When the monster storm struck, my colleagues at The Times's Room for Debate desk asked an array of experts whether New York should build protective barriers against the next one. The answers covered, pardon the expression, the waterfront: Do something big! ("Worth the Investment") Do something small! ("Big Projects, Big Problems") Do nothing much! ("Low on the List of Life-Saving Ideas") Think about doing, well, something! ("A Wake-Up Call to Consider the Options")
My friend and fellow columnist Joe Nocera, who grew up in Providence, R.I., thinks New York should look to that city's waterfront defense system of dikes and gates. My friend Andy Revkin, whose indispensable Dot Earth blog is where serious climate conversation takes place, prefers to emphasize more modest projects aimed at bolstering the city's resilience. New York's governor, Andrew Cuomo, has expressed interest in taming the surging sea. Mayor Michael Bloomberg sounds more skeptical.
It's enough to send you down a deep hole of denial — which, I fear, is where the whole question of New York's survival will end up without a public outcry or a feat of leadership. The problem is not just that smart people differ wildly about what to do; it's that the problem crosses multiple jurisdictions, that everything costs loads of money and that humans have short memories. The will to do anything ambitious tends to recede almost as fast as the tide surge.
But this is no time for fatalism or forgetting. While victims are still digging out, while the costs are still adding up, now is the time to set big things in motion. When President Obama visits this week, he has an opportunity to address not just the misery before his eyes, but the magnitude of the future threat it represents and the scale of the commitment required. Leading the world in the effort to curtail climate change is a moral obligation to our descendants, but there is an equally urgent need to defend against the consequences of the damage already done to our poor biosphere. At the risk of slighting the brutalized communities of the Rockaways and the Jersey Shore, I'll call it a new Manhattan Project. It would make someone a fine legacy.
I've spent some time talking to people who study weather disasters from different angles, looking for a leadership to-do list. Here's where I'd start:
Come together.
The number of local, state, regional and federal agencies that have a piece of the action in disasters is paralyzing. Everybody is in charge, so nobody is in charge. This problem needs a chairman of the board: someone with the conviction and the pulpit to rally support, with the authority to bring some order to the chaos, with the trust of the private sector and with the requisite mastery of politics, bureaucracy and finance. The logical candidate is Mayor Bloomberg. Of course the three governors — Andrew Cuomo of New York, Chris Christie of New Jersey and Dannel Malloy of Connecticut — are essential partners, sources of authority, energy and ingenuity. But someone needs to play the role Mitt Romney played in the rescue of the Olympics. (Yes, Mitt's available. No, I don't think so.) Bloomberg has made climate change and its urban consequences a priority for five years. He's a first-class manager and isn't running for anything. His initial skepticism regarding a re-engineering of the waterfront could actually be an asset; advocates will have to make their case. He's tenacious (O.K., stubborn) and he's independent (sometimes, admittedly, to the point of being politically tone deaf). He's consumed with the immediate business of recovery, and he's a lame duck, with just a year to go, but he's singularly positioned to get this started and — who knows? — saving New York might turn into the perfect post-mayoral project for a capable billionaire.
Think big and small, long and short.
There are lots of short-term and medium-term things to be done. Revkin calls them the no-brainers — measures to improve the resilience of the city: toughening building codes to get vulnerable electrical systems out of flood-prone basements, retrofitting tunnels and subways with waterproof lids or inflatable barriers, paving streets with more permeable surfaces. Bloomberg's administration has made a good start on planning a more resilient infrastructure, but these things are expensive and some are resisted by developers. Superstorm Sandy should put a foot on the accelerator.
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