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It’s run by individual capitalists who will each deny the problem as long as possible until they, personally, can sell out and move to Denver leaving some greater fool behind hodling the “real estate”
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Planning and building a city below sea level from scratch, on purpose, is a completely different thing from jacking one up at the last minute that’s already there and wasn’t designed to do that
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But also, let’s not forget when many cities were founded, climate change was not a major issue, and being on the coast was an asset, because you could position yourself as a port city.
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Wait, do you actually think that if the water goes up an inch, all you need to do is put up an inch barrier and it will be as if it never happened? You’ve never heard of hurricanes or groundwater or erosion or…breaker waves? Water has lots of ways to travel. 
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Tbh, it’s for reasons like this that I think some kind of geoengineering intervention – and very much a double-edged sword of one – is inevitable in the medium-term. Injecting sulfates in the upper atmosphere or similar.
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That’s not what this is about. This is about action that all of humanity needs to take right now. Because if we don’t, it’s not going to matter how much dirt cities move around.
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And BTW, bite me. Climate change is not just about rising sea levels. Wildfires got within a few miles of my house. Many people have lost their homes or their lives or their loved ones. Downplaying it is beyond shitty.
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Well thanks for the curiousity, but uh, I’m not sure how else you would do it. How would you go about getting China, the largest carbon dioxide emitter on the planet, to stop burning coal? How about Russia? Oil and gas are (or were) their main economic exports. It’s pretty transparent now that the reason that the Eurozone was so gung ho on renewables had more to do with their Russia strategy than saving the planet.
This sort of intentional blindness to strategic reality is I think why people might make the silly argument that we won’t be adapting to climate change / resist the idea that rich cities with competent engineers will be just fine. The story goes that there won’t be any particular winners or losers and there won’t be any use of hard power. Well we’re in it now buddy! Hope the Eurozone can get those heat pumps and Atlantic CNG terminals going before winter hits!
Speaking of intentional blindness, having no alternative to trying to adapt to climate change is not remotely the same thing as anyone ending up just fine. Someone who thinks shoveling a little dirt is all it takes to stop the ocean might not understand, but cities are already having trouble adapting – to heat and fires and storms and changes to water and food supply. That’s only going to get worse, and if the root problem is allowed to continue unchecked there’s no promise they can handle it.
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We don’t have to. If the US fixes its contribution to the problem, we prevent the worst of climate change.
Furthermore, it makes financial sense to do so. Climate change will cost tens of trillions over the next 50 years or so, so spending a fraction of that now to prevent it makes perfect sense. Carbon neutral energy development also reduces dependence of foreign oil, which lowers those geopolitical tensions you are concerned about. It also means no longer having to deal with ethically garbage countries like Saudi Arabia. Additionally, carbon-free technology is a competitive advantage that we should be investing in to get an edge over China and Russia in the future. China is investing heavily in it and will dominate the future of energy if the US does nothing.
Your canned talking points are really tired, dude.
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Thanks. That was just as nonsensical as I suspected it would be, with a bonus straw-man argument thrown in.
The implication that the war in Ukraine is the fault of the West is a nice touch – poor Putin, being forced to invade his neighbour just because those ecological elitists in Europe don’t like that he runs the world’s biggest gas station.
The idea that any place will be “just fine” 30-80 years down the line if countries and corporations don’t take serious action now to mitigate the climate emergency is the same type of techno-utopian Libertarian fantasy that has people believing that pandemics respect the boundaries of gated communities.
In the real world there is no Galt’s Gulch where tycoon engineers can avoid the worst effects of the climate emergency. There is no “away”.
You’re not thinking like an MBA. Anything that happens after the next three months doesn’t matter to guys like this, and they’ll make any ridiculous argument they can come up with in an attempt to make sure you join them in their myopia.
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the name of your failing garage band?
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Rude! You don’t have to be libertarian to tell that rich countries are going to do better than poor ones.
I know it was 2005, but now its 2022, we’re in a proxy war with an oil state for whom climate change will mostly benefit, and the main way that Europe is threatening them is by refusing to pay for their oil and gas
It’s also 2022, it is 20 years down the line, maybe 50, depending on how you count, the temps have risen, and the governments of the world have uh, well, they just keep burning more. If one doesn’t burn it, the other will! This fantasy that we’re all going to work together: how long we got on this? Is it done in 2050? 2080? 2 deg C? 4 deg C?
Or is this gonna be like Paul Ehrlich and sort of fossilize into the wingnut corners and you have to hear about it long after the population bomb was supposed to explode into cannibalism.
You do have to be one to find that an acceptable and perhaps optimal situation. Especially if you’re invoking Randian visions of heroic capitalist engineers saving not just wealthy countries but wealthy enclaves (“rich cities” that will “be just fine”).
The only ones characterising the Russian invasion of a sovereign nation-state as a “proxy” war that’s driven by the West are the Putin regime and its Useful Idiots and, apparently, those heavily invested in the continued burning of fossil fuels (a different kind of idiocy).
That childish excuse for inaction may impress people on Facebook and Twitter but it won’t wash here.
Not long at all any more, thanks in large part to the fossil fuel industry and its political allies spending decades pushing talking points like yours.
I thought you lot had given up on the whole “let’s ignore/downplay the scientific consensus” tactic. Paul Ehrlich never had close to 97% of scientific experts in various inter-related fields backing his claims.
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And I’m not clear on how having Siberia on fire is of benefit to Russia…
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Irrelevant. Most of us probably do not live in China, and have no say over the political choices of the government here. Many of us here, though, do live in a country where we have some say over how we’re governed and what environmental policies are implemented.
If China is the hold up from the US doing the right thing, then we’ve lost and China and Russia has won. It’s an act of cowardice to not take responsibility for our own messes because other countries are not doing so.
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Indeed, we can’t do much to control China. Even so, the narrative that China is all about burning fossil fuels is more BS.
The East Is Green: China’s Global Leadership in Renewable Energy
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It’s honestly like saying that because your neighbor is not following this law or that, you don’t need to do that either. It’s just BS from people who don’t want to tackle a difficult issue that would mean we have to make radical changes to our lives. People don’t want to do that. Maybe we need to start seeing it as an opportunity to build something better rather than a burden?
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See, you just have to poke a little bit and then you get to see that this supposedly pacifist technocratic idea is in fact a great powers conflict, and we’re in the conflict! It turns out we do have some political choices of governments abroad: we make these decisions by blocking trade and sending armaments abroad.
What makes this idea and its attendant brainworms so gross is that it has no possibility of diplomacy: we can’t discuss adapting to rising sea levels because if you came up with that number then you might have to contrast it with the costs of war with Russia and the dead mounting in pariah and buffer states. As long as you can just pretend that everyone is going to lose if you don’t you can kill as many people as you like.
No. I’m talking about the US taking responsibility for the damage we’ve done to our environment in the modern age, and working to reverse it.
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