09/03/2021

(USA) How Nature Can Help Solve Our Infrastructure Crisis Amid Extreme Weather, Climate Change

Washington Post - Brian Bledsoe | Justin Ehrenwerth

Workers repair a power line in Austin on Thursday. (Thomas Ryan Allison/Bloomberg News)

The recent horrors in Texas, as millions went without electricity and water during a historic winter storm and cold snap, remind us of the ticking time bomb that is our nation’s aging infrastructure.

In the early 20th century, we made bold investments in our infrastructure that powered our success, and our continued prosperity depends upon our ability to innovate and adapt. Yet we have failed to invest for decades, leading to the American Society of Civil Engineers consistently giving America’s infrastructure C-minus to D-plus marks.

As climate change brings more frequent and intense weather events, our infrastructure will continue to face challenges it was not built to withstand. The most vulnerable among us will suffer disproportionately. If this is to be a time of equitable renewal amid a global pandemic, then we must meet this once-in-a-generation opportunity to address our crumbling infrastructure, climate change and social equity with a natural solution.

The case for engineering with nature

A 21st-century infrastructure system should incorporate conventional approaches using rock, concrete and steel that are strategically designed to work with natural infrastructure. Imagine a concrete flood wall with an expansive reef and marsh in front of it. The wall provides flood protection benefits during storms but does little on a sunny day.

In contrast, the reef and marsh system not only reduces the power of waves but also self-adjusts to rising seas, captures carbon, improves water quality, and provides places for us to hunt, fish and recreate.

John Flood works on making a living shoreline in front of a home on the Severn River to protect it from damage caused by cliff erosion. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

Further inland, river floodplains, parks and greenspaces can serve as pressure relief valves to help protect downstream communities from flooding and pollution. When conventional engineering and Mother Nature join forces, our communities are protected by multiple lines of defense that generate a wide range of economic, environmental and social benefits.

Importantly, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will soon release new guidelines outlining how natural infrastructure can best support resilience and flood-risk reduction. This four-year effort, involving scientists and engineers from around the world, will, for the first time, outline in a comprehensive fashion how to best conceptualize, plan, design, engineer, construct and maintain natural infrastructure.

A price on the environment, and life itself

One of the primary barriers to implementing this approach are benefit-cost analysis requirements for federal projects. BCA requirements are rooted in an intuitive approach that most of us use every day. When faced with a decision, we consider our alternatives, weigh the pros and cons, and pick the solution that provides the greatest benefit for the lowest cost.

This approach makes sense for a fiscally responsible government but falls on its face when we don’t consider some of the most important benefits. What if the greatest benefit of the project is a more equitable and resilient future?

Current practice focuses on monetizing the economic benefits of concrete flood walls and levees based on the property values they protect. For decades, many of the engineers and economists who design and evaluate federal infrastructure projects have not fully considered the benefits and costs related to the environment, human health and social equity. As a result, the deck is stacked against progress.

The science of monetizing environmental and social benefits has dramatically advanced, and it is time for federal policy and practice to catch up. Tools like social return on investment employ well-established economic, accounting and social science research to measure what we know to be true — our communities and our environment are worth far more to us than their property values alone.

An opportunity at the intersection of infrastructure, environment and social equity
Trucks line up in February by the Port of Oakland on the San Francisco Bay. Disadvantaged communities in America are disproportionately affected by pollution from industry or waste disposal, but their complaints have few outlets and often reach a dead end. (Jeff Chiu/AP)

When we limit ourselves to old ways of thinking about costs and benefits, we tend to invest in protecting wealthier communities. This approach perpetuates climate injustice: Multimillion-dollar condos on Miami Beach are deemed worthy of protection while less wealthy neighborhoods, disproportionately communities of color that have been underserved or actively harmed by past infrastructure investments, are neglected.

But there’s reason to be optimistic. President Biden has rightly made environmental justice a core priority and called for modernizing the regulatory process to account for environmental and social factors. Tucked away in last year’s coronavirus relief bill was a provision that, for the first time, clearly permits the Army Corps of Engineers to consider environmental and social factors when developing infrastructure projects.

In its 2021 “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure” released Wednesday, for the first time, the American Society of Civil Engineers recognized natural infrastructure as a key solution for building resilience and raising the grade across all infrastructure sectors.

While these are encouraging developments, change of this magnitude is never easy. Consistent leadership from the White House and relevant federal agencies will be needed to break decades of federal practice in which exclusive reliance on outmoded economic calculations and conventional infrastructure has limited progress.

If we do not act today, it’s not a question of whether another extreme weather event will expose our growing vulnerabilities but when and at what cost. 

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Book Review: “The New Climate War”

Dispatches From Upstate NY - Mark Marchand

Author
Mark Marchand is a writer and adjunct professor in the Journalism Program at the University at Albany (SUNY), teaching courses in news and reporting, crisis communications, and public relations writing.
There is a new type of warrior emerging in the ongoing tussle between the evidence-based science of climate change and the diversionary tactics of fossil-fuel companies and political supporters.

This rare but growing cohort in the winnable battle against climate change denial are scientists who can effectively communicate about complex science.

They’re also willing to engage in pitched social media, news media, and other battles against the trolls, bots, and uber-conservative news outlets who are telling us to move along … nothing to see here.

Photo: Courtesy of NASA
One of the leaders of this new battle front is Dr. Michael E. Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State. Working with two other scientists, he was the originator of the famed “hockey stick” graph that in 1999 showed us the sharp rise in atmospheric temperatures over the past 1,000 years. It is perhaps the most easily understood, most frequently used visual depiction of why we need to act against manmade climate change.

Dr. Mann has previously authored or co-authored four books on climate change, each time providing us with the empirical science behind relentlessly advancing temps and sounding the alarm we need to hear. He is constantly called on to speak around the world. And he has developed a reputation as a no-nonsense, often amusing, and blunt combatant against the social media misinformation campaigns waged by fossil fuel supporters, oil-producing nations, conservative Republicans, and news media outlets such as Fox News.

I have been following Dr. Mann on Twitter for some time. His tweets are entertaining, informative … and prolific. As I write this, he has tweeted or re-tweeted over 35 times in the last 24 hours. He touched on topics ranging from the bizarre Republican “green new deal/alternate energy source” blame game in the wake of the tragic Texas storm to his ongoing news media interviews on climate change and his new book.

***

With his fifth and latest book, “The New Climate Wars,” (released Jan. 12) Dr. Mann is taking his efforts to a new level. The new book represents his sharpest blow yet against climate change denial. While it contains the accepted and proven science to support the reality of climate change, it also raises the stakes in several new areas.

Dr. Mann draws the curtain back on the well-funded communication and public relations campaigns designed to shed doubt on climate change and to attack leading public and scientific figures, including him. As someone who has spent a career working in journalism, communications, and public relations I found this part of his new book fascinating.


 
Some elements of Dr. Mann’s discussion of PR and communications are not new but are bolstered with revelations sure to shock even the most ardent of environmental activists. You might not know, for example, that Exxon’s own researchers as far back as the 1970s knew continued burning of fossil fuels would elevate atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide dramatically and could raise average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees centigrade—and this warming could happen within 5 to 10 years.

Exxon not only didn’t act on the conclusions of its own scientists and others in the field, but the company also launched a long-term PR effort to cause confusion about climate change and the role of fossil fuels.

Think of tobacco companies and their legendary (and now admitted) PR efforts to bolster cigarette sales—despite well-known connections of the habit to lung cancer. The fossil fuel companies employed the same game plan.

For me, the most startling revelation involved the famous anti-littering “crying Indian” public service TV ad in the early 1970s. Those of us who saw the ad were so moved by it we stopped littering. What I didn’t know—and I wasn’t alone—was that the ad was a clever creation of beverage and packaging companies.

They launched the effort to deflect attention from early efforts to pass bills to require deposits on cans and bottles, removing that trash from waste and garbage streams. The strategy worked. There is still no national bottle bill law today. Only 10 states have these laws.

To add insult to injury, the actor in the commercial was not even Native American. His name was Espera de Corti, an Italian American well-known for playing Native Americans.

In his book, Dr. Mann uses this example to draw our attention to today’s diversionary tactics. Fossil-fuel companies and their fervent conservative supporters want us to focus on individual actions we should be taking to help slow or reverse the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere.

Through direct or indirect PR efforts, they encourage us to drive cars with better mileage, take fewer airline flights, use alternative energy sources, and generally reduce our carbon footprint. And when we do take those airline flights, they say, we should buy carbon offsets.

Those same groups are quick to shame people who don’t take these and other personal greenhouse gas-limiting actions. There is absolutely nothing wrong with taking these steps. But by themselves these measures will not save us from the potential catastrophic damage of climate change.

What’s needed, Dr. Mann and other scientists and activist argue, are widespread systemic changes, such as better government regulation and policies, significant industry steps such as electric or higher-mileage cars, an array of proven alternate energy sources, and carbon pricing. All of these and other major changes are challenged by fossil fuel providers and their supporters.

Who can blame them? They have a massive revenue stream based on selling oil, coal, and natural gas. Dr. Mann asks the question: Why not do both? Take individual action and become an activist for the wider-reaching changes we need.

It’s pretty simple when you step back and examine the big picture. The confusion we see (and the shame we experience when we don’t take personal action) is exactly what climate change opponents and deniers want.

Like the crying Indian ad, our attention is diverted from what really should be happening.

***

While Dr. Mann’s new book is rich with points like these, I’ll share just two more.

Those who deny the reality of climate change want us to give up because they want us to believe we’re already past the point of no return. There’s nothing we can do now, they say, so the focus should be on adapting to this new world. Build higher sea walls and dikes. Use water more efficiently. Change building codes to harden them for the stronger storms.

Perhaps, as Dr. Mann says humorously, we’ll develop gills and fins, maybe even fireproof skin. The point is if we believe the result is inevitable, we won’t do anything to stem carbon dioxide emissions now. Dr. Mann and other scientists argue that we still have time to slow down, flatten out, and eventually reverse carbon dioxide emissions that result from burning fossil fuels. Don’t fall for the deniers’ claims.

Finally, I’ll call it the coal mining point. As our former president and others have stated on many occasions, we must do everything we can to save the livelihoods of coal miners and the companies they work for.

As a reminder, not only does burning coal emit carbon dioxide but it also produces the sulfur dioxide behind acid rain, the particulate pollution behind smog and other forms of air pollution, and nitrogen oxides, which also contribute to air pollution and respiratory illnesses. And there is no such thing as “clean coal.”

Whether we like it or not the constant state of our world is change. Horse and buggies were replaced by cars and trains. Candles gave way to electric lights. One of my favorites stories in this vein was my own experience working as a senior manager in public relations at Verizon and its predecessor companies.

Up until late in the 20th century pay phones were an important part of our business. From street corners to airline terminals, they were a staple in our lives and the way we communicated when we were away from home or the office.

Enter the handheld cell phone. Within a short time, the pay phone business within Verizon—a multimillion-dollar revenue source—withered away. No one tried to save them. Customers wanted more portability. We gave it to them, even if it meant killing off another part of our business. We closed the large centers where we used to count coins from pay phones, and we migrated those and other pay phone-related employees to new jobs.

***

My conclusion? This newest book from noted climate scientist Michael Mann is essential reading. In a world beset by problems caused by the non-stop burning of fossil fuels since the 19th century, this book should rest beside our computers as we live our lives each day.

It is, in my opinion, an indispensable aid not only in understanding climate change but also in mapping out how to take individual action and engage in activism to spur the significant systemic change needed to arrest the warming of our globe. And it’s well written.

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(USA) The Civilian Climate Corps Is A Big-Government Plan That All Americans Can Embrace

The New Yorker - Jim Lardner

The Civilian Conservation Corps, created at the behest of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, gave jobs to an eventual three million young men. Photograph from Library of Congress / Corbis / Getty

It was a rare case of Presidential understatement in the unveiling of a program: the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior, according to a paragraph buried in Joe Biden’s long executive order on climate change, had been directed to make plans for a Civilian Climate Corps, modelled on the Civilian Conservation Corps—the C.C.C.—of the nineteen-thirties.

It would put underemployed Americans to work on projects intended “to conserve and restore public lands and waters, bolster community resilience, increase reforestation, increase carbon sequestration in the agricultural sector, protect biodiversity, improve access to recreation, and address the changing climate.”

That is plenty of justification for such an initiative in the country’s current circumstances. But the potential of this idea, if the record of the original C.C.C. is any guide, goes far beyond the advertised purposes. A modern-day C.C.C. could be an attention-getting reminder of something that a great many Americans seem to have forgotten: the capacity of government to be an instrument of the common good.

The Civilian Conservation Corps, created in the spring of 1933 at the behest of the new President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, gave jobs to an eventual three million young men, before the Second World War took over the task of fighting unemployment. (Roughly eighty-five hundred women participated in a “She-She-She” program, belatedly established at Eleanor Roosevelt’s insistence.)

The C.C.C. left a legacy of trees, trails, shelters, footbridges, picnic areas, and campgrounds in local, state, and national parks across the country. It had equally notable effects on the health and outlook of the men who served. Most were undernourished as well as unemployed when they signed up. They came home with muscles, tans, and, according to a letter sent to corps headquarters, in Washington, by a resident of Romeo, Colorado, an “erect carriage” that made them easy to pick out from the rest of the young male population.

Joseph Kaptur, of Toledo, Ohio, treasured the memory of his corps service, spent reforesting the shores of the Miami and Erie Canal. His gratitude stuck in the mind of his daughter Marcy Kaptur, now an Ohio congresswoman and the sponsor of one of seven C.C.C. bills introduced in Congress last year. “I don’t know anybody who wasn’t changed and uplifted by that experience,” she says.

Although Roosevelt sold the C.C.C. as a jobs program first and foremost, it was shaped by his strong interest in timber and soil management, acquired over the course of efforts to revitalize hundreds of acres of badly tended farmland attached to his family estate in Hyde Park, New York. The C.C.C., in turn, raised the conservation consciousness of many of its participants, according to “Nature’s New Deal,” a book from 2009 about the program, by the historian Neil Maher. C.C.C. camps had lectures and night classes, as well as libraries.

A corpsman named Robert Ross, assigned to a camp near Crystal Springs, Arkansas, used his off-hours to investigate matters that he “had been totally ignorant of—soil erosion, restoration, protection of the forests, the uses of land, the damage of forest fires.” Less than ten per cent of the enrollees had graduated from high school.

Many of them learned to read and write during their time in the corps, however, and hundreds went on to jobs with the National Park Service, the forestry-service unit of the Department of Agriculture, and other federal, state, and local conservation programs.

The C.C.C. had educational value for the people living alongside its camps, too. Many communities, Maher writes, objected mightily to the anticipated arrival of “street-slum foreigners,” “corner holders,” and “bums.” The hostility tended to evaporate once corpsmen came to town in person, proved unthreatening, and began spending their wages at local diners, shops, and movie theatres.

The program was hugely popular everywhere, and Roosevelt promoted it as a morale booster in a time of extreme hardship—and as a vote-getter in election years. Among his Administration’s many groundbreaking policies, only this one escaped the anti-New Deal fulminations of Alf Landon, the Republican governor of Kansas, when he ran for President, in 1936.

Landon, like other Republicans, praised the corps; he even tried to take credit for getting Congress to extend its operations to state parks. Despite his claim, the presence of C.C.C. camps flipped several Kansas counties blue and helped F.D.R. win the state in his landslide reëlection victory.

The revival of interest in the idea can be traced to two loose groups of C.C.C. champions. One, whose ranks include the retired General Stanley McChrystal and the Starbucks founder Howard Schultz—who are among the backers of an initiative called Serve America Together—sees a way to overcome the “political, social, economic and religious barriers causing such divisiveness in our country,” as McChrystal and Schultz put it in a joint op-ed last summer.

The other group, composed mainly of academic economists, is more concerned about the job-replacing effects of robots and computers, and the marketplace’s chronic failure to meet important social needs. Those two streams of thinking converged and gained force last spring, after the pandemic abruptly terminated the employment of some twenty million Americans.

In addition to the White House plan and Representative Kaptur’s measure, bills have been introduced by Colorado’s Joe Neguse and Illinois’s Bobby Rush, in the House, and by Delaware’s Chris Coons, Illinois’s Dick Durbin, and Oregon’s Ron Wyden, in the Senate. Thinking separately, they have come to common conclusions about what a new C.C.C. should be like—and what it shouldn’t be like.

The original corps, besides excluding women, was racially segregated, with camps for African-Americans often placed in remote areas, according to Maher, “because of local protests in every region of the country, including the North.” A twenty-first-century C.C.C. would correct those fundamental defects. Most of the idea’s backers agree that it should also pay a living wage, in contrast to Roosevelt’s program, which offered room and board and thirty dollars a month (about six hundred dollars in today’s money), with most of it earmarked for families back home.

Another difference: cities and suburbs could be major work sites this time around. Openlands, a Chicago-based nonprofit that collaborated with Durbin on his plan, has drawn up a list of project categories, including brownfield remediation, the greening of schoolyards, the repair of biking and walking trails, and the planting of urban vegetable gardens and orchards.

Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat of Pennsylvania with his own C.C.C. proposal in the works, imagines a corps that would build and improve parks in green-starved inner-city neighborhoods and reverse the loss of tree canopy that has made cities especially vulnerable to global warming.

Casey has allied himself with the coalition of more than a hundred organizations behind an economic-policy package called “Reimagining Appalachia.” It proposes a C.C.C. that would restore wetlands and areas scarred by coal-mining while making room for ex-prisoners, victims of opioid addiction, and others unlikely to be hired by private employers.

Along the way, Casey says, such a program could have the salutary effect of reminding rural and urban Americans that “they have very similar and overlapping problems,” including cycles of community decay set off by the exodus of well-paid jobs, whether in mining or manufacturing.

The White House effort is focussed, for now, on developing an administrative structure (it is likely to build on AmeriCorps, a Clinton-era national-service program) and finding funds in the existing budgets of the Agriculture Department, the Interior Department, and other federal agencies to get a fledgling corps up and running. Putting more serious money into such a program would require Congress’s coöperation and, perhaps, a degree of bipartisanship.

That might not be outside the bounds of possibility. Although Democrats have been the principal instigators of legislation so far, there are signs of Republican enthusiasm for the idea, aligning as it does with the party’s preference for work over cash relief.

Seven G.O.P. senators—including Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina; Roger Wicker, of Mississippi; and Bill Cassidy, of Louisiana—signed on as co-sponsors of the Coons bill, which was comparatively modest in scale and tailored to Republican tastes (omitting all mention of climate change, for example). With that show of bipartisan support, it came close to being included in the pandemic-relief package passed in December.

The prospects for some version of a revived C.C.C. are favorable. To realize an ambitious version of the idea, the Biden Administration would have to bring a sense of urgency to the effort. It should. The Administration, with its $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan,” hopes to accelerate the pace of vaccinations, expedite the reopening of schools, give tens of millions of stressed-out Americans the wherewithal to pay their bills, and get a frozen economy moving.

There is little in this measure, however, to lift a vast number of Americans—including roughly four million who have been unemployed for more than six months, and more than fifty million low-wage workers whose annual median income, according to the Brookings Institution, is eighteen thousand dollars—who were already feeling disheartened and undervalued when the pandemic came along.

Trumpist Republicans, fixated for the moment on settling intra-party scores, will turn their attention back to Biden and the Democrats before long. The backward elements of corporate America and Wall Street have been quiet lately, perhaps out of a sense of pandemic-induced propriety, but they, too, can be counted on to get back to obstruction mode.

The best things that the new Administration has said and done—its commitments to racial and gender equity, its welcoming attitude toward immigrants, its seriousness about climate change—guarantee blowback.

Biden and his party can take comfort in opinion surveys that show overwhelming support for many of their proposals. To go by the polls, however, wide majorities of Americans have come down on the side of progressive policies for years. Meanwhile, mounting distrust of government has led many of those same people to consistently not vote for candidates committed to putting progressive policies into effect.

That dynamic will probably be with us until Americans without wealth or privilege see convincing evidence (more convincing than checks in the mail, however badly they are needed) of the government working zealously and effectively on their behalf. The old C.C.C. told that story in Roosevelt’s time. A new one could tell it in ours.

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