As previously posted here, people along coasts and their governments, are failing to learn the lessons of both climate-induced sea level rise, and storms like Extratropical Sandy.
Now, it’s startlingly clear how ignorant people are of these necessary lessons. The New Jersey coast, where Sandy hit the hardest, has been rebuilt, utilities and all. Acknowledged, the homes are on stilts, and some of the local officials have doubts of the wisdom of this rebuild, even if they went along, but here, in great detail, is a record of how people of some means are going to try to deal with the inevitability of climate change. It is an article from Inside Climate News, by Leslie Kaufman which details not only this reconstruction, but the federal subsidies and incentives which implicitly refuse to admit climate change, whether because federal agencies are hamstrung by legislative constraints, or because citizens simply insist upon their right to occupy their property, no matter what the evidence is otherwise.
It is ironic to me that a state much aligned by the environmentalists and liberals of the Northeast, Texas, not only is beating California in zero Carbon energy generation (excluding hydropower), and has three cities in the Environmental Protection Agency‘s 2016 list of top 100 green power organizations (Dallas, Houston, and Austin), Texas has also pioneered regulatory takings due to flooding, as well as legal obligation of governments to mitigate environmental damage when foreseen, as in the case of flood.
I have linked the talk by Professor Robert Young in again below:
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