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Home » Rational Urbanism » …Not As I Do

…Not As I Do

Global warming. Climate change. The ice sheets on Greenland and the Antarctic melting leading to sea level rise, just one in a long list of  potentially catastrophic outcomes; I’m sure you’ve heard of it by now. Only people blinded by politics, greed, or ignorance don’t “believe” it, right? Certainly insurance companies, technology companies, and corporations headed by executives who lean toward the Democrats would be among those who take it the most seriously.

Except, if you look at where they are putting hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars of brick and mortar investment, it’s going, or potentially going, to places which are considered to be right in the bullseye of the primary impacts of climate change.

Massachusetts Mutual and GE are putting their Boston headquarters here.


Blue means most susceptible to sea level rise by the way.

Look at Amazon’s list of 20 favorites for HQ2:

There are some which could make sense, but many of the ones not likely to be a little too wet are going to be a little too hot or dry…you know, if you believe the most fundamental prediction for climate discontinuity in North America; that the South will become unbearably hot, and anything west of the Mississippi will be drying up substantially, as John Michael Greer expresses here in his chapter on the ecological aftermath of industrial civilization from Dark Age America:

You can tell me what you believe or what you stand for, but if you are seriously considering Fan Pier in Boston or Miami as great places to invest for corporations that have been around and/or intend to be around for a hundred years, you don’t really think sea level rise or any of the other impacts of climate change are anything to be worried about.

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2 thoughts on “…Not As I Do”

  1. Johnny says:
    February 19, 2018 at 4:24 am

    Most corporations invest in buildings with a relatively short event horizon of fifteen years. At that point a building has been fully amortized for tax purposes and generally needs to be renovated, otherwise it works its way down the value chain as it physically declines. Many companies lease their space rather than own their own properties. And more than a few business models include periodic moves to distant locations as a way to passively purge unwanted employees and extract new subsidies and tax breaks.

    I attended a panel of experts here in San Francisco that included a climatologist, a Dutch engineer, and a political science guy. The climatologist explained that the climate has constantly changed for millions of years. Sea level rises and falls all the time, sometimes rapidly and dramatically. The Dutch engineer explained that a third of his country is already well below sea level and they’ve learned to adapt by building national scale engineered solutions. He added the Dutch can be called upon to fix things as needed – for a price. The political science guy pointed out that fixing every patch of vulnerable land is an entirely different thing than fixing only the most valuable bits. Low-lying areas occupied by poor people are likely to be quietly neglected while areas populated by wealthier more powerful people are probably going to be saved at great public expense.

    Reply
    • Steve says:
      February 19, 2018 at 7:36 am

      I understand your point, my interest has more to do with the mocking tone of people toward those who claim climate change is a Chinese hoax or whatever but who fail to see that almost no one is actually taking anthropogenic global warming seriously; the differences are all about giving reverence to the concept…and then doing what we were going to do anyway.

      Horrors! Trump pulled us out of the Paris agreement!

      And that non-binding bit of kicking the can down the road was going to change people’s behavior on the ground in a serious way? Lol.

      We aren’t doing anything, we haven’t done anything, and we won’t do anything because, to steal from Chris Martenson, “solutions” are things OTHER PEOPLE can do so that I can keep doing what I’ve always done!

      Reply

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