The Water Will Come - Red White & Blue Bullshit Will Not Change The Fate Of Florida
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Having offered a crash course in these concepts, Goodell invites his readers to witness the ways that rising seas are lapping away at the edges of civilization. And he takes us to meet the experts, up close and personal. A contributing editor at Rolling Stone, Goodell has spent time with the world’s foremost scientists and political leaders. He interviewed former Vice President Al Gore, whose name has become synonymous with climate change advocacy. He accompanied the White House entourage when President Barack Obama visited Alaska in 2015 and interviewed him there, in the small Arctic town of Kotzebue. He joined then-Secretary of State John Kerry on a tour of the century-old Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval base, which may, in as little as two decades, be so flooded that it has to relocate. He met with Lowell Wood, the gadfly inventor and “dark star” of geoengineering, the field that is studying ways to redesign the entire globe in the face of climate change.
Encounters with these and other characters — the notorious, the celebrated, and the unknown — bring both authority and humanity to the book. Goodell also offers a tour of possible solutions to the challenges posed by rising waters, from the fanciful and clearly unfeasible to the pragmatic. We learn that the most technologically wondrous solutions are not always the best. Big, costly engineering projects — such as the nearly complete floating barrier of Venice, Italy, or the giant berm that New York City has considered building — are often controversial and can be plagued with cost overruns. Moreover, any such solution may fail if it miscalculates the severity of sea level rise: A wall designed to hold back six feet of water is useless if the oceans swell by eight feet.
In a similar vein, seemingly magical solutions — like a Nigerian floating school designed by an award-winning architect — are sometimes too good to be true. (The school collapses in a storm just before Goodell heads to Nigeria to see it.) Meanwhile, simple innovation is sometimes most effective. Goodell meets with slum dwellers in Lagos, Nigeria, and marvels at their resourcefulness: They have learned to build houses that can quickly be raised if floods become a problem.
The response of local government and business leaders can alternate between outright denial and magical thinking. Between these journeys, Goodell returns, again and again, to Miami, the “New Atlantis,” as he calls it — a metropolis reclaimed from wetlands and built on fantasies of beach life and real estate speculation, a city that may or may not be lost. Already, some of the chronic problems posed by flooding and sea level rise in Miami are nearly as disturbing as the acute impacts of storms like Irma. For instance, septic tanks are leaching into waterways. Storm drain outfalls in parts of the city already have fecal bacteria levels more than 600 times what state regulations allow.
And the response of local government and business leaders sometimes alternates between outright denial and magical thinking. Scott Robins, the owner and manager of prominent properties in downtown Miami and Miami Beach’s Art Deco District, tells Goodell, “We’re going to raise the city two feet,” without any indication of how this is feasible. When Goodell asks Jorge Pérez, a wealthy Miami developer, how his properties will handle rising seas, Perez replies, without remorse, “By that time, I’ll be dead, so what does it matter?”
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https://undark.org/article/book-review-goodell-water-will-come/