A Narrow Path

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The quote above came to mind when I read the recent report from The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicting that over the next thirty years we are guaranteed to live on a hotter planet regardless of how quickly we now reduce carbon emissions. The world struggled and largely failed over the past several decades to stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere. Even this week, as leaders from countries around the world meet in Scotland to set new emission reduction targets, it is unclear that each country can achieve its stated commitments. The hard reality is we need to effectively ramp up our transition to clean energy production to prevent worst case scenarios and also adapt at the same time to a hotter planet because we didn’t act fast enough over the past thirty years.

Upon reading the report and reflecting on the last two decades of the “climate action plans” issued by large cities across the country, I thought it would be interesting to explore the hard choices now confronting government leaders in this new reality.

The IPCC released its report during a year when millions of Americans experienced intense heat, rain, and deep freezes, even in parts of the United States which previously thought themselves immune to the near-term effect from climate change (e.g. freezing weather in Texas that paralyzed the power grid and record breaking heat in the Pacific Northwest.)

Over the past thirty years, policy discussion about climate change has been stunted by anti-science deniers, many of whom benefit financially from the fossil fuel industry. In areas with elected officials who deny climate change is real, or believe the cost/benefit analysis that making changes now is not worth the cost or economic transition required, policy remains stuck in the fossil fuel age and communities are not discussing either reducing emissions or adapting to a hotter planet.

In communities that accepted the science and passed policies as a result, leaders focused their actions on emission reduction to avoid the catastrophic impacts of a warming planet, more recently the dreaded rise in average global temperatures above 2 degrees Celsius. While some cities did craft “resilience plans” over the last twenty years, elected officials largely did not make the necessary investments in infrastructure changes identified in the plans. As a result, the local governments with climate action plans now face the huge challenge of coupling regulatory action on emission reduction with aggressive investments in adaptation.

Cities need adaptation strategies and corresponding financing for the following:

1. Heat, Fire and Smoke

In Oregon this past summer, we learned the deadly impact of even a short heat wave – particularly due to the drastic departure with our historically temperate climate west of the Cascade mountains. We have a lot to learn from the decades of adaptation of cities in the Southwest who have adjusted work and recreation hours, modified buildings to use for year-round shelter needs, hired professional staff to work on protecting residents from intense heat year-round, and collaborated with local electricity providers to protect the power supply of their local electrical grids.

As people in California, Oregon and Washington have learned over the past few years, we built communities for millions of people in what is called the “wildland urban interface.” These communities, because they are located directly in forest land or adjacent to it, now live with wildfire threat or smoke cover for many months of the year.

As any forest expert will tell you, the West simply has too much fuel (i.e. trees) to fully prevent fires on a warming planet. We will have more fires, the question is how extensive they will be and how prepared we will be for the inevitable impacts. State and local governments need to move aggressively to commit public and private sector investment for both prevention and mitigation work like building firebreaks near residential areas, automating fire detection, developing fire resistant trees and plants, and protecting water supplies.

In urban areas, we need public and private sector commitments for investments as far ranging as reflective roofs, tree-planting programs to provide canopy cover to cool neighborhoods, and pavement replacement to reduce the heat island effect, to name just a few.

Beyond prevention and mitigation efforts, communities should stop scrambling each summer to stand up “emergency shelters” and identify permanent short-term and long-term places for people fleeing wildfire, smoke, or heat. Even for people who don’t live in the wildland urban interface, their community could be smothered in smoke for days or weeks at a time due to longer and larger wildfires.

2. High and Low Waters

As we have seen during the past two years in Tennessee, North Carolina, New York, and other parts of the country rain is falling in dramatically higher quantities in compressed intervals. Cities did not design and build stormwater systems, levees, and other infrastructure for the rain we should now expect. Policy makers need to prioritize multiple unattractive actions, ranging from helping people move out of floodplains, financing expensive water diversion construction projects, and deciding how to protect existing structures near coastlines and rivers. Insurance companies’ recent decisions show us where this is headed: it will soon be prohibitively expensive for people to live in flood prone areas.

Over the past several years, nearly the entire U.S. West Coast has been in a historic, prolonged drought. While much of the news coverage focuses on farmers irate with irrigation restrictions, climate change is steadily reducing the water supply for millions of people.

Local and state governments should not only help people relocate and discourage development in floodplains, they should also work with the federal government to finance massive water conservation and reconstruction projects (one study estimates we lose 6 billion gallons of water a day due to leaky pipes.)

3. Grid Shocks

The freezing cold in Texas during February 2021 woke many of us up to the mistaken assumptions about our electricity providers’ preparation for climate change. While the Texas grid is a unique case in many ways, as periods of intense heat, cold and high winds occur with more frequency, governments should ensure utilities have upgraded local electric grids to withstand these shocks while also shortening the duration of inevitable power outages. We should expect our legislatures and public utility commissions to ask more of our power providers in this area as a function of approving the rates they charge consumers. Local governments need to add staff who are sophisticated on energy and resilience to educate both elected officials and the public on how the grid should adapt to a hotter earth.

Do we have a “first rate intelligence” to both effectively reduce carbon emissions and also adapt to a hotter planet for the next several decades. We better have!

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