Will New York City Survive Sea-Level Rise?
Sometimes in New York, you get surrounded by steel and glass and brick and brownstone and it's easy to forgot that you live on an island -- and not a particularly big island at that.
Then it pours for one afternoon and the subways fill with water and the streets run like rivers and the sewage drains back up and you feel like we could all just float off into the Atlantic at any moment.
And it's not just the rain falling from the sky that we've got to worry about -- it's the rivers and ocean surrounding our tightly packed little city. We're overdue for a major hurricane. Our climate's getting hotter and wetter. And we could be looking at the equivalent of a 100-year-flood every decade, according to at least one report (not to mention losing Long Island lobsters and honeycrisp apples).
Mayor Bloomberg and a special panel of science advisers warned this week that New Yorkers need to brace for the possibility of more storms, more floods, more heat waves and sea level rise that could reach a couple of feet by the end of the century.
"All of the evidence from the science community is that the seas are going to rise," Bloomberg said Tuesday as he unveiled the panel's findings.
The point isn't to scare people. It's to help make the city ready. "We're providing the science by which the City of New York can get ready and prepare," said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior NASA scientist who chaired the panel.
So what's an island city to do when the sea starts rising? Get higher. Bloomberg's panel unveiled its report at a sewage treatment plant in Queens, where pump motors and circuit breakers are being moved to 14 feet above sea level from 25 feet below sea level. The city also plans to build up seawalls and take other steps to update its aging infrastructure.
It's great to see the city where I live and hope to raise my family taking the threat of climate change so seriously and planning for the future. Still, it would be nice if we could all make the changes necessary to avoid the worst consequences of global warming. And in many ways, this city is a great example for that, as well.
New York might not look like it to outsiders, but it's actually one of the greenest places on earth. As writer David Owen explained in a 2004 New Yorker piece:
The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That's ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use.Since moving to New York two years ago, I've started biking to work whenever I can, taking the train when I don't and walking almost everywhere. My wife and I sold one of our cars. The other we don't see for weeks at a time. New York makes this possible.
Not everyone wants to live like this, I know. There was a time when I didn't think that I ever would. Now, I can't imagine wanting to live anywhere else.
Which is why I don't want to see the sea come and take it back.
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Ya see, if you take a glass of water with ice, and the ice melts, the level doesn't rise...oh, never mind. These scientific proofs are like water off a duck's back to the illiterati.
NYC is a mixed green bag, as many have noted in comments above. As a native of the small island of Manhattan and an environmentalist, I'd like to throw in why I think NYC is green. It's not because of footprint, locally or factoring in resources pulled in from afar. It's something more profound. NYC is one of the few large metropolitan areas in the USA that has been working for an extended period of time to improve environmental quality and ensure resource availability. NYC has an excellent, reliable, and clean water supply because it has been making agreements with landowners in the watersheds that supply the city inhabitants. Water quality in the bodies surrounding the Hudson estuary has also been improving steadily for the past 20 years. Ecosystems have become healthier and more diverse. Waterfront space development has also been picking up, promoting further stewardship. Mostly, though, it's the ideas that make NYC green. The access to an educated public, the presence of academic institutions, and the pride of local community, place, and the preservation of place are what truly make NYC green. NYC has been finding solutions for its own survival and success for 400 years. It will also find the requisite green solutions.
The simple, straightforward and honest _scientific_ answer to the question is: If we don't start, on whole, REMOVING carbon from the atmosphere BEFORE 2040, and maybe before 2020, the answer is _clearly;_ No.
Yes, the answer is CLEARLY no.
No.
Yes, NO.
What's wrong with you people that you don't understand how URGENT this is for the whole world?! I'm Very frustrated that our world leaders are taking a "go-slow" approach. It's leading us into disaster.
We DESPERATELY need a go-fast approach to _reversing_ the trend of CO2 and the atmosphere
.
Oh Oh..... another black eye.
http://www
Don't forget that Los Angelenos have a very low carbon footprint at the end of the day, despite all the driving, simply because their climate is so much milder than New York's. That means less heaters blasting in the winter and less A/C in the summer. (Well, maybe a little less).
In 2005, metro areas with the greenest carbon footprints?
1. Honolulu
2. Los Angeles
3. Portland
4. New York City
This surprising result was published last year in report by the Brookings Institution, which you can find here:
http://www
and written about in The Economist here:
http://www
The report only took into account household usage and highway data, not local traffic. But it's still something to keep in mind when thinking about who's the greenest.
-Christopher
(California transplant living in NYC)
Sure, as Salty says, the total energy consumption of New York City is high. There are 8 million people living here, after all. But the per capita energy consumption? Extremely low in comparison to most Americans. And just think about how much land and resources those 8 million people would consume if spread out like the rest of America, with all the extra land and highway construction and truck traffic and everything else it would take to accommodate them at a much lower density.
Allow me to again quote from the "Green Manhattan" article I excerpted above, because I have it at my fingertips (and David Owens did such a great job explaining the same concepts):
“Anyplace that has such tall buildings and heavy traffic is obviously an environmental disaster—except that it isn’t,” John Holtzclaw, a transportation consultant for the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. “If New Yorkers lived at the typical American sprawl density of three households per residential acre, they would require many times as much land. They’d be driving cars, and they’d have huge lawns and be using pesticides and fertilizers on them, and then they’d be overwatering their lawns, so that runoff would go into streams.”
Does that mean New York is perfect or that we don't have problems like childhood asthma and waste disposal and the like? Of course not. But from an energy and land use perspective, I remain convinced that city livin' is green livin'.
Way to completely ignore the points about having to ship everything in. Your new quotes dispute none of what I said. I acknowledged that "in terms of individual transportation and heating and such, NY uses far less oil". But to leave it at that would be the typical shell game of ignoring otherwise environmentally catastrophic behavior. With current technology, any city is - by definition - unsustainable, since it necessitates the importation (which is fueled almost entirely by oil) of resources in order to exist.
Wasn't ignoring it. I meant to address it as part of the point that if you spread the same amount of people over a wider area, with less density, that means it requires more energy for goods and services to reach them -- or for them to reach those goods -- not less. More deliveries, more distribution points, more vehicle miles traveled, etc.
Thanks, Christopher, for the Brookings Institution and Economist references. I'll also throw in SustainLane, which puts NYC at No. 5 on the list of greenest U.S. cities, and says, "Despite New York’s skyscrapers and congested streets, the city is one of the most sustainable in the country." See it here: http://www
Ultimately, of course, you're right pfadfaog: No large-scale human habitation is currently sustainable with the way we use energy and resources, which gets back to the real point of my post about why NYC needs to prepare for the consequences facing it in the future.
Thanks very much for the lively discussion!
Al Gore has told us that the northern polar ice caps will melt within 5 years.
http://www
No wonder Hillary took the Sec. of State job. She's obviously fleeing NY to avoid the impending catastrophe!
"New York might not look like it to outsiders, but it's actually one of the greenest places on earth." - Only a New Yorker would have the audacity to make such a ridiculously self-righteous yet obviously false claim about his city of residence. New York is a monument to 20th century American environmental excess. The energy consumption of NY is extraordinary by any standard. Coal mines hundreds of miles away work to fuel the power plants that supply NY with all of its "juice". The New Yorkers' pride in being able to find any foodstuff from anywhere in the world available on the menu of some restaurant somewhere in New York is a testament to the excess; how much hydrocarbon is consumed to provide NY's 18 million residents with out of season fruit from the southern hemisphere or fresh fish from Alaska or any number of more exotic non-local food imports?
This whole "NY is the greenest city" thing is so absurd. Yes, in terms of individual transportation and heating and such, NY uses far less oil. But that hides how much oil is being used on their behalf/at their behest - to ship in everything they consume and to ship out their waste. Once that is added into the equation, I wonder where they would rank.
I am a long, longtime NYer, but really, to call New York "one of the greenest places on earth" is just ludicrous. So "the average Manhattanite" doesn't use much gasoline in a year -- so what! The HUGE number of cars, buses and freight trucks that move thru the city's major and minor roads every single day pollute the place beyond belief. Many of those trucks obviously haven't seen the inside of an environmental inspection station *ever.* And it is normal for cars, trucks and buses to idle for long periods of time, both at traffic lights and just out of sheer laziness of the driver -- and lack of enforcement of environmental and noise laws -- to the further detriment of the air and environment.
While it's true that NYers are ahead of the curve in terms of public transportation use and just plain willingness to walk -- something you simply, and weirdly, *cannot* do in most places in this country -- it is also true that the morning air in Manhattan is a disgusting, ozone-laden mess that doesn't start to clear out till around 2 in the afternoon, when the wind changes. I love NY -- but it has a LONG way to go to become really green. (For starters, a lot more trees would help... !! )
Move to Brooklyn. We got mad trees.
Electrical consumption to keep the city lit up like a lightbulb.
Fuel spent to keep 18 million people fed with non-local foodstuffs year round.
Fuel spent by all of the airplanes flying into and out of NYC all day long 365 days a year to keep the wheels of commerce going because of the archaic, but now inefficient concentration of service industries in NYC.
The list goes on...
This is all a plot by the Dutch to make money on a seawall for NYC. They bought Manhattan cheap from the native Americans, then left so that 350 years later they could come back and engineer
The dutch doubled the size of their country in the last 150 years. They are very experienced engineers in that field, that might come in handy some day.
Yeah, when all the politicians live in the flood plane, things get done.
You could just become a republican so you won't have to worry about "librul" science.
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