Thread by @dwallacewells

I spoke last week with @Enrique_Acevado of @CBSThisMorning about the climate context in which Miami is being pitched as a future tech hub. A few thoughts and a correction (1/x).

https://twitter.com/CBSThisMorning/status/1397889054646095872

When imagining climate futures, it is easy to fall into an apocalyptic cast of mind, in which scenarios for 2050 or 2075 or 2100 seem gruesome enough to crowd out the possibility of human life, or human flourishing, under increasingly intense impacts of warming.

But life becomes more difficult, and governance more challenging, much sooner than anything like an apocalypse appears.

This is a very basic failing of vernacular climate discourse, in which apocalyptic visions play an increasingly large role but whole categories of experience we would've once found intolerably difficult now look, by contrast to those visions, relatively livable, even comfortable.

It's a testament to human resilience and adaptation, and to our technological and political capacity, that we can find ways to navigate a world defined by increasingly intense climate impacts.

But being able to navigate that world isn't the same thing as avoiding climate change, or as demonstrating that its impacts aren't significant.

The Army Corps of Engineers has proposed a series of sea walls to protect parts of the Miami mainland from flooding, but the cost is estimated to be almost $5 bn, and, as I mentioned in the story, it does not protect the most vulnerable parts of the region, including Miami Beach.

The Army Corps is doing some exploratory work on plans for the archipelago that includes Miami Beach — that's the correction, I said in the segment they weren't, because, unlike their plans for the mainland, none of the Miami Beach work has been published or publicized.

But plans to protect Miami Beach and the rest of the archipelago will be, almost certainly, dramatically more expensive still.

An Army Corps plan to protect New York harbor, for instance (a much smaller waterway, and less vulnerable to Caribbean hurricanes) has been priced at $119 billion.

Many of these projects will be worth doing, even in a very cold calculus evaluating simply the value of local real estate. But they don't represent a "solution" to warming, or a way out of climate change, so much as a coming to terms with warming and what it means.

In the case of Miami, it means an enormous burden of adaptation that will disrupt the shape of the city and its infrastructure, and divert resources away from other priorities as the city endeavors to protect itself.

This is not merely the climate dilemma facing Miami—it's the same challenge everywhere, including in many parts of the world much less well-resourced than Miami to respond.

That is the meaning of climate crisis—not that apocalypse is imminent, but that our experience of the future will be shaped profoundly by the response to its impacts. Those impacts are already unavoidable and will only grow more intrusive, perhaps much more so. (x/x)