Forewarned

On Monday the 29th of October, 2012, a tidal surge 13.9 feet high (the highest ever recorded) washed up and over the waterfront in Lower Manhattan, pushed forward by the superstorm Sandy. That same week, the storm destroyed large swathes of coastline from the New Jersey shore to Fire Island, while driving torrential rains, heavy snows, and powerful winds inland across the eastern U.S. and Canada. By the time the storm blew out, it had killed more than 100 Americans, made thousands homeless, left millions without power, and caused at least $50 billion in damage. Sandy was, by any reckoning, one of the worst natural disasters in American history.

Maybe, though, the word “natural” belongs in quotes. Because what was surprising about Sandy wasn’t that it happened (indeed, many had predicted that rising sea levels and storms intensified by warmer oceans would make something like Sandy inevitable), but that it was seen so clearly, and so immediately, for what it was: a forewarning of what a planet in climate chaos has in store for us.

Sandy was far from the first sign that climate change is here — scientists have been warning for decades of the dangers of a heating planet, and in the last 10 years we’ve seen a flurry of unprecedented storms, droughts, floods, melting glaciers, and wildfires, as well as record-breaking heat waves following one after another. Sandy, though, knocked down walls of denial and inattention that have kept us from admitting what’s happening to our world.

What’s happening is that we’re losing the climate fight. Climate change is here, it’s worsening quickly, its effects are more dire than many thought they would be, and — if we continue with business as usual — we’re on a track to unleash an almost unimaginable catastrophe on ourselves, our children, and our descendants.

“Part of learning from [Sandy] is the recognition that climate change is a reality,” said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo at the time. “Extreme weather is a reality. It is a reality that we are vulnerable.” He added later, ”Anyone who says there is not a dramatic change in weather patterns is denying reality.”

Our choice: “extremely dangerous” or “catastrophic”

To not warm the planet at all no longer remains an option. The Earth is already dangerously hotter than it was before the Industrial Revolution.

We used to think that warming up to 2 degrees C fell within a sort of “safe zone,” where we could expect change but not crisis. But in a world we’ve warmed only by about 1 degree C above the historical baseline, we’re already seeing massive climate impacts across the planet. These unexpected impacts, along with new projections from ever-improving climate models, tell us that the climate is not nearly as forgiving as we’d like it to be. As the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research’s Kevin Anderson puts it, “1 degree is the new 2 degrees.” Two degrees, meanwhile, now appears not just dangerous, but extremely dangerous.

That means the menu of choices in front of us no longer includes a completely safe and stable climate. Instead, our choices come down to two options: a world in which climate change becomes extremely dangerous, or one in which it becomes totally catastrophic.

To keep climate change within that merely “extremely dangerous” range, scientists say, we must limit the rise in global temperatures to 2 degrees C. Allowing warming to accelerate beyond 2 degrees C to 4 degrees C takes us beyond extremely dangerous into downright insane.

Yet that’s where our current emissions trajectory is leading us: to a world 4 degrees C hotter, perhaps as soon as 2050; and perhaps even 6 degrees C hotter by the end of the century. Four degrees global temperature rise involves so many utterly catastrophic impacts — permanent droughts, large-scale shifts in agriculture, megastorms, rapid sea-level rise, ecosystem collapses, and so on (all triggering social instabilities) — that we can’t expect our global civilization to avoid serious disruptions, and in many places, long-term ruin. A world 4 degrees C hotter is, as some put it, “beyond adaption.” (A world 6 degrees C hotter is almost beyond comprehension: To conceive of a world 6 degrees warmer, imagine alligators in the Arctic.)

A world that’s 4 degrees C hotter would also be vulnerable to nonlinear climate feedbacks — ways in which the effects of warming (like the melting of the Arctic permafrost) could rapidly worsen warming itself (by, in this case, releasing enormous volumes of CO2 and methane now trapped in frozen soils). Some worry these feedbacks could lead to “runaway” climate change, wherein a cycle of warming and greenhouse-gas releases and more warming spirals viciously out of control. At that point, even the wildest “geoengineering” ideas — for example, creating artificial volcanoes to fill the stratosphere with sulfate particles, blocking some of the sunshine headed towards Earth — would be, at best, “Hail Mary” strategies (and would do nothing to address other catastrophic effects of rising emissions, like the acidification of the oceans and the resulting mass die-offs of ocean life). Spiraling climate chaos of this severity would leave us on a profoundly different planet than the Earth we now call home.

There is simply no way to put a cost to those kinds of impacts: Their magnitude transcends economic reckoning, because their impact could be greater than the entire human economy is worth. Four degrees of warming, Anderson and many others say, is therefore something we should avoid literally at all costs, because no economic cost we pay will be greater than the losses we risk in a climate catastrophe of that magnitude.

Now, all of this is the sort of thing that can bum you right the hell out, and it’s not irrational to let it get to you — there’s a real chance we may destroy civilization and much of the natural world in the decades ahead, and that’s a valid reason for being a bit glum. There’s just no shiny side to extreme climate chaos.

It’s not too late to avoid catastrophe

If that were the end of the story we could all just start drinking now. Hell, I’d buy the first round. But it’s not. We still have a choice. We still, just barely, have the option of choosing to limit warming to 2 degrees and then working hard to restore the climate once we’ve stabilized it. We can, yet, pause at “extremely dangerous” and pull back from the brink of chaos.

To do that, we have to limit the total amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. What’s the limit? Drawing on the scientific consensus, 350.org, the world’s leading climate advocacy network, puts the number at 565 more gigatons of CO2 (or about 450 parts-per-million [ppm] of CO2 in the atmosphere). That’s the most humanity can emit and still, probably, hold global warming to 2 degrees C.

That means we need to face a fact almost no one likes to discuss: We need to hit zero. That is, we need, as a species, to bring our global climate emissions into balance with what nature can safely absorb (actually, because we need to start rolling greenhouse gas concentrations backwards, we almost certainly need to emit less than nature can absorb, in order to take CO2 back out of the atmosphere and get back to safer greenhouse gas levels, of 350 ppm or less — but one shocking reality at a time is enough). This means that all the expressions of commitment we’ve heard from politicians about reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent off 1990 levels, say, or 80 percent by 2050 or whatever — all of those numbers are meaningless. The meaningful number is simple: zero, as soon as possible.

Zero, worldwide

A worldwide transition to a climate-balanced global economy (one which adds zero CO2 each year to the total CO2 in the atmosphere) lies completely within our reach. But to achieve it, we’ll need to be honest with ourselves about geopolitics and reality. Because we have some tough decisions to make.

Climate change is global, with people everywhere worsening the crisis. But we are not all equally responsible for the crisis we face now. Those of us who live in the wealthier nations got our wealth by cutting down forests, and burning coal and oil to fuel our industrialization. We are wealthy, to be blunt, because we’re the ones who put most of the greenhouse gases up there in the first place.

In the last century, to get wealthier, you needed smokestacks and clearcuts and coal mines. Poorer nations — whose economies rely more on older, more polluting technologies — argue that they have a right to grow their economies to help their people escape poverty and achieve prosperity. These nations are mostly willing to negotiate with wealthier countries on lowering their climate emissions rapidly, but they will need time to transition to low-carbon economies, and they expect that we in the wealthier countries will lead the way on cutting emissions rapidly to buy them time. Essentially, the poorer nations are saying, they have a right to the lion’s share of those remaining 565 gigatons of CO2.

Even ambitious plans for global emissions reductions take time. Poorer countries now emit less overall, but their economies are inefficient and largely dependent on dirty energy. Lots of work will need to be done for those countries to level off their emissions, and more work after that for their economies to become carbon neutral, even with really aggressive innovation — innovation bolder than any we have seen anywhere in the developing world. For example, one recent credible scenario by Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows would have emissions in poorer countries leveling off in 2025, then declining 7 percent per year thereafter, until the global carbon balance was restored. Seven percent a year, it should be noted, would be extremely bold: but even that extremely bold goal would demand that the wealthier countries buy time by zeroing out their own emissions first. The poorer countries argue this is a matter of “climate equity.”

Since we need their agreement, and their action, it’s probably smart to just go ahead and admit they’re right. It would be unjust to ask the world’s poor countries to absorb the costs of taking actions we ourselves avoid, in order to solve a problem we mostly created. We need to go first in zeroing-out our emissions.

But here’s the thing: far from being some unbearable burden, rapid reductions to net-zero emissions may in fact offer wealthier nations our best opportunity to rebuild our economies to prosper in the 21st century. To understand why, we need to look at the kind of planet we’re becoming: an urban planet.

Our urban future

Humanity is already an urban species, with more people living in cities than in the countryside. By the middle of the century, we will likely have as many as 9.5 billion people living on the planet, with 70-75 percent of us (around 7 billion people), demographers estimate, living in cities themselves, and 95 percent or more of humanity living within a day’s travel of a city. By the 2050s, the overwhelming majority of humanity will be participating in urban systems of health care, education, communication, commerce, and government that only a few decades ago were limited to the “developed” world.

Growth is transforming the very nature of cities. Every day, at least 200,000 people move to cities or are born in them. That’s like building a city the size of San Francisco every four days. Then doing it again, four days later. Then doing it again — and repeating the process several thousand times in the next 40 years. By 2050, we will have an estimated 3.5 billion more urbanites, and to house them we will have built a constellation of thousands of large cities, including a scattering of extremely large megacities, each home to tens of millions of people. The largest city-building boom in human history will happen in the next four decades, with each decade experiencing more change than the one before.

This urban boom won’t be wonderful for everyone; for many, it may be tragic. Unless we change our priorities quickly, as many as a billion people — climate refugees, the rural and destitute, victims of conflict and deep structural poverty — will live on the very edge of existence. Perhaps as many as 3 billion people will live in informal settlements — in the huge slums springing up around many developing world cities. Hundreds of millions of these slum-dwellers will live in abject poverty. Inequalities will strain our societies. In the midst of widespread poverty, 3 or 4 billion others may rise out of poverty to enter the global middle class, living what we today would consider a “modern” — if modest — life. A billion may well live in even greater affluence than we experience today. And the one thing the vast majority of these people will have in common is their cities, and the ways in which those cities are linked together.

How we build this coming wave of cities will largely decide not only the quality of life of the people living in them, but also the future of our planet. Because how we build our cities will decide, more than any other factor, how much we heat the planet.

Our urban opportunity

Climate emissions are a byproduct of the global economy; but the links that connect that economy together are forged in our great cities. In this book, we’ll see how the choices cities make about how they grow will largely determine whether their economies will be clean or dirty; and the choices these cities make, in aggregate, will largely determine whether the global economy as a whole will be catastrophic or full of possibilities.

In 40 years, humanity will live in thousands of these major cities, each stamping the global economy with its own character — and burdening the planet with its consumption and pollution, to greater or lesser degrees. But right now, the economies of only about 200 cities define the global economy. These cities and the regions surrounding them are responsible for the vast majority of their countries’ prosperity, and also of their countries’ greenhouse gases.

Most of these cities are still in the wealthier nations. If our cities reinvent themselves, finding pathways to low-to-no-carbon futures, our nations can rapidly cut climate pollution, even if most of our compatriots lag behind in reducing emissions. Building cities that produce no net emissions — that reduce emissions to the extent that the greenhouse gases generated can be balanced through other actions that draw CO2 out of the atmosphere (what I call “carbon zero” cities) — may in fact be the smartest, quickest pathway to lowering national emissions.

Furthermore, the options that will be available to those thousands of emerging cities over the next 40 years largely depend on the choices we in the world’s wealthiest cities make today. The reason is that innovation and invention move slowly, yet are critical. When no new solution is available, business as usual is a given. Once a better solution to a given problem has been found, its spread can be hastened, though innovation diffusion still takes time. As the wealthier cities design away their own emissions, many excellent new solutions will be created, resulting in zero-emissions pathways poorer cities will be able to follow as they get wealthier.

There’s no time to lose. The costs of action will rise, not fall, with time. Many big investments have long life spans: They can operate for decades — and need to, in order to pay back the costs of their construction. This makes it politically very hard (and sometimes economically expensive) to shut down new infrastructure and industrial systems, even when those systems are producing unwanted results. What we build in the next two decades will probably be with us for decades more. Making new investments in old, dirty ways of doing things (like coal-fired power plants, highways, and suburban sprawl) retards change, and commits us either to continued pollution or to costly retrofits and replacements in the near future. But also, the longer we wait, the more the consequences of climate change already set in motion will hamper our progress and make us less able to act. All of the impacts of climate change have human costs, in many cases quite large. Few have any benefit at all. The longer we wait, the more our economic capacity for change will be damaged by droughts and floods, rising oceans and spreading diseases, climate refugees, and political instability. This is not even to mention the increasingly heart-wrenching human costs or the psychological trauma caused. Sandy was just a taste of what climate change could cost us.

Our cities as climate solutions

So, changing how our cities work proves to be a pretty vital job. Fortunately, our comparatively massive wealth has left us with a number of capacities the rest of the world simply doesn’t have: The majority of the world’s research universities, think tanks, engineering and design firms, advocacy groups, investment funds, venture capitalists, and so on, are all concentrated in the wealthiest cities — and even with China, India, and Brazil growing by leaps and bounds, this central fact of the concentration of the capacity for innovation in a relatively small number of rich cities is unlikely to change overnight.

Leading the way into a carbon zero future will be good for business. Cities that innovate in design, planning, policy, and products will equip their citizens with exportable skills and marketable experience before those in slower cities even know they exist. With thousands of large and small cities about to boom, the markets for urban innovations are almost inconceivably vast. There’s a 40-year boom on its way; cities that lead the way into a carbon zero future will be its great success stories.

Many of the most important kinds of innovations, policies, and plans needed to create such urban success stories are local — or are, at least, the kinds that don’t demand bold national action to succeed. In countries like the United States, where dirty energy companies have managed to clog the works of government, the ability to innovate meaningfully at a local level represents a huge advantage. Our major cities are small enough that committed people can actually change them, and large enough that changing them can produce big impacts.

Americans, Canadians, and Australians, in particular, sail now on a collision course with planetary realities. Our sprawling suburbs and low-density cities depend on abundant resources, cheap oil, and low costs for pollution, none of which the future holds. No amount of political grandstanding will change that fact. Sprawling, auto-dependent suburbs are unsustainable, and that which cannot be sustained does not long continue. For the size of their populations, our cities are the most climate-damaging in the world.

Even Northern European cities, with their older, more compact urban forms, better transit, and reputations for climate leadership, are far from sustainable — they, too, need a lot of change — but I have chosen to focus on North American cities precisely because that is where we need the biggest change in the shortest time. (Readers from the rest of the world should find a few ideas worth mulling over — much of what applies to North America applies without too much translation to Australia and New Zealand, as well as in parts to much of Europe and the prosperous parts of Asia, especially Japan and Korea. Around the world, leadership will take different forms: the imperative to lead will be the same.)

I’m writing most directly to my fellow Americans, though. That’s because I care deeply about my country, as do most Americans. I believe that if we truly love our country, we must care about its future; and we can’t care about its future without taking into account the ways our nation’s actions today are shaping that future; without attempting to steer a course that will leave our countrymen better off in the future. To love our country today is also to wish to see it secure and prosperous tomorrow. So to be patriots, we have to want to be good ancestors to those who are coming after us. And being good ancestors today means, perhaps above all else, fighting climate change. No greater threat faces America in the coming years than climate chaos. We learned that with Katrina; we’ve learned that with droughts and floods and wildfires; and now we’re learning it afresh as our nation recovers from the assault of a superstorm of unprecedented size. And the biggest storms are still ahead.

Building carbon zero cities means not only greater prosperity, but more security. Almost everything we need to do to drop our climate emissions also leaves us more rugged and resilient to disasters and global instability. Carbon zero cities mean future-proof cities, or as close as we’re likely to get.

Our choice could not be clearer, to my mind: Remake our cities into central hubs in the global climate-neutral economy we’re moving towards (and ready ourselves for the tough times to come), or shirk our responsibilities and leave ourselves even more vulnerable to the onrushing chaos. As a patriot, the right choice for America is plain to me.

Imagining carbon zero cities

How do we get to work? Well, we can’t build what we can’t imagine, so the first task in building carbon zero cities is to reimagine the cities we have.

Reimagining is hard work. It requires both a robust conversation about what carbon zero cities might be like, and a far more creative approach to envisioning the kinds of innovations and solutions that could get us there. This little book is my attempt to outline one version of a carbon-neutral city; to get a conversation going about what kind of change a 90 percent cut in emissions might entail; and to point out some of the main areas of possible innovation.

It’s worth emphasizing that this is a sketch, not a blueprint. I wouldn’t even attempt to ordain a model for zero-carbon development that every place should adopt. Every city is unique, with its own character, geography, civic culture, and history. Regional economies and politics have left every metro area with different workforces, institutions, and business cultures. The implementation of national policies and local capacities vary widely. No one set of innovations applied in a specific way will suit the needs of every city. Large teams of professionals and engaged citizens should (and I hope, will) take up the actual work of upgrading their cities. I’m not interested in dictating approaches to anyone.

Indeed, it seems to me that what we need most right now are not conclusive answers, but good hypotheses put immediately to the test; and good hypotheses spring first from reframing our understanding of a given challenge. I hope that my reframing of this challenge will influence readers to begin to see their own cities’ challenges in a new light.

But don’t expect things to look normal, illuminated by the demands of the future. We have, again and again, mistaken what we think of as “normal” for “best” and “permanent.” Normal as we knew it in the second half of the 20th century is already a thing of the past. Already, many of our older systems are crumbling, revealing themselves to be unsustainably expensive or indefensibly harmful. Even the timescales of the 20th century are out of date. Changes that took half a century before are erupting in a few years now.

The speed of change will not slow. It is both pulled along by the dire necessity of quick action — for, as Donella Meadows has written, on a planet full of limits, “Time is in fact the ultimate limit” — and driven along by the unleashing of innovation, collaboration, and competition on a planetary scale that dwarfs anything our great-grandparents could have comprehended. If the ultimate limit turns out to be time, the last infinite resource turns out to be creativity.

I believe that planetary limits and human creativity are now inextricably bound together. I doubt we’ll reinvent the physical limits of this world, at least in the next few centuries. I would bet against the emergence of any technologies that allow us to exceed our planetary boundaries on both a global scale and a sustained basis. But I would also bet we can build a civilization that works within our planetary limits, and furthermore, that the realm of possibilities for human experience within those ecological limits is essentially infinite.

Indeed, as we cease trying to maximize the volume of material growth and start emphasizing sustainable prosperity, I think we’ll find that what we’re able to do with energy and materials becomes more and more brilliant, meaningful, and enriching. Design constraints often deliver better results than a belief in complete freedom. Quite the opposite of imposing hardship, carbon zero targets may very well spur a renaissance in urban creativity.

The straining limits that pressure us to remake our cities will likely produce an unprecedented blooming of applied creativity and civic acumen. I find it completely likely that the constraints of climate neutrality and ecological sustainability, boldly met, may produce the most livable, prosperous, and resilient cities the world has ever seen.

Nothing in this book is utopian: Most of what I suggest is already being implemented or experimented with somewhere, though no city I know of has put all the pieces together in one place. Some of what I suggest still lives in the realm of conjecture, but that realm is not as far away as it used to be.

I hope you will take my sketch, use what makes sense to you, discard what doesn’t, and begin your own drawings of what the future’s possibilities can be — they are bound to be better than mine, and the world needs every well-grounded, well-crafted vision it can get. Please, don’t just read: reimagine.

Read the sidebar to this chapter: Consumption-based footprinting.

Read on: Why clean energy isn’t enough

Since Hurricane Sandy, the historic Belle Harbor Yacht Club in the Rockaways — one of New York City’s hardest-hit neighborhoods — has become an indispensable hub for supplies, volunteers, and a much-needed round of drinks. Three weeks after the storm, the oft-maligned Long Island Power Authority still hasn’t reconnected this building, not to mention its neighbors, back to the grid, leaving locals to face the prospect of a cold, dark Thanksgiving.

But outside, the sun is shining, and three local solar power companies have seen an opportunity to bridge the gap left open by the electric utility. The yacht club, among several area buildings, is now plugged into a portable solar power generator, which frees volunteers from the endless gas lines that plague those dependent on traditional generators and leaves them ready to dish out hot plates of turkey and stuffing to the beleaguered community.

This story was produced as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A little less than four years ago, I was a bright-eyed intern in the Obama White House. The halls buzzed with hope, and optimistic predictions that we would tackle health care and then move on to the more challenging issues of climate change and immigration reform.

It wasn’t long, however, before the realities of the recession and extreme partisanship set in. The public’s disillusionment with politics grew almost as fast as the president’s gray hairs.

Obama’s victory on Nov. 6, though narrow, has offered a chance to reframe the debate. He has already promised that immigration reform will be introduced soon after his inauguration. Here’s why a climate bill should follow soon after:

1. Clean energy will grow our economy

Solyndra might have failed but solar is clearly here to stay. I know this firsthand. I work at Mosaic, an online marketplace for investing in solar, and I live in Oakland, Calif., which is rapidly emerging as a solar hub. I can’t get a beer without running into an orange-clad Sungevity staff member or a Brightsource employee giddy on the company’s recent $83 million raise.

But it isn’t just an Oakland, or even a California, phenomenon. The solar industry is one of the fastest growing industries in America, employing over 100,000 people. Employment in the solar industry grew by 13 percent in 2012. (Employment in the overall economy grew just 2 percent during the same period.) Wind energy, meanwhile, has provided 35 percent of all new U.S. power capacity over the past five years.

As my colleague Erica Etelson recently outlined, there are a number of things President Obama could do to support the clean energy economy, including following through on his proposed National Clean Energy Standard, supporting the creation of Clean Energy Victory bonds, and pushing for a carbon tax as part of the fiscal cliff negotiations (though this is unlikely). He could also push for the extension of the Production Tax Credit for wind power, without which we could lose 37,000 American jobs.

The bottom line is that clean energy is an emerging, rapidly growing industry that is producing quality jobs right here in America. Republicans like jobs, Democrats like jobs — really, who doesn’t like jobs? And while not everyone loves government subsidies, the truth is that America subsidizes the hell out of mature, slow-growth industries like fossil fuels and big agriculture. Why not move some of those subsidies into an industry that actually gives us some economic bang for our buck?

2. Americans of all stripes want action on climate

As a post-election survey by the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) showed, voters in key swing states said that energy was a “very important issue” in their vote decision. The majority of voters in Ohio, Iowa, Virginia, and Colorado wanted to move away from fossil fuels and toward solar, wind, and natural gas.

It’s not hard to see why. As Matt Kasper and Kiley Kroh explained in a recent piece in Climate Progress, voters in Colorado understand that the Mountain West “boasts nearly unlimited renewable energy resources like wind, solar, and geothermal,” enough to create 71,872 direct jobs [PDF]. Voters in Iowa are thrilled with their booming wind industry that provides 20 percent of the state’s electricity and creates around 7,000 jobs.

And this isn’t just a swing state thing. Polls have consistently showed that the majority of Americans believe that our climate is changing (67 percent) and that global warming should be a priority for the government (77 percent). These polls were conducted before the Hurricane Sandy wake-up call that broke the climate silence that permeated this election and even led to Mayor Bloomberg’s endorsement of Obama.

Apparently the president got the hint, as he acknowledged climate change in his victory speech, saying, “We want our children to live in an America … that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.” (He also spoke about it at length in his first post-reelection press conference.)

But acknowledgement is one thing, action is another. Obama’s speech put forth goals of deficit reduction, tax code reform, immigration reform, and “freeing ourselves from foreign oil.” Though the last goal will hopefully include the aforementioned clean energy boons like extending the production tax credit for the wind industry, it will no doubt be a continuation of Obama’s “all of the above” energy strategy.

3. It’s the right thing to do

The problem with picking an “all of the above” energy strategy is that some of the options are, quite simply, bad. Dirty energy pollutes our air, poisons our water, and heats up our planet. How many devastating storms or widespread wildfires do we need to suffer through before our politicians realize that taking action on climate change is “worth it”?

I’ve traveled from Copenhagen to Rio de Janeiro and a lot of New York in between with SustainUS, a delegation of young Americans working towards sustainable development. But now, even as many of my friends prepare for the upcoming climate conference in Qatar, I’ve decided I’m done with U.N. conferences.

Mostly, they’re too depressing. I don’t have a good answer when people from around the world ask why the United States refuses to significantly reduce our carbon emissions. How do you tell someone from a small island state on the verge of submersion that tackling climate change isn’t politically popular enough in the U.S. to merit concern?

President Obama is a brilliant man who has managed to accomplish a lot in his first term, despite unprecedented levels of partisanship in Washington. This second term presents a historic opportunity to take action on climate change to grow our economy, address the concern of the American public, and ensure the continuation of life as we know it.

Please, Mr. President, don’t mess this one up.

From the early ’40s into the ’70s, New York City had a Miss Subways campaign. It involved pretty young New York women having their photos on trains, so that their beauty and winning personalities could be appreciated by all New Yorkers. [Ed. note: My uncle can still recite the entire text for some of these posters, so they apparently hit their mark among adolescent boys.] This program is no longer alive, but former Miss Subways beauty queens have gone on to important lives, some in civil service — and with New York’s recent hurricane, they have decided to give back to the city that gave them so much.

Here’s a video of the Misses Subways raising money for Sandy, featuring some amazing New York accents:

A few things to say after seeing that: (1) We hope we look like that when we’re 92. (2) We’re glad that the mustache-drawing thing has been with us for so long and isn’t just recent proof that society is going to hell in a handbasket. (3) It’s so sweet that these women are raising money for Sandy relief. Their upbeat humor and empathy and commitment to those less fortunate makes them just as beautiful as they were back in the days their photos were hanging up in trains.

Two days after Sandy struck, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) gave this statement on climate change, as excerpted by The Rachel Maddow Show.

Today, the governor struck a much stronger tone on the link between climate change and weather disasters in an opinion piece in the New York Daily News.

Extreme weather is the new normal. In the past two years, we have had two storms, each with the odds of a 100-year occurrence. Debating why does not lead to solutions — it leads to gridlock. The denial and deliberation from extremists on both sides about the causes of climate change are distracting us from addressing its inarguable effects. Recent events demand that we get serious once and for all.

We need to act, not simply react.

The governor outlined a series of ways in which the state can better prepare for climate change’s effects, including upgrading and improving infrastructure, increasing redundancy on critical systems like pumps and fuel distribution, improving cell-phone networks and the power grid, and improving business systems. One key point:

The next generation’s infrastructure must be able to withstand another storm. We must also reduce the energy consumption that contributes to climate change — which means, for starters, upgrading our building codes.

Cuomo reserved particular ire for the agonizingly slow pace of power restoration.

Power utilities are the equivalent of vinyl records in the age of the iPod: antiquated, 1950s-style institutions that don’t serve our current needs. …

To a large degree, the state and local governments are captive to the utilities in an emergency, just like their customers.

Yesterday, news broke that the state attorney general had subpoenaed two of the largest electricity providers to answer questions about their preparation for and response to the storm. On Tuesday, the chief operating officer of the Long Island Power Authority resigned his position; LIPA has been the target of particularly strong critique — with some reason. Yesterday, two Long Island residents filed their own suit against the agency for negligence and fraud.

While it is good news that Cuomo plans to better prepare the state for climate change — since the Obama administration isn’t exactly leaping into action — it is also very much overdue. In August, we looked at how New York and Boston were slowly moving to defend against rising seas; in September, we noted the New York Times’ critique of that progress.

Fixing these problems requires political will — which, at long last, seems to exist — and money. The governor is hoping the lame duck Congress will approve $30 billion to go toward Sandy recovery efforts, but it’s not clear if any of that money would go to storm preparation — if it’s even granted at all.

Andrew Cuomo is regularly mentioned as a candidate for the presidency in 2016. But he is already involved in a much more important race — the push to prepare the nation’s biggest city for a major storm before another such storm hits. If he loses that race, it’s safe to say that he’ll lose any race for the White House — and probably any future races in Albany as well.

The former vice president and climate champion, Al Gore, has called on Barack Obama to seize the moment and use his reelection victory to push through bold action on climate change.

The president has faced rising public pressure in the wake of superstorm Sandy to deliver on his promise to act on global warming.

But none of those calling on Obama to act carries the moral authority of Gore, who has devoted his post-political career to building a climate movement.

Now, Gore said, it is the president’s turn. He urged Obama to immediately begin pushing for a carbon tax in negotiations over the “fiscal cliff” budget crisis.

The former vice president’s intervention for a carbon tax could give critical support to an idea that has gained currency since the election — at least among Washington think tanks. The conservative American Enterprise Institute held an all-day seminar on the carbon tax on Tuesday.

“I think all who look at these circumstances should agree that president Obama does have a mandate, should he choose to use it, to act boldly to solve the climate crisis, to begin solving it,” Gore told the Guardian in a telephone interview.

“He has the mandate. He has the opportunity, and he has the inherent ability to provide the leadership needed. I really hope that he will, and I will respectfully ask him to do exactly that.”

Gore will ratchet up his own pressure on Wednesday evening when he hosts a 24-hour live online broadcast from New York City on the connections between climate change and extreme events such as Sandy.

The Dirty Weather Report, produced by his Climate Reality Project, will kick off with footage from New Jersey’s devastated shore and interviews with Govs. Chris Christie (R) and Andrew Cuomo (D). It begins at 8 p.m. Eastern.

In terms of policy specifics, Gore said he wanted the White House and Congress to start an immediate push for a carbon tax. “It will be difficult for sure but we can back away from the fiscal cliff and the climate cliff at the same time,” he said. “One way is with a carbon tax.”

It would require a balancing act, but “the most direct policy solution to the climate crisis is a carbon tax, offset by reductions in taxes on wages,” Gore went on to explain. “By including the carbon tax in the solution to the fiscal cliff we can [get] away from the climate cliff.”

Gore’s endorsement of a carbon tax comes at a critical time, with less than 50 days left for Congress to work out a budget deal and avoid triggering a set of automatic tax increases and spending cuts.

A number of conservatives have also raised the possibility of a carbon tax — even before Obama’s reelection — giving hope to environmental campaigners.

In the view of Gore and others, Obama’s reelection in the wake of Sandy dramatically expanded the scope for action on climate change. So too did the endorsement from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, which singled out Obama’s efforts on climate, such as raising fuel performance standards for cars.

American public opinion also shifted, after a summer of punishing drought and record high temperatures. Two-thirds (67 percent) of Americans now say climate change is real, compared to 57 percent in 2009, according to a poll last month from the Pew Research Center.

Then came last month’s superstorm. A sizable percentage of voters invoked Sandy as a factor in their vote, according to exit polls. The storm put climate change on the map after an election in which Obama and Mitt Romney went out of their way to avoid even mentioning the words, Gore said.

The president also signaled in his victory speech that he saw climate change as one of the top three priorities of his second term. “We want our children to live in an America that isn’t burdened by debt, that isn’t weakened by inequality, that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet,” Obama said.

Gore said it was now up to the public to keep the pressure on.

“Many elected officials have been frightened of the reaction should they even talk about the climate crisis much less propose the obvious solution: We need to put a price on carbon,” he said. “It is just as plain as day. But the only way to give these elected officials more backbone is to ensure that they hear more from their constituents who are deeply and rightly concerned that they are not doing anything to stop this accelerating destruction of the global climate balance.”

Other environmental leaders are also trying to seize the moment. Activists have called a demonstration at the White House on Nov. 18. to demand Obama block the Keystone XL pipeline, designed to expand production from the Alberta tar sands by pumping crude to Texas refineries.

Gore said he supported their campaign. “I do agree with those who are trying to stop the Keystone pipeline. The tar sands are just the dirtiest source of liquid fuel you can imagine,” he said. “At a time when we are desperately trying to bend the emissions curve downwards it is quite literally insane to open up a whole new source that is much more carbon intensive and that makes the problem worse.”

But it is not his fight, he said. “For me, I believe that my efforts are best expended on the central challenge of building a sufficient support for action to solve the climate crisis. It’s not that complicated ultimately. We have to put a price on carbon.”

This story was produced by the Guardian as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In some parallel universe, New Yorkers took advantage of the city’s massive, distributed (at least in Manhattan) bike-sharing network to get around in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Maybe Citi even waived fees for the vehicles, eager to get a little bump of goodwill at a moment of extreme need. But, as longtime viewers may remember, despite plans to unveil the 10,000-bike system this year, it got pushed to March of 2013 due to technical glitches.

Or, at least March was the target date in August. It’s not clear if that is still the new date, because the system got damaged again. By Sandy.

From the Times:

The storm dumped several feet of water at some points across the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where the city had been storing equipment like bicycles and docking stations in Building 293, near the northern tip of the yard and the waters of Wallabout Bay.

Building 293 was among those that flooded, and a spokesman for the mayor’s office said Tuesday that there appeared to be damage to program equipment, including docking stations for bicycles, as a result. …

Officials said it was premature to estimate whether the flooding could affect the program’s start date, scheduled for next March.

Oh, it’s premature, is it? Well, maybe in your book, “officials,” but we’ve been watching this thing for long enough to make a prediction: This will affect the program’s start date. We can say that because every single other thing that has been mentioned about the bike share program has resulted in a delay. Literally every other thing. We strongly advise the Times and the city to stop talking about the program, now, immediately, to ensure this thing happens before 2025.

Even with that drastic action, the question is: Will the bikeshare program be in place before someone invents a bike that can fly, like some sort of space bike? And the answer is no, because that basically already exists.

So, the Budweiser Corporation is putting water in cans. Wait. Why is that new? Doesn’t it already put water in cans? Ha, ha. That’s very funny. I’m sure it’s never heard any jokes before from microbrew-obsessed America about the fact that its beer sucks. But this time, it really is water, to help Hurricane Sandy victims whose drinking water isn’t safe.

Thousands of people were left without potable water after the storm. And it’s super nice that Bud gave them water instead of watery beer. And we shouldn’t make fun of its watery beer right now, because Bud is actually being very nice — it temporarily turned an entire manufacturing facility from a place that cans beer to a place that cans water. Wow. Totally righteous of it, right? We feel kind of bad now for making fun of how much its beer sucks. Budweiser folks: You might make beer, but this was a real champagne move.

You probably would rather not think about the fact that Hurricane Sandy created a lot of sewage problems. Well, you’re lucky you don’t have to, because there are people whose job it is to do that. And they have satellites that allow them to get a sense of … well, there’s no way to say this nicely: how much raw sewage made it into our waterways as a result of the devastating storm.

You can’t actually detect sewage from a satellite. Meaning it can’t take a picture of water that would allow them to look at an image and deduce, oh, that part of the water? That has human waste in it. However, “you can find river discharge that you suspect has raw sewage,” Matthew Oliver, assistant professor of oceanography in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment at University of Delaware, said in a press release. “The reason why is because river discharge usually has a very different temperature and color than the surrounding waters.” 

From satellite data, environmental organizations in the mid-Atlantic states have been able to deduce this much about Sandy sewage: Hurricane Sandy damage caused several wastewater facilities to malfunction, and untreated sewage went into the Hudson River, Passaic River, Hackensack River, Newark Bay, Kill Van Kull and Arthur Kill, Raritan Bay, Raritan River, Sandy Hook Bay, and northern Barnegat Bay. Advisories are currently out about boating or fishing in all of these areas. Oh, shit.

We’re learning more about the eco-impact of Hurricane Sandy, and it’s not looking good.

Nearly a quarter of New Jersey and New York’s Superfund toxic sites are within a half-mile of vulnerable coastal areas. Those the Environmental Protection Agency says were “impacted by the storm” include New York’s Gowanus Canal and Newtown Creek, both designated Superfund-supergross in 2010. From The Wall Street Journal:

The EPA said it tested water samples its workers took from Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal and nearby flooded buildings, but found only “low levels” of potentially cancer-causing pollutants, which it said may be “related to spilled fuel and runoff from asphalt.” New York state officials say they think the floodwaters probably traveled over the Gowanus and Brooklyn’s other Superfund site, Newtown Creek, without disturbing the pollutants that line the bottoms of both waterways.

But Thomas Burke, a professor and associate dean at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, said the Gowanus and Newtown Creek—whose cleanups haven’t begun in earnest yet—are more vulnerable to flooding risks than sites in more advanced stages of remediation, where caps and liners have already been placed over bottom-lying toxic material.

“There really has to be a careful evaluation of whether there has been any disturbing of the waste,” Mr. Burke, a former director of sciences and research at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, said. “Flooding moves things around much more quickly.”

Fuel spills at refineries are also of concern, such as a 378,000-gallon diesel dump into New Jersey’s Arthur Kill waterway and a spill of heavy waste oil at a Linden, N.J., refinery. Also: heavy-metal pollution at the Raritan Bay Slag Superfund Site in Sayreville, N.J., where a 10,000-gallon fuel tank was overturned.

Delaware is bracing for Sandy-related debris and pollution to start washing up on the state’s beaches. From the Cape Gazette:

Dr. Andreas Muenchow, associate professor of coastal oceanography at the University of Delaware, said debris that ends up on Delaware’s shores generally comes from the north, but most of the trash and pollution from New York and New Jersey as a result of Sandy will stay out to sea.

Muenchow said large debris would be trapped off of Cape May because of tidal currents. Debris within the Delaware Bay from Philadelphia is more likely to arrive on Delaware’s shoreline, he said.

Behind the MERR building, volunteers collected a wheelbarrow full of debris that has already washed up in the days since the storm.

“Debris that has washed into the water from land is a hazard, and highly contaminated water is also a huge concern,” Thurman said.

Debris floating in the water could injure marine animals, while contaminated waters could cause sickness and death, she said.

The Coast Guard says 137 people are currently working on pollution cleanup. I think this might take a while.