Interestingly, the official website doesn't mention climate change at all, as far as I can see [1].
Instead, it claims that the purpose of the tunnels is to protect the areas surrounding some smaller rivers upstream of Tokyo, which are on flood plains and regularly used to get flooded (no climate change required, just regular rain season/typhoon does this). Now due to urban sprawl more people want to live there, exacerbating the problem and creating the need for this system.
I do not doubt that climate change is happening. I just don't like articles with such a clear agenda in the background, especially when the official sources contradict the statements.
Also too, of course you should build your "prevent floods from wrecking our shit" system to handle floods "beyond anything we've seen before". Building it to handle less than what you've seen before would be stupid.
> Building it to handle less than what you've seen before would be stupid.
Let me tell a second hand anecdote of a Burmese village.
It was a rather small collection of huts raised on tall poles. But it was a village none the less.
All paths in the village were laid out with a connected mass of wood. Along the path were sticks, rising pretty high up in the air. Somewhere along the top of the sticks were a lot of cuts made out in the wood, at various heights. By a knife or so.
In the dry season, this path laid on the ground to be walked on. You didn't have to walk on it of course, since the surrounding dirt was dry.
In the wet season however, floods often came. And so, they raised the path up along the sticks so that it became a water bridge for when floods came. They raised it to the level of the highest cuts that were made in the sticks. A very reasonable thing to do, in order to connect the village in times of crisis, without using boats.
Interestingly, however was the background of the cuts. Each cut represented a water height that had some time ago been the highest the flood had become. So each season, they only raised the water bridge to the level of the worst flood they had experienced.
They did not have a margin.
While they didn't prepare for less than what they had previously seen, they only prepared for the worst flood in history, and not the worst flood in history + a margin.
That isn't entirely true. How much is it worth to upgrade from a "once every 500 years" system to a "once every 5000 years" system? If it's more than the expected damages...
Because the reason is building codes, cutting green areas.
Flooding is almost always related to changes upriver.
Storms and climate change related water level rises are a danger, but not the main reason.
Isn't it an agenda to call the consensus reality an "agenda"? I'm not being facetious, but that discourse has fallen the point where simple statements of reality are politicized has dumbed the entire discourse.
I can only speak for myself, but analogously, I have no disagreement when the anti-vaccination contingent paints the rest of us as having an "agenda" when we post stories about horrible flu outbreaks. Herd immunity and total extinction of certain viruses are definitely an "agenda" I will own up to supporting.
Calling it a consensus reality is also showing an agenda - trying to make it sound more certain than it is, which is to push the agenda of saving people from possible harm of future climate change by fooling them into believing it's certain because they're not competent enough to assess the risk of uncertain things. I'm not complaining about trying to do good, but it's not science, it's belief and it might be wrong.
The rest of science doesn't get described so confidently because people don't care if the general public believes it or not. If you're interested in understanding, not politicizing, then it doesn't matter if there's a consensus or not. Look at the history of consensuses about how nature works to see how unhelpful they are at determining what reality is.
I may not understand the scope of this project, but when I read the $2 billion, my thought was "wow that's cheap!" Consider the Big Dig or the current Seattle tunnel, at $14B+ and $3B+ respectively.
I'd guess that part of it is that people tunnels need to keep water out, and drain tunnels want to let water in. Generally keeping water out is a lot harder than letting it in.
There may also be extra safety requirements for people tunnels that could raise costs. A tunnel used for cars for example will need some way to deal with accidents. Imagine a big accident in the middle of the tunnel, perhaps with a fire, during rush hour.
You'll need some way to get rescuers in even if the public traffic lanes are completely blocked both ways by the accident. If there is also a fire you might need a way for people on foot to quickly get out.
These requirements could increase the space requirements for the tunnel, driving up costs. They might also cause limits on where the tunnel can go or how deep it can go, which may drive up costs.
The Big Dig may have been closer to the budget, except it kept getting changed. An example would be that they initially planned on shutting down certain routes until a politician decided to announce that traffic flow would not be disrupted.
That's great if you're paid to model the traffic but probably not so great if you now have to pay the added expenses.
I don't know how they handle infrastructure, but whatever they do seems like something the rest of the world could learn from. A little while ago it made international news when they fixed a sink hole in a few days: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/15/asia/fukuoka-sinkhole-fill...
$3.2B of that is going to replacing the system's electrical infrastructure, replacing 90 miles of track infrastructure, and on retrofitting all of the tunnels, including the Transbay tube, new train control systems, relieving crowding, and more. [1][2]
BART has problems, but it's not spending 3.5B on lights and cleaning seats, and to suggest otherwise, especially without a citation, is arguing in bad faith.
It's so crazy to me that everyone in vulnerable places--Tokyo and Houston in the article for example--are happy to spend hundreds of millions, even billions, to put a bandaid on their local climate change problems.
It seems like they all acknowledge the reality and danger of climate change and are willing to spend money on it.
In TFA Houston wants $400 million to build a reservoir. They seem to acknowledge that things are only going to get worse for them as the years go on. And yet everyone there still drives everywhere spewing carbon into their own air with every trip, public transit is in a poor state, and oil exploitation continues apace. Everyone's OK with spending money and manpower on huge public works projects, but they're not OK with addressing habits and addictions that make the projects necessary in the first place.
It's as if our eyes can see the oncoming train just a mile away, but instead of stepping out of the way we want to build a mechanized winch that will temporarily lift us over the train, and hopefully we'll be done building it before the train hits us, and oh yeah, never mind how we're supposed to get down, or the taller train after that one.
Why can't we put that money, effort, manpower, and will into actually addressing climate change and make crazy projects like vast man-made Mines-of-Moria-style underground tunnels and huge artificial reservoirs unnecessary?
Yes it's a global problem, but solutions to global problems start at home. Throwing our hands up and saying it's pointless until the other guy does something too can't be the way to progress on this issue.
It's very likely that local band-aids are the most effective way to deal with this.
Your train example is a pretty good one, but you've mixed up the metaphor. Here, "stepping out of the way" = mass migrations out of coastal cities. "A mechanized winch that temporarily lifts us over the train" = flood control projects like in Tokyo, Houston, Venice, or the Netherlands. "Calling the train company and asking them to stop running trains" = stopping global warming by addressing carbon emissions.
If you had a train barreling down on you, which one would you choose? I'd bet it wouldn't be calling the train company and asking them to stop running trains, because a.) they are unlikely to anyway and b.) even if they were willing, by the time you got through to someone with the power to stop the trains you'll probably be dead anyway.
I'd argue that the actual solution to global warming will be more akin to "stepping out of the way": people will evacuate from major cities, major cities will be destroyed, and people will pick up the pieces of their lives elsewhere. If they're proactive, they might evacuate before the city is actually destroyed, and we'll see mass migrations of people (as have been happening for the last several hundred years anyway) away from areas that will face greater climate risks and toward areas that benefit from global warming.
That's what humans do: we adapt to our environment. Only in particularly hubristic times (like now) have we expected to adapt our environment to us.
Adaptation without mitigation will not be effective as the impacts worsen. Uncapped emissions and business as usual scenarios will cause outcomes that we will not be able to build ourselves out of.
We must reduce emissions and push for sustainable infrastructure and solutions, now.
We must adapt and we must also mitigate. Only through the combination of both efforts and through our determination and willingness to lead sustainable lifestyles will we be able to beat climate change. We must push for renewable energy, and technological solutions to efficiently use resources.
The policy coming out of the White House is against these efforts and we need to find a way to prevent them from hurting us and our posterity by postponing the efforts to transition to clean energy.
> I'd argue that the actual solution to global warming will be more akin to "stepping out of the way": people will evacuate from major cities, major cities will be destroyed,
And the people too poor to evacuate will stick it out in the city hoping for the best, and die in the aftermath of the next catastrophe.
> I'd argue that the actual solution to global warming will be more akin to "stepping out of the way": people will evacuate from major cities, major cities will be destroyed, and people will pick up the pieces of their lives elsewhere
Even this is optimistic. It seems more likely to me that cities like Houston will keep getting flooded and "bailed" out (ha ha) by federal relief funds and state bond issuances.
"Only in particularly hubristic times (like now) have we expected to adapt our environment to us."
You can't generalize at this level of granularity. Humans have done a lot of "adapting the environment to us" - draining swamps, building canals, reversing rivers, building dams, making water, power, and sewage distribution systems.
yet everyone there still drives everywhere spewing carbon into their own air with every trip
This.
Every single person who claims they believe global climate change is a very serious, and man-made, problem absolutely should be taking personal steps now to address it. Telecommuting is a thing. Home-solar is a thing. Electric cars are a thing. Quit telling _others_ to solve the problems, and start doing it personally, now.
Put another way: if you're seriously concerned about global climate change, and using gasoline-powered vehicles (directly or by proxy), you're not seriously concerned about climate change - and I can't take your concerns seriously because you don't.
And "leaders" who take private jets to "climate change policy conferences" are straight-up charlatans.
(I'd be construed as a "climate change denier", and yet I do more about mitigating climate change than anyone else I know.)
Be the change you want in the world. You can afford it.
>Every single person who claims they believe global climate change is a very serious, and man-made, problem absolutely should be taking personal steps now to address it. Quit telling _others_ to solve the problems, and start doing it personally, now.
This being effective seems contrary to everything we know about economics. If even a huge portion of people voluntary lower consumption or energy usage, it frees up that energy to be consumed more cheaply by other people and so the overall consumption is hardly impacted. Historically this is the case.
If you don't price an externality into the market with a tax or credit or it's useless.
Put another way: if you're seriously concerned about global climate change, and do not support pigouvian taxes or other policy that will actually have an impact, you're not seriously concerned about climate change - and I can't take your concerns seriously because you don't. You're just concerned about projecting the appearance that you care.
Changing economic behavior with public campaigns has a pretty much zero success rate. Anyone remember Pres Ford's "WIP" buttons (Whip Inflation Now)? It had the hubris that inflation could be stopped if only people would just stop raising prices.
Even as a kid, I laughed at the absurdity of that campaign. Of course it had zero effect.
Something that will work is to tax pollution, i.e. a carbon tax. Making it more expensive will do far more to influence behavior away from it than any marketing campaign. And besides, it raises spending money for the government, too.
Using the tax system to "internalize the externalities" (economist jargon) is an efficient and effective way to do it.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with taking personal steps, but by themselves they are largely worthless. It’s like optimizing an I/O bound program by speeding up some of the arithmetic operations not on any critical path.
Telling people who continue to commute by car or use grid electricity or travel internationally that they don’t really care about climate change is idiotic – not just useless but actively counterproductive because it makes people dismiss you as an arrogant jerk.
What’s needed are large-scale policy changes (international agreements, public investment in research and alternative infrastructure, changes to zoning laws, carbon taxes, regulations of agricultural runoff, crackdown on tax evasion and money laundering and international bribery, ...), which takes significant amounts of political organizing effort, money, and political capital (including flying various leaders around on jets).
This reminds me of the whole "take shorter showers" thing. The amount of water consumed taking showers is minuscule compared to how much water is used for industrial agriculture. It's not going to make a difference to take a 5 minute shower vs. 10 minutes. So it overall feels very defeating as an individual to try to make a change.
To me, this sounds like “if you’re not down in steerage baling water out of the sinking Titanic, you’re not seriously concerned about it sinking.”
It won’t make any detectable difference if I go 100% solar and vegetarian, or if I spend all my disposable income on gasoline that I burn in amusing ways.
Collective action is the only thing that matters for this. If you go all-in on a low carbon lifestyle for yourself, and your friend nudges government policy towards something that reduces emissions, your friend has done far more to mitigate climate change than you have.
This doesn't add up to me. I can be one of the two people in a prisoner's dilemma scenario and fully acknowledge the reality that I might be heading to jail while still playing the selfish strategy of snitching.
Just because you recognize that your personal actions won't affect the outcome as it pertains to you doesn't mean you can't recognize that the personal actions of a large number of other people will affect the outcome as it pertains to you.
> Every single person who claims they believe global climate change is a very serious, and man-made, problem absolutely should be taking personal steps now to address it. Telecommuting is a thing. Home-solar is a thing. Electric cars are a thing. Quit telling _others_ to solve the problems, and start doing it personally, now.
Let me get it straight, you mean Leonardo Di Caprio, George Clooney and Al Gore should live like the peasants? Please, hold my beer.
It's clear that our contemporary social structures are not well equipped to deal with climate change. This is unlikely to change in the next 10-50 years. So local governments that are able to act must do so.
"Solutions to global problems start at home." --> If everyone in Houston switched up their SUVs for Prius', nothing globally would change at all, except that the people of Houston would have smaller cars. Why does this make sense for them?
It's basically the Tragedy of the Commons on a global scale. The atmosphere is a huge public good, and climate change is a huge negative externality. It's relatively beneficial to the individual person, and even the individual country, to ignore the problem, even if it ultimately harms the population as a whole in the long run. That's why so many people prefer to ignore the problem or pretend it doesn't exist, rather than actually confront the issue.
If I have a pile of coal, and you want electricity, I can sell you coal for a good price. I make a profit, you get energy, we both lose a tiny bit due to increased global warming. The other 7 billion people in the world each lose a tiny bit to global warming and get zero direct benefit from our trade. It is rational for me to keep selling you coal, and for you to keep buying it, while we can keep the game rolling and push the costs onto everyone else.
It's be beneficial for everyone else if they banded together and prevented us from trading without paying them appropriate compensation.
If you're feeling particularly misanthropic / politically foolish, repeat similar argument about living in society with high per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Suppose you and a partner decide to have children. Maybe everyone else in the world should band together and demand compensation/regulation for the global environmental impact due to population growth in these countries. Some things we currently regard as individual freedoms are not logically compatible with constrained resources/constrained pollution sinks.
Japan didn't (over)build that flood control system because they're worried about global warming or thousand year floods.
They did it to create jobs. In the same way the US is said to have a "military industrial complex", Japan has a "construction industrial complex", wherein the government builds a whole lot of infrastructure the country can't really justify or even maintain. Flood control, rail lines, airports, etc. It's all stuff an industrialized country needs, but the Japanese take it up to eleven in an effort to stimulate the economy.
The same thing happens with our health. People would rather spend trillions of dollars on health care, rather than start eating healthy. 70% of all healthcare dollars go towards diseases and causes of death that are lifestyle related causes (eating, nutrtion, excercise, smoking, etc)
Well, as for the excessive spending, there is also the fact that healthcare is basically a parallel to the military industrial complex (doctors, hospitals, insurers, drug companies) especially conducive to oligarchy/monopoly-like behavior.
Paradoxically enough (but not so much if you think about it a while), a review of patient mortality rates during doctor's strikes found that mortality decreased when doctors were on strike.
The tragedy of the commons is another name for the failure of private property and markets to account for externalities. For a real theory of the commons without leaving mainstream economics cf. Mary Ostrom's Governing the Commons. Otherwise, all of anthropology.
> Why can't we put that money, effort, manpower, and will into actually addressing climate change and make crazy projects like vast man-made Mines-of-Moria-style underground tunnels and huge artificial reservoirs unnecessary?
In part because the Carbon Industry is huge and powerful, and holds power over most of the worlds major governments.
I mean Rex Tillerson, the former head of Exxon Mobil is currently the US Secretary of State.
The rest is because the machine of Late Capitalism is built on a presumption of endless growth with no consequences. The crisis that's barrelling down on us is so __alien__ to the established way of thinking that it's literally impossible for these economies to react with anything other than stupor and paralysis.
Preparing for the effects is much more practical, and something that you can execute against. I have long been a proponent of the notion that there is ample, and incontrovertible, evidence of climate change even before people started adding their own hand to the mix. As such, the expected value of a dollar spent on preparing for a change in climate gives a better return in terms of survivability than spending a dollar changing a local contribution to CO2 production. Spending money on both is even better.
When one of the super volcanoes burps its going to screw up a lot of things, and it would be nice to have some options.
There's a coordination problem at work. If Tokyo stops emitting entirely, it still gets flooded. Whereas the flood prevention actually stops the flood (for a couple of decades anyway). Even though it's not a great solution, it turns out that flood prevention is the only solution Tokyo can actually implement on its own.
I wish we had a global system of carbon taxes, and hope that we might make an effective solution. And I wish cities like Tokyo would push harder for national/international solutions. But I don't think they're wrong to prepare locally.
This is all a great illustration of support for Elon Musk's idea that a carbon tax is the best way to fight climate change.
Unfortunately, a global carbon tax would put the billion dollar Climate Change Bureaucracy Industry nearly out of business. And people act like we haven't seen this kind of perverse incentive structure--bureaucratic inertia--before with the War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Terrror, etc.: they all end up focusing on self-preservation rather than their apparent objectives.
Yeah I won't really be worried about global warming until they start talking about something like "The Climate War". We lose all our wars, so that would be a declaration of inevitable doom.
Climate change is in dire need of a Themistocles type character that can sway the public. The current talking heads I feel are just not up to the task. Someone who the right can relate to who but doesn't alienate the left in the process and who can rise above the media noise and can encapsulate their arguments into easily digestible sound bites so as to not get lost. There's no doubt humanity is in for a hep of trouble in the immediate future, however the powers at be are too disjointed with conflicting interests to be expected to reach a rationale consensus. It Doesn't help that the right has developed some pretty powerful newspeak rife with thought terminating cliches that makes argument all but impossible. If history is any consolation, things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better. Unfortunately things getting worse in this case means it'll probably be too late to make things better.
Because climate change makes the floods worse, meaning that without climate change you still have floods. Reversal of climate change is not significant enough to be able to safe money on these tunnels. Although we would save a lot of lives by undoing climate change.
I don't get why Houston wants to spend $400M on a reservoir. Sure they need a reservoir, but they need all of the other stuff too. Perhaps if they had $4B budget, they could actually fix everything that needs to be fixed.
Houston needs to get to the point that they can handle 60+ inches of rain in a 24 hour period. Token efforts might keep their budget balanced and the voters appeased until the next election, but they're getting 100 year storms so frequently now, they'll have to stop calling them that.
Climate change is great and all, but even if you sharply cut carbon emissions today, it would take a years before 100 years storms went back to their previous frequency.
Building such infrastructure does properly address specific risks of natural disasters and climate change.
One should not assume that climate changes have been, are, nor will be, exclusively caused by human action; one should not think that there is a single, global path of action that will somehow set all future climates to some ideal version. More concretely, consider that we happen to live in an interglacial period. [1]
> In TFA Houston wants $400 million to build a reservoir. They seem to acknowledge that things are only going to get worse for them as the years go on. And yet everyone there still drives everywhere spewing carbon into their own air with every trip, public transit is in a poor state, and oil exploitation continues apace. Everyone's OK with spending money and manpower on huge public works projects, but they're not OK with addressing habits and addictions that make the projects necessary in the first place.
It sucks to have to drive for miles to get anywhere in Houston. Public transportation is downright dangerous in Houston where the threat of violent crime is very high. It is not practical to arrive at work sweaty from walking or bicycling. Just being outside on a motorcycle moving at moderate speed causes intense perspiration within 10 minutes. Air conditioning is necessary. There is no alternative to the gasoline powered automobile because the city is planned so poorly. So you deal with it the only way you can by taking personal responsibility to ensure your own safety and comfort. Fundamentally the problem may be poor planning or that the government is dysfunctional and taxpayer money is squandered.
Simple economics. Its a free rider problem, both on state to federal, as well as federal to global level. There simply are not the institutions to have global solutions.
The way I see it, the only possible way to stop the coming disaster is for the entire world to come together, collectively, and limit population with sterilization lottery programs. We need to bring things down to 1 billion or less people. Nations that don't volunteer willingly will have to be drug along by force.
Every single country that has become wealthy has seen a drop in reproduction rates to rates lower than what's necessary to keep population numbers steady–except the US because somehow they managed to be become more religious with time.
Meaning you can make excellent progress towards your goal without committing injustices on an industrial scale. Instead, you get to work on empowering women and bringing education, economic opportunity, and health care to everyone.
Everyone's OK with spending money and manpower on huge public works projects, but they're not OK with addressing habits and addictions that make the projects necessary in the first place.
Careful how you throw around “they” there buddy. We Houstonians are 7 million diverse people doing the best we can with what we have.
Thanks for your outrage on our behalf. Instead of grand standing and virtue signaling perhaps you could, you know, actually do something to help.
Hurricane Katrina was estimated to have over $200 billion in losses—if that's true, it seems like there should be more investment in this type of infrastructure.
Savannah Georgia is spending over a billion to dredge the harbor to make way for bigger Panamax container ships. Same with Charleston, about 2 billion. My point is that there are a fair number of billion dollar infrastructure projects that fly under most people's radar. Source: today's WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-panama-canals-big-bet-is-pa...
From what I understand, Japan thinks the climate is getting warmer due to human action, and serious steps need to be taken to deal with it.
I have a question for the global climate change skeptics out there.
Are there any major countries in the world besides the US and maybe Russia where the central government agrees with you on what is happening and what to do about it? (If there are give us some links)
Does the USA have a central government with a central policy? Obama believed in climate change even if Trump doesn't, most of congress, even on the right, believe in some amount of climate change (e.g. McCain). I'm really at a loss to find that unified anti climate change sentiment in the states. It's more like a democracy where politicians and electorates are allowed to have different opinions.
There is a difference between "central government agrees with you" and whether they are actually doing something about it. Most world governments give lip service to climate change but don't do much trying to stop it.
A little off topic, but the novel Japan Sinks [0] by Sakyo Komatsu is a wonderful insight into Japan and its fears/feelings on natural disaster. Also, more generally, just a really great disaster novel.
Between natural disasters and weaponized weather modification (yes it still sounds crazy but it's becoming increasingly clear that it's a real thing), this is definitely a priority for a country like Japan.
Interestingly, the official website doesn't mention climate change at all, as far as I can see [1].
Instead, it claims that the purpose of the tunnels is to protect the areas surrounding some smaller rivers upstream of Tokyo, which are on flood plains and regularly used to get flooded (no climate change required, just regular rain season/typhoon does this). Now due to urban sprawl more people want to live there, exacerbating the problem and creating the need for this system.
I do not doubt that climate change is happening. I just don't like articles with such a clear agenda in the background, especially when the official sources contradict the statements.
[1] http://www.ktr.mlit.go.jp/edogawa/gaikaku/intro/01intro/inde...
(Please correct me if I'm wrong or I missed something.)
Also too, of course you should build your "prevent floods from wrecking our shit" system to handle floods "beyond anything we've seen before". Building it to handle less than what you've seen before would be stupid.
> Building it to handle less than what you've seen before would be stupid.
Let me tell a second hand anecdote of a Burmese village.
It was a rather small collection of huts raised on tall poles. But it was a village none the less.
All paths in the village were laid out with a connected mass of wood. Along the path were sticks, rising pretty high up in the air. Somewhere along the top of the sticks were a lot of cuts made out in the wood, at various heights. By a knife or so.
In the dry season, this path laid on the ground to be walked on. You didn't have to walk on it of course, since the surrounding dirt was dry.
In the wet season however, floods often came. And so, they raised the path up along the sticks so that it became a water bridge for when floods came. They raised it to the level of the highest cuts that were made in the sticks. A very reasonable thing to do, in order to connect the village in times of crisis, without using boats.
Interestingly, however was the background of the cuts. Each cut represented a water height that had some time ago been the highest the flood had become. So each season, they only raised the water bridge to the level of the worst flood they had experienced.
They did not have a margin.
While they didn't prepare for less than what they had previously seen, they only prepared for the worst flood in history, and not the worst flood in history + a margin.
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That isn't entirely true. How much is it worth to upgrade from a "once every 500 years" system to a "once every 5000 years" system? If it's more than the expected damages...
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This official interview mentions the intended purpose and use over time.
https://www.travel.co.jp/guide/article/5796/
To protect from climate change and the increased risk of flooding.
Because the reason is building codes, cutting green areas. Flooding is almost always related to changes upriver. Storms and climate change related water level rises are a danger, but not the main reason.
Isn't it an agenda to call the consensus reality an "agenda"? I'm not being facetious, but that discourse has fallen the point where simple statements of reality are politicized has dumbed the entire discourse.
I can only speak for myself, but analogously, I have no disagreement when the anti-vaccination contingent paints the rest of us as having an "agenda" when we post stories about horrible flu outbreaks. Herd immunity and total extinction of certain viruses are definitely an "agenda" I will own up to supporting.
Calling it a consensus reality is also showing an agenda - trying to make it sound more certain than it is, which is to push the agenda of saving people from possible harm of future climate change by fooling them into believing it's certain because they're not competent enough to assess the risk of uncertain things. I'm not complaining about trying to do good, but it's not science, it's belief and it might be wrong.
The rest of science doesn't get described so confidently because people don't care if the general public believes it or not. If you're interested in understanding, not politicizing, then it doesn't matter if there's a consensus or not. Look at the history of consensuses about how nature works to see how unhelpful they are at determining what reality is.
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>Interestingly, the official website doesn't mention climate change at all, as far as I can see
The facts are true, the news is fake.
I may not understand the scope of this project, but when I read the $2 billion, my thought was "wow that's cheap!" Consider the Big Dig or the current Seattle tunnel, at $14B+ and $3B+ respectively.
I'd guess that part of it is that people tunnels need to keep water out, and drain tunnels want to let water in. Generally keeping water out is a lot harder than letting it in.
There may also be extra safety requirements for people tunnels that could raise costs. A tunnel used for cars for example will need some way to deal with accidents. Imagine a big accident in the middle of the tunnel, perhaps with a fire, during rush hour.
You'll need some way to get rescuers in even if the public traffic lanes are completely blocked both ways by the accident. If there is also a fire you might need a way for people on foot to quickly get out.
These requirements could increase the space requirements for the tunnel, driving up costs. They might also cause limits on where the tunnel can go or how deep it can go, which may drive up costs.
To be fair, nobody would have undertaken the Big Dig if the true cost were known up-front. And a debt that's 200% GDP is a unique circumstance.
The Big Dig may have been closer to the budget, except it kept getting changed. An example would be that they initially planned on shutting down certain routes until a politician decided to announce that traffic flow would not be disrupted.
That's great if you're paid to model the traffic but probably not so great if you now have to pay the added expenses.
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Similarly, the cost of Seattle's tunnel was greatly inflated by the little mistake that halted Bertha.
Chicago metro Deep Tunnel : $3B
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_and_Reservoir_Plan
Milwaukee, at well under 1/20th the size of Tokyo, spent $1B on a similar system: https://deeptunnelmke.com/impact/cost/
I don't know how they handle infrastructure, but whatever they do seems like something the rest of the world could learn from. A little while ago it made international news when they fixed a sink hole in a few days: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/15/asia/fukuoka-sinkhole-fill...
It should be noted that that sinkhole re-occurred shortly afterwards.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-38129691
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There is also this:
1,200 Japanese workers convert above-ground train to subway line in a matter of hours.
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/2msfz2/1200_japanes...
That's what I thought as well, $2 billion doesn't seem like that much for that kind of project?
The project is a number of years old now. The cost of construction projects tend to increase by 15% per year in western countries.
Or the $3.5B approved for BART to upgrade some lights and wash more of the urine smell off the seats.
This is (intentionally?) false and misleading.
$3.2B of that is going to replacing the system's electrical infrastructure, replacing 90 miles of track infrastructure, and on retrofitting all of the tunnels, including the Transbay tube, new train control systems, relieving crowding, and more. [1][2]
BART has problems, but it's not spending 3.5B on lights and cleaning seats, and to suggest otherwise, especially without a citation, is arguing in bad faith.
[1] http://www.bart.gov/better-bart/the-plan
[2] https://sfbay.ca/2017/05/11/bart-maps-out-plan-to-spend-3-5-...
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It's so crazy to me that everyone in vulnerable places--Tokyo and Houston in the article for example--are happy to spend hundreds of millions, even billions, to put a bandaid on their local climate change problems.
It seems like they all acknowledge the reality and danger of climate change and are willing to spend money on it.
In TFA Houston wants $400 million to build a reservoir. They seem to acknowledge that things are only going to get worse for them as the years go on. And yet everyone there still drives everywhere spewing carbon into their own air with every trip, public transit is in a poor state, and oil exploitation continues apace. Everyone's OK with spending money and manpower on huge public works projects, but they're not OK with addressing habits and addictions that make the projects necessary in the first place.
It's as if our eyes can see the oncoming train just a mile away, but instead of stepping out of the way we want to build a mechanized winch that will temporarily lift us over the train, and hopefully we'll be done building it before the train hits us, and oh yeah, never mind how we're supposed to get down, or the taller train after that one.
Why can't we put that money, effort, manpower, and will into actually addressing climate change and make crazy projects like vast man-made Mines-of-Moria-style underground tunnels and huge artificial reservoirs unnecessary?
Yes it's a global problem, but solutions to global problems start at home. Throwing our hands up and saying it's pointless until the other guy does something too can't be the way to progress on this issue.
It's very likely that local band-aids are the most effective way to deal with this.
Your train example is a pretty good one, but you've mixed up the metaphor. Here, "stepping out of the way" = mass migrations out of coastal cities. "A mechanized winch that temporarily lifts us over the train" = flood control projects like in Tokyo, Houston, Venice, or the Netherlands. "Calling the train company and asking them to stop running trains" = stopping global warming by addressing carbon emissions.
If you had a train barreling down on you, which one would you choose? I'd bet it wouldn't be calling the train company and asking them to stop running trains, because a.) they are unlikely to anyway and b.) even if they were willing, by the time you got through to someone with the power to stop the trains you'll probably be dead anyway.
I'd argue that the actual solution to global warming will be more akin to "stepping out of the way": people will evacuate from major cities, major cities will be destroyed, and people will pick up the pieces of their lives elsewhere. If they're proactive, they might evacuate before the city is actually destroyed, and we'll see mass migrations of people (as have been happening for the last several hundred years anyway) away from areas that will face greater climate risks and toward areas that benefit from global warming.
That's what humans do: we adapt to our environment. Only in particularly hubristic times (like now) have we expected to adapt our environment to us.
Adaptation without mitigation will not be effective as the impacts worsen. Uncapped emissions and business as usual scenarios will cause outcomes that we will not be able to build ourselves out of.
We must reduce emissions and push for sustainable infrastructure and solutions, now.
We must adapt and we must also mitigate. Only through the combination of both efforts and through our determination and willingness to lead sustainable lifestyles will we be able to beat climate change. We must push for renewable energy, and technological solutions to efficiently use resources.
The policy coming out of the White House is against these efforts and we need to find a way to prevent them from hurting us and our posterity by postponing the efforts to transition to clean energy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/climate/clean-power-plan....
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> I'd argue that the actual solution to global warming will be more akin to "stepping out of the way": people will evacuate from major cities, major cities will be destroyed,
And the people too poor to evacuate will stick it out in the city hoping for the best, and die in the aftermath of the next catastrophe.
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As an aside with similar sentiment, this quote really drove home the point of flexible humans are to their situations.
"Centralisation breeds anomalies: beach resorts often buy their seafood in Mexico City’s wholesale market, hundreds of miles from the coast."
https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21665027-its-combinat...
>That's what humans do: we adapt to our environment. Only in particularly hubristic times (like now) have we expected to adapt our environment to us.
Changing emissions profiles IS adapting. We've already done it with smog and lead, etc.
> I'd argue that the actual solution to global warming will be more akin to "stepping out of the way": people will evacuate from major cities, major cities will be destroyed, and people will pick up the pieces of their lives elsewhere
Even this is optimistic. It seems more likely to me that cities like Houston will keep getting flooded and "bailed" out (ha ha) by federal relief funds and state bond issuances.
"Only in particularly hubristic times (like now) have we expected to adapt our environment to us."
You can't generalize at this level of granularity. Humans have done a lot of "adapting the environment to us" - draining swamps, building canals, reversing rivers, building dams, making water, power, and sewage distribution systems.
yet everyone there still drives everywhere spewing carbon into their own air with every trip
This.
Every single person who claims they believe global climate change is a very serious, and man-made, problem absolutely should be taking personal steps now to address it. Telecommuting is a thing. Home-solar is a thing. Electric cars are a thing. Quit telling _others_ to solve the problems, and start doing it personally, now.
Put another way: if you're seriously concerned about global climate change, and using gasoline-powered vehicles (directly or by proxy), you're not seriously concerned about climate change - and I can't take your concerns seriously because you don't.
And "leaders" who take private jets to "climate change policy conferences" are straight-up charlatans.
(I'd be construed as a "climate change denier", and yet I do more about mitigating climate change than anyone else I know.)
Be the change you want in the world. You can afford it.
>Every single person who claims they believe global climate change is a very serious, and man-made, problem absolutely should be taking personal steps now to address it. Quit telling _others_ to solve the problems, and start doing it personally, now.
This being effective seems contrary to everything we know about economics. If even a huge portion of people voluntary lower consumption or energy usage, it frees up that energy to be consumed more cheaply by other people and so the overall consumption is hardly impacted. Historically this is the case.
If you don't price an externality into the market with a tax or credit or it's useless.
Put another way: if you're seriously concerned about global climate change, and do not support pigouvian taxes or other policy that will actually have an impact, you're not seriously concerned about climate change - and I can't take your concerns seriously because you don't. You're just concerned about projecting the appearance that you care.
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Changing economic behavior with public campaigns has a pretty much zero success rate. Anyone remember Pres Ford's "WIP" buttons (Whip Inflation Now)? It had the hubris that inflation could be stopped if only people would just stop raising prices.
Even as a kid, I laughed at the absurdity of that campaign. Of course it had zero effect.
Something that will work is to tax pollution, i.e. a carbon tax. Making it more expensive will do far more to influence behavior away from it than any marketing campaign. And besides, it raises spending money for the government, too.
Using the tax system to "internalize the externalities" (economist jargon) is an efficient and effective way to do it.
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There’s nothing inherently wrong with taking personal steps, but by themselves they are largely worthless. It’s like optimizing an I/O bound program by speeding up some of the arithmetic operations not on any critical path.
Telling people who continue to commute by car or use grid electricity or travel internationally that they don’t really care about climate change is idiotic – not just useless but actively counterproductive because it makes people dismiss you as an arrogant jerk.
What’s needed are large-scale policy changes (international agreements, public investment in research and alternative infrastructure, changes to zoning laws, carbon taxes, regulations of agricultural runoff, crackdown on tax evasion and money laundering and international bribery, ...), which takes significant amounts of political organizing effort, money, and political capital (including flying various leaders around on jets).
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This reminds me of the whole "take shorter showers" thing. The amount of water consumed taking showers is minuscule compared to how much water is used for industrial agriculture. It's not going to make a difference to take a 5 minute shower vs. 10 minutes. So it overall feels very defeating as an individual to try to make a change.
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To me, this sounds like “if you’re not down in steerage baling water out of the sinking Titanic, you’re not seriously concerned about it sinking.”
It won’t make any detectable difference if I go 100% solar and vegetarian, or if I spend all my disposable income on gasoline that I burn in amusing ways.
Collective action is the only thing that matters for this. If you go all-in on a low carbon lifestyle for yourself, and your friend nudges government policy towards something that reduces emissions, your friend has done far more to mitigate climate change than you have.
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This doesn't add up to me. I can be one of the two people in a prisoner's dilemma scenario and fully acknowledge the reality that I might be heading to jail while still playing the selfish strategy of snitching.
Just because you recognize that your personal actions won't affect the outcome as it pertains to you doesn't mean you can't recognize that the personal actions of a large number of other people will affect the outcome as it pertains to you.
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> Every single person who claims they believe global climate change is a very serious, and man-made, problem absolutely should be taking personal steps now to address it. Telecommuting is a thing. Home-solar is a thing. Electric cars are a thing. Quit telling _others_ to solve the problems, and start doing it personally, now.
Let me get it straight, you mean Leonardo Di Caprio, George Clooney and Al Gore should live like the peasants? Please, hold my beer.
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It's clear that our contemporary social structures are not well equipped to deal with climate change. This is unlikely to change in the next 10-50 years. So local governments that are able to act must do so.
"Solutions to global problems start at home." --> If everyone in Houston switched up their SUVs for Prius', nothing globally would change at all, except that the people of Houston would have smaller cars. Why does this make sense for them?
You're right that we require a policy attack on Climate Change, but nonetheless, it feels a bit odd to keep doing the thing that'll kill you.
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It's basically the Tragedy of the Commons on a global scale. The atmosphere is a huge public good, and climate change is a huge negative externality. It's relatively beneficial to the individual person, and even the individual country, to ignore the problem, even if it ultimately harms the population as a whole in the long run. That's why so many people prefer to ignore the problem or pretend it doesn't exist, rather than actually confront the issue.
http://tragedy.sdsu.edu/
Yep.
If I have a pile of coal, and you want electricity, I can sell you coal for a good price. I make a profit, you get energy, we both lose a tiny bit due to increased global warming. The other 7 billion people in the world each lose a tiny bit to global warming and get zero direct benefit from our trade. It is rational for me to keep selling you coal, and for you to keep buying it, while we can keep the game rolling and push the costs onto everyone else.
It's be beneficial for everyone else if they banded together and prevented us from trading without paying them appropriate compensation.
If you're feeling particularly misanthropic / politically foolish, repeat similar argument about living in society with high per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Suppose you and a partner decide to have children. Maybe everyone else in the world should band together and demand compensation/regulation for the global environmental impact due to population growth in these countries. Some things we currently regard as individual freedoms are not logically compatible with constrained resources/constrained pollution sinks.
Very interesting idea
Japan didn't (over)build that flood control system because they're worried about global warming or thousand year floods.
They did it to create jobs. In the same way the US is said to have a "military industrial complex", Japan has a "construction industrial complex", wherein the government builds a whole lot of infrastructure the country can't really justify or even maintain. Flood control, rail lines, airports, etc. It's all stuff an industrialized country needs, but the Japanese take it up to eleven in an effort to stimulate the economy.
I find this argument a little weak. I think you are confusing Japan with China?
Or do you have any sources?
The same thing happens with our health. People would rather spend trillions of dollars on health care, rather than start eating healthy. 70% of all healthcare dollars go towards diseases and causes of death that are lifestyle related causes (eating, nutrtion, excercise, smoking, etc)
Well, as for the excessive spending, there is also the fact that healthcare is basically a parallel to the military industrial complex (doctors, hospitals, insurers, drug companies) especially conducive to oligarchy/monopoly-like behavior.
Paradoxically enough (but not so much if you think about it a while), a review of patient mortality rates during doctor's strikes found that mortality decreased when doctors were on strike.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18849101
Tragedy of the commons - it's a ubiquitous and powerful economic principle.
The tragedy of the commons is another name for the failure of private property and markets to account for externalities. For a real theory of the commons without leaving mainstream economics cf. Mary Ostrom's Governing the Commons. Otherwise, all of anthropology.
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> Why can't we put that money, effort, manpower, and will into actually addressing climate change and make crazy projects like vast man-made Mines-of-Moria-style underground tunnels and huge artificial reservoirs unnecessary?
In part because the Carbon Industry is huge and powerful, and holds power over most of the worlds major governments.
I mean Rex Tillerson, the former head of Exxon Mobil is currently the US Secretary of State.
The rest is because the machine of Late Capitalism is built on a presumption of endless growth with no consequences. The crisis that's barrelling down on us is so __alien__ to the established way of thinking that it's literally impossible for these economies to react with anything other than stupor and paralysis.
Preparing for the effects is much more practical, and something that you can execute against. I have long been a proponent of the notion that there is ample, and incontrovertible, evidence of climate change even before people started adding their own hand to the mix. As such, the expected value of a dollar spent on preparing for a change in climate gives a better return in terms of survivability than spending a dollar changing a local contribution to CO2 production. Spending money on both is even better.
When one of the super volcanoes burps its going to screw up a lot of things, and it would be nice to have some options.
There's a coordination problem at work. If Tokyo stops emitting entirely, it still gets flooded. Whereas the flood prevention actually stops the flood (for a couple of decades anyway). Even though it's not a great solution, it turns out that flood prevention is the only solution Tokyo can actually implement on its own.
I wish we had a global system of carbon taxes, and hope that we might make an effective solution. And I wish cities like Tokyo would push harder for national/international solutions. But I don't think they're wrong to prepare locally.
This is all a great illustration of support for Elon Musk's idea that a carbon tax is the best way to fight climate change.
Unfortunately, a global carbon tax would put the billion dollar Climate Change Bureaucracy Industry nearly out of business. And people act like we haven't seen this kind of perverse incentive structure--bureaucratic inertia--before with the War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Terrror, etc.: they all end up focusing on self-preservation rather than their apparent objectives.
Yeah I won't really be worried about global warming until they start talking about something like "The Climate War". We lose all our wars, so that would be a declaration of inevitable doom.
Climate change is in dire need of a Themistocles type character that can sway the public. The current talking heads I feel are just not up to the task. Someone who the right can relate to who but doesn't alienate the left in the process and who can rise above the media noise and can encapsulate their arguments into easily digestible sound bites so as to not get lost. There's no doubt humanity is in for a hep of trouble in the immediate future, however the powers at be are too disjointed with conflicting interests to be expected to reach a rationale consensus. It Doesn't help that the right has developed some pretty powerful newspeak rife with thought terminating cliches that makes argument all but impossible. If history is any consolation, things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better. Unfortunately things getting worse in this case means it'll probably be too late to make things better.
Because climate change makes the floods worse, meaning that without climate change you still have floods. Reversal of climate change is not significant enough to be able to safe money on these tunnels. Although we would save a lot of lives by undoing climate change.
I don't get why Houston wants to spend $400M on a reservoir. Sure they need a reservoir, but they need all of the other stuff too. Perhaps if they had $4B budget, they could actually fix everything that needs to be fixed.
Houston needs to get to the point that they can handle 60+ inches of rain in a 24 hour period. Token efforts might keep their budget balanced and the voters appeased until the next election, but they're getting 100 year storms so frequently now, they'll have to stop calling them that.
Climate change is great and all, but even if you sharply cut carbon emissions today, it would take a years before 100 years storms went back to their previous frequency.
Building such infrastructure does properly address specific risks of natural disasters and climate change.
One should not assume that climate changes have been, are, nor will be, exclusively caused by human action; one should not think that there is a single, global path of action that will somehow set all future climates to some ideal version. More concretely, consider that we happen to live in an interglacial period. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interglacial
> In TFA Houston wants $400 million to build a reservoir. They seem to acknowledge that things are only going to get worse for them as the years go on. And yet everyone there still drives everywhere spewing carbon into their own air with every trip, public transit is in a poor state, and oil exploitation continues apace. Everyone's OK with spending money and manpower on huge public works projects, but they're not OK with addressing habits and addictions that make the projects necessary in the first place.
It sucks to have to drive for miles to get anywhere in Houston. Public transportation is downright dangerous in Houston where the threat of violent crime is very high. It is not practical to arrive at work sweaty from walking or bicycling. Just being outside on a motorcycle moving at moderate speed causes intense perspiration within 10 minutes. Air conditioning is necessary. There is no alternative to the gasoline powered automobile because the city is planned so poorly. So you deal with it the only way you can by taking personal responsibility to ensure your own safety and comfort. Fundamentally the problem may be poor planning or that the government is dysfunctional and taxpayer money is squandered.
Even billions is cheap for Japan given that their strongest export sector these days is automobiles.
Well, mitigation without adaptation would be a terrible idea. That's how you get screwed over by industrial countries with little regulation.
Obviously the answer is a bit of both, so it's not entirely clear what you're arguing for....
Simple economics. Its a free rider problem, both on state to federal, as well as federal to global level. There simply are not the institutions to have global solutions.
I kinda agree with you, but I still find this more interesting than the usual nothing + catastrophy aftermath in flooded areas.
Rational self-interested bots engineered to maximise shareholder value.
The way I see it, the only possible way to stop the coming disaster is for the entire world to come together, collectively, and limit population with sterilization lottery programs. We need to bring things down to 1 billion or less people. Nations that don't volunteer willingly will have to be drug along by force.
This probably won't happen, though. We're f#@^ed.
Every single country that has become wealthy has seen a drop in reproduction rates to rates lower than what's necessary to keep population numbers steady–except the US because somehow they managed to be become more religious with time.
Meaning you can make excellent progress towards your goal without committing injustices on an industrial scale. Instead, you get to work on empowering women and bringing education, economic opportunity, and health care to everyone.
Yeah!
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Everyone's OK with spending money and manpower on huge public works projects, but they're not OK with addressing habits and addictions that make the projects necessary in the first place.
Careful how you throw around “they” there buddy. We Houstonians are 7 million diverse people doing the best we can with what we have.
Thanks for your outrage on our behalf. Instead of grand standing and virtue signaling perhaps you could, you know, actually do something to help.
Y'all could build a robust mass-transit system and get those cars off of the road for a start.
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Hurricane Katrina was estimated to have over $200 billion in losses—if that's true, it seems like there should be more investment in this type of infrastructure.
Why? When you can use disaster capitalism and profit on the "volatility" provided by such events?
I've heard it said that in the UK a fatal car crash increases GDP by about £1 million.
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Thanks, Keynes.
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Boston is too: https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2017/09/06/what-a-fut...
Savannah Georgia is spending over a billion to dredge the harbor to make way for bigger Panamax container ships. Same with Charleston, about 2 billion. My point is that there are a fair number of billion dollar infrastructure projects that fly under most people's radar. Source: today's WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-panama-canals-big-bet-is-pa...
From what I understand, Japan thinks the climate is getting warmer due to human action, and serious steps need to be taken to deal with it.
I have a question for the global climate change skeptics out there.
Are there any major countries in the world besides the US and maybe Russia where the central government agrees with you on what is happening and what to do about it? (If there are give us some links)
Does the USA have a central government with a central policy? Obama believed in climate change even if Trump doesn't, most of congress, even on the right, believe in some amount of climate change (e.g. McCain). I'm really at a loss to find that unified anti climate change sentiment in the states. It's more like a democracy where politicians and electorates are allowed to have different opinions.
By central government, I meant for the US the federal government, and in particular the present administration.
My question still stands.
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There is a difference between "central government agrees with you" and whether they are actually doing something about it. Most world governments give lip service to climate change but don't do much trying to stop it.
A little off topic, but the novel Japan Sinks [0] by Sakyo Komatsu is a wonderful insight into Japan and its fears/feelings on natural disaster. Also, more generally, just a really great disaster novel.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Sinks
Also fascinating, Dragon Head[0] is a 10 volume post-apocalyptic natural disaster psychological and survival horror manga worth a read.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Head
Enjoyed the movie based on the novel as well.
Between natural disasters and weaponized weather modification (yes it still sounds crazy but it's becoming increasingly clear that it's a real thing), this is definitely a priority for a country like Japan.
I do believe there's a movie coming out with a similar premise of weather modification to control natural disasters gone wrong called Geostorm.
The US feels more like a third world country in its "response" to climate change compared to countries like Japan
Tokyo is 30% of Japan's population..
Fukushima Is Preparing for Melt-down(2008)
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was happend. Disasters occur at unexpected places.
The caption of the last image says: "Visitors can tour the system, which cost $2 billion and was completed in 2006." I hope that's just a typo.
What part do you hope is a typo?
Tokyo has a GDP of $1.6 trillion per year. And they have a lot of expensive property they want to protect from flooding.
Quick lookup of other sources all state figures between US$2billion and US$3 billion
I initially read that as the tour costing $2 billion. Seems a bit steep!
Is it? How much have the recent floods experienced in the Americas cost?
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Yeah I wouldn't want to pay $2 billion for a tour.