NYC:
As hurricane season approaches it is startling to note that the region has chosen to ignore the warnings and lessons of Sandy (2012) by looking at the astonishing development occurring in the city’s floodplains. This collective stubbornness and short-sightedness is not unique to NY. Where short-term profit is to be made, people will pursue it. And the dopes left holding the bag, that’s their problem. Except that it isn’t. The impacts of storms like Sandy are felt far, wide and long and threaten the financial viability of entire regions.
As of Jan. 2018, about 12,359 new apartments were under construction or planned in the city’s most vulnerable flood zones. Most of the new construction is on the southern tip of Brooklyn in Brighton Beach, Coney Island and Gravesend where 45 projects are under construction. Hunters Point on Long Island City is largely situated in FEMA’s high-risk flood zone. Its population increased 90% between 2010 and 2016 and 5,900 more apartments are under way.
People are voting with their feet and obviously do not believe they or their investments are at risk. Prices in the city condo market have increased 60 - 70% in the last two years. Sandy is a distant memory. The Rockaways still has not fully recovered from Sandy and yet residential sales in the flood zone there increased by 167% between 2013 and 217.
But warning signals are there too for those who look. Older homes built prior to more strict building requirements will see their insurance rates jump. Flood insurance is required for home-owners with a mortgage in high-risk zones. The latest FEMA maps were published in 2015 and should be finalized shortly. Zones designated as 100-year flood plains will have the highest insurance rates. Homes in such zones have a 1% chance of flooding every year. Over the course of a 30-year mortgage the chance of flooding is between 25-30%.
Federal subsidies and grand-fathered status have kept many older, more vulnerable homes in flood zones. But such subsidies and status are being phased out. A home-owner paying $400/year for flood insurance may see a ten-fold increase to $4,000/year. Low income areas like Canarsie may see such spikes. But even in the luxury buildings being built with an eye on future storms, trouble waits. These buildings may continue to operate as their infrastructure and essential machinery have been elevated, but the neighborhoods around them will certainly flood and the residents will be stranded in luxurious isolated islands.
Flood Protection - Infrastructure
The need to physically address the vulnerability of NYC to flooding is pressing. The Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE) has rushed out six proposals to deal with the problem. ACOE held several public hearings that were poorly advertised and is offering only a limited time for public comment (see below).
Two of the proposals are to construct massive in-water barriers which pose many problems not just of cost and inadequacy but threats to the future viability of one of the world’s greatest rivers, the Hudson. Other proposals are for land-based floodwalls, dunes and levees intended to “manage the risk of coastal storm damage” to New York Harbor and the Hudson Valley.
ACOE stated that it intends to winnow down the six alternatives to one or two alternatives by mid-2018 – without a thorough review of the environmental impacts of each alternative and without meaningful public input.
These in-water barriers are billed as protecting against “storm surge” – the above-normal, temporary rise of sea level produced by a coastal storm – and would have gates that allow for ship transit and for limited tidal movement in fair weather.
The barriers likely would restrict migrations of striped bass, Atlantic sturgeon, herring, shad, eel and other species essential to the Hudson estuary. The barriers would prevent the ocean tide from flushing NY Harbor, causing contamination to concentrated there. The barriers could restrict rainstorm flood waters, like those we experienced during Irene and Lee in 2011, from leaving the Hudson, the Harbor and the City area.
The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) 2013 report “A Stronger, More Resilient New York” states that a strategy using barriers “would pose significant risks to the city that far outweigh its theoretical benefits.” (A more recent report, “One New York: The Plan for a Strong and Just City” has a chapter on “Coastal Defense,” at page 244.)
The fundamental flaw is that the storm surge barriers do not address the bigger problem of sea level rise. In its report, NYCEDC states that ”since the barriers would be open most of the time (to allow navigation), it would represent a major public investment that would end up doing nothing to address the growing problem of rising sea levels.”
Barrier projects throughout the harbor would cost an estimated $10 billion to $36 billion to build, and $100 million to $2.5 billion to maintain every year (a project of this scale generally exceeds the estimated cost). ACOE has said that maintenance and operation costs would not be covered by the federal government. The endless billions spent on giant in-water barriers would not be available to fund urgently needed shoreline protections, which can be built one at a time, starting now. On-shore measures require a fraction of the maintenance cost, and are necessary to protect communities from sea level rise, regardless of whether offshore barriers are built.
Because of sea level rise, future storms will eventually over-top the offshore barriers being considered by ACOE. And when these storms and tides flow over the barriers it will be money down the drain as the complex system of gates and walls cannot be easily modified or heightened the way individual shoreline walls or levees can.
As sea level steadily rises, the gates will need to close more frequently because, with progressively higher average sea level, smaller storms will trigger closure of the gates. The slow but sure strangulation of the river will ensue.
The ACOE is considering what it has labeled Alternatives 1, 2, 3A, 3B, 4 and 5. Alternative 1 is “No Action.” Alternatives 2, 3A, 3B and 4 involve outer and inner harbor barriers that almost entirely block either the Hudson or tributaries. Alternatives 2 and 3A – involving barriers from Sandy Hook to Rockaway, or across the Verrazano Narrows, respectively – likely would diminish the Hudson and the Harbor over time. Alternatives 3B and 4, while they spare the Hudson, would kill various tributaries to New York Harbor.
Only Alternative 5 offers shoreline-based floodwalls and levees. It would protect low-lying communities from both storm surge and flooding from rainstorms like Irene and Lee, while leaving rivers to flow naturally, as they have for millenia.
The comment period runs 30 days, through August 20, 2018. Comments may be submitted to Nancy J. Brighton, Chief, Watershed Section, Environmental Analysis Branch, Planning Division, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New York District, 26 Federal Plaza, New York, Room 2151, NY 10279-0090, or via email to [email protected].
Heat, Wildfires and Flooding: US, Japan, Siberia
In the first half of 2018 there have been 24,760 wildfires in the US. Over a decade such fires caused in excess of $5 billion in damages. Currently there are wildfires burning in AZ, CO, ID NE, NM, TX, UT, WA, WY and MT. This is the worst fire season in over a decade and given the heat and drought it is predicted to worsen.
Japan experiencing record heat (nearly 106 F) just weeks after record rainfall and flooding. The weekslong heat wave also afflicted the Korean Peninsula where at least 10 heat-related deaths were recorded. At least 21 people have died from heatstroke in Japan while 1,000s have been taken to hospitals for heat-related reasons, with no relief in sight for the rest of the week.
The heat has added to the suffering caused by deadly floods two weeks ago in southwestern Japan. The floods killed 225 people and roughly 4,500 are in temporary shelters. The heat has exacerbated the task of clearing debris and shoveling mud from flood-stricken areas and increased the risk of heatstroke.
Two million people were ordered evacuated from areas along the western coast of Japan. Typhoon winds and raging floodwater caused disruption and misery which will not abate anytime soon.
Siberia experienced temperatures in excess of 90 degrees in early July. Permafrost may no longer be “perma” nor “frost.” I’ve already written of the dangers of melting permafrost as it releases both CO2 and Methane.
Washington:
Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge Kavanaugh, is especially troubling to those who care about climate change. Justice Kennedy was a moderate swing vote in big environmental cases and voted with the Court’s four-member liberal wing in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, giving EPA the authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate GHG.
Congress had originally crafted that clean air law in the 1970s, before climate change was a major policy concern. But the Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gases fit within the act’s “capacious definition of ‘air pollutant’” finding that the law was flexible enough to deal with problems that lawmakers hadn’t specifically anticipated at the time.
Kavanaugh strongly disagrees. In 2012 he dissented from a DC Circuit Court decision upholding several Obama-era greenhouse gas regulations. Kavanaugh argued that EPA had “exceeded its statutory authority” and lacked explicit guidance from Congress. “The task of dealing with global warming is urgent and important,” he wrote, but “As a court it is not our job to make policy choices.” He went on to note that “EPA went well beyond what Congress authorized” in crafting a greenhouse gas permitting program.
Kavanaugh likely influenced the Supreme Court’s conservative justices who later overruled the lower court and voted 5-4 to strike down parts of EPA’s permitting program that Judge Kavanaugh found troubling.
In other cases, however, Judge Kavanaugh went even further than the Supreme Court’s conservative wing was willing to go. In E.M.E. Homer City Generation v. Environmental Protection Agency, he wrote a majority opinion for the D.C. Circuit Court striking down a federal program to regulate air pollution that crossed state boundaries. The Supreme Court later took up the case and overruled him 6-2, with Justice Kennedy and Chief Justice Roberts voting to uphold the pollution rule.
Pruitt:
Pruitt is unlikely to leave much of a legacy. In his haste to undo government rules he failed to follow important procedures, leading to poorly crafted legal efforts that have been and likely will be struck down in court.
Six of Pruitt’s efforts to delay or roll back Obama-era regulations, including pesticides, lead paint and renewable-fuel requirements, have been struck down by the courts. Pruitt also backed down on a proposal to delay implementing smog regulations and another to withdraw a regulation on mercury pollution.
The courts found that EPA had ignored clear legal statutes when they ruled that Pruitt had illegally delayed a regulation curbing methane emissions from new oil and gas wells and that the agency had broken the law by missing a deadline last year to enact ozone restrictions.
In other cases, including one in which a federal court ordered EPA to act on a Connecticut request to reduce pollution from a Pennsylvania power plant, and one where judges demanded quick action from the agency on new lead paint standards, the courts warned Pruitt that avoiding enacting regulations already on the books was an unacceptable and unjustified effort to repeal a rule.
One of the chief examples of Pruitt’s ill-advised efforts came when EPA filed its legal justification for what may be the Agency’s largest attempted: undoing of an Obama-era regulation aimed at cutting pollution of GHG from vehicle tailpipes.
The rules Pruitt targeted required automakers to nearly double the average fuel economy of passenger vehicles to 54.5 miles/gallon by 2025. Automakers argued the rule is onerous, forcing them to invest heavily in building hybrid and electric vehicles.
Pruitt filed a 38-page document as the government’s legal justification for rolling back the rule. But the document lacked supporting legal, scientific and technical data that courts expect when considering challenges to regulatory changes. About half the document consisted of quotations from automakers objecting to the rule. By comparison, the Obama administration’s 1,217-page document justifying its implementation of the regulation included technical, scientific and economic analyses supporting the rule.
Some Good News: Costa Rica and Sweden
Costa Rica is the first nation to ban fossil fuels. It already derives 99% of its energy from renewable sources. The biggest hurdle will be in the transportation industry where demand for cars is growing. Hyundais (a favorite vehicle there) are available completely fossil fuel free. President Carlos Alvarado has set a goal of decarbonizing by 2021. The goal is aggressive and may not be entirely feasible, especially with Costa Rica’s current financial issues.
Sweden:
Swedish utilities and power generators have already installed so many wind turbines that it is on course to reach its 2030 renewable energy target late this year. By December, Sweden will have around 3,680 wind turbines installed. Together with second-half investment decisions, this will be more than enough capacity to meet a target to add 18 terawatt-hours of new, renewable energy output by the end of next decade.
The surge in new installations and investment decisions has become a concern for existing power producers who rely on subsidies to make their projects financially viable. Forward prices in the renewable certificate market are 70% lower for 2021 than a year earlier because of all the new installations.
Fun Fact: Queens College, Cambridge, divested its 86 million pound endowment from fossil fuels.