20 April 2017, Bloomberg Climate Changed, The Nightmare Scenario for Florida’s Coastal Homeowners. Demand and financing could collapse before the sea consumes a single house. On a predictably gorgeous South Florida afternoon, Coral Gables Mayor Jim Cason sat in his office overlooking the white-linen restaurants of this affluent seaside community and wondered when climate change would bring it all to an end. He figured it would involve a boat. When Cason first started worrying about sea-level rise, he asked his staff to count not just how much coastline the city had (47 miles) or value of the property along that coast ($3.5 billion). He also told them to find out how many boats dock inland from the bridges that span the city’s canals (302). What matters, he guessed, will be the first time a mast fails to clear the bottom of one of those bridges because the water level had risen too far. “These boats are going to be the canary in the mine,” said Cason, who became mayor in 2011 after retiring from the U.S. foreign service. “When the boats can’t go out, the property values go down.” Jim Cason, mayor of Coral Gables, in his office. He worries that rising insurance costs, reluctant lenders or skittish foreign buyers could hurt home prices well before sea-level rise gets worse. If property values start to fall, Cason said, banks could stop writing 30-year mortgages for coastal homes, shrinking the pool of able buyers and sending prices lower still. Those properties make up a quarter of the city’s tax base; if that revenue fell, the city would struggle to provide the services that make it such a desirable place to live, causing more sales and another drop in revenue. And all of that could happen before the rising sea consumes a single home. As President Donald Trump proposes dismantling federal programs aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions, officials and residents in South Florida are grappling with the risk that climate change could drag down housing markets. Relative sea levels in South Florida are roughly four inches higher now than in 1992. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts sea levels will rise as much as three feet in Miami by 2060. By the end of the century, according to projections by Zillow, some 934,000 existing Florida properties, worth more than $400 billion, are at risk of being submerged. Read More here
Category Archives: PLEA Network
17 April 2017, The Guardian Stop swooning over Justin Trudeau. The man is a disaster for the planet. Donald Trump is so spectacularly horrible that it’s hard to look away – especially now that he’s discovered bombs. But precisely because everyone’s staring gape-mouthed in his direction, other world leaders are able to get away with almost anything. Don’t believe me? Look one country north, at Justin Trudeau. Look all you want, in fact – he sure is cute, the planet’s only sovereign leader who appears to have recently quit a boy band. And he’s mastered so beautifully the politics of inclusion: compassionate to immigrants, insistent on including women at every level of government. Give him great credit where it’s deserved: in lots of ways he’s the anti-Trump, and it’s no wonder Canadians swooned when he took over. But when it comes to the defining issue of our day, climate change, he’s a brother to the old orange guy in Washington. Not rhetorically: Trudeau says all the right things, over and over. He’s got no Scott Pruitts in his cabinet: everyone who works for him says the right things. Indeed, they specialize in getting others to say them too – it was Canadian diplomats, and the country’s environment minister, Catherine McKenna, who pushed at the Paris climate talks for a tougher-than-expected goal: holding the planet’s rise in temperature to 1.5C (2.7F). But those words are meaningless if you keep digging up more carbon and selling it to people to burn, and that’s exactly what Trudeau is doing. He’s hard at work pushing for new pipelines through Canada and the US to carry yet more oil out of Alberta’s tar sands, which is one of the greatest climate disasters on the planet. Read More here
12 April 2017, SMH – John Pilger, Australia is sleepwalking into a confrontation with China. Australia is sleepwalking into a confrontation with China. Wars can happen suddenly in an atmosphere of mistrust and provocation, especially if a minor power, such as Australia, abandons its independence for an “alliance” with an unstable superpower. The United States is at a critical moment. Having exported its all-powerful manufacturing base, run down its industry and reduced millions of its once-hopeful people to poverty, the principal American power today is brute force. When Donald Trump launched his missile attack on Syria ‒ following his bombing of a mosque and a school ‒ he was having dinner in Florida with the President of China, Xi Jinping. The attack on Syria was clearly, above all, to show his detractors and doubters in Washington’s war-making institutions ‒ the Pentagon, the CIA, the Congress ‒ how tough he was and prepared to risk a war with Russia. He had spilt blood in Syria, a Russian protectorate; he was surely now on the team. The attack was also meant to say directly to Xi, his dinner guest: this is how we deal with those who challenge the top dog. China has long received this message. In its rise as the world’s biggest trader and manufacturer, it has been virtually encircled by 400 US military bases ‒ a provocation described by a former Pentagon strategist as “a perfect noose”. This is not Trump’s doing. In 2011, the then president Barack Obama flew to Australia to declare, in an address to parliament, what became known as the “pivot to Asia”: the biggest build-up of US air and naval forces in the Asia-Pacific region since the Second World War. The target was China. America had a new and entirely unnecessary enemy. Today, low-draft US warships, missiles, bombers and drones operate on China’s doorstep. In July, one of the biggest US-led naval exercises ever staged, the biennial Operation Talisman Sabre, will rehearse a blockade of the sea lanes through which run China’s commercial lifelines. Based on an Air-Sea Battle Plan for war with China, which prescribes a “blinding” attack, this “war game” will be played by Australia. Read More here
5 April 2017, ECOS, Before the storm. It’s a catastrophe in anyone’s book, not least those of insurance companies anticipating the tens of thousands of claims likely to be lodged.As the floods surged south in the days after Cyclone Debbie hit landfall near Bowen in north Queensland on March 28, a natural disaster was declared in five major centres in northern New South Wales.Citing the chairman of the Insurance Council of Australia, the Australian Financial Review said “in insurance terms, a catastrophe means a disaster that causes a significant number of claims in a region” and for Cyclone Debbie that could be claims over $1 billion. CSIRO’s Dr Chi-Hsiang Wang and colleagues have been researching the cost implications of extreme weather events but with a focus at the other end – predicting the likely cost before the storms. Counting the cost of extreme events Deloitte Access Economics last year delivered a report on building resilient infrastructure which estimated that, between 2002-03 and 2010-11, an annual average of more than $450 million was spent by Australian governments on restoring essential public infrastructure following extreme weather. If it’s business-as-usual, the report said, $17 billion is expected to be spent on direct replacement costs of essential infrastructure due to natural disasters between 2015 and 2050. These estimates don’t factor in the impacts of climate change. In the case of Cyclone Debbie, the wind intensity exceeded the limitations of the building specifications. “It’s not a surprise that we see considerable damage because the intensity is so high,” says Dr Wang. Until now, a cyclone with the force of Debbie was considered a once in a 2,000 year event by Australian design standard for wind actions (AS/NZS 1170.2:2011). That may change. “There’s a consensus among scientists, although not as strong as the consensus around rising global temperatures, that for some tropical cyclone basins around the world they are likely to see events of increased intensity,” he adds. What’s missing? Dr Wang says the current practice for wind impact assessment of physical infrastructure uses only wind intensity (in terms of wind gust) to gauge the damage potential of windstorms. “This ignores other threats brought upon by the accompanying rainfall and storm surge,” he says. Read More here