12. THE LONG GOODBYE
A DECADE AGO, an elite group of scientists, economists, and government officials gathered at Snowmass ski resort near Aspen, Colorado, to contemplate the end of the world. The week-long workshop, held in the shadow of fourteen-thousand-foot peaks at the Top of the Village lodge, was organized by the Energy Modeling Forum, a group of academics and industry leaders affiliated with Stanford University. A few months earlier, Stanford professor John Weyant, the director of the group, had asked participants to consider a nightmare scenario: It’s a decade or so in the future, and the impacts of climate change are accelerating. The Greenland and Western Antarctic ice sheets are melting at an exponential rate, leading to predictions of a dramatic rise in sea levels by 2070. In this scenario, southern Florida vanishes, New York City becomes an aquarium, London looks like Venice. In Bangladesh alone, 40 million people are displaced by the rising waters.
If you needed to put a “sudden stop” on emissions of CO2, Weyant asked, how—short of shutting down the global economy—would you do it?
At the Snowmass workshop, it was clear that putting a “sudden stop” to climate-warming emissions would require something more than investing in wind turbines. In one presentation, Jae Edmonds, chief scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, suggested that one way to radically cut emissions without shutting down the economy would be to capture and bury CO2 emissions from power plants, as well as to replace coal and oil with genetically engineered biofuels, which could potentially create negative emissions if the crops used as a fuel source suck up enough carbon dioxide as they grow. But accomplishing this would require a massive expansion of agriculture, sweeping changes to the world’s energy infrastructure, bold political leadership, and trillions of dollars.
Then Lowell Wood approached the podium. At sixty-five, Wood was a big, rumpled guy, tall and broad as a missile silo, with a full red beard and pale blue eyes that burned with a thermonuclear glow. In scientific circles, Wood was a dark star, the protégé of Edward Teller, inventor of the hydrogen bomb and architect of the Reagan-era Star Wars missile defense system. As a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for more than four decades, Wood had long been one of the Pentagon’s top weaponeers, the agency’s go-to guru for threat assessment and weapons development. Wood was infamous for championing fringe science, from X-ray lasers to cold-fusion nuclear reactors, as well as for his long affiliation with the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank on the Stanford campus. Everyone at Snowmass knew Wood’s reputation. To some, he was a brilliant outside-the-box thinker; to others, he was the embodiment of Big Science gone awry.
Wood hooked up his laptop, threw his first slide onto the screen, and got down to business: What if all the conventional thinking about how to deal with global warming was wrong? What if you could do an end run around carbon-trading schemes and international treaties and political gridlock and actually solve the problem? And what if the cost to get started was not trillions of dollars, but $100 million a year—less than the cost of a good-size wind farm?
Wood’s proposal was not technologically complex. It was based on the idea, well proven by atmospheric scientists, that volcano eruptions alter the climate for months by loading the skies with tiny particles that act as mini reflectors, shading out sunlight and cooling the Earth. Why not apply the same principles to saving the ice sheets? Getting the particles into the stratosphere is not a problem—you could generate them easily enough by burning sulfate, then spray the particles out of a few high-flying jets. The particles would fall out of the sky after a few months, so you’d have to keep spraying more or less constantly. They’d be invisible to the naked eye, Wood argued, and harmless to the environment. Depending on the number of particles you injected, you could not only stabilize Greenland’s ice—you might actually grow it. Results would be quick: If you started spraying particles into the stratosphere tomorrow, you’d see changes in the ice within a few months. And if it worked over the Arctic, it would be simple enough to expand the program to encompass the rest of the planet. In effect, you could create a global thermostat, one that people could dial up or down to suit their needs (or the needs of polar bears).
Reaction to Wood’s proposal was fast and furious. Some scientists in the room, including Richard Tol, a climate modeler with the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, found Wood’s ideas worthy of further research. Others, however, were outraged by the unscientific, speculative, downright arrogant proposal of this… this weaponeer. The Earth’s climate, one scientist argued, is a chaotic system—shooting particles into the stratosphere could have unforeseen consequences, such as enlarging the ozone hole, that we might only discover after the damage was done. What if the particles had an effect on cloud formation, leading to unexpected droughts over Europe? Bill Nordhaus, a Yale economist, worried about political implications: Wasn’t this simply a way of enabling more fossil fuel use, like giving methadone to a heroin addict? Besides, if people believed there was a solution to global warming that did not require hard choices, how could we ever make the case that they needed to change their lives and cut emissions?
John Weyant, surprised by the “emotional and religious” debate over Wood’s proposal, cut off discussion before it could turn into a shouting match. But Wood was delighted by the ruckus. “Yes, there was some spirited discussion,” he boasted to me when I had lunch with him at a Mexican restaurant in Silicon Valley shortly after the event. “But a surprising number of people said to me, ‘Why haven’t we heard about this before? Why aren’t we doing this?’”
Then Wood flashed a devilish grin. “I think a few of them were ready to cross over to the dark side.”
We live in a rapidly accelerating technological age, with new iPhones every year that make the old ones seem as primitive as a brick, where robots perform surgery and computers fly 757s. Scientists are unraveling the mysteries of DNA and plotting the circuitry of the human brain. Techno-optimists like Ray Kurzweil talk openly about immortality. Elon Musk aspires to create a “multiplanet civilization” in the very near future. It seems only natural that a slow-moving force like sea-level rise would have a technological solution too. Why not build a thermostat for the planet? We are already engineering the Earth’s operating system by dumping billions of tons of greenhouse gases into it every year. We’re just doing it badly. Why not get good at it?
When Wood made his presentation in Aspen a decade ago, very few people had heard of geoengineering. Now it is openly debated in the climate and energy world. Mainstream scientists are cautiously acknowledging that geoengineering could indeed be an important tool in the what-the-hell-do-we-do-about-climate-change toolbox. As the IPCC’s most recent report concluded, “Models consistently suggest that [solar geoengineering] would generally reduce climate differences compared to a world with elevated greenhouse gas concentrations and no [solar geoengineering].” Other scientists, including the United Kingdom’s Royal Society and the United States’ National Academy of Sciences, support further research. Environmental groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council do too. Near the end of Obama’s second term, the White House went so far as to recommend a federally funded research project to better understand the risks and benefits of geoengineering (alas, nothing came of it). But just as awareness of the need for further research has grown, so has awareness of the potential downside. At the 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, geoengineering was cited as one of the top risks that the world faces.
And what Wood said ten years ago at that meeting remains true today—when you think about big technological fixes for sea-level rise, spraying particles in the atmosphere to reflect away sunlight is the only planetary-scale fix we know of that could plausibly stop or slow sea-level rise. Other ideas, such as pumping billions of tons of ocean water onto Antarctica, where it would freeze and lower sea levels, or re-creating an ice-age landscape (complete with genetically engineered beasts that would be a cross between elephants and woolly mammoths) in Siberia to help reflect sunlight and keep the tundra frozen, may be provocative thought experiments, but few scientists take them seriously.
Wood was a bit optimistic about the costs of a full-scale geoengineering program—David Keith, a Harvard professor who has thought deeply about how to design and implement a geoengineering program, estimates that instead of costing $100 million a year, it would cost more like $2 billion a year. If that sounds like a lot, consider that global subsidies for the fossil fuel industry are about a thousand times that ($1 trillion a year).
Wood, being the technology-happy guy he is, also downplayed the risks of geoengineering during his talk at Aspen. Although reflecting away some sunlight before it hits the Earth could slow the melting of the ice sheets on the surface, it would be a very long time before this had any impact on the warming of the oceans, which is the most immediate threat to the big glaciers in West Antarctica. Nor would it do anything to reduce ocean acidification, which is caused by high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and is already damaging coral reefs and threatening the ocean food chain. There are also risks to the ozone layer, not to mention the fact that people would be breathing in these particles as they slowly fall out of the sky (today about 6.5 million people die prematurely each year from air pollution; Keith estimated that a full-scale geoengineering program might lead to thousands of additional deaths each year, but those deaths would likely be offset by hundreds of thousands of lives saved by reduced heat exposure). Finally, Wood neglected to point out that once we started spraying particles into the stratosphere, we would have to keep it up for decades or risk a sudden warming—creating, in effect, a climate version of the Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads.
Geoengineering also brings up complex questions about governance. Whose hand controls the thermostat? Vladimir Putin, after all, might be happy with higher temperatures than Tony de Brum in the Marshall Islands. You don’t have to be a science fiction writer to see how geoengineering—or even the threat of geoengineering—could lead to conflict and even climate wars.
Of course, no one would be talking about geoengineering as a solution to sea-level rise (or anything else) if the world had gotten serious about cutting greenhouse gas emissions thirty years ago when scientists first began to raise the alarm. And just to be clear: despite what some conspiracy theorists may believe, the Illuminati are not spraying particles into the atmosphere right now. Nor are any large-scale field research programs under way. Most of what we know about geoengineering comes from computer models, as well as a few modest laboratory experiments. To better understand how particles react in the stratosphere, Keith and a colleague at Harvard have proposed spraying a few kilograms of particles into the stratosphere from a hot-air balloon above Arizona. In a glimpse at what will surely be future fights over the ethics of geoengineering, critics have already cast Keith’s modest and valuable experiment as the first move toward the creation of Planet Frankenstein.
The difficult truth about geoengineering is a seductively simple technological fix for a wickedly complex problem. It doesn’t require us to change our lives, or to pay more money for energy, or to swap out our SUV for a skateboard. It just requires people to sign off on the idea of a few airplanes spraying particles high up in the stratosphere every week and agreeing to trust someone else to manage the climate for us.
And that is exactly why it is dangerous. Instead of putting faith in individual action to address the problem of climate change, geoengineering puts faith in the magic of technology. As Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian and the author of Homo Deus, put it in an email: “Governments, corporations, and citizens allow themselves to act in a very irresponsible way because they assume that when push comes to shove, the scientists will invent something that will save the day.”
I thought about this while I watched Mayor Philip Levine welcome people to the celebrity-filled 100th anniversary of Miami Beach, which was held, appropriately enough, on a stage set up on Miami Beach. Levine is a smart guy, and he didn’t hesitate to address skeptics who believed that Miami Beach’s 200th anniversary would be celebrated in scuba suits. “I believe in human innovation,” Levine told the crowd. “If, thirty or forty years ago, I’d told you that you were going to be able to send messages to friends around the world with a phone you carried around in your pocket, you would think I was out of my mind.” Thirty or forty years from now, he said, “We’re going to have innovative solutions to fight back against sea-level rise that we cannot even imagine today.”
Translation: Party on, folks. The future will take care of itself.
But the future will not take care of itself. It will be shaped by decisions we made yesterday and will make tomorrow. For people who live in coastal cities, dealing with sea-level rise will require a lot of difficult choices, including in which neighborhoods to invest in new infrastructure, where to build seawalls, which historic structures to save and which to let go (“You can only save so many lighthouses,” Lisa Craig, the chief of historic preservation in Annapolis, Maryland, told me). Smart cities will develop master plans, articulate long-term strategic visions, revise zoning ordinances, pass tax incentives to shift development to higher ground. But that’s just a start.
Of all the hard decisions people who live on vulnerable coasts will have to face, the most difficult one is the idea of retreat. Retreat, after all, is what you do if you’re standing on the beach and the tide comes up too fast. You get out of the way. It’s what the Calusa did on the coast of Florida a thousand years ago, and what the hunter-gatherers who lived in in the now-flooded lands beneath the North Sea did ten thousand years ago. But we modern humans have poured a lot of concrete and asphalt and erected a lot of steel on the beach, and that makes it far more difficult for us to just fold up our tents and move to higher ground.
In many ways, retreat is the opposite of geoengineering: instead of relying on scientists to take care of the problem for you, it requires individual action, thoughtful planning, and a willingness to change your life. Most of all, it means giving up the war with water and admitting that nature has won. That is not a feeling many people embrace. In strictly practical terms, retreat also requires city and state officials to willingly shrink their tax base and politicians to willingly give up power. Who wants that?
Consider the case of Toms River, New Jersey, a town of 92,000 people along the Jersey shore about seventy-five miles south of Manhattan. Until the 1950s, Toms River was a quiet, rural place, best known for the egg farmers who shipped their goods off to New York City. Then the chemical industry arrived and built dye factories. Population boomed for a few decades; then the factories shut down, made obsolete by innovation and global competition, leaving a toxic legacy of cancer clusters and Superfund sites and a lot of cheaply built houses on the beach and along Barnegat Bay, which separates the barrier-island beaches from the mainland.
In some ways, Toms River resembles a working-class version of Miami. The heart of the town is on the shore, but the soul of the town is across the bay, at the beach, which, like Miami Beach, is a wispy island of sand facing the Atlantic. Like Miami, Toms River depends heavily on beach tourism, and like Miami, the town is extremely vulnerable not just from the ocean side, but also from the bay side, where many homes were built right on the water. Already Toms River has one of the highest rates of nuisance flooding on the Jersey shore. With sea-level rise, it will only get worse. According to a report by the Regional Plan Association, an influential group of industry leaders and university researchers in the New York area, one foot of sea-level rise will inundate 3,000 residents around Barnegat Bay. With three feet, 23,000 residents will be underwater. “At six feet of sea-level rise,” the report concludes, “the story of the Jersey shore is the loss of arcades, boardwalks, amusement parks and sands that fuel New Jersey’s tourism economy.”
Toms River was hit hard by Hurricane Sandy. A nine-foot storm surge had inundated the town, damaging or destroying 10,000 homes. On Ortley Beach, a neighborhood out on the barrier island, all but 60 of the 2,600 homes were damaged or destroyed. Houses on the backside of the island, as well as along the bay, were protected from the worst of the surge but were still flooded by rising waters in the bay. Miraculously, nobody in Toms River was killed. A drowned roller coaster in Seaside, a nearby town, became one of the iconic images of the disaster.
In the aftermath, there was much talk about how to reduce risks from future flooding events. A team of scientists and researchers at Rutgers University spent a year talking with local officials and members of the community to come up with a plan, as one document put it, “to help to shift the barrier island communities away from an over-reliance on the beach toward a more nuanced, diverse, sustainable relationship to the shore.” The Rutgers team wanted to create an inland “pier” or passageway to connect the coast with the nearby Pine Barrens, a heavily forested area with a unique coastal ecosystem (orchids and carnivorous plants), allowing for easy movement of people and wildlife. They imagined connecting the beach with inland areas by means of new, more sea-level-rise-friendly transportation systems, including aerial trams and water taxis. But they also imagined that as the seas rose, beach tourism would give way to a broader and more sustainable kind of ecotourism, including hiking and biking and bird-watching in the Pine Barrens. The plan included five thousand new housing units on higher ground to ease the transition away from the coast. All in all, it was a bold vision, and one that would take a lot of time, money, and political leadership to achieve. But it would have begun transforming the city into a place that might thrive in a world of rising seas and increased storms.
Instead, Toms River was rebuilt exactly the way it was. Well, not exactly: most of the rebuilt homes were elevated several feet, and critical infrastructure like electric panels were moved out of the way. In addition, the Army Corps of Engineers agreed to spend $150 million to construct a stronger dune for several miles on the Atlantic side of the barrier island, including the section in front of Toms River. The Army Corps has been building “reinforced” dunes like this since the 1960s, and they offer some protection from storm surges for a while, but need to be constantly rebuilt. It might be good for the Army Corps too, because it gives them purpose and allows the agency to ask for a bigger chunk of the federal budget every year, but in the long run, these dunes are just sandcastles on the beach. As far as sea-level rise goes, a higher dune does nothing to protect residents from rising waters in Barnegat Bay, which is where the real risk is. Yes, a few wealthy residents had turned their homes into elevated fortresses, but all in all, five years after Sandy had rolled in, Toms River was not in much better shape to face the future than it had been before the storm.
Why? The simplest explanation is that people in Toms River like where they live and don’t want it to change. As one longtime resident told me, “This is a unique place, the best of small-town America. I love it just the way it is.” And sea-level rise? Most of the people I talked to were far more worried about radical Islamic terrorists than climate change. When I asked Mayor Tom Kelaher, an eighty-three-year-old three-term Republican, about his views on climate change, he said, “I think the climate is changing, but whether it is caused by human beings or not, I can’t tell you.” When I asked him if the majority of residents of Toms River felt the same way, he said, “I don’t know. It’s not something we talk about a lot around here.” I suspected that Mayor Kelaher might have stronger views about climate change than he was willing to let on (a few years ago he traveled to Norway as part of a group to learn about climate science) but that he understood that it was dangerous to talk openly about it. After all, Toms River voted two to one in favor of Trump in the 2016 election. Kelaher knows as well as anyone that if you thought climate change was a serious problem, you probably didn’t vote for Trump.
But it wasn’t just ideology. It was also money. About $2 billion in taxable property in Toms River was destroyed in the storm, causing a shortfall of $18 million in the city’s annual budget. For a city like Toms River, which thrives on low taxes, this was a crisis. If the city increased taxes, Kelaher and others believed residents would flee. If it didn’t raise taxes, however, it would have to cut services.
In the end, the city was forced to raise taxes a small amount. But mostly they tried to increase the tax base by encouraging people to build back bigger homes. In some cases, instead of strengthening building codes and changing zoning regulations to motivate people to move out of risky areas, the city loosened them. New Jersey officials also worked to make sure that FEMA didn’t make any big changes in the floodplain designations for the town. When I asked the mayor if flood insurance rates had gone up after Sandy, he said, “Not really.”
This is how disaster relief works in America. There are lots of incentives to rebuild but few incentives to rebuild differently, much less to rethink the long-term future of cities and towns along the coast. And it’s not the people who live in town like Toms River who pay the costs anyway, so they have no incentive to change their thinking. By the end of 2016, the State of New Jersey had spent $4.6 billion on Sandy recovery efforts, 95 percent of which came from the federal government. In effect, people in Kansas and Washington and Iowa—people who will probably never see a Jersey beach—paid for the reconstruction. In Toms River, where four thousand homes were substantially damaged, US taxpayers subsidized recovery efforts with about $300 million in federal recovery funds. The town was granted another $30 million in state funding over five years simply to help close the budget gap caused by lost property tax revenues.
Given the risks that towns like Toms River face in the future, you have to wonder: How long is this sustainable? As seas rise and flooding gets more and more frequent, damaging, and costly, more and more cities and towns will be begging for more and more help, basically arguing, as New Jersey officials did, If you don’t bail us out, this town dies. “The question is, when do taxpayers who are not benefiting from this wake up and say, ‘We’re not paying for this’?” said Peter Byrne, director of the Environmental Law and Policy Institute at Georgetown University. “There has to be a limit to how long the public will pay for protecting beachfront property when we all know it is going underwater anyway.”
During one of my visits to Toms River, I took a walk on the boardwalk with Mayor Kelaher. A few days earlier, a nor’easter had blown in, wiping out a temporary dune the town had built while they were waiting for the Army Corps of Engineers to construct something more substantial. While Kelaher and I talked, dump trucks lined up near us, bringing sand to the shore to protect the beachfront houses in case they were blasted by another storm. Kelaher told me the two thousand truckloads of sand would cost the city nearly a million dollars when all was said and done. “But what are we gonna do? We need some protection from the waves,” he said, standing on the boardwalk, his green knit tie blowing in the cold winter wind.
He pointed to the rows of neatly kept beach houses. “People love it here,” he said with obvious pride. “They have been bringing their families here for years, every summer. They are very attached to it.”
“Do you think sea-level rise is a risk for this town?” I asked.
“Oh, I think it is. But not in my lifetime.”
I pointed out, gently, that he was eighty-three, so that wasn’t saying much. He laughed.
“What would happen if you told people here that, even with the dune, the risks of flooding are going to get higher and higher in the coming decades, and that if they aren’t ready for that, maybe they should sell their houses and move to higher ground?”
Kelaher looked as me as if I were crazy. “If I went door to door in this neighborhood, telling people that, I wouldn’t get out of here alive. If you told people they couldn’t live here anymore, it would be an economic and emotional catastrophe.”
In a world of quickly rising seas, the rationale for encouraging people to move out of harm’s way is straightforward: it saves money and it saves lives. For elected officials, the rationale for not encouraging people to move out of harm’s way is also straightforward: if you ask voters to do something difficult, something time-consuming, or, worst of all, something that costs them money, you get voted out of office. Or sued.
When it comes to new development, many cities have developed incentives to encourage people to build on higher ground. Zoning ordinances and restrictions on how close you can build to the water are the simplest. Some cities, including Miami, are considering levying impact fees on developers, especially if they want to build in low-lying areas, then using the money to fund clean energy and climate adaptation projects.
But the most difficult problem is not new development; it’s the stuff that’s already built. Tax incentives and other regulatory tools can encourage people to move, but that is slow and uncertain. Raising flood insurance rates to better reflect the true costs of living in risky places can help. But the simplest way to get people to move out of low-lying areas is simply to buy them out. States can condemn properties with the power of eminent domain, but that is a hostile move that reeks of Big Brother and leads to expensive courtroom battles. Voluntary buyouts avoid all that. In most cases, the state or federal government simply offers to buy out residents at more or less full market value. For people who live in risky areas, where their homes might not be marketable, this is often an attractive option. The State of New York spent $240 million to buy out 610 properties, mostly in a few neighborhoods on Staten Island that had been hard hit by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. In 2016, the US government spent $48 million to resettle twenty-three families who lived on Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, which had lost 98 percent of its land to flooding. As waters rise and the risk of flooding increases, pressure will surely build on politicians and civic leaders to find ways of moving people out of harm’s way.
As a long-term strategy, however, there are several problems with buyouts. First, they work best when entire neighborhoods volunteer to go. Holdouts force towns to keep providing municipal services (garbage pickup, water, sewage, road maintenance, snowplows, streetlights, police, firefighters) to a shrinking tax base. And they prevent the neighborhood from returning fully to nature, which is often one of the goals.
Another problem is money. Buying out twenty-three families in Louisiana is one thing; buying out an entire town or city is something else entirely. To buy out the 4,000 homes in Toms River that were damaged by Sandy would cost roughly $1 billion. According to the 2107 Coastal Master Plan for Louisiana, 24,000 homes in the state are at risk for flooding in the next fifty years (and that’s assuming the state spends billions to improve dikes and levees and other flood control barriers). Back-of-the-envelope price tag to buy out those homes: $6 billion.
The third problem is, who chooses which homes get bought out and which homes are left to flood? In 2015, Alaskan officials lobbied the US Department of Housing and Urban Development for $62 million in federal funds to help 350 residents in Newtok, a village about five hundred miles west of Anchorage that is rapidly being eaten away by the sea, relocate to higher ground nine miles inland. When President Obama visited the state in 2015, he spoke bluntly about the dangers of sea-level rise. But when it came to doling out money to pay for relocation, HUD officials funded Isle de Jean Charles but not Newtok. Why? HUD officials explained it to Bloomberg View writer Christopher Flavelle with vague references to Isle de Jean Charles’s “leverage” of local and state funds. Flavelle cited HUD’s decision-making process as a good example of “the insane bureaucracy of funding climate adaptation.”
As I saw in Toms River, the biggest issue any relocation strategy will have to overcome is simply that people love their homes and don’t want to leave. That’s less of a political problem in places like China, where more than a million people were forcibly relocated to make room for the Three Gorges Dam. But even in the Netherlands, where there is a strong consensus among the citizens that government has the authority to take whatever actions are necessary to reduce the risks of flooding, relocation is difficult. In Nijmegen, the oldest city in the country, the Dutch government spent nearly $500 million to reroute part of the Waal River to give it more room to spread out and reduce the risk that it would jump its banks and flood parts of the city and surrounding farmland. About fifty residents had to be relocated. “It was not easy,” Mathieu Schouten, an advisor to the City of Nijmegen, told me when I visited. “We had to buy everyone out, and offer them new land in a higher place. And even then, a few people didn’t want to go. The negotiations were difficult. In some cases, it took eleven years of talking.”
Even in Staten Island, where 145 families in the Oakwood Beach neighborhood banded together to convince New York State officials that they should buy them out after Sandy destroyed their homes, I found people who wouldn’t budge. When I visited the neighborhood in 2016, many of the homes had been razed and the lots were scrubby meadows. There were still a few abandoned houses that had not yet been torn down, but you could feel nature making a comeback. The streets were lined with Phragmites australis, an invasive reed that creates a dense four-foot-high wall of green. Ducks wandered through the streets. Seeing a neighborhood being reclaimed by nature provokes a spooky feeling, like watching the reel of civilization play backward. I found two or three houses that were still occupied. I stopped at one of them—a simple white bungalow with a porch crowded with plastic gnomes—and talked with Lois Kelley, a kind-looking woman in her late fifties. She told me that during Sandy, she had been home alone. As the water came into her living room, she climbed onto the couch. The water kept rising until it was five feet deep. She watched her refrigerator float away, her chairs bobbing in the dark water. “I spent the whole night in the dark, floating on the couch with my cats,” she told me. In the wind, she heard the voices of her neighbors, cries for help (she later learned that across the street, a man and his son had drowned in their basement). The next day, the water receded. She was cold and wet, but she was not hurt. She fed her cats, summoned contractors to repair her soggy house (flood insurance covered it all), and went on with her life. A year or so later, when city officials knocked on her door and offered to buy her house at full market value, she refused. “This is my home,” she told me. “Why would I leave?”
From a purely economic point of view, it may make sense to spend $3 billion or $4 billion to build a wall around Lower Manhattan. It’s more difficult to justify $3 billion or $4 billion to save Hunts Point in the Bronx. Other factors go into deciding what to protect and what not to protect than a blunt cost-benefit analysis (race, historical value, political influence), but the larger point is obviously true: not everyone is going to be saved. Wealthy people will take care of themselves, either by moving their homes or elevating them or building seawalls or simply writing off the house as it crumbles into the sea, but for the vast majority of people who live on coastlines, it’s going to be a tough day when they wake up and realize that their state or federal government doesn’t have the money or the political will to rescue them.
In the United States, if someone owns property on the beach, it is their right to live there until the land vanishes beneath the waves—at which point, according to common law, the land (now underwater) becomes part of the public trust. But beyond that, the legal questions get more complex. Do you have the right to build a seawall on your property even if it causes flooding for your neighbor? If half your property is underwater, do you pay only half the taxes? If you live on a high spot in the middle of a swamped neighborhood, do you still have the right to expect essential services, including fire and police, from the city?
The law is murky on a lot of this, but you can see one version of how it might play out in Summer Haven, Florida, an old-money enclave just south of St. Augustine in St. Johns County. Until the 1920s, there were no roads there—people arrived by boat from St. Augustine or drove along the beach. The state finally built a road along the coast, designated as State Route A1A. It was originally made of brick, but after it got washed out several times, it was rebuilt with gravel and asphalt. Summer Haven remained a small, exclusive community of less than 100, but as the years passed, residents got used to the road—it provided the easiest access to their homes.
In the 1970s, state officials grew tired of rebuilding the road after every storm and moved A1A farther inland; it turned over about one and a half miles of the old road—now known to locals as Old A1A—to the county to maintain. Old A1A became essentially a long driveway for Summer Haven residents. In 2004, the road washed out again, and county commissions faced a choice: repair the road for $1 million and see it get washed out again, or leave it alone and doom the residents to living without road access. The county had already spent more than twenty-five times the average annual maintenance costs to keep the road open and in good shape.
And sea-level rise was just making it worse. The county decided to build a six-foot-wide berm—using $950,000 in federal funds—to protect the road from the ocean, but the berm washed away quickly.
In 2008, after more storms and washouts, the residents of Summer Haven had had enough: a group of sixty-five property owners sued the county for failing to maintain the roadway in usable condition. In effect, they argued that it didn’t matter if sea-level rise and increasing storm surges were making the road vulnerable—the property owners paid taxes, the county owned the road, and it was their job to maintain it. The property owners argued that the county’s failure to do so violated their right to keep existing public access to their properties and therefore constituted a “taking” under the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution, which states that “private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
This was a highly unusual argument. There have been plenty of cases where property owners have successfully argued that faulty engineering on the part of local, city, or federal officials destroyed their property values. To cite just one example: after Hurricane Katrina, a group of residents argued that a levee designed by the US Army Corps of Engineers had been poorly designed and contributed to the flooding that destroyed their homes. The case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, and the property owners eventually won.
But this case was different. This was not a case of government taking action that damaged their property; the wealthy Summer Haven residents argued that they were harmed because the government hadn’t taken more action than just spending about twenty-five times as much per mile to maintain their piece of road than the county spent on other roads.
In response, the county argued that as a low-lying coastal road, Old A1A is subjected to continuous damage from natural forces, such as storms and erosion. According to county officials, the only feasible way to protect the road from the “ravages of the ocean” was to spend more than $13 million to elevate the road and then protect it with an embankment of sand that stretched all the way down to the high-tide line. County officials argued it would have to spend an additional $5 to $8 million every few years to maintain that protection. That was more than the entire county budget for repair and maintenance of eight hundred miles of roads in the county. If they had to continue to maintain the road, it could bankrupt the county.
The local court ruled in favor of the county, but the property owners appealed to the district court, which overturned the trial court and found in favor of the property owners, essentially ruling that the county had a duty to “reasonably maintain” and repair Old A1A in such a way as to result in “meaningful access.” More significantly, however, the court held that “governmental inaction—in the face of an affirmative duty to act—can support a claim for inverse condemnation.” This case, for the first time in Florida, established a precedent that government inaction may be grounds for a plaintiff to bring a constitutional takings claim.
In 2014, property owners and the county worked out a settlement, with the county agreeing to make “good faith efforts to preserve, protect, and maintain” the road. But the court’s decision supporting the takings claim still stands. And for anyone thinking about the economic implications of sea-level rise to cities and towns, it sets a disturbing precedent. As Thomas Ruppert, a lawyer and coastal planning expert with Florida Sea Grant, a university-based partnership with state and local governments, wrote in an analysis of the decision: “If a court were to determine that local governments must maintain a ‘level of service’ for drainage rather than maintain the existing infrastructure itself, this could force local governments into the difficult choice between spending what may amount to unrealistic sums of money to keep everyone’s property dry or risk facing legal liability.”
To state it more bluntly, this means that property owners in Florida can invoke the Fifth Amendment and sue their city and town every time a road or bridge washes out due to flooding—not because the road was poorly designed, but because when it was built, engineers failed to anticipate sea-level rise. “It allows residents to tell their local officials, ‘We think you should rebuild our bridge again, and this time make it twenty feet higher. If you don’t do it, we will sue the government and get paid,’” said Peter Byrne of Georgetown University. “Thanks to this decision, that mentality is metastasizing in other states.” It also means that wealthy, politically connected residents will be able to dictate how and where cities and towns spend their money, which will of course mean less spending for poor neighborhoods that don’t have the means to threaten lawsuits.
“As seas rise, cities and towns could go broke trying to maintain their roads and bridges and other infrastructure,” said Ruppert. “It’s just that simple. And legal decisions like this one could make that day come sooner because they take away the ability of local governments to exercise discretion in how best to serve their citizens with the limited money they have.” As cities and towns pull away, Ruppert sees a future coastline emerging that is a mix of watery slums, where people live beyond the reach of government, and enclaves of the superwealthy living in fortresses on the sea, moving in and out with boats and helicopters. “I admit it’s apocalyptic,” he said. “But that may be where we are headed unless we learn to make difficult, expensive, and painful decisions about adaptation before the crisis hits.”
One day while I was exploring the Jersey shore, I drove by some summer cottages in the town of Lavallette, a barrier-island town just north of Toms River. It was winter, and the cottages were all closed up, but I turned off the main road and parked my car and walked around in the neighborhood for a few minutes. Most of the cottages had been built in the 1940s and 1950s, perhaps purchased out of a Sears catalogue and assembled on-site. Some had been fixed up, with second floors added or bigger porches, while others looked like nothing had changed in fifty years. There was no sign of money here. These cottages were not owned by hedge fund managers. They were houses of plumbers and schoolteachers and highway workers who had worked hard and saved hard and got a little place at the beach for their families. Maybe they hung out for two or three weeks a year there, a brief respite from fifty-and sixty-hour workweeks that drove them the rest of the year. And of course many of these houses were built right on the sand.
When I got back to the car, I drove north toward Asbury Park. I’ve never lived on the Jersey shore, but I’ve spent enough time there (and listened to enough Bruce Springsteen) to feel an emotional connection to the place. I remembered the night in Atlantic City many years ago when my father phoned me to tell me he was dying, and another, happier night even longer ago, playing Whack-A-Mole with a girlfriend in Wildwood. I hadn’t thought of either of these moments in a long time, but our memories adhere to places in surprising ways. As seas rise, we will not only lose homes and property; many of us will lose parts of our past. Others will lose more.
As I drove, I tuned the car radio to a New Jersey NPR station, hoping to catch the news. What I heard instead was a desperate man’s voice: “… Well, yeah, after Katrina we lost everything and the state came up with this ‘Road Home’ program, where they’ll buy your property out at a lesser amount than what it’s valued at, but if you stay and rebuild they’ll give you the full amount. With the understanding that we would get protection and get help. So we built this home here with the understanding that we was gonna get some protection. We got nothing.”
I later learned that the voice on my radio belonged to Anthony Caronia, who lived on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, just north of New Orleans. I had been there a number of times, and as he talked, I could picture the flat bayou landscape, punctuated by strip malls and car dealers. Caronia was being interviewed for a story about Louisiana’s $50-billion plan to save the state from disappearing beneath the sea. After Katrina, the state had encouraged him to stay and rebuild his home. Now he was regretting that he’d agreed.
“… So yeah, the state basically told us to stay, and it would help us out and do all this protection, and nothing—nothing—nothing was ever done. So please, could y’all follow up, the newspeople? And make sure that this doesn’t go to the wayside? ’Cause I have five children and a granddaughter and a wife, and I don’t expect to live forever but this is their equity, this is gonna be left, this is what I’m—my plan is to leave it for them.”
In Caronia’s voice, you could hear anger and disappointment and fear: this was a man who had finally realized how much he had to lose.
“But man, the flooding’s getting worse and worse and worse and worse. I’m ready, man. I—I—I should have left after Katrina but my wife said ‘No, let’s—let’s just build a house.’ It’s just a matter—I’m tired. I’m ready to go. The school buses can’t turn around on certain days, you know I had to track my kids through water. I mean I had—the National Guard can’t even get back to us, the water gets so high. The fire department can’t get back there. You’re trapped in your house ’cause there’s only one way in and one way out. My tractor, my boats, my four-wheelers, my zero-turn lawn mower. Every spring I gotta start sweating, what am I gonna do with my tools?
“I mean, I’m being honest with you, I’m giving up! I’m fifty-one years old—I don’t care anymore. And I shouldn’t feel that way! This is not right. This is not fair. Something needs to be done today. Today. Please understand me—this is a cry out for help. From anyone and everyone in America listening, Mr. Anthony Caronia is begging the State of Louisiana and the United States government to come in and buy me out and please move my family outta harm’s way. Please understand my cry. I’m ready to go. I’m begging for help. I’m not asking for help, I’m begging for help.”
Shortly after that, the interview ended. I pulled off into a parking lot near the beach and made a note to myself to track down Caronia and learn more about what had happened to him. I guessed that the anger and fear I heard in his voice were just the beginning of a much larger anger and fear that will rise as the water comes and people lose what they love. It reminded me of a conversation I’d had with Dutch landscape architect Adriaan Geuze. I had seen him give a lecture about sea-level rise at a conference in Rotterdam one day, and he’d invited me back to his home for dinner afterward. We sat in his ground-floor kitchen—which was actually below sea level, he pointed out—and talked about the anger and resentment and hardship that are going to surface if our inevitable retreat from the shoreline is not carefully managed. Geuze argued that it will require a radical rethinking of the role of government. If the most basic job of government is to keep people safe, what happens when people realize they are not? What is the government’s role in keeping people out of harm’s way? Geuze compared sea-level rise to other transformative catastrophes, such as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, a partly man-made natural disaster that profoundly changed the geography of America and also expanded the role government plays in ensuring the long-term welfare of even the most vulnerable people. “We’re going to need a new New Deal,” Geuze argued. “It is going to require a rethinking of the social contract between governments and citizens.”
Maybe it will. And maybe it will begin with people like Anthony Caronia. After the radio news segment ended, I got out of the car and went for a walk on the beach. It was twilight, and getting cold. I was alone except for a few sea gulls circling overhead. I listened to the crash of waves washing against the shore as they have for millions of years. It sounded like Mother Nature unfurling her sheets and making her bed.