Comment by giorgioz
16 hours ago
It seems everyone is on the same "We will find new solutions to a new problem". I totally agree.
Here is a list of all new solutions we need: 1) not insure places at higher risk 2) mass desalinification 3) fix US hot climate grids sparkles and/or place them underground 4) Street corridors to isolate fires in neighborhood 5) Build with more fire-resistant materials 6) Install automated hydrant towers with cameras able to spray water on fire remotely (it's done in Spain on the edge of forests and urban areas) 7) Pass on the costs of maintaining of living in expensive risky areas to the people living there and/or give them benefits to move to unpopulated areas with no risk
1) Not all the world will suffer equally from climate change. The parts that are at higher risk should not be insurable so that new housing will not be built there but somewhere else.
2) The idea there won't be water because it doesn't rain it's ridiculous. We live on a planet literally made of water. We'll develop mass production de-salinification plants and have enough water. We need to keep investing and improving that technology. I think having water artifically priced at a low price won't help the development of the desalinification industry. So water should cost more NOW that we can afford it to reflect the R&D cost of it that we must make to have water later.
5) Hot countries don't tend to have plenty of wood to build with. Forests grow with more rain. Building with wood in Spain and Italy is very rare. LA got his wood shipped from somewhere further out. Let's build with other materials in arid fire-prone zones. Yes it's perfectly possible to have houses that are both more-fire-resistant and more-earthquake resistant.
> We'll develop mass production de-salinification plants and have enough water.
And then you'll have the brine problem.
Can you explain this problem for those unfamiliar?
I'm asking naively and honestly: is there a solution to brine? Believe it's pumped directly back into ocean at the moment.
Brine is probably very valuable.
If we make it a slurry, perhaps we could use it to pump to unpopulated areas with endorheic lakes like the Salt Lake or Salton Sea, then mine and refine the resulting slurry.[0]
The concern is the brine getting into the atmosphere -- that can likely be mitigated.
[0] https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/gold.html
Desal plants use static mixers to mix the brine with a bunch of ocean water and pump it back out. The specifics depend on the local ecology and ocean currents but it’s a matter of making the outfall pipes long enough (they’re kilometers long usually).
brine can be used for mineral extraction.
I'm guessing there's local ecology issues with this? Groundwater seepage, etc. Though that hasn't really stopped fracking so maybe it'll just be a non-issue at the policy level.
and storing cheese
Two step forwards one step back. Doesn't mean the step back made the two step forward not good. I was not familiar with the concept of brine. I thought we would extract the salt from the water and store it. Maybe use it for construction material like with the CO2 extracted from the atmosphere. I'm not an expert and I might have the Dunning-Kruger effect on this. It might be a lot harder than I can imagine/know at this moment but it might still be worth it and necessary.
>"We will find new solutions to a new problem"
Fire risk isn't that new. London famously largely burnt down in the great fire of 1666 and the solution was to build stuff that doesn't burn as easily. It's not really a new science.
You’re mostly talking about wildfires. The top 5 most destructive events in US are all hurricanes. They are the size of multiple states and bring more water in a period of a day than rest of annual non-hurricane rainfall.
It’s desalinated water falling from a massive sprinkler in the sky.
Wildfires can be avoided by not building wood structures in places that historically have had frequent wildfires. A good way to incentivise this is very high insurance costs, which lenders will require before granting a mortgage. Governments can also enact fire codes.
Buildings can be built out of less fire prone materials, and surrounding non native vegetation avoided which feeds fires. This does mean someone can’t live in LA as if they are in a New England country town.
Wildfires can also be avoided by letting forest management people dictate forest management policies instead of environmental activists, and by prioritizing the people that live there over the animals.
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I'm not so familiar with huge wind but a lot of water I got some (naive) ideas. Build much bigger sewer pipes and river beds. Build houses higher. As usual each region has his own problems. We can all agree either we move out of there or we invent ways to mitigate the problems. For the long term of course, as we all agree, reducing CO2 emissions, stop climate warming and trying to get back some CO2. I believe and hope we can both do that and not having to live like austerity monks.
> Build much bigger sewer pipes
Great, now in a storm surge (which is the most destructive part of most hurricanes), you have built an effective system for transferring rising seawater into your urban area!
> and river beds.
Great, now you've completely eradicated the delicate ecosystem that was living there and everything that depends on it.
> Build houses higher.
That is how a lot of coastal houses are built. But now you're more susceptible to wind damage, so you're playing a risk balancing game.
Every time a natural disaster shows up, nerds starting inventing solutions. I love the optimistic spirit behind that impulse. But at the same time, people living in those areas, including generations of civil engineers, having been thinking about this a lot longer than us.
The solutions are known but most either have even worse externalities, or simply take a long long time to roll out.
Any solution relating to housing is particularly slow to ship because, surprise, people don't like being forcibly kicked out of their homes. So houses basically only get upgraded at the rate that people die.
You are right. I live in Europe and I'm not very familiar with hurricanes. I'm more familiar with fires and earthquakes. It seems some parts of Florida have been hit by catastrophes every 2-5 years. Maybe we should treat the whole space as natural reserves and building less there. I saw a lot of houses constructured right on the beach in Florida that they seemed just looking for trouble.
> 1) Not all the world will suffer equally from climate change. The parts that are at higher risk should not be insurable so that new housing will not be built there but somewhere else.
So what about the people who already live there...? Like I'm fine telling millionaires their coastal cottages are fucked, but there's a lot more folks out there who've lived in these areas for generations both because they're attached to them emotionally, and also because they can't afford to go anywhere else.
I know, is sad :( Tough choices must be made. Like many of our ancestors, we will have to migrate to better places and/or adapt. We'll do all we can to make it work. As personal advice, I will be buying my second home (when I'll be able to afford it) somewhere in a different country/region with different climate (and political) connotations. Avoid having all the eggs in the same basket. I think we should all have 2nd/3rd homes and also Airbnb them to be more efficient. If all would rent their 2nd/3rd homes the supply would exceed demand and the price would drop. I think we really need to use smart-locks remotely openable in a bigger scale. We could have a future of prosperity and abbundance with enough redundancy to accomodate for all the distasers we were not able to mitigate enough.
I have a very visceral response to people who say things like "tough choices must be made" when it's notable that they will not be making those tough choices, nor will have those tough choices impact them, and will instead be apparently playing musical homes for the best personal outcome.
Like I'm glad your personal wealth is going to let you skate out of the worst effects of climate change (so you think/for now). That is far from a universal experience and "tough choices need to be made" in this context sounds a hell of a lot like euphemistic language for "a lot of poor people are going to die, at least if they're too poor to afford to rent my spare homes."
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