“In a drastic attempt to protect their beachfront homes, residents in Salisbury, Massachusetts, invested $500,000 in a sand dune to defend against encroaching tides. After being completed last week, the barrier made from 14,000 tons of sand lasted just 72 hours before it was completely washed away”
@pvonhellermannn
The Netherlands used to have privately funded dikes. Turns out that leaving protection to people who just want to protect their own property at the cheapest possible cost is not a great idea.
@juandesant@pvonhellermannn@espanabizarra yes all true, but to be fair, there are more serious engineers out there. The Army Corps of Engineers is protecting Rockaway Beach in NYC with a more hard-core version of this and it should last at least a few years. Sounds like these people are either cheap or got taken for a ride by a charlatan.
@stevenbodzin@pvonhellermannn@espanabizarra yes, I did not go into that. You don’t do a dune, you do a series of stone piers to support the sea actually providing more sand on its own… but I’d course that is a long term solution.
@stevenbodzin@pvonhellermannn@espanabizarra but the proposal you linked seems to include much more work, including those piers in the drawing (is that what they call groins?). Not sure about the relative length of beach being treated.
That price tag reinforces, in my mind, the argument that the value of the houses is now $0.
If you have to spend an amount equal or greater than the value of the houses in order to protect them, then the houses are - and please excuse the pun - underwater.
@passenger@dibi58@stevenbodzin@juandesant@pvonhellermannn@espanabizarra My question is how do we deal with this? There’s a lot of wealth tied up in doomed waterfront homes, enough that our economy will definitely feel it if we write these off. But I can’t think of any reasonable way to move these homeowners to a better-placed home.
It’s a huge issue we’re sort of punting to the next generation
Do you mean "what should a better society do?" or "what would capitalist America do?"
For the former, my feeling is that the current homeowners can afford to take the loss. It's a wealthy town, and wealthy landowners can afford to go bankrupt.
I'm not American so I can't speak authoritatively for the latter; I suspect that the country that left Flint to deal with its water crisis on its own might not be as callous when it comes to the residential land investments of wealthier and Whiter people.
@passenger@dibi58@stevenbodzin@juandesant@pvonhellermannn@espanabizarra I think you’re right. But the thing about climate change is it’s not selective, and the areas that were desirable (and expensive) no longer will be. As wealth and tourism leaves these areas, the wealth will move to cities (which can offer amenities), leaving poverty and increasing radicalization behind
Bruce Sterling wrote about the concept of "involuntary parks": areas which capitalism would abandon because nobody would insure a building or business there. Sterling predicted that climate change would lead to more of these areas, and that they would be very interesting: on the one hand places of potential natural reclamation, and on the other hand places of refuge for the desperate and laboratories of new ways of ordering societies.
I think there's a threshold for such areas, when it tips from "this area has been abandoned by the wealthy but the machinery of wealth extraction still functions", for example many former mining towns, to "this area has been abandoned by the machinery of wealth extraction and becomes wholly outside of empire." I think coastal towns like this, close to wealth but abandoned by it, are more likely to become an example of the former, but we may see them morphing into the latter in some instances.
@passenger@dogzilla@dibi58@juandesant@pvonhellermannn@espanabizarra the insurance industry and it's underwriting are most definitely not coming to save us. I am with @mbpaz . Insurance policies will keep getting written. And if not, rich people and companies sometimes "self insure." Which usually means paying for routine problems or of pocket and offloading tail risk onto the public
#Insurance is key in all this - Just came across this article (sharing even though due to paywall i can only read beginning). Jeremy Powell arguing that one reason US #inflation is staying high is that the economy is increasingly uninsurable #ClimateDiary
“In the longer term, companies are withdrawing from writing insurance in some coastal areas”, Powell said.
Not at all. You've made the same recommendation to me before, but others who're reading this thread may not have seen it, so repeating the recommendation hurts nobody.
@passenger@dogzilla@dibi58@stevenbodzin@juandesant@pvonhellermannn@espanabizarra That's fascinating! It reminds me of Donna Haraway's Camille Stories, in which 'Communities of Compost' pop up in the near future which commit to (re-)learning to live on damaged land in small-scale and radically different ways. Perhaps involuntary parks are indeed the places where this kind of re-imagining needs to happen.
@passenger@stevenbodzin@juandesant@pvonhellermannn@espanabizarra
I agree with you in principle. However, most of these folks are getting others (eg. US govt) to pay for remediation at no cost to the wealthy homeowners. Even in cases where this is paid via insurance, this is heavily subsidized. Even for HOA's..
Short story, rest of us are subsidizing the property value of the over-wealthy, who rarely are forced to pay for much
@rwba@juandesant@pvonhellermannn@espanabizarra they aren't stupid. The people quoted in the story are the owner of a bunch of beach rentals and a construction contractor. They are doing a good job of squeezing a last bit of value out of this land.
No, this is actually a good idea! It's our only chance at stopping the effects of climate change! The only problem is that the dune wasn't quite big enough, and didn't utilize my unique design!🤡
$500K is not enough. For the small price of $1 million dollars, I will construct a dune that is twice as big!
Maybe, just maybe, this time, loose sand will hold against checks notes the ocean!
If it doesn't? Fear not! Our team is hard at work designing the $2 million dollar dune!
And we're just at 1,5°. Imagine what life will be like with 2° or 3° global warming. I mean, we could do something about climate change on a big scale, hold corporations accountable, stop capitalist exploitation of resources, put high fines on waste production and pollution to invest into renewables, public transport, water treatment and other public infrastructure.
But na, let's just sit it out. It will probably go away. Or we will. Does it matter?
Another case of more money than brains. I wonder who sold them on it?
I just came from Bald Head Island in NC. Homes are at or near sea level on the ocean side with just sand dunes separating them from the sea. Next hurricane through there and it’ll all be gone.
@pvonhellermannn This is happening in Southern California as well. The Palos Verdes peninsula and south to San Diego has huge numbers of very expensive houses. The cliffs they rest on are succumbing to physics. The residents and politicians seem to think that physics will be stopped by taxpayer money.
@pvonhellermannn
If you're able to afford a house in that location, you are most likely a major contributor to global warming through your investment portfolio, if not directly.
In Sydney's lower north shore, a haven for rich white entitled anglo saxons, a similar thing happened.
@pvonhellermannn One is reminded of the premise of Robert Louis Stevenson's short story "The Bottle Imp":
"The protagonist buys a bottle with an imp inside that grants wishes. However, the bottle is cursed; if the holder dies bearing it, his or her soul is forfeit to hell. ... The bottle must be sold, for cash, at a loss."
Because that's basically dealing with Customers from Hell. How can do build proper dikes for a people who think they can deal with sea level rise by denying its existence?
@Lyle@fishidwardrobe@pvonhellermannn We Dutch spend millions per year to keep our coast where it is supposed to be staying (we drew a line). We add around 10 million m3 every year along the coast.
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