New York's Climate Adaptation Plan Includes Protections for Fossil Fuels
Today, Mayor Michael Bloomberg presented the city’s long-term plan to prepare for the impacts of a changing climate in the wake of Superstorm Sandy. “We haven’t waited for Washington to lead the climate change charge,” Bloomberg said at the Duggal Greenhouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. “If we did, we’d still be waiting.”
In fact, we expect that by mid-century up to one-quarter of all of New York City’s land area, where 800,000 residents live today, will be in the floodplain. If we do nothing, more than 40 miles of our waterfront could see flooding on a regular basis, just during normal high tides.
Unfortunately, there are major flaws.
The report asserts it is making the city “resilient,” but there is no climate resilience without divestment from fossil fuels and pollution barons like David Koch, New York’s richest man.
Furthermore, the report’s authors seemed uninterested in how New York’s communities survived the storm’s aftermath. In particular, the crucial achievements of Occupy Sandy in responsive, community-based disaster relief and recovery are buried, if not ignored.
Most importantly, basic realities of economic and social inequality are not sufficiently addressed. For example, even though over the report recognizes that over half of the Rockaways’ residents live in public or low-income housing, only two of 13 building initiatives address that population.
In sum, this report comes far closer to recognizing the reality of our carbon-polluted future than has been achieved on the national stage, but that is a very low bar. Existing infrastructure – physical, social, economic, and political – is built upon fossil-fuel dependence. Only a dedicated and full-scale effort to fight the polluters who profit at the expense of the very existence of cities such as New York will offer us a fighting chance.
Most of the nation is far less prepared for the ravages of fossil-fueled global warming than Mayor Bloomberg’s New York City. Unfortunately, it appears even Bloomberg is unprepared to take the necessary steps to turn back the rising tide of our polluted climate.