Climate Change and the Future of Cities | Eric Klinenberg

[Music] let me just tell you that Eric is a professor of sociology is the director of the Institute for public knowledge at NYU right now he is the author of books including modern romance with Aziz Ansari which I don't think he's going to talk about tonight but maybe in Q&A we can if you have need advice on that but and the heat wave a social autopsy of disaster in Chicago which we have on sale tonight and he'll be sticking around afterwards of course to sign it as well so we're honored to have Eric here to talk tonight about climate change and the future of cities join me in giving him a big round of applause hi there can you hear me okay yeah I hear myself now well thank you so much for coming out tonight I was really worried that people weren't gonna come and then I told them to advertise me as the guy with the underwater drone but I don't have an underwater drone at all the I then had it came up with another strategy which is that once I wrote this book with diseases Ansari I realized that if we tease that people would sometimes come thinking Aziz which is going to show up like in San Francisco you know you can relate like the idea is like you're gonna go to this folk band and Jerry Garcia is gonna be there because he always plays with his folk band so I just want to welcome Aziz Ansari from no no actually he's not coming at all I'm so he's not would never even consider coming to do this with me so I'm pretty much on my own talking about climate change with no technological device other than the clicker but let me get my face off of there I think we have a lot of stuff to talk about and it will probably be a little bit less jolly than evening with disease but maybe we'll do that another time climate change and the future of cities can anybody tell me where and when this shot was taken sandy or Katrina Russian River yeah you said it there too but you said it so quickly that it wasn't it was gonna ruin the whole you know thing so so that was steps San Jose two weeks ago and and no one was talking storm of the century right that was a rainstorm in San Jose so I just I don't have that much more to say about this right now but I want a you know we're gonna what we're going to talk about today is the convergence of these two trends that you hear a lot about rarely in unison right one is urbanization and the others climate change I want to talk about the significance and this is long now and we're going to be kind of emphasizing more of the now than the long for a lot of it but I'm gonna start talking towards the end about the long part because what I want to try to persuade you tonight is that we have some incredibly consequential decisions we're going to make in the next few years about how we build the places that that we inhabit including this place and when you hear a political leader talk about an infrastructure investment I want you to start thinking about the infrastructures that we use in our day-to-day life and when they were built and how long they last and then I want you to project forward what it will mean to build infrastructure for this coming period of time okay so that that's we're gonna get to the long questions I'm a social scientist I'm here this year because I'm at the Center for Advanced Study and behavioral sciences at Stanford and so this chart that you see here which I presume everybody in the room is familiar with is actually a very strange chart to start a social science talk with and I often have to explain it to my colleagues in social science you know many of the social sciences were built on this idea that there's something social that explain the world we live in and because there's a social explanation there's precisely not a natural explanation so the you know economics and political science and sociology they were built in some ways in opposition to studies of nature which means when you see a chart that shows you know the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and global temperatures and you see that incredible spike people sometimes call this the hockey stick graph it actually needs explanation in some quarters it doesn't need explanation here nor do I need to persuade you of why you should be concerned about this the point is those two things are going up together and you know one of the reasons that there's this kind of group of us who has tried to make the case that this is an urgent matter is because when we think about greenhouse gas emissions when we think about our our sources of energy are the ways we consume things the conversation that we're having in policy terms is about whether in the next 20 or 40 or 50 or 100 years we're going to be following the red line up above which gets us to a level of heating that would really be catastrophic or whether we're getting beyond the blue line which would just be really terrifying but not totally catastrophic we have serious stuff that we're going to be managing and and and that's what I want you know want us to start focusing on the issue is that the you know the real danger we have right now is that we have to start this this project of mitigating of reducing our consumption of greenhouse gases but the problem is that if this clicker that I'm holding in my hands suddenly got converted into a magic button and right the second by pressing the forward slide in addition to getting you to the next image I also could stop all global greenhouse gas emissions that would be an awesome technology that that you would be feel very proud to have witnessed up there with the underwater drone but as awesome as it would be to do that it actually wouldn't do much to stop rising temperatures or sea levels for the next century or so because we have baked so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere already that no matter what we do we can't just mitigate we have to mitigate but but we have to do more that wasn't there in the practice round let's not worry about it right now we're already at a moment where we're seeing a spike in extreme weather events that are consequential that that kill many people that force waves of migration we're seeing this all over the world this is just a couple year period that happened to be two of the hottest years in history then 2016 came around and was even hotter so we're seeing a rising incidence of droughts and heat waves and hurricanes and things that we have to worry about we're beginning to see serious displacement and migration and emerging conflicts that are related to the spike in extreme weather and you should know that our last president before he left office issued a memorandum in which he he made it clear what the implications for US national security were from climate change this is not something that the president was out on a limb doing the Pentagon has been sounding the same note that think of climate change is a threat multiplier and and that continues to be the case that that climate change is a factor that that that increases the the possibility of the probability of dangerous conflicts in many places around the world so it's a it's a serious thing at the global level and probably many of you here tonight know that climate change also is a local concern not just because of the image of San Jose but these are the walls that keep much of San Francisco dry this is around the Embarcadero so you know not too far from here and we don't get to see what that looks like very often but that's what our walls in this city look like today we all know about the Orval Dam now none of us knew about the Orval dam a few weeks ago but that's one of the things that's going to start to happen with more frequency is that systems and structures that held everything together that we took for granted will suddenly flash up as being vulnerable and we will have to deal with them in some cases we'll have to deal with them in very urgent ways sometimes they'll have the luxury of time but not that much time what I'm saying right now is that we are about to enter a process that people who think about the climate a lot call either adaptation or transformation we're gonna have to change the way we live and we're gonna have to change the places that we live adaptation is kind of a soft and fuzzy word it may it sounds kind of innocent you know we're just going to kind of gradually shift the way we do things and build things to live in this new world of extremes transformation is probably more accurate for what we're going to have to do and I hope I can persuade you of that soon and so what what I mostly want to talk to you about tonight is what it will mean to adapt or transform cities and the way that I want to do that is I want to begin with this note of caution and that is when we think about investing in structures and infrastructures and we think about building and rebuilding cities we're talking about spending real resources it is extraordinarily expensive to build new subway systems and new seawalls new kinds of high-rise buildings new flood management systems it is extraordinarily expensive and so as a preliminary let me tell you that as we enter into this conversation you should know that that one of the great dangers of dealing with climate change through adaptation projects is that it will inevitably increase the problem of environmental justice the problem of environmental injustice to a level that I think we haven't really taken seriously yet and when you read about international diplomacy around climate and you hear about negotiations between the wealthier countries in the world and the poorer countries in the world there's issues about mitigation who's going to reduce consumption of greenhouse gases but there's also this conversation about a fund where wealthier countries will put in money to help poorer countries in the world adapt and that's generally what's the most vulnerable in these changes of the negotiation of negotiate negotiation so I want you to bear in mind as we go through this thing you're gonna see a lot of expensive ideas and any time you see an expensive idea know that implementing it is going to be exacerbating inequality issues okay off we go so I have a crew with me from Chicago tonight I've invited some old friends who I grew up with who come to the Bay Area and so what I wanted to do because I grew up in Chicago and Chicago is a place where we actually got some early warning signs about the possible dangers of living in a hotter world and so to introduce you to the way that I think about this issue I want to bring you back to Chicago in 1995 so Chicago gets hot in the summer but this is a summer where it was unusually hot the temperature in July hit about 106 degrees and the heat index which is like the windchill these are really foreign concepts to people who live in the Bay Area where the weather is always perfect I know but but the heat index which tells you what a typical person feels hit about a hundred and twenty six and and cities in San Francisco people start saying oh like that eight once you get above like 75 people start freaking out God how do they live but the thing about Chicago is that Chicago like like most urban areas is what's called the heat island cities are heat islands because all of the the concrete the pavement the building's they attract the Sun and all of that pollution that we put out from cars and from industry traps the heat and why that's significant is that at night when the outlying areas cooled down city air traps the heat and it tends to be significantly warmer so you don't get the natural cooling that can keep people alive and Chicago the the nights were also very very hot so it happened in 1995 is that the city set its record for energy consumption that's now become pretty mundane anytime it's hot cities set their records for energy consumption it used to be the case that one of the things that kind of helped us understand and appreciate being American and living in a place like this is that we could rely on our energy working on our you're working when we really needed it I think now in many cities we just expect that the infrastructure and the power is going to break down it certainly is what happened in Chicago these are emergency workers I just stole this image from a television station in Chicago which is why the image is so bad so bear with me and please don't sue me if you're watching this ABC but these are guys trying to spray down a substation guess guess what didn't work about 250,000 households in Chicago lost access to power when it felt like it was 126 and as you know if you live in a city when you don't have power if you live in a high-rise building you can't pump water up to high floors the elevators don't go up and down the power you know the lights are out obviously it's very dangerous for older people and frail people in particular about 3,000 hydrants in Chicago were opened at the same time this is before they had the spray that could you know release a small amount of water and so many hydrants were open at the same time that entire neighborhoods lost water pressure in addition to high rises again 126 degrees the transit system in Chicago broke down the plates on the bridges were expanding so the bridges couldn't open and close the rails on train lines were moving just enough that it was very dangerous for the trains to travel quickly when the power was out you couldn't get the traffic lights working so you had gridlock in Chicago which is significant because thousands of people needed emergency care because they were overheating in their homes in fact so many people in Chicago needed to get emergency care from ambulances that half of the hospitals in Chicago had to go on bypass status which means that they closed their doors and refused to take in any more emergency patients because they literally could not handle the load and the problem in Chicago in 1995 is that there was no centralized system for figuring out which hospitals were open and which hospitals were closed so the ambulance would go to a place and knock on the door and be told that they couldn't come in and they'd have to drive to another nearby hospital the odds of which it was also closed and remember they're driving through gridlocked traffic so you have this incredible backup of the violence's in a situation where people need urgent care to prevent the heat related illness from turning into something truly deadly but that didn't work so the reason I wound up writing this book about the heatwave is that more than 700 people died from a heat event that lasted just about two and a half to three days thousands more were hospitalized and this is truly an amazing event what puzzled me when I first learned about it I was actually I just moved to Berkeley I come to Berkeley to do a PhD in sociology and I started reading about this event and it was it was a strange thing to learn about scientifically because we actually have pretty sophisticated climate models that predict how much mortality and how much morbidity you would get under different conditions and will end and the kind of climate health world was really freaked out about this event because they kept saying this was so much worse than our models tell us it should be something else must be going on but what was it and they kind of released this you know report published in the American Journal of Public Health saying you know we don't know what's going on so I started doing what i call it came to call a social autopsy kind of like opening up the skin of the city in the same way that a medical examiner opens up the skin when they're gonna do a physical autopsy to try to figure out kind of what what broke down and what made the event so deadly and there are a lot of things that that I do in the book that I won't tell you about but one thing I want to mention you know quickly because it's going to be central to our discussion here is I was really interested in this question about why some places in Chicago were so much more vulnerable than other places and and what could I learn about what happened in the heatwave from looking at this and so the first thing you do when you're a sociologist is you map stuff especially when you're working in a city and if you know anything about the city of Chicago you'll see that the red areas on this map are important because those are what the neighborhoods are in what's called the black belt the historically african-american neighborhoods in Chicago on the south side and the west side they are disproportionately poor Chicago is almost perfectly segregated so they're almost entirely african-american in many places and this is the kind of map that is completely predictable like if you if you if a disaster is coming to a big city you expect to see a map like this so that was important to discover but it wasn't scientifically interesting to find a pattern like that so what I then did is I tried to flip that map and look at a different question which was could I understand which neighborhoods in Chicago proved to be the most resilient which were the places that actually had the lowest death rates and no one had asked that question but it turned out to be really fascinating because it was it was a very mixed set of neighborhoods and part of what was interesting is that three of the neighborhoods that had incredibly low death rates should have been in the red they're entirely african-american perfectly segregated disproportionately poor a lot of vulnerable people and it kind of didn't make sense on paper that you would have such high survival rates in places that should have been so vulnerable so I want to look closer and I went back to Chicago I went back home and I started looking very closely at which neighborhoods had done well and which hadn't done well and it was especially attuned to neighborhoods that were right next to each other pairs of neighborhoods that looked statistically very similar but that had very different experiences in the event so this is a neighborhood on the south side of the city called Englewood which is characteristic of a certain kind of Chicago area that had been massively depopulated and the decades leading up to 1995 less than half of the population from 1950 was there it had a lot of abandoned Lots a lot of empty buildings a lot of tall grass a depleted commercial infrastructure and it's possible to look at this and think like oh that's a green neighborhood but that's not a healthy green neighborhood that's a green environment that actually discourages people from going out of their homes and into public life especially older people who'd be more likely to be alone and frail there's not much to do in a neighborhood like this unless you're dealing drugs in which case that ecology is great for you because if the cops come you just drop your stuff in the grass and run and that's basically how people treated these neighborhoods that's a neighborhood across the street from angle wood which on paper looks almost identical it's called auburn gresham entirely african-american very poor what's so striking about our regression is that they didn't have that loss of population the residential infrastructure was very similar to what it was 30 or 40 years before the neighborhood organizational structure very similar the commercial infrastructure relatively robust more like a poor neighborhood you find in in New York City than in a neighborhood like like Englewood from before and what I discovered is that the death rate in the first neighborhood you saw Englewood was ten times higher than the death rate in auburn gresham and moreover the life expectancy in Englewood this neighborhood the life expectancy from living here is five years lower than the life expectancy of living across the streets and I came to believe that there was something that that social scientists had failed to appreciate about what organizes the world we live in and I came to call it social infrastructure the the network the set of places and institutions that shape the way we interact with each other when it works well it can help people connect in a daily way so you get longer life expectancy you get a stronger sense of cohesion and connection and community and when it doesn't work well it actually promotes very unhealthy ways of living the kind of living where you stay inside you it engenders distrust it makes you more isolated and and less likely to survive an extreme event so as it happens you know this kind of insight was missing in the public conversation about the heat wave of 1995 could I just ask really quickly could you raise your hand high if you have strong memories of the Great Chicago heat wave of 1995 I want everyone to look around the room at the moment because it's really telling you know first of all that my friends from Chicago are either very shy people or they don't remember it either which is doubly embarrassing as I realize it now because I think I've sent a book to each one of them already but but anyway we don't know about this event it was a non-event despite the fact that it really is one of the great disasters but one of the reasons it's a non-event is because the city of Chicago really treated this as a public relations crisis even more than as a public hell hazard and one reason I know this is because this is the the city never held public hearings about what happened this is the only major report published by the city it was a mayor's commission could I just ask does anybody see anything funny about this report cover there's a snowflake on the cover which is a very odd thing for a report about why 700 people died in a heatwave anyone see something that's missing like you would expect it to be there and it isn't it's a how about a word a concept disasters would be a good one anything else more specific in that genre how about heatwave thank you very much so this is a report about why so many people died in a heatwave from a city that refused to hold public hearings and it's got a snowflake and it doesn't have the concept heatwave you should have that too it should that but this is a report that was designed to hide rather than to show right this was a publication meant to disappear something which is a heart it's the kind of thing we associate with like Central America but I want to I want to argue that this is kind of how it's a very nice metaphor for how we manage climate issues for a long time in this country and that sense is part of a genre my book came out in 2002 it was a really exciting moment for me you know it was on fresh air and Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article about it and I did all this media and I felt like I am now a social scientist who's changing the world and people will understand this issue in a way they never would have before I'm gonna make a difference with my pen and then in 2003 there was a heat wave in Europe and 70,000 people more than 70,000 people died and not a single European political official paid a major price for it because they - a person said nothing like this has ever happened before how could we have known this a heat wave could be so deadly so I was totally crushed it was you know made me think I had to work a lot harder and we all have to work harder actually it turns out we all have to work harder on these issues because it's very hard to convey a sense of their seriousness in the urgency what I do know is if we what I learned from that Chicago story and from the European story is that we're facing these incredible threats and I'll tell you something else but just to go back to this for a second well it's especially scary for me about the European heat wave story is that we know it mostly as a French story because the French were very open about the fact that so many people were dying so was covered as a French heat wave was only later when we looked at the epidemiological data that we learned that in fact there were tens of thousands of deaths across Europe but here's what's haunting for me the the heat wave in Europe lasted about three weeks and France has about sixty million people and there did in 2003 when I learned what I looked at the numbers is that the death rate in France from a heat wave that lasted three weeks was basically the same as the death rate in Chicago for a heat wave that lasted two and a half or three days and it raises for me this question of you know what would happen to Chicago or Milwaukee or Philadelphia or Washington or New York or Phoenix or Los Angeles or even San Francisco if a heat wave like the one that hit Europe in 2003 just happened to hit here and those are the kinds of things that we now have to be thinking about okay so then I moved to New York and does anybody recognize this that's sandy right there there's sandy not San Jose that's actually sandy about $1,000 wow that was San Jose it would be really weird about a thousand miles wide actually when sandy hit New York was a combination of several storms but you know when sandy hit New York it was not a hurricane my friends in New York talk about having dodged a bullet but I want to show you what it means what it looks like to dodge a bullet okay so it's hard to picture a heat wave you close your eyes and try to think about what a heat wave looks like and you probably draw a blank or you see kids playing and a fire hydrant or something but you have an image of Sandy I bet because there's an iconic iconography for it and this is the great image right this is this lower Manhattan out of power and I live in the zone that had no power and I had a 92 year old father-in-law at the time who was in a wheelchair who lived on the 10th floor of a building that was across the street from where the power was on but he did not have power and this was a stunning thing that happened the wave of water that came into the East Side of Manhattan was about 14 and a half feet high and the wall at the substation on the Lower East Side on 14th Street was about 14 feet high and the equipment was on the ground level it wasn't elevated and so as soon as the water breached that wall it was out and what was amazing to me any of you guys spend time in New York and you raise your hand if you spend time in New York okay so anyone ever lived in New York City okay New Yorkers back me up if you think I'm right about this but so I've lived in Manhattan for about 15 years and the world view when you live in Manhattan is like okay some terrible shit's gonna happen but if there's ever a situation where there was no power they would find a way to keep it on where we live and they like shut it off in the Bronx or something like that right I mean I'm not saying that with pride or anything I don't feel good about that but you you know there's this feeling when you live in San Francisco and you're like you know you live in a great like a super star city and the feeling you have is like they're gonna take care of us in our neighborhood because we're the awesome people and and I think a lot of people in New York really felt that way right week you know come on we're in a bar you could admit it you know like it's that sense like I you know I'm probably half of you have a house in New Zealand or something like everybody's got a way of getting of getting out so that was the thing is you were down there and you there was no getting out you were just in the dark and the power wasn't coming on and you talked to people and say you know when is the power coming on and they would say the power is coming on maybe next week and you would say there must be some kind of mistake but there wasn't a mistake except for in the way that we built things it turns out that Manhattan is wasn't the only place that lost power this is Long Island about 8 million households in the country lost power more than a million people along Island as well and in Long Island as in many American communities there's a technology that we use to sustain the power grid it's called the pole you probably are familiar with the pole we have these electrical wires and we put them on top of poles and you know we keep right on top of the electrical wires trees yes you guys are sharp and and and what happens routinely on a windy day not even a super storm but the trees go down and they fall I mean no it's not surprising when the power grid goes down so we know that the Long Island Power Authority had a board meeting a few days before sandy hit it was a long scheduled board meeting sandy was on its way we knew it was coming but they had other things to discuss so they talked for according to the minutes of the meeting I think it's either 37 or 57 seconds about pre sandy planning things like pruning the trees to make sure that that they don't go down but they you know so if you don't think about these things a long time in advance you have problems but even if you don't think about things in the short time advanced you can compound them the subway flooded like a bathtub and what's truly strange about this image is look closely New Yorkers its 86th Street which was completely dry and so this is a horrifying image because it shows you like we built a lot of stuff underground without thinking about the possibility of flooding and it's very hard to keep water from going underground because it's not just entering into the stations it goes through all the grids like when when you walk in New York or Chicago or I don't know the BART system well enough to know how the how the circulation system works but you know if their grids on the ground the water goes right under them so this is scary but here's a cool story about New York City the city and the state were actually very concerned about climate change and they were concerned about hurricanes and extreme weather events now you don't need to be concerned about climate change to be concerned about extreme weather but there tends to be a strong relationship between them it may be very interesting in this with the current president we have to see whether they're interested in sparing us from storms even though they don't believe in climate change I guess the early science is like getting rid of all the weather generating data and technology to tell us we probably shouldn't be optimistic on that front but New York was really concerned about it so here's what they did before sandy hit they evacuated the cars from subway system and move them to higher ground they went in underground and they pulled out as many of the electrical wires that they could so that when the salt water came into the system it wouldn't corrode the lines all that much and the water came in as predicted they got it right away they pumped it out they replaced the lines in about five days much of the system was up and running again okay and every day that the New York City subway system is down there's X billion dollars of economic damage okay it's an expensive thing to get wrong now across the river anyone here from Jersey yeah there's like 20 times more people that from Jersey here but nobody's admitting it so so it's just because what happened is that half the people who said they were from Manhattan actually grew up in like t-mac and they just don't want to say it so now they've already raised their hand is Manhattan and they're embarrassed but okay so here's what happens in New Jersey the governor doesn't believe much in climate change he's not inclined to think it's a serious thing he doesn't do a lot of work prepping the city the cities around the New Jersey or the state to deal with an emerging crisis and so as sandy approaches the New Jersey Transit leaves it's cars right next to the river and they have a hundred and ten million dollars of flooding destroying the cars which means not only that the taxpayers of New Jersey and ladies and gentlemen all of us in this room wind up paying for the new cars but also it takes much longer for New Jersey to bounce back and get the commute right again so everybody suffers from that situation right you didn't even have to order the bridge closed the the transit system went down right so that's a so that's a story about what what can you do if you take seriously climate threats before they happen right there's not not the big story about mitigation but just little things that you might not think about that actually like it makes a difference what the leadership is okay but don't let me get carried away with the idea that New York did everything right because this is a billion dollar subway station that went up at the bottom of the battery about a year before sandy hits and guess what did not survive sandy those are my colleagues at NYU as it happens the health infrastructure for much of Manhattan is built along the East River several hospitals are clustered together there it turns out that they're also completely vulnerable to floodwaters and we learned that the hard way in Sandy so the regulation was that you had to have your generators your backup generators on the roof but you couldn't have your fuel exposed so you put your fuel in the basement where people wouldn't be able to breathe it in so when the floodwaters came in to the basement they mixed with the fuel and destroyed the computer systems and tens of thousands of laboratory animals who are there for medical testing and this hospitals were really in trouble and this is I love this image this is a scene from the neonatal NICU at NYU hospital so they they managed to in a situation where there was no power in the hospital they carried these premature babies down eight flights of stairs pumping air into their lungs with paper bags remove them out into a hurricane into an ambulance which went through flooded streets to go uptown and not a single child died which is amazing right and and the moral of the story is that if we screw up the planning in advance we need heroes to get us out of these situations and sometimes we have them and often we don't so how do we start to think about climate security for a world that's getting hotter how do how do we begin to put this on the agenda of the kinds of things that cities need to think about really regardless of who the president is there's some places on earth that won't work if you don't have a wall you need some kind of gate to keep the water out because the cities just are too low and the water is already too high so if you've been to Venice you know that Venice is building the system they called Moses a series of sea gates that's going up because Venice is going under this is London which would be a lot wetter wear it not for this hard system and after Sandy happens many people suggested that New York City build this it's very funny so this is an amazing thing Auto but it turns out that Auto like everybody else forgot about Staten Island which is like right over here toward Staten Island gets no respect so this is Staten Island here that's the Verrazano Bridge and people said we need to build a giant gate to protect the protect you know lower Manhattan where the money is where the infrastructure is where the people where the people are now this is how disaster planning works it's like triads you know what can you save whose and this is going to get very serious because we're going to start to be thinking we're going to start thinking about what are the places that we're going to protect who are the people we're going to protect how are we gonna make those decisions it's gonna get very interesting for us in our lifetimes hopefully so so people said well building this gate here but the thing about the gate is it's got a lot of Appeal and it's also got a lot of problems the appeal is problem solved right we don't have to worry about the storm coming in because we've got these gates around the city well the bad news is first of all you can't wall in the entire United States and you can't wall in the entire world so you're gonna have to make some choices as it happens when the water smashes into that gate and the sediment splashes into that gate it doesn't just powder eyes it goes to Staten Island and it goes to Brooklyn and Queens in Connecticut and I don't know about San Francisco but New York is a pretty litigious place and when you have sediment and water that is now threatening the viability of other dense settlements they tend to sue and so you can't put a thing up without you know real struggle okay there's another problem which is it's incredibly expensive and another problem which is how high are you going to build it if you start to take into consideration various scenarios of sea level rise plus the storm surge that comes on top of it you can find yourself building walls so that we're standing here but we don't see much of Marin and I don't know that we want to do that in San Francisco another thing is the walls like that we that we make these sea gates are open most of the time so the water flows in and out the notion is you just close them when there's extreme weather but if we start to get serious sea level rise and more and more extreme weather we're talking about keeping those gates closed and it turns out there's an entire ecosystem that lies behind there right the Hudson River the East River and you do real damage if you just build a wall take that however you want so so that's a strategy for dealing with climate change that people talk about is kind of armoring defending that's one of the things that we can do in the face of the weather that's coming is we can armor try to keep the water out try to keep the heat out another thing that we can do and this is very tricky as we can retreat so say like you know what we should never have settled here in the first place this is a very dangerous place to build let's start to move people and move structures to different areas here's a long view problem there's about 800 million people in the world who live in coastal or Delta cities that are less than ten feet above sea water sea sea level and as we get sea level rise and as we see an incidence of emerging weather increase we'll have to face these really tough questions about what's going to happen to these 800 million plus people and the very expensive structures and infrastructures that make their lives possible and that is not going to be an easy thing to manage let me tell you that is going to be a very serious problem that our generation or future generations has to deal with so normally we think about retreat from places like the Marshall Islands or the Maldives but after sandy a group of beachfront communities in Staten Island lobbied the state for hundreds of millions of dollars to be bought out of their homes to relocate to higher ground as an incredible thing right because these are this Staten Island so this is a white you know working-class and middle-class community that tends to vote Republican and not believe that climate change is real and also outside of fire and police they don't think the government can do that much to help and now they're working with government to try to help them get through climate change so it's an amazing thing but it's a haunting thing also because they got the money they were able to pull it through but where do you say no as soon as those three neighborhoods got money a bunch of other neighborhood said we want it to and then Bloomberg came in and said whoa whoa whoa we can't be buying people out here because think about all the New Yorkers who who would want this so we should build more expensive structures and just build like high-tech places on the water but then you give the beach to very wealthy people and people don't want to sell their houses or walk away from their houses on the beach to turn it over to the next wave of real estate developers so that's a tough area this is not like a long-term thing solely the state of Louisiana issued this map you might not think of the state of Louisiana as a leader when it comes to climate change warning but look at all these areas in red that are projected to be underwater in the next 50 years you know that's our problem no matter their you know no matter who they vote for red or blue they've got a situation and similarly the highlighted areas are places in the United States that continually reapply for disaster relief funding and at some point you say actually maybe it doesn't make sense to rebuild there but go tell that to people in New Orleans it's tricky so a third strategy is to accommodate to kind of let the water let the water in let the climate come let's find a way to live with water in some cases this can be very useful there's places on earth like Singapore the Netherlands California that actually could use the water so when it rains and there's flooding you know rather than just building a park you build a park that can convert as this one can into a water storage basin that then diverts the water underground where it can be recycled or reused for a number of different purposes in Singapore it's a matter of life and death there's just not enough water it's not coming and in California could be too so there are a lot of places that are trying to figure out you know what are ways that we can live with the the water that's coming the heat that's coming those are very tough questions I'd love to talk about that as well there's some places on earth like the Rockaway Peninsula which you can see here otto got that one right where it's very hard to just accommodate it and let the water in because it's incredibly vulnerable that's the kind of thing that we used to call a barrier island right but it turns out we we we built on all of our barrier islands we settled them and the government actually subsidized settlement of those areas right the government built infrastructure the government built housing the government subsidized flood insurance right so we we had a strategic policy of doing it the Rockaways by the way are gorgeous if you've never been out there it's a beautiful place like you kind of can't believe you're on the beach we've got this gorgeous boardwalk that's what the boardwalk look like after sandy that's what happens to barrier island when storm hits and and when I went out to do reporting for a story I did for The New Yorker right after sandy I discovered you know that remarkably as in Chicago where social infrastructure really mattered in the neighborhoods of New York City when the systems and the infrastructures broke down as they inevitably do the social infrastructure really became crucial so here is a surf club where people really knew the neighborhood well and knew their neighbors well and had a terrific Network and we're managed to convert their facility from a place where people went to surf on the weekends to a place that served more than 10,000 people in the Rockaways got them connected to plumbers and electricians and got them food and got them cleaning supplies and help them get their pharmaceuticals and did an extraordinary amount of work this is a youth employment agency and a kind of a youth support agency in Red Hook it's called the Red Hook initiative which also completely converted into a neighborhood Relief Center and what I learned is I I looked through different neighborhoods and you and that was subsequently confirmed by more quantitative research is that the neighborhoods that had very strong social infrastructure and strong social capital fared better in Sandy and also recovered more quickly than places where the levels of social capital were lower and people had higher levels of estrangement and so as we think about the climate I want to emphasize that we shouldn't just be thinking about these big structures that we build we should also be thinking about the social structures that organize our lives that's true for disasters and it's true every day I want to wrap up and make sure we have time for conversation and the way I'm gonna do it is I'm gonna spend a few minutes talking to you about a remarkable thing that happened in New York and that happened to me and my work life after sandy it happened that at the time there was a big a very bitter fight in Congress about whether to provide emergency funds to the region that was affected by Sandy you probably are familiar with these political debates where people get very ideological about who's responsible and who should pay but after a fight Congress appropriated about 50 billion dollars to the region affected by Sandy for for relief and the president obama had a commission that that was working on the sandy project he appointed Shaun Donovan the HUD secretary to head this commission and they pulled aside a couple billion dollars for a project they called rebuild by design which was meant to generate ideas and also funding for innovative infrastructure projects for the region they said basically after sandy what we typically do when there's a disaster in this country is we say we're gonna build it back we're gonna build back what we lost but that doesn't make sense anymore right we no longer have the luxury of just building back what we had before actually we have federal regulations that required cities and states to build back exactly what was there before and nothing better so the policy had to be changed but now the idea was we're gonna set aside a couple of billion dollars we're gonna have this international design competition and we're going to generate exciting ways to think about infrastructure projects and they I had written this article about sandy and the White House had read it and we've done a bunch of public my Institute and they came to me and said you know we'd like you to be the research director for this event and we want to have you do it at your Institute in New York so we said sure even though we really had no idea we were doing at first we kind of built the airplane while we were flying it and it was an amazing thing because we had these design teams of engineers and architects and landscape architects and climate scientists and social scientists and my job for three months was to show them around the region and to identify needs and possibilities vulnerabilities things that we could do together and this is a scene from a day we spent on Red Hook there's a 3-month research process that all the teams had to go through that came to the project without a plan they just came as a team that was selected for their excellence and achievement about 150 teams applied we picked ten finalists three months of research they did three months of civic participation talking to different stakeholders from community organizations and residents of public housing buildings to mayors and governors and small business owners so really you know not just coming into communities and saying here's what you need but listening then selecting sites and spending three months designing things and the way I want to wrap up is by just showing you the ideas for one of the winning projects that came out of this which has a really dramatic idea for how we would do New York differently you remember this image right New York without power lower Manhattan without power and these one team from Bianca Ingalls who's a very prominent young Danish architect in his group called the big group was you know we want to make sure that New York looks like this next time there's a storm this is like sandy right how do we how do we make New York look like this and so they came for the project that they called for a while the big you and if you look at that kind of yellow illuminated line around here think of that as you know like a curse of you from a third grader learning cursive that the idea was to build something like a protective wall around around lower Manhattan but not exactly what you think of when you think of a wall and it really needed it I told you you know I've emphasized that inequality is an issue around climate change adaptation some people are more exposed than others but but we're all exposed in some ways like we all affected by water we all have to breathe so it's not like you can opt out of climate change and this is a building a very expensive building in Tribeca I have good friends who live you know next door to this it flooded the garage attendant who was trying to save the cars of the clients died because the water came in so quickly you know really serious suffering and catastrophe and and one of the things the big you said is we want to build a series of compartments our version of what would be a wall around this loop in lower Manhattan around this you each chain you're varying by neighborhood that would that would keep that scene from happening so if you've walked around the Hudson recently on the west side you know that that white wall doesn't exist it's kind of like a sculpture of that concept but it's also actually sea wall so they said could we could we blow up the notion of a wall and actually create a series of water management systems that would really beautify the riverfront and not only protect people from a storm but also make this part of New York more pleasant to walk on every day and there's no reason why you know the west side of Manhattan can't look like this so that on a day like sandy instead of the scene with the cars that's what you got the guys walking is probably a little bit glib but other than that it's it's not impossible to do something like that right and so that was the West Side and this is the Lower East Side which had even more catastrophic flooding and far higher level of vulnerability and so I live like right in the center of Greenwich Village and my NYU's right there and I started noticing this thing which is has anyone ever been for a run in New York City in lower Manhattan there whenever gone jogging in lower Manhattan okay so if you've ever jogged in lower Manhattan not Central Park you you go to the west side on the Hudson right and the reason you go to the west side is because this is this is what happens when you go for a run on the Lower East Side it's a kind of run that makes you very happy to live in San Francisco I have to pause every few minutes to get water so I just put those in okay so it's a really ugly landscape it's a very gray landscape on the lower east side and it's a poor area and the the big you also had a compartment for this area that involved creating again a protective layer on the river but now the the East River looks like this it's a bridging berm a sloped Park right where the stairs and the and the green space are protecting people from water but also think about that run that we just took together it would be much nicer for people to use that river front if it looked like this all the time and the idea here is we are about to embark on this program of spending billions and ultimately trillions of dollars on something called climate security and if you think about Homeland Security as a political project and an architectural project you think about urban design in the age of homeland security think about the money we spent on homeland security it gets exponential if you throw in the wars we're gonna make a comparable kind of investment in climate security in the course of the next several decades and if we just build to wall out the bad weather we're gonna have a very ugly environment but we can use this moment of climate security and building infrastructure to build things that keep us safe during a crisis but also make our lives better every day and that was a fundamental goal like at the root of this rebuild by design idea was let's be attentive to issues of inequality and let's make sure that when we design things we're designing things that aren't just good for keeping us from a hurricane but also make daily life better so we get not just the reduced death rate but also the five years of life expectancy right we want both of those things to work and I'll tell you something that that's kind of a fantasy but I'd like to put that up there don't don't expect that so here's a cool thing about this that big new project was funded it's gotten about 700 million dollars of funding so far it needs more to do the whole thing but in my version of the way the world works if there's two different parts of lower Manhattan that want the money and one is on the kind of Greenwich Village Tribeca side and the others on the Lower East Side which has this thick concentration of public housing and Chinatown in the way that I teach kind of the sociology of power the west side gets the money right but because of the political leaders who happen to be in power when this was allocated the funds for the first tranche of money is going to the east of the Lower East Side where the vulnerability is where you can actually address inequality but that's an arbitrary thing right if you have a certain president and a certain governor and a certain mayor and they're aligned and they think you know when we spend federal money we need to deal with inequality right and we need to enhance the quality of life for people who don't have it as much of a chance you get a spending decision like that if you have a imagine a different political leadership you could very easily have the money go to the people who already have right so mar-a-lago is going to be safe but these guys won't be last thing I want to I want to share with you we the the project gets funded on the Lower East Side there's these communities that are there and let's go back to our inequality theme so we have this beautiful vision of this Park Slope Park land that's going to make being on the Lower East Side feel better all the time and we built this project through stakeholder meetings where people articulate their sense of what they want right they give us a fantasy for what it could look like and we work with them and we and they get it and the money's there and we're about to do it and we're going through the approval process and the leader of the community organization says okay you're gonna do this now but can you promise me can you promise me that when you come in and spend all this money and it gets beautiful here that I'm gonna get to stay that my relatives are gonna get to stay that my community is going to get to say can you promise me that when you spend all this money on the climate security to make the city look that beautiful that this isn't just gonna be the next thing that makes gentrification happen and I couldn't say I could promise that and that's another challenge right dealing with this issue about equity as we gear up for this new age of climate so this is relevant to you for a bunch of reasons you're American you're vested in New York but also many of you might not know this the rebuild by design competition that started in New York kind of morphed and became a national competition a few years ago the HUD brought through with support of the Rockefeller Foundation and as of a few months ago it was publicly announced that the bay area now has resilient by design competition that is going to mimic in many ways the structure of the rebuild by design competition it's a it's a competition that's designed to generate to spark exciting ideas about how to rebuild and innovate an infrastructure that will work for the Bay Area in the 21st century when the new Managing Director Amanda is sitting in the first row and she's gonna be running this project so make sure you come and talk to her there's one catch about the Bay Area resilient by design competition that is that there's not a billion and a half dollars guaranteed to fund the projects afterwards so after they come up with these great design ideas through a process that's got several million dollars of funding the cities and the state are then and the teams are gonna have to go out and try to find sources of funding but that will happen because it's the Bay Area and you guys do things here so I talked for probably longer than I wanted to I noticed a bunch of long now people trying to throw things at me while I was up here but I hope you don't mind me going a little bit long I think this is the challenge of a lifetime you know I think this is the challenge of our moment and we have a lot of issues on the table right now there's a lot of you know kind of issues that feel very urgent in the country every day you know I don't know what's going to happen with immigration I know it's gonna happen to the Constitution but no matter what this climate no matter what we say in the White House no matter how much we fund scientific organizations we're going to be living with this challenge and it might not always feel like it's the most urgent thing at the moment but our challenge is at the moment when climate change feels like the most urgent thing it will be too late to do anything about it so people like us who have the luxury of spending a night in a beautiful bar in a beautiful city talking about ideas I think should should take that luxury and use it as a moment an opportunity to do something great so thank you very much [Music] Thank You Eric we're gonna we're trying to get a couple quick questions in Rio's in the back there with the mic Eric let me ask you a question we talked about a couple specific cities more generally about city cities seem to be both a point where there could be massive disasters a concentration of resources and of people so they are both kind of more vulnerable to become a giant disaster but also could prepare and whatever do you have thoughts kind of more generally about about what approaches or other examples you're seeing of what cities are doing to prepare we're talking more about the way things have reacted what do you see are there trends you see what else can you say so it really depends on the kind of city one of the most vulnerable places on earth is Bangladesh you know heavily urbanized very dense population completely vulnerable to extreme weather events you know especially you know massive and immediate flooding and you know some of the most innovative and life-saving programs in Bangladesh involve things like teaching women and children to swim that's an adaptation strategy providing basic life skills that people need to survive situations where in the past they've been left to fend for themselves and you know several relief organizations have managed to work on this and reduce the mortality by tens of thousands of people in recent events so it goes from kind of really like baseline skill level work you know to places like Singapore that are so completely vulnerable to the elements and are you know these kind of island nations that are dependent on you know nations around them where they have no choice but to become technological leaders that you know building systems that are going to withstand you know massive downpour or they're gonna be able to produce potable water so I see a lot of variation I guess it kind of I it goes without saying but I'll say it here because you know we're settled that cities can concentrate vulnerability but same time is a very strong school of thought that thinks that you know we need to be urbanized we need to live in more denser and more dense settlements because then we reduce our need for cars for private automobiles we can walk more places you know if you live in high-rise buildings you probably have much less demand for artificial cooling and heating and so you know there's a you know this writer David Owen who says there's nothing greener than tar and that's that's probably right in some ways although I think as we look at this question more closely we realize you know if you live in a city like San Francisco or Manhattan you shouldn't just pat yourself on the back for being awesome because you know you have this incredible you know condo if you can if you consume and travel the way that people in places like New York and San Francisco consume and travel your individual carbon footprint is probably very very high compared to other people on earth so there you go it's a that Bangladesh example shows that not all the solutions are capital intensive sometimes their population intensive and training right think about the Chicago example I mean there's there's really low tech you know relatively inexpensive things that can keep a place connected and so you know when I was working with the teams around sandy and rebuild by design one of the architecture and engineering groups had this idea for building what they called resilient centers and they wanted to to build like a new resilience building in every neighborhood and it would you know be there in a crisis and it would have a backup power generator and we'd have all this programming every day and they had these really great ambitions for what this what it would mean to build a resilient Center and as it happened just when we did that they're talking about that we walked by a neighborhood library and I said there's your resilience center going to any neighborhood for one of the great things if you go into any city there's a neighborhood library in that city that people of all ages use all the time for a range of different things they trust the people who are there the ethic of the library is come in we're not going to ask you for ID you know you have to work so hard to get kicked out of a library like you really you have to like devise the most evil plan to get kicked out of the library like everybody in a library is there to help you and and so if instead of building a brand new resilience center we said like how could we update our libraries in cities so that every branch system you know hat was not just welcoming all the time was not just a more pleasant environment but we add bathrooms because they all need more bathrooms but also you know they would have more flexible space that could be converted into a relief center they would all have backup power they'd all have a wireless mesh network so that you could get internet access when systems were down like we have some facilities in place that we could just build up a little bit more and that doesn't cost a trillion dollars all right we've got a question right yes Eric I really appreciated your talk you are talking straight forward and I really really like that but you know we're gonna talk about the long term problems of climate change and I'd like to put that in one context last year we passed 400 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in my mind the likelihood that we'll ever see that again would be maybe in a hundred thousand years because we are not really addressing the mitigation that we need to yeah when the earth was last at 400 parts per million was about three billion three million years ago in the machine and sea level would be about where those lights are that was be the low part 15 meters 50 feet above sea level up to 85 feet above sea level to stop that is likely impossible but we could maybe make it a little lower if we work our asses off and really come together like saul griffith said this is like world war two but with all the combatants on the same side yeah can you comment on that well so i want i want to make you clear that you are right that that is the most urgent problem we face that all of this stuff is kind of secondary to mitigation so you can only mitigate so much right so if we if we get if we get to the point where we're on the red line and the slide i showed you before it's all commentary because we have such massive changes to the places that we've settled and to our systems that uphold us that you know like we'll all be thanking Elon Musk for that SpaceX stuff that gets us to another place it was really exciting to learn that they just discovered planets that possibly host life it was like just in time you know so so so I think that's I think you're right about mitigation so I think that we all know what the bad news is right the good news is that this conversion to renewables is happening and it's kind of happening no matter what we do it's you know we could make it happen more slowly and we can depress the market for you know electric cars and for other renewable sources of energy wind and solar here and certainly you know I predict that this administration we have now will do that but the trend is turning and it's getting to the point where the costs of conversion are relatively low now we're gonna have to rebuild power grids and you can't do that if you don't have major federal investment and so at some point something something has to happen that I can't quite anticipate but there is a part of me that you know doesn't think we're quite that stupid that that thinks that it's it's going to happen and the question is just you know when and so so what I what I did in my own work as I said all right this is going to be the thing that I own you know like I don't own the problem but this will be my this will make this my life's work right now so I will work on this issue and what the climate scientists I know say is look we're out there on our own at this point you know we had so many tough questions thirty years ago and we've just spent all this time fighting really brutal political battles trying to establish the basic science about what's happening in our environment and now we have all these puzzles that are social and behavioral and we need your help so we use social scientists kind of come up to the plate and so the reason you know the thing I'm doing at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford this year is trying to work with Stanford to build a program that will really kind of bring more social scientists into the world of this climate change debate it's a hard thing to do because of the you know kind of historic hierarchies of the disciplines where like I said in the beginning the environmental stuff is marginalized and the high status stuff is dealing with other problems but we're trying to say you know it's time for us to join the world so that's our modest way of helping and and you're working on a book about social infrastructure we're gonna book that's about what I called social infrastructure which you know hits on many of the themes from tonight but explore some other ones as well what's the timeline are you beginning of ever ask that to an author you host the whole damn series and you ask questions we're long-term thinkers we always say it's not done yet okay okay I'm working hard man all right you took a night off yeah um I have a question just on a slightly more modular version of the you know there's there's one mode of thought where you build the wall around all of lower Manhattan there's also one where you build into building codes that they have to be flood resistant there's you know I live in I moved into a building in Sausalito about ten years ago and we were putting a machine shop into the first floor right on the water and the very first thing we did was put in flood gates and we've had to raise them probably 15 times in ten years and they've kept the water out and so that was vastly cheaper than even paying the insurance premiums have they been flooded yeah but in the United States we generally kind of work on this mode of we wait for the flood to happen then we insure it but then the insurance company's got a business because they all get insured instead of paying you know a few thousand dollars on the front end but you know we did do things like the AEA which cost you know at least on the order of magnitude as it would cost to kind of flood proof most buildings so I'm just wondering if you've seen any efforts that are on this more modular effort where you just say you know like the earthquake retrofits that happen here in San Francisco or something like that Kay yes absolutely and this is a very important point but two issues first issue is we have a you know a lot of these areas that are most vulnerable are very heavily built up already right and there's a lot of subsurface infrastructure that's hard to elevate and protect so the price tag for keeping the subway system dry in New York City is incredibly high and the price tag for updating the power grid is incredibly high and if you think about all those high-rises that are completely vulnerable you know in San Francisco and Manhattan and you know you name your city it's it's it's not as easy an update if you know as it is here so so it's it's it is challenging to do it but let me so here's that here's another political leadership thing so what another thing that President Obama did not long before about a year before he left office he said you know another rule that you could not get federal funds for any kind of rebuilding project you know whether it's a house or a piece of infrastructure if you didn't have an estimate for sea level rise that would tune you to the kinds of vulnerabilities in the place where the structure is and you'd have to you know build to code in anticipation of you know sea level rise Forex time horizon and that had very very high stakes decision for the way that federal money went especially for these larger infrastructure projects right so now we're in this really interesting situation we have a president who says you know he's gonna find a trillion dollars to spend on infrastructure maybe it's gonna be 500 billion I don't know what it's going to be it could be public money it could be private money but if the policy on climate is to say climate change is not real you know it's a theory he might also say then we don't have to take those things into consideration in which case we might start building very expensive infrastructure without taking sea level rise into account so back to the long consideration what when you read a story about an your project that the United States is taking on the highway tunnel bridge transits think about the New York City subway system or the water system in San Francisco you know and think about how long we want our infrastructure to last and if we start to build those structures if we cite those structures if we compose those structures design those structures without taking into consideration a trend in the climate that we know is happening we're gonna we're gonna just burn that money we're just gonna burn the money the way they burnt their money in New York with that subway so it's totally an apt question maybe I mean what's at stake in this fight between Prewitt and the state of California is Pruitt saying you know you know this is on emission standards but you know that it's true it seems to be saying that he wants to challenge the State of California's right to have its own standards for emissions which were there because they were grandfathered in right Pruitt has indicated that he wants to make it have a legal fight against the state of California so that California can't have its own standards so I don't know where that's gonna play out and you know one of my jobs and I think one of the jobs of anyone who's really concerned about this issue is to have a sociologist so I have not cracked this problem like how do you make issues like this feel alive and urgent and relevant so that we can talk about them in politics in the same way that we talk about Trump's tweets you know it's really a hard thing I mean this I I like I've invite and plead with you to it helped us think about how to deal with this so it's such a hard problem for people to get their minds around you know it is so hard to convey urgency and drama and significance right so we have these disasters as resources because like so say so Chicago had this heatwave and 700-plus people died but it wasn't spectacular it didn't make for good television who cares about Chicago and it didn't you know so did tows a non-event so then you have this spectacular storm that hits New York City that scares Washington DC that scares Boston a great hits the power corridor of New York far fewer people die but there's tens of billions of dollars in damage and an incredible television and you know now every government official and philanthropic leader and business owner in the region is suddenly attuned to climate change and so like there were years after that when my Institute like I wish I was still in this moment but we couldn't take any more money because everybody wanted to do stuff and there just weren't enough organizations that were doing this work and now I fear that we're kind of forgotten about that and I get how urgent all the other stuff is I'm not saying like don't worry about this whole immigration thing it's gonna be fine I don't feel that way at all but I don't want us to forget about this all right we're gonna have to leave it there but Eric you're gonna stick around sure yeah a reminder we have copies of Eric's book he's gonna be signing the book he's gonna be happy to take more of your questions continue this discussion things about states rights and the different different cover ability of different types of disasters so please stick around and thank you again so much for coming out tonight this is along now challenge coins a little token of our thanks for for speaking one more time around of applause for Eric and thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Long Now Foundation

Views: 113,455

Rating: 4.5999999 out of 5

Keywords: Cities, Civilization, Climate Change, Culture, Environment, Futures, Infrastructure, Social, Design, Sea Level Rise, New York, Levy, Oysters, Biomimicry

Id: 6aBQCZIeonc

Length: 76min 0sec (4560 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 03 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/UntitledGooseDame]

So interesting! The future is going to be a trip, I can tell already. Thanks for sharing.