Hot, Wet, and Nasty (But Not in a Good Way): Superstorm Sandy and the New York of Tomorrow
Come June, Klaus and Isabella are preparing to raise their home a second time, by an additional five feet. The zoning department, more willing to make exceptions after Sandy, has approved their application. The procedure will be easier this time around, because the foundations have already been modified.
Mayor Bloomberg also has what he wanted: his resiliency plan. June 11, it debuts on the public stage, in a location heavy with obvious symbolism. The cavernous Duggal Greenhouse in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard was flooded by four and a half feet of water during the storm, but looks magnificent now, like a world-class gallery space. It’s also extremely hot. At a guess, using the James Brown scale, I’d say it’s hotter than 10 motherfuckers. Some of the older members of the press are starting to wilt. At least one fella has dropped off completely when Bloomberg raises that familiar turtle’s head above podium. As usual, his tone is even and measured. Why, even this man’s pattern baldness is expressive of moderation. Not for him the monk-like tonsure or barren scalp. His hairline is the old one downsized, his hair shrinking to the dimensions of a toupee before it sets like the sun behind his crown. Through the windows behind him rise the crenellations of Manhattan’s skyline and, though it’s almost too fitting to believe, a storm begins to brew toward the end of the speech.
It’s not a reproach to say that location and events conspire to diminish Bloomberg’s stature. He’s all too human, like the rest of us. He can’t fail to be dwarfed by the environment. Mind you, his opening lines don’t help him rise to the occasion. He begins by thanking the greenhouse’s owner “for his determination to turn disaster into opportunity.”
“In the 40s,” continues the mayor, “the Navy Yard was nicknamed the ‘Can-Do Yard’ because no place better exemplified the spirit and resolve or our country.”
You don’t have to share Josmar’s suspicions to find these sentiments unsettling. Surely, the only opportunities to arise from climate change will be of the character-building variety, and there are some challenges that must be surmounted regardless of the effect on profitability.
These reflections aside, the report and the mayor’s introduction inject a welcome degree of honesty to the politics of climate change. “We can’t stop nature,” he says, “and so if we’re going to save lives, and protect the lives of communities, we’re going to have to live with some new realities.” It’s important to acknowledge that the city’s greenhouse gas emissions are reported to have dropped by 16 percent during the mayor’s tenure, and a goal of a 30 percent reduction has been set for 2030. In terms of both aims and actuality, New York has, on its own relatively small scale, far exceeded the achievements of the UN’s Kyoto Protocol.
Bloomberg’s speech pauses early on to allow a video to be screened, a collage of first responders, victims and spokespeople in the aftermath of the storm.
Among them is Virginia Deere, captured speaking at her local charette. For anyone who doesn’t know better, the edited Ms. Deere is another booster for the mayor’s office.
Afterward, New York’s journalists dutifully cut and paste the press release. New York magazine manages the impressive feat of publishing six pages on the report without including a single allusion to climate change. For most publications, the take-home details are that 800,000 residents are expected to be living in the 100-year floodplain by 2050, and the number of heat waves is set to increase. More than 250 initiatives are proposed, from small levees and mobile sea walls to an East River counterpart to Battery Park City. With depressing predictability, the forecast from the NPCC is even bleaker than it was four years ago. The sea level may rise more than 2.5 feet come mid-century. All other predictions are up, too. The IPCC statistics have been wholly abandoned.
Klaus has certain reservations on the report now that his work on it is complete: “It was a Herculean task to put the SIRR report together. And there is good and bad news.” Principal among the bad news is the short timeline used. No forecast went beyond mid-century. “If we only plan what is effective on that 2050 time horizon, then we may create liabilities of additional and perhaps irreversible risk exposure to future generations.” And there’s more. “I still believe that retreat from the waterfront in some parts of the city will need to be part of the package.”
As to the future of the most vulnerable areas of the City, Klaus is unambiguous:
“They have the same future as New Orleans. A hundred years from now there is no New Orleans. There may be a very few crests that are occupied by a couple of buildings, but New Orleans as we know it will be gone. It’s not defensible. So places like Staten Island and the Rockaways, but also places like Red Hook, the Newtown Creek area and other low-lying areas, will be parklands and some of them will be water parklands.”
Still, Klaus is an optimist, although not of the Bloomberg variety. Life in New York will not be impossible: “It will just look entirely different. You know the High Line? We will have many high lines. You will walk from building to building on the high line. Some of them might become transportation high lines. Think how New York City looked 200 years ago, when it was a shipping town. Then 100 years ago, when it was a railroad end station, and barges from New Jersey came over to Brooklyn and Manhattan. Now it’s an automobile town. Well, New York might become a water taxi town, where you still have yellow taxis, but they’re boats. They may even be amphibian. Human kind is very adaptive—it’s just very slowly adaptive, and that’s our problem. But New York City has changed all the time, and this is a city that actually has a record of changing fast, compared to Rome or other places.”