I think I’m on the cusp. And I think everybody on my staff is a millennial, my mayor staff. And I think, you know, I forget who was saying it, you know, technology and the knowledge-based economy is sort of the macroeconomy of where we are right now. And so as a city we are in a global competition for survival in that reality. And so I think, you know, as mayors we have a duty to pay attention to all the different segments of our society. I think you get a tremendous amount of wealth of knowledge and energy and ideas from the millennial generation.

And so I probably have taken a little bit of heat as mayor because all my entire staff is millennials essentially. But the truth of the matter is they’re very hard-working, idea-driven, passionate generation. So it’s certainly inures to my citizen’s benefit. And so that interaction is daily for me.

Greg Dalton: Mayor Turner.

Sylvester Turner: Yeah. I think it’s important you have to include millennials at the table of decision-making. I know when I ran for office, my daughter who is 30 years old and said, dad when you become mayor don't forget about us. You know, you can’t talk about building a city for the future, when the future is now sitting at the table today. And I take that very seriously. And so a part of what I've done, a significant part, is to place millennials at the table of decision-making so that they can advocate and include their ideas. There’s a millennial conference, for example, in the city of Houston that’s taking place on this coming Saturday which I look forward to being a part of that and being with them. And again, you know, what I say to people is that from age-wise I may be a little bit older than Mayor Suarez.

[Laughter]

But that doesn't mean you don't have ideas that can relate and be a part of the millennial generation. But you have to include people -- you can be diverse, but diversity doesn't necessarily mean in terms of ethnicity or language or religion. Okay? Diversities come in many different forms and you have to include that diversity at the table of decision-making so that they can advocate for themselves.

Greg Dalton: Let’s go to our next question. Welcome to Climate One.

Female Participant: Thank you. So this question is for Mayor Benjamin, although given Mayor Turner’s comment on 100% clean energy tonight, I invite all the mayors to respond. Columbia recently became the first city in South Carolina to commit to 100% clean energy by 2036. Why was it important for Columbia to make this commitment and what message would you share with mayors across the country as to why their city should join Columbia in making a commitment in a just and equitable transition to 100% clean energy.

Steve Benjamin: You know, we relish the idea of being a state capital in a state where you don’t expect a lot of progressive thought. And so whether it's banning bump stocks or being the first state, city to ban texting while driving or making this commitment to 100% clean energy. It's amazing when we stretch with blueberry in this tomato soup; it's amazing how other cities then begin to follow. We have to model the type of behavior that we know that we ought to expect for all of the cities to follow. Both of my colleagues here are right on point. If America's cities lead and we lead our metropolitan economies and we do together, and we lead not just as municipal corporations that we are but recognize that these goals are meant to be citywide goals, that we’re doing this in partnership with our for-profit and nonprofit partners and public agencies. That working together with some of our wonderful institutions like the Sierra Club and others, we can do this. And we can do this and it won't be driven by bad policymaking of one administration or another, that together that American citizens can help change the world indeed. And we’re gonna keep doing it.

Announcer: Greg Dalton has been talking about the challenges of steering America’s cities into the future, with the mayors of three cities that have been hit hard by climate change.

Francis Suarez is the mayor of Miami, Florida. Steve Benjamin is mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, and Sylvester Turner is mayor of Houston, Texas.

To hear all our Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast at our website: climateone.org, where you’ll also find photos, video clips and more. If you like the program, please let us know by writing a review on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. And join us next time for another conversation about America’s energy, economy, and environment.

Greg Dalton: Climate One is a special project of The Commonwealth Club of California. Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Carlos Manuel and Tyler Reed are the producers. The audio engineer is Mark Kirschner. Anny Celsi and Devon Strolovitch edit the show. The Commonwealth Club CEO is Dr. Gloria Duffy.

Climate One is presented in association with KQED Public Radio.

Play

Jeff Goodell: The Water Will Come

Otto Pilot — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 00:01:00 +0000

Jeff Goodell: The Water Will Come

11/09/2017

Rising waters represent the most visible and tangible impact of climate disruption. Protecting people and property from all that water, while simultaneously ensuring billions have enough to drink, will have unfathomable costs and alter the lives of most people living on earth.

Jeff Goodell, Author, Contributing Editor, Rolling Stone
Marco Krapels, Former VP, Tesla; Producer, Before the Flood
Katharine Mach, Senior Research Scientist, Stanford University

This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, CA on November 8, 2017.

Guests

Jeff Goodell

Author, Contributing Editor, Rolling Stone

Marco Krapels

Former VP, Tesla; Producer, Before the Flood

Katharine Mach

Associate Professor, Marine Ecosystems and Society, University of Miami

Announcer: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, economy and the environment.

We know that melting icecaps are causing the world’s oceans to rise. But for those of us who don’t own beachfront property, it may be hard to fathom the consequences of a few feet of water. Recent extreme weather events like Sandy, Harvey and Irma have given some U.S. cities a hint of what might be in store.

Jeff Goodell: One way to think about this is as a kind of dress rehearsal for sea level rise. I mean imagine this kind of water coming in and instead of just spending a couple of hours there and going out the way it did with Sandy, it stayed in.

Announcer: But even as the people of Puerto Rico struggle with the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, some see an opportunity.

Marco Krapels: Why don't they make loans available so people can afford and purchase their own energy systems, which comes from a sustainable and a renewable source, and Puerto Rico is going to have sunshine for the next 5 billion years that is not gonna run out.

Announcer: Rising seas, sinking cities, and the future of our planet. Up next on Climate One.

Announcer: The tide is high – and getting higher. Are we prepared for an increasingly watery world?

Jeff Goodell’s new book on sea level rise is titled “The Water Will Come.” But according to experts, it’s already here – oceans have risen by six to eight inches in recent decades. By some estimates, our seas could rise between three and eight feet by the end of this century, threatening hundreds of coastal cities and possibly wiping out entire island nations.

On today’s program, we welcome author and Rolling Stone contributor Jeff Goodell to discuss his book. We’re also joined by Katharine Mach, senior research scientist at Stanford University, and former co-director of science for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and Marco Krapels, former vice president of Tesla and co-producer of the documentary Before the Flood.

Here’s your host, Greg Dalton.

Greg Dalton: Jeff Goodell, let's begin with you. You opened your book saying that you had written about climate change, but when hurricane Sandy slammed into New York City it became a visceral issue for you. So tell us how that hit you in the gut.

Jeff Goodell: Well, you know, I have been writing about climate change for a long time, and I'd heard about sea level rise, I kind of knew about it the way that, you know, one knows about these things that you read about. But it was never a kind of urgent issue to me and then when Sandy hit, I wasn't in the city but I went down the right afterwards and seeing all the, you know, we got about 9-foot of storm surge into lower Manhattan. (0:06:18)

And I went down there and was walking around the streets, you know, seeing the water still in the cars and, you know, people hauling soggy furniture out of their apartments and the smell, you can already smell the mold. And it was just, you know, it’s just very visceral feeling of what water can do to a place. And as a journalist, I was thinking about how to cover this, how to write about this and I knew I had to write about it. I was talking to some scientists at Columbia and one scientist said to me, you know, one way to think about this is as a kind of dress rehearsal for sea level rise. I mean imagine this kind of water coming in and instead of just spending a couple of hours there and going out the way it did with Sandy, it stayed in. And that was a pretty mind blowing thing and he said, well if you -- I told him that, I said it’s a pretty mind blowing idea. And he said, well if you really want to blow your mind, go down to Miami and think about that.

And so I did and I went to Miami and I happened to get there at king tides, which is the annual high tide for the region. And I was walking through 3 feet of water in Miami Beach on just a regular king tide kind of day. And I thought about it for a few minutes literally, and you realize that, you know, most of Miami-Dade County is 6 feet above the sea. It's built on a kind of porous limestone, making it very difficult to build any kind of walls and I realized that Miami was a city in big, big trouble. And that was sort of where the book began right there.

Greg Dalton: Katharine Mach, what can science tell us about how fast the sea level rise will happen? Because a lot of people think of sea level rise as like this very slow moving thing that'll be a problem for my grandkids. But what do we know about Antarctica and Greenland, how fast it will happen?

Katharine Mach: Before we jump to how fast it might happen, I might just say that it’s already happening and superstorm Sandy when it struck New York City in October of 2012 hit shore on top of 1 foot of sea level rise. And the key question of when we think about what’s happened to date versus what might happen into the future is that there are different processes at play. So warmer ocean takes up more space and ice is melting from land and also from the ice sheets. But the really big question about risk is exactly how fast the ice sheets might collapse. So the West Antarctic and Greenland don't just melt on the surface, they flow through time. And what we're doing with our missions of heat trapping gases is the amount of force in that normally might happen between an interglacial and in glacial cycle and they’re incredibly important questions about how much faster those processes might play out over the next two decades and the next few centuries.

Greg Dalton: Okay. So we’re not sure. What are the ranges for someplace like California, the east coast. What are we looking at like a timeframe; give me a timeframe when I think I’ll be alive and not 2100.

Katharine Mach: Okay. So today, there have been eight inches of sea level rise globally. U.S. is pretty much at the global average, Alaska has more intensity because of the ice and permafrost and the eastern seaboard is seeing a bit more than that. In the next 15 years, we might see another half foot of sea level rise so a substantial increase in the rate at which the oceans are rising. Stepping through this century when I guess I won’t be alive in 2100, but the risk at that point is best estimates around 1 to 4 feet of sea level rise globally. But if the ice sheets move faster rather than slower that upper bound could be up to 8 feet at the global scale.

Greg Dalton: Eight feet. Jeff Goodell, are we anywhere prepared for 8 feet or even 3 feet?

Jeff Goodell: 8 feet, no. I mean just imagine what 8 feet of sea level rise means. We were just talking a few minutes ago that there’s already flooding on 101 around here, places in Miami are already inundated, Norfolk, I mean many places are already dealing with this. So even small amounts are usually consequential, 8 feet is, I mean I don’t want to be melodramatic, but that's catastrophic.

I mean there’s just no scenario in which a modern city can be prepared for that. But even these midrange scenarios of three or 4 feet is really important to see. The thing about sea level rise is it doesn't have to be gargantuan to have enormous problems with beaches washing away, with roads eroding. The costs for communities to deal with this, property values declining at exactly the time when they need to spend more money on adaptation. The economic kind of downward spiral that can be caused by even modest amounts of sea level rise is usually consequential. And will begin to play out long before these big numbers get hit. I mean even in the next few decades, even now we’re seeing it in places in Florida where, you know, they're spending instead of $10 million every two years to replenish the beaches they’re spending $50 million. And, you know, where is that money coming from? And every inch of sea level rise increases that erosion rate increases the, you know, washing away of roads and incursion into buildings and things like that. So it's a progressive problem.

Greg Dalton: Sea level rise amplifies big storms, hurricanes, cyclones, Katharine Mach, tell us about we’ve been through Harvey, Irma, we’ve talked about Sandy, also Maria, what is the climate connection with these and what can they tell us about the intensity and frequency in the future?

Katharine Mach: Cyclones are complex phenomena in our climate system. So it helps to break it down to some simple ways of thinking about the connections between our emissions of heat trapping gases and how these events have become more intense in the North Atlantic and how they might continue to become more intense. So first of all, when the ocean surface is warmer and also when that warmer water goes deeper, you can drive the creation of more powerful storms. Second key feature is that a warmer atmosphere can hold more water, which means that it can come down in heavier rainfall events. And then the third point is where we were at the start, is the fact that when waves are striking shore from a hurricane oftentimes where you get the largest damage is those waves are striking shore on top of sea level rise which is amplifying the risks.

Greg Dalton: So more fuel in the air and more fuel in the water, bigger storms. We saw the rain bombs in Houston also, Puerto Rico has been devastated. Marco Krapels, you've been to Puerto Rico. Tell us how the devastation there can also be an opportunity.

Marco Krapels: Yeah, we went to Puerto Rico with my foundation Empowered by Light and basically Puerto Rico is being wiped out. There is no grid. That's an opportunity rebuild the grid for the future and, you know, I’m gonna try not too much of a downer in this session.

You know, I just want to take a quick step back four years ago when I was last with you on a panel like this, we didn’t have electric cars on the road. Solar cost on a per panel base is still $.80 a watt. And utility scale solar to develop cost about $1.50 a watt. Today, four years later, we’ve seen a lot of electric cars. Tesla is not the only one anymore which is great. You know, every major car manufacturer, Mercedes, Audi, Volkswagen, everyone, Volvo decided to phase out all petrol cars by 2025. So we’ve seen in the last four years electric cars really taken hold and we’re not dependent on one company anymore. We’ve seen the cost of solar drop by somewhere between 30% and 50% and which means that in places like Puerto Rico, which are completely devastated by the way, there is no grid, every transformer is burned down. The polls are broken down, the utilities under FBI investigation. It is a complete disaster which gives us a complete white canvas to rebuild the infrastructure that we need which is about empowering people to make their own energy to store it, to use what they need and to sell what they don't need.

And to create microgrids that are powered by renewable energy and instead of the federal government sending more money to buy more diesel which is going to run out, why don't they make loans available so people can afford and purchase their own energy systems, which comes from a sustainable and a renewable source in Puerto Rico is going to have sunshine for the next 5 billion years that is not gonna run out. So I think there is and, you know, there's a lot of negative news out there, but there's also an opportunity with the technology that we have available today that are affordable. They're cheaper than diesel guaranteed to basically incubate a model for the future.

Greg Dalton: Jeff Goodell, there's a lot of inertia to rebuild communities the way they were after a devastating, you know, Sandy, people want to rebuild the Jersey shore. I just want my home to be the way it was. I want my life back. What are some of the inertia to rebuild the way it was and what are some of the forces to rebuild smarter differently like Marco Krapels just outlined?

Jeff Goodell: Before I answer that I want to say one thing that’s really important what Marco is saying about is, you know, how we move quickly towards renewable energy and cut carbon emissions is incredibly important. But I think there's a big fallacy out there that if we move quickly enough we can stop sea level rise and that we can eliminate this problem and it’s just a question of how fast we move to renewable power, that’s not the case. No matter how fast we move to renewable power we’re still gonna have sea level rise. We can change the trajectory of it. We can change the ultimate height of it, but we still have to have this conversation about dealing with it because we’re already too far down that path. We already have enough heat buildup in the oceans and things that we’re going to see these rising seas. That doesn’t mean again to underscore that we don't have to cut carbon emissions as quickly as possible for a lot of reasons. But I think that there’s a fallacy that we can kind of fix this in a straightforward way and it's not true.

Greg Dalton: You slam on the brakes on a supertanker that supertanker keeps moving for a while.

Jeff Goodell: Exactly. Exactly. Alright. So about the rebuilding I mean, you know, there’s tremendous inertia in these coastal communities after a big storm, especially when you have, you know, a Trump administration, to rebuild it the same way. The contractors come in and they're not like Marco who are brilliant people who are thinking in a profound way about these risks and want to really use this as an opportunity to change the world. Many people who rebuild after storms are people who see this as an opportunity to make a buck and that's a whole different scenario. And that's what we see happening in a lot of places. I saw that after Hurricane Sandy on the Jersey shore.

So, you know, it really requires sort of visionary thinkers to seize these moments and say okay this is a time when we can use this opportunity to change where we build. And with sea level rise and storms one simple thing that does happen and will certainly happen a lot more is buying out communities and returning them to nature. We did that in couple of neighborhoods on Staten Island and there are going to be places where that’s gonna be the sort of solution after a rebuild is to say we’re not gonna rebuild at all. This is going back to nature.

Greg Dalton: Katharine Mach, how are we gonna decide who gets protected and what areas get abandoned?

Katharine Mach: We have a very clear understanding that managing the risks in a changing climate is gonna require a big portfolio of actions. And so when I think we dive in right to this question of retreat we need to step back and say how does that fit into the whole landscape of what we’re doing. And so some of the responses will be engineered. We need to adopt what the Dutch have done and figure out dikes and barriers. But also like the Dutch have done we need to figure out how even nature can be a part of that, where we want to create floodplains. And then in part of that we need to say where there are places that are so at risk that for example The National Flood Insurance has paid $1 million to a house that is worth $70,000; those are the types of places where we need to be stepping in either through buyouts or through community relocations or through strategic adjustments of our infrastructure and create more room for the river in some really important ways coming together with the stuff that's protection, the stuff that’s accommodation and the stuff that's moving out of harm's way in the entirety.

Greg Dalton: Jeff Goodell, you write about living differently with water and not fighting it, but kind of a new relationship with water.

Jeff Goodell: Yeah, well that’s something the Dutch are figuring out. They have this new idea, you know, they’ve obviously, you know, what 70% of the Netherlands is as you know better than I is below sea level. And they’ve, you know, constructed this world that is protected by walls and dikes, but they're even figuring out that given the kind of sea level rise projections were talking about they can’t continue that, that's not, building walls, simply walling off the water is not going to work. So the Dutch are really sort of forward thinking in this idea of we have to live with water we have to figure out new ways of living with water. The future is going to require kind of adaptable living. You know, I think that's one of the profound ideas about sea level rise that I try to communicate in my book is that we have this sense of our coastlines as being these fixed places that where you build a house there, you put a road there and that's where the beaches and that’s where the water is and here's where the land is. Well, the thing that we know now is that that is going to be changing very rapidly. And in fact, you know, that’s the way nature creates coastlines; they’re all temporary arrangements of sort of sand and rock. And, you know, we have to live in a way that embraces that and reflects that. You know, when I saw that in some of the, you know, in places like Lagos where I went and looked at people who are living in water slums there and, you know, they're living in houses that are on stilts and you talk to them about sea level rise and they’re like, I don't care if it rises four feet I’ll just put bigger stilts up and we’re fine because everything is on a boat and there's no built infrastructure.

Greg Dalton: You write about a school, a floating school there.

Jeff Goodell: Yeah, and it’s a great thing and it was a very cheap they just basically, there’s a Nigerian architect a really brilliant man, you know, basically lashed together a bunch of oil drums and built like a tepee on top of it, a sort of fancy tepee and it was fabulous and it was the community center and it was two levels high and everybody loved it and it really was a sort of epicenter of this slum community. It was really inspiring for everyone; it's why I went there. And seeing the resiliency in this sort of simpler way of living was really inspiring to me too because it really showed me that it’s really like how we think about it more than anything else that is their biggest stumbling block. That if we can think about this in more creative and flexible ways, it’s not as scary.

Greg Dalton: If you’re just joining us we’re talking about sea level rise at Climate One. Our guests are Jeff Goodell, author of the new book The Water Will Come. Katharine Mach, a scientist from Stanford University and Marco Krapels, a former vice president of Tesla. I'm Greg Dalton.

Earlier when President Obama went to Alaska, Jeff Goodell traveled there and spoke with President Obama about the impact of climate disruption. Here’s a part of their conversation.

[Start Clip]

Barack Obama: You wish that the political system could process an issue like this just based on data and science. But people have to see it and feel it and breathe it. And that makes things a little scarier because it indicates that we’re already losing a lot of time.

Our democratic process is painfully slow. Historically, politics catch up when the public cares deeply. The American people have to feel the same urgency that I do. It’s understandable that they don’t because it feels abstract to people.

[End Clip]

Dalton: President Obama talking to Jeff Goodell in Alaska, Rolling Stone writer Jeff Goodell. So Jeff Goodell, tell us about that time that interview. He was trying to lay out his legacy there and saying that also that gotta reach people at a visceral level.

Jeff Goodell: Right. I mean he went up there in order to communicate with people about this. He went to Alaska where it’s the sort of poster child for both our dependency on fossil fuels and the risks of global warming and the melting that’s going on there the permafrost and everything and displaced villages. And I was lucky enough, you know, he basically chose one writer to go with him to spend a few days with him and for reasons that you’d have to talk to them about, they asked me if I wanted to go.

Greg Dalton: You’re one of the best.

Jeff Goodell: But I got the extraordinary opportunity not only to kind of climb around on glaciers with the president, but to spend an hour and a half sitting in a eighth grade classroom in the Arctic Circle just him and I talking about climate change.

Greg Dalton: No one gets that kind of time with that guy.

Jeff Goodell: Yeah, it was very pretty good news. You know what’s really extraordinary was that I've interviewed many people in my life as a journalist and whenever you interview someone of prominence they always want to know what -- the aides always want to know what are you going to ask so that the important person is not surprised by some weird question you’re gonna spring on them. Nobody asked me, all they said is, you have an hour and a half with the president to talk about climate change and that’s all. And there was no like, are you gonna ask him about glaciers, are you gonna ask him about, you know, there was no prep.

So I had him completely, he had no idea what I was gonna ask him. And I have after all these years I have a very good sort of BS detector for people who understand climate change and energy questions and people who have read a lot of notes about it, and there's a big difference and he got it. He really understood what was at risk and what was happening. I don’t agree with everything that he said, but it was really an extraordinary moment and it led to an extraordinary thing, which was the Paris climate agreement. And that was the whole point of that to bring the American public along. He worked very hard, he and Secretary Kerry to bring the Chinese on board to get this coalition together that came together and achieve what happened in Paris. And I was in Paris and it was very emotional moment, everyone next to me was crying when the gavel went down.

And now in retrospect, it seems like some other world. It's like, you know, a long-lost past.

Announcer: That’s journalist and author Jeff Goodell, and we’re talking about rising seas, here on Climate One. We’ll continue the conversation right after this.

Announcer: Welcome back to Climate One. Today, we’re talking about rising seas – why it’s happening, what it means to our coastlines and what we can do about it. Our guests are author Jeff Goodell, former Tesla vice president Marco Krapels, and Katharine Mach of Stanford University. Here’s Greg Dalton.

Greg Dalton: Katharine Mach, there's some interesting research that shows what reaches people. President Obama is saying former President Obama but then President Obama saying need to reach people at a visceral, emotional level. Tell us about some research that you're aware of that says how that can happen with regard to climate.

Katharine Mach: Climate change is an awesome challenge in so many different ways. Responding effectively is going to require proactive transformation of our energy and land use systems globally in this century. That’s where we’re grappling with in reality, but what we often do as scientists is kind of the worst way to connect with people and drive the kind of creativity and innovation and leadership that's necessary to solve that awesome challenge. So what we usually do scientifically is we take it from the top. We talk about carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide and methane and the way they’re shifting the radiative balance of the planet. And if people haven’t tuned out at that point we then march through this long litany of risks, not just what's happening in the climate system but bam, bam, bam you can go continent by continent, people, nature how this is a pervasive challenge for every aspect of our existence. So at that point most people are either elevated and their pulse slightly alarmed or they have just completely disengaged. What we know from the science of how to do communications effectively is that you don't start with creating an abstract, unfixable, unending challenge in your communications narrative, you connect with people.

And Obama had it exactly right. You start with the fact that yes, it's real, it’s happening, it’s serious, but we see solutions happening in so many different ways. And if you’re gonna hit people with the risk you want to make sure they see how it connects to them, here and now, how it’s urgent and how they can solve it. Again and again scientifically we haven’t quite figure out how to make that happen but I think there’s enough recognition at this point that whether it's the IPCC or the NCA or scientists at every university there is increasing determination to get the communications and engagement right.

Greg Dalton: There’s an acronym that I learned from George Marshall who wrote a book called Don't Even Think About It, what we think about when we’re not thinking about climate change. And in there he cites PAIN to reach people. It needs to be personal, abrupt, immoral, and now - all the things that climate change in its abstraction is not. So Marco Krapels, you work a lot with Leonardo DiCaprio there's a Solutions Project. Tell us about that effort to try to get to and using his celebrity to communicate to reach people who may not be paying attention to scientists like or others.

Marco Krapels: Sure. And by the way, I really do miss President Obama. I just want to say that. Boy, the world has changed

But, but, the world is still moving forward with or without us. China right now is deploying solar at twice the rate that we are deploying solar. And sooner it’ll be a three times the rate. India, Modi, I had the privilege of meeting Prime Minister Modi when he came here to Silicon Valley. And he’s made a huge commitment to solar and powering his country with renewable energy. So with Leo, yeah, I think one of the reasons why we want to make Before the Flood, the documentary is to try to find a way to reach more people.

And National Geographic end up picking up the movie and it was great that they screened it for free on various media outlets for two weeks. I think over 80 million people ended up watching it just in the first few weeks. And, you know, unfortunately we weren’t able to swing the elections. But, you know, I do think it's important that public figures and Leo has done a great job, Mark Ruffalo has done a great job as well are reaching out to their followers and their people and letting them know that this is important, vote and please adopt renewable energy technology as much as you can. So Leo has been amazing, he’s been a big supporter of the Solutions Project as well and, you know, it's great when you see people like Bernie Sanders as part of his campaign take the hundred percent renewable energy platform as his energy plan. I mean that is incredible. I mean we didn’t see that one coming either.

Greg Dalton: And there's been some talk about a national policy for the state of California at 50% trying to go to 100% but there's been an interesting backlash to this, you know, Professor Mark Jacobson, engineering professor at Stanford published a paper we can get to 100% in California and some very green people pushed back on that and now there's a lawsuit. So tell us about that Marco.

Marco Krapels: Yeah, so I mean I’m not party to the lawsuit, but Dr. Jacobson who’s the cofounder of the Solutions Project with myself and Mark Ruffalo and Josh Fox. He, a few years ago published a paper doing scientific analysis of what technologies are available to transition ourselves to 100% renewable. And he focused on pumped hydro as an important storage source. So I think he was upset that there were factual errors made in certain publications, and when he attempted to get those corrected and not getting response to that and he did reach out to various of those authors and he didn't get a response. So I think he decided to file a lawsuit to get their attention.

And so, you know, the good news is, is that there are many other technologies available today to store energy. I mean the cost of batteries has dropped over 50% the last four years. So we’re not necessarily dependent on stored hydro or pumped hydro using a lot of turbines to create that energy during peak hours. The beautiful thing about renewable energy is you can harvest the sun; you can harvest the wind and create cheap energy. The problem is that's intimate and it's only during certain parts of the day. And our peak demand in California is in later hours in the day in the evening when we needed energy most.

So you need some formal storage to be able to store what you generate during the day and be able to discharge that at night. The good news is, is that batteries are there so there’s a reason why company like Tesla are building massive storage projects coupled to solar, coupled to wind in parts of the world not because people think it's the right thing to do it’s because it's cheaper than any other source of energy. And so I think the good news for Dr. Jacobson and any other scientist looking at how we transition to 100% renewable is that there are other forms of storage that are available that are economically feasible that can be integrated with intermittent sources of new energy like wind and solar to get us to a 100% renewable. And I really hope that SB 100 the California effort that’s on the way to get ourselves to a 100% renewable energy faster gets passed next year and then California can lead again with or without the rest of the United States.

Greg Dalton: Marco Krapels is a former vice president of Tesla. Our other guests today at Climate One are Katharine Mach, research scientist at Stanford University and Jeff Goodell, author of the new book The Water Will Come. I'm Greg Dalton.

We’re gonna go to our lightning round. I’m gonna mention a noun to each of our guests and get their immediate visceral, unfiltered response association and also a true and false part of this. Starting with Jeff Goodell, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind when I mentioned Norfolk, Virginia?

Jeff Goodell: Sunken ships.

Greg Dalton: Marco Krapels. Warren Buffett.

Marco Krapels: Nevada.

Greg Dalton: Katharine Mach. President Trump’s science advisor.

Katharine Mach: What science advisor?

Greg Dalton: He does not have one. Jeff Goodell, U.S. Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke.

Jeff Goodell: A clown.

Greg Dalton: True or false. Jeff Goodell. Humanity is doomed?

Jeff Goodell: False.

Greg Dalton: Katharine Mach, you would buy oceanfront property today?

Katharine Mach: Maybe.

Greg Dalton: Depends on the price. Marco Krapels. True or false. Tesla’s stock is way overpriced?

Marco Krapels: No comments.

Greg Dalton: There are no securities lawyers in the house. True or false. Jeff Goodell. You will go condo diving during your lifetime?

Jeff Goodell: Anywhere in the world. In my lifetime, I’m feeling pretty good. True.

Greg Dalton: One of the titles in his book, chapter titles Condo Diving. Katharine Mach, the cover image of Jeff Goodell’s book is depressing and doesn't activate readers?

Katharine Mach: It’s a hard whack and we need solutions.

Greg Dalton: Marco Krapels. Elon Musk sometimes really does sleep at the end of a Tesla production line?

Marco Krapels: Or on top of the factory.

Greg Dalton: On the roof. Alright, that ends our lightning round. Let’s give them a round of applause for getting through.

Greg Dalton: Jeff Goodell you traveled around lots of different places. Where are some model cities who's getting it right, who's really kind of starting to build this new future with water that we’re looking at?

Jeff Goodell: That’s a hard question because there's no real simple answer. There’s no one model place that’s really figuring it out. I mean Copenhagen is trying to do really interesting things with water squares, you know, he’s building the squares in the center of the city like double as reservoirs when there is big rain events.

You have places like the Netherlands that are doing interesting things with moving rivers around. But I actually think that New York is really thinking deeply about this. And, you know, obviously they have the advantage if you will of just being wiped out with Hurricane Sandy and so that inspired a lot of thinking and they got money for this redesign, rebuild by design where they had a competition with a bunch of architects and urban planners and some really innovative things have come out of that. They have enormous problems because of obviously the size of New York and the amount of sort of built infrastructure of, you know, brownstones with basements at sea level right at, you know, zero elevation. But they also have a lot of really forward thinking people there who are really pushing hard on how we reinvent the city and how do we begin to take serious steps in this direction. So that's what I would say.

Greg Dalton: Are you familiar with the story of Hoboken and Hoboken also flooded. They were offered a whole bunch of money and there were designs for some cement sea walls and they’re like, ugh, those are ugly you can keep your money we don't want that.

Jeff Goodell: Yeah. Yeah, I know I’ve spent a lot of time in Hoboken. And, you know, it brings up the whole problems of walls. It’s not only are they ugly but there's this question of who's behind them and who's not. And there were a lot of residents there who have paid a lot of money for condos right on the water with views of Manhattan that did not want the wall. They’re like, I don’t care if it’s flooding, well I’ll deal with the flooding I don't want to stare at the wall every day. And so a lot is, you know, contrary to what one would think a lot of people were pushing back saying I don't want the protection, I'll deal with the risk.

And then there's also the problem on the other side of things is like, why do you get a wall and I'm 12 feet over here and I don't get a wall. Why do you decide to stop it there? How do you make that political decision of who's behind the wall and who's not? And that's one of the big problems broadly about coastal protection is how you decide who gets the wall.

Greg Dalton: Katharine Mach that brings up another conversation about winners and losers. There will be winners and losers in climate change; a lot of losers, but some winners. Tell us how that'll be distributed across incomes and geography.

Katharine Mach: So there are winners and losers in the realm of risk. But I also feel like there are winners and losers in the realm of responses we've seen so far that have played across the globe in some really interesting ways. So for example as Jeff was describing all of the action we’ve seen in the Netherlands or in London or Oslo. I think what’s also really fascinating is that Bangladesh which is often characterized as a major loser in the realm of impacts, they’re right at sea level, huge populations right on the Delta, incredibly poor, at the same time has been a big innovator in the realm of solutions. So they are preparing for cyclones having areas where you can raise up your livestock, early warning systems that are incredibly low cost. Another category where there is huge vulnerability to impacts is sub-Saharan Africa where it’s water issues, it’s food issues, it’s extremes that are already pushing people at the margin, but there we’ve also seen great innovation in the realm of solutions. Whether it's the development banks recognizing that if you climate proof your investments usually that’s a marginal investment in terms of the whole cost of the road to the bridge or the dam but it makes you that much more easily into the future.

So climate change risks are highly uneven across the globe as a whole within any one country within any one community. But we’re also seeing innovation and responses that isn't just the losers are faring worse, sometimes losers have been the biggest innovators in terms of making it happen so far.

Greg Dalton: And within the United States, there are certain regions and there is a project at the University of California Berkeley that look at county by county in the United States and generally what can you tell us about the South versus the Northwest in terms of how that distribution lands in terms of winners and losers on the economy?

Katharine Mach: Just about every community in the U.S. has experienced climate change impacts to date. But I think a really key point is that they have been different in different places. So in the Northeast there's been a substantial increase in the amount of rain falling and heavy downpour events. Here in California we've been thinking about drought. Agriculture plays out differently where there are areas that actually have cooled in some cases at the same time that we've seen declines in productivity. So really adaptation in many ways or preparing for the risks that are in the pipeline means that we need to consider the broadscale trends the globe as a whole for the U.S. as a whole but becoming prepared oftentimes means saying right here for us in the San Francisco Bay Area or California or the Southwest. So to any region the portfolio of risks is different, as well as the menu of response options.

Greg Dalton: Jeff Goodell, you write about St. Augustine and New Orleans both with mayors who wanted their communities to be removed from flood maps so that their constituents could pay lower flood insurance premiums, which is kind of increasing their risk reducing their protection but it's responding to short-term political pressure that seems logical I guess.

Jeff Goodell: Yeah, I mean, you know, I had the amazing experience of being in St. Augustine when Hurricane Matthew hit and was there watching the water like come into the streets and I was like, you know, being kind of actually stupid and risking, we shouldn’t have been out but I was, I was like this is my moment, you know, I mean, this is what I write about I need to be --

Greg Dalton: You want to be a storm chaser on weather channel, yeah.

Jeff Goodell: Exactly. Exactly. Sending little videos to my kids, look at the water, kids. But I was there and it just so happened that I had been looking at the flood maps for St. Augustine, you know, a few weeks before, and not knowing that I was gonna be inundated. And I was standing in a street and I could see the water going over the hood of a Mercedes. And I looked at the flood maps and this had just been removed from the flood zone. This exact block had just been removed from the flood zone where the water was so deep it was going over the hood of a Mercedes. I mean these flood maps are the whole flood protection program is a big disaster it's been in the front page of the Times and John Oliver did a great segment the other night also.

But one of the fundamental reasons is these flood maps are completely out of date and they’re, you know, they’re prone to political pressure. So, you know, if you don't, because if you're in a higher risk flood zone you have to pay higher rates, and so a way to lower your rates is to call your congressman and just say I don't like being in the zone get me out of it. And if your congressman is Chuck Schumer or if your congressman is someone with some power, you know, you can get that will happen and it literally gets these flood maps get rewritten. And the other big problem is they’re not look forward looking at all, there's no calculation for sea level rise for future flooding. And so you have this, you know, government program that is essentially encouraging people to rebuild in areas that are hugely at risk and is doing a very poor job of what I think is the most important thing to happen here, which is to make risk transparent.

Allow people the tools to see what these risks that they're running really are. Because people don't know and people have their entire homes, you know, their life savings in their homes and they’re building and living in areas that are really going to only decline in value.

Announcer: Jeff Goodell’s new book is “The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World.” We’ll be back with Goodell and our other guests in just a moment. This is Climate One.

Announcer: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about America’s energy, economy and environment. You can listen to all of our programs and subscribe to our podcast at our website: climate-one-dot-org.

We’re talking about high tides and wild weather caused by climate change. Our guests today are Rolling Stone contributor Jeff Goodell, Stanford University research scientist Katharine Mach, and Marco Krapels, co-founder of The Solutions Project.

Here’s your host, Greg Dalton.

Greg Dalton: Marco Krapels, you know, coming back to solutions, how much of this can the Trump administration move toward clean energy can be slow bound by the Trump administration right now?

Marco Krapels: I think they could do a lot of harm. Right now there’s a trade tariff dispute which could cause if Trump actually does end up signing that resolution that could double the price of a solar panel.

Greg Dalton: This is kind of part of hitting China for hitting back at them.

Marco Krapels: Yeah that could add as much as $.30-$.40 a watt to the price. So that would be devastating for the United States. It would be great for the rest of the world because there’ll be global solar panels that needs to go somewhere else. Places like Brazil and other places are quickly adopting renewable energy. So, you know, I think there's a lot of harm that the Trump administration could do now. I do believe that the Trump administration likes the job creation aspect of solar and wind. He wants U.S. manufacturing; a lot of products are actually made here, you know, Tesla makes cars here and the batteries are made here. So I think it could cause a lot of harm and United States loss will be the rest of the world's gain if that happens.

Greg Dalton: Let’s go to our audience questions. Welcome.

Male Participant: Yeah. Thank you. Good evening. I like to follow up with this resiliency you mentioned about adaptation. As you may recall, there was another major event but way back 1984 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It looks like that city is doing a good job in term of adaptation. Do the speakers know anything about this idea that engineers can do something about it in term of adaptation design?

Katharine Mach: We’re seeing innovation happening both in terms of preparing for the impacts of climate change and reigning in emissions in places where climate change isn't the motivation or even the first thing in people's consciousness. In terms of the five states that are producing the most wind energy right now, they all voted red in the last election. In terms of grappling with sea level rise you have this wonderful example of Florida where their communities where it's not really at the forefront of people's consciousness that they want to proactively address the risk of climate change. But they recognize that it's flooding and that they need to grapple with it somehow. So I think in terms of adapting to the risks of climate change we’re seeing smart action because we’re behind the eight ball now. In some cases because people understand that there are substantial future risks in the pipeline but often because the co-benefits are so large that it makes sense, irrespective of the climate change benefits.

Marco Krapels: There are dozens and dozens of cities in the United States in spite of the U.S. as a country pulling out of Paris agreement. There are I think it's in a couple hundred now cities and some of them are really big cities that have committed to transitioning to 100% renewable energy because they think that’s in the best interest of their citizens. So this is definitely happening.

Jeff Goodell: And if I can just say, you know, good example also is the military. I mean the military is obviously, you know, hardly tree hugger lefties. And I spent a lot of time at naval bases and they totally get it. And they’re doing, you know, all kinds of things to prepare for this changing world. Unfortunately, they have to do it under the guise of not talking about it because if they say they’re doing something for climate change then it gets zeroed out depending on budget. So they make up reasons that don't have anything to do with climate change, to do what they need to do for climate change. So they’re in this kind of double.

Greg Dalton: Navy secretary under President Obama, Ray Mabus was one of the most progressive people in U.S. government I think in the entire Obama administration. Great Green Fleet moving ships to renewable energy, jet fighters have running on biofuel and solar power on bases. Has that rolled back under the Trump administration or they managed to kind of keep that going, Jeff Goodell?

Jeff Goodell: I don’t really, I can’t really answer in the kind of authority that I’d like to have because I haven't been in contact with many of the Navy people that I got to know while I was reporting the book. So but I cannot imagine that it's changed significantly. I mean as one commander said to me, you know, our job is to deal with the world as it is not as we want it to be. And so their whole way of seeing the world is to look at it accurately and to, you know, look at the facts. And they understand that the climate is changing. They see it. They see the water coming up. They see the droughts that they’re dealing with. Their job is to think about future conflicts they’re doing all kinds of modeling around that about how droughts in certain areas that climate scientists are looking at might inspire conflicts, might put people in motion, you know, the idea of the political instability from people leaving areas because of food shortage is very much in the forefront of their mind.

Plus disaster work I mean like not only hurricanes and things like that. But now that we have the Northwest passage open because of the melting ice in the Arctic. One of the things they’re very concerned about is when is inevitably will happen, one of these big cruise ships hits some ice or something and, you know, falls over and who’s gonna go get them? And that’s gonna be the U.S. military. And so they’re thinking about all this kind of stuff.

Greg Dalton: I was up in that near the Northwest Passage this summer. And it is a long way from anywhere. Let’s go to our next question at Climate One.

Male Participant: Thank you. Given the existing projections on the rise in sea level and global warming assuming that these projections continue, what do you see as far as any changes in global migration and the geopolitical consequences. In particular globally and within the U.S. what the consequences of that would be?

Greg Dalton: Who’d like to tackle that? Katharine Mach.

Katharine Mach: So a really key thing about migration is that oftentimes migration when it is economically motivated is super adaptive. The people who are moving benefit and the host regions benefit economically. The question around climate change is how much will some of these traditional patterns we’ve seen around migration hold especially when it could be a hundred million people inundated within the century. So for example oftentimes what happens in the aftermath of the disaster is that you get local temporary displacement. It’s actually what we’re seeing in Puerto Rico right now; it’s what we saw after Katrina here in the U.S. go country by country that's the typical pattern.

Where it really comes up before is well we get to the point where that’s not just within country displacement but displacement that’s spilling across national borders in ways that the international governance systems just can't handle. So there may be something there in terms of missing institutions where what we have in place right now for migration and refugees may simply be incapacitated due to volume depending on how some of these disruptive events play out in particular in the realm of extremes.

Greg Dalton: Let’s go to our last question. Welcome to Climate One.

Female Participant: Hi, I am a volunteer for The Climate Reality Project and for 350 Bay Area. And so I speak in the community and it’s a different group than it’s here. So I grapple a lot with how to approach the issue and it kind of depends on what study I just read, right? And so I have a talk tomorrow night to a group and I’m so grappling with how, what is my feeling tone, what am I, am I optimistic, am I really depressed about this and do any of you have suggestions for me as for how to approach this.

Greg Dalton: Marco Krapels.

Marco Krapels: So yes, we are in deep trouble.

Female Participant: Yeah.

Marco Krapels: And it is your responsibility for having being the gift of life to do everything that you can in your power to slow down the negative chains that we’re gonna be all experiencing. So everything that you can do in your power, don't wait for some magic Superman or Superwoman to arrive because they're not coming. It is your responsibility to do everything you can do in your power. Which is, I mean if you are a resident in California, next year is Jerry Brown's last year as governor inspire him to commit this state, the sixth largest economy in the world to move into 100% of renewable energy. We are voters, we can call our local councilmen, we can call our mayors, we can call our senators. Don't give up on being able to influence local politics even though the national politics are disaster. So yes we’re in trouble but you have to do everything you can that’s within your power.

Female Participant: Yeah, I’ll sure do.

Greg Dalton: Katharine Mach, I think everyone who works in climate wrestles with this despair and hope. We live in both places. I asked that to Steve Chu and he said, yeah, I’m totally bipolar, you know, he’s very optimistic and he sometimes very depressed. How do you personally manage that bipolarity?

Katharine Mach: The risks are really serious but climate change responses are a way to build a better world and that’s the case of clean energy technologies that are good for human health, livelihood, security, air quality and every community throughout the country and it’s the case in terms of preparing for the impact that we’re gonna have to grapple with no matter what. And make sense here in San Francisco, California and U.S. as a whole.

Greg Dalton: So Jeff Goodell, how do you manage that yourself and dealing with people. How do you connect with people in that hope, fear, tension?

Jeff Goodell: So I’m kind of primitive about this. I think of myself as a journalist who's trying to tell a story and trying to tell the truth about things. And I don't spend a whole lot of time worrying about -- I want to effectively tell the truth that I best know and how that truth and that story is used and told. You know, I’m not a political activist I want to communicate but I don't spend a lot of time really thinking about that part of it, you know. But I do find that sometimes I think about the scientist who was very influential to me in Florida when I was putting this book together who I was with him once in an audience and they said can you give us anything for hope? And he said yeah, I can give you hope, I hope you're listening.

Greg Dalton: What a great way to end it there.

Announcer: You’ve been listening to a Climate One discussion on rising seas and rising temperatures, how to find solutions and where to look for hope. Our guests were Jeff Goodell, contributing editor at Rolling Stone and author of the new book The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World. Marco Krapels, former vice president of Tesla and co-founder of The Solutions Project. And Katharine Mach, senior research scientist at Stanford University and a former co-director of science for the IPCC.

Podcasts of this and other Climate One shows are available wherever you podcast, and on our website: climate-one-dot-org. Please leave us a comment; we’d love to know what you think about our conversations on energy, food, water and more.

Greg Dalton: Climate One is a special project of the Commonwealth Club of California. Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Carlos Manuel is our producer. The audio engineer is William Blum. Anny Celsi and Devon Strolovich are the editors. I’m Greg Dalton, the executive producer and host. The Commonwealth Club CEO is Dr. Gloria Duffy.

You can discover additional podcasts, videos, speaker information and more at climate-one-dot-org. Join us next time for a conversation about America’s energy, economy and environment.

Climate One is presented in association with KQED Public Radio.

Play

C1 Revue: Surviving a Megadrought

Otto Pilot — Tue, 01 Nov 2016 09:00:00 +0000

C1 Revue: Surviving a Megadrought

11/01/2016

After last winter’s rains, Californians breathed a collective sigh of relief. But short-term weather is not the same as long-term climate. And state water watchers understand that this rainfall did not break the worst drought in over a thousand years. With the effects of climate change being felt around the country – droughts in some areas and flooding in others – the nation is looking to California as a model for how to handle a new normal. Today we’ll dig into the water woes of this bellwether state. How is California planning for a hotter, drier climate in the cities and down on the farm?

Play

floods

Rewind: Saket Soni on the People Who Make Disaster Recovery Possible

Rewind: Saket Soni on the People Who Make Disaster Recovery Possible

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Saket Soni

Daniel Castellanos

Labor and the Climate Crisis

Labor and the Climate Crisis

Two Hemispheres, One Story: Reporting on Rising Seas

Water and Civilization: Resilience and Collapse

Driving Forces: How Climate Fuels Human Migration

Talk Isn’t Cheap: The Power of Conversation

How Activism Can Win Bigger and Faster with Kumi Naidoo

What More Can I Do?

Indigenous Perspectives: What Makes a Just Transition?

This Year in Climate: 2023

Two Hemispheres, One Story: Reporting on Rising Seas

Two Hemispheres, One Story: Reporting on Rising Seas

Guests

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson

Lauren Sommer

Rising Seas: Is San Francisco Ready?

Bringing Biodiversity Back from the Breaking Point

Stefan Rahmstorf: 2022 Schneider Award Winner

Managed Retreat: When Climate Hits Home

Fire and Water: A Year of Climate Conversations

Weathering the Storm: Mayors of Houston, Miami and Columbia

High Tide on Main Street

Jeff Goodell: The Water Will Come

Risky Business: Underinsured Against Climate Disaster

Risky Business: Underinsured Against Climate Disaster

Guests

Junia Howell

Dr. Simon Young

Umair Irfan

Carolyn Kousky

Eric Letvin

Weather Whiplash

Weather Whiplash

Managed Retreat: When Climate Hits Home

Two Hemispheres, One Story: Reporting on Rising Seas

Preparing for Disasters We Don’t Want to Think About

Water and Civilization: Resilience and Collapse

Flooding in America

Building a Resilient Tomorrow

Law and Disorder: Climate Change in the Courts

Fire and Water: A Year of Climate Conversations

Managed Retreat: When Climate Hits Home

Managed Retreat: When Climate Hits Home

Guests

Sam Turken

Amy Chester

Kia Javanmardian

Fire and Water: A Year of Climate Conversations

Weathering the Storm: Mayors of Houston, Miami and Columbia

Two Hemispheres, One Story: Reporting on Rising Seas

Risky Business: Underinsured Against Climate Disaster

Flooding in America

Chaos and Progress: A Year of Climate Conversations

C1 Revue: Surviving a Megadrought

Killer Heat: Confronting Disproportionate Impacts on Women and Girls

Water and Civilization: Resilience and Collapse

Water and Civilization: Resilience and Collapse

Guests

Giulio Boccaletti

Sara Aminzadeh

Flooding in America

Weathering the Storm: Mayors of Houston, Miami and Columbia

C1 Revue: Surviving a Megadrought

Housing Density as a Climate Lever with Scott Wiener

Sea Changes: Why Oceans Play a Bigger Role in Climate Change Than You Think

Nearly 2 Years In… Is the Inflation Reduction Act Delivering Yet?

Climate Migration: Should I Stay or Should I Go?

This Year in Climate: 2023

Flooding in America

Flooding in America

Guests

Julia Kumari Drapkin

Ed Kearns

Martha Shulski