Senator Schumer (far left) and Congressman Nadler (far right) at the mouth of a flooded Brooklyn Battery Tunnel—the kind of damage both hope to prevent. (Jay Fine/MTA)

There has been a big debate in (local) government about how best to respond to Hurricane Sandy going forward. There is the governor's camp, which argues for redesigning great swaths of the city and state's built environment; and the mayor's camp, which both before the storm and after, argued that the city could never really protect itself from these kinds of disasters, so it was up to citizenry to protect themselves. The city would help with evacuations and the like, but really, don't build near the sea or count of some fancy new sea gates to protect you, the mayor insisted.

During the recovery, The Observer would ask major officials into which camp they fell. Both Senator Charles Schumer and Congressman Jerry Nadler (who represents much of the formerly flooded downtown Manhattan) put themselves in the camp of doing more, building more, protecting more.

"For the future, we have to look into it," Senator Schumer said.

He stressed that if anything, the storm serves as a wake-up call to action for investments and practices the city should have been undertaking already anyway because of sea rise due to climate change. "We were going to have look into it anyway, with the waters rising and climate change," the senator said. If anything, Sandy may have saved us from something far worse in the future, the quiet, creeping tides that go largely unnoticed.

The senator did not have any specific ideas on what might be good measures to undertake, but he seemed eager to get into the discussion. "We’re just at the beginning of thinking about it," the senator said, saying that the clean-up efforts would have to come first. He did say he would work to wrangle money from the federal government to help pay for any solutions the city comes up with. After all, if the Army Corps and the treasury help keep up the flood protections surrounding New Orleans and the rest of the Mississippi Delta, why not do the same for new York Harbor?

Congressman Nadler, on the other hand, had plenty of recommendations. He is a bit of a waterfront infrastructure wonk, after all, having called for trans-harbor freight rail and other interesting investments in the past.

"Certainly Lower Manhattan, we should have much higher seawalls," Mr. Nadler said. "We had a 14-foot surge. Why couldn’t you have a wall around Lower Manhattan that went up 14 feet? I don’t know how much it would cost, but it would be a heck of a lot cheaper than the cost of a flood." He said the gates could even be retractable, but something like them seemed prudent.

Utilities were another major concern. "The Con Ed station at 14th Street, that cut off a quarter of a million people," the congressman said. "That, and other facilities like it, should be waterproof. They should not be flood-able. You could insulate them. They could be made like fortresses. Given how valuable they are, how crucial they are to lives and fortunes, they should be."

Mr. Nadler also echoed a now-familiar recommendation, to build some serious infrastructure around the harbor to help protect from other storms. "To me, we should consider to protect the city through the kinds of storm gates that Rotterdam and London have," he said. The congressman even rattled of what should be built where, such as gates and sluices at Perth Amboy, Hell's Gate and the Verrazano Narrows, thus cutting off much of the harbor from a storm surge.

"It's big, but you could do it," Mr. Nadler said. He also acknowledged the considerable, but worthwhile costs of such an investment. "The cost estimate for that is 10, 12 billion dollars, but to two or three of these storms, even one of them, is more than that," he said. Indeed, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli calculated an $18 million cost to the city as a result of the storm, but that includes the entire five boroughs, much of which would not be protected by these fancy new sea gates.

This is a problem Mr. Nadler fully acknowledges. "The problem is it wouldn’t protect Coney Island, Sea Gate or Jamaica Bay," he said. "It would protect downtown, Brooklyn, Hoboken and Jersey, but it’s not the answer to everything. It’s something to consider seriously, but unfortunately, given the geography of the city, there’s no way you do a storm gate that would give you broader protection.

But he still thinks it would be worth pursuing. "I don’t think it’s right to dismiss these proposals off hand," Mr. Nadler said. "They should be studied carefully, and a lot of them should be done. Maybe the storm gates, maybe not, but certainly Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn would be much better protected. And our electrical facilities. Also our subways." By protecting these critical pieces of infrastructure through a large project like sea gates, it might save the government money on other, smaller investments that would then not be necessary.

Whatever winds up being the appropriate solution, big or small, Mr. Nadler agreed with Mr. Schumer that something must be done.

"People say the worst case scenario could happen—it just did, almost," the congressman said. "It could have been a little worse. But people after Irene said, oh, all the hype, it didn’t happen. It just did. Now you have to look at all these proposals and realize these kinds of things can happen, especially with climate changes, the seas are getting warmer, it means there’s more energy for these, there’s going to be higher waves, harsher storms, more often.

:We have to protect ourselves. Things that weren’t practical in terms of the investment, now they will be."

Coming soon to a sea level near you: Iceland's melting glaciers. From Chasing Ice.

“Wow. We live in a horror movie,” my husband opined one morning not long ago. He was reading an article about the melting of the Arctic tundra releasing massive bubbles of methane gas into the atmosphere, which in turn causes more melting, which in turn causes global warming, which in turn creates monster storms that threaten to end civilization as we know it.

I love scary movies, the creepier the better. But this Halloween season, they’re bleeding off the screen and into real life.

Can we please turn it off now?

Actually, no, we cannot.

A week ago, I was invited to the premiere of a deeply alarming documentary called Chasing Ice. It follows the work and adventures of a National Geographic photographer named James Balog in his endeavor to document, with time-lapse photography, the epic melting of the Arctic glaciers, a melting that is filling the world’s seas and atmosphere with water that has nowhere to go but onto land. 

Mr. Balog became an ice aficionado in 2005, when The New Yorker sent him to document the frozen landscape in Iceland. A year later, National Geographic sent him to document melt. He was stunned by the speed of the changes he witnessed and began documenting the retreating ice on three continents.

With the help of National Geographic and other funders, he created the Extreme Ice Survey, which he calls an “art meets science” project that also involved some serious adventure travel. With a small team of graduate students, he rappelled and hiked up ice walls from Greenland to Everest to Alaska, installing 27 time lapse cameras that are still recording images every half hour.

The cameras, currently at 18 locations, yield up to 8,000 images a year.

Arranged as time-lapse video, the shrinking of the mountains of ice in the northern hemisphere and the higher altitudes of our planet is plain to see, and absolutely alarming.

One of the most shocking images in the film was captured by two young members of Mr. Balog’s team who were flown in and dropped on the edge of an unstable Greenland glacier. After two weeks freezing their asses off in a lonely tent in the middle of a windy, white landscape, they were rewarded, first with a thunderous noise, and then by witnessing and videotaping the epic collapse of an edge of an Arctic glacier bigger that the island of Manhattan.

That’s a lot of water, flowing into the world’s oceans, and it’s bad news for cities like New York.

It also is not news. In 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report predicting that by the year 2100, the sea will rise 20 inches both from “thermal expansion” (warming) of the ocean and from melting glaciers and ice sheets. That rise has huge implications for coastal cities.

To view this movie is to witness epic amounts of ice turning into billions of gallons of water, in real time. It is impossible to watch it and not wonder how islands on the edge of the ocean, like Manhattan, are not already underwater.

The issue of climate change has been utterly ignored by the candidates, both of whom won’t challenge the status quo on it.

Because it’s happening so slowly, mostly out of sight and with no apparent solution, it’s been almost impossible to get emotional about global warming. Until Sandy.

The moment it hit me was a few months back, reading a Times article that (again) predicted that the city of New York will be mostly underwater in 100 years. I was sitting in an airport, and suddenly I burst into tears. Our city will be either gone or utterly transformed by the time my grandchildren are adults. My kids will be among the last generation to remember this great city.

How is it that everyone isn’t crying over this?

Chasing Ice humanizes an enormous and incomprehensible geological phenomenon with time-lapse images, putting unusually rapid geological change on breathtaking display. It also personalizes the story by focusing on one man, the photographer whose commitment to the project involved repeated knee surgery so he could keep scrabbling up icy inclines to check his cameras, and the technological difficulties of building and maintaining photo gear in the harshest conditions on the planet.

The film also has an emotional component, insofar as Mr. Balog, who attended the premiere, is shown with tears in his eyes talking about what his findings mean for his—and everyone’s—children.

“This is the memory of the landscape,” he said of the film. “That landscape is gone; it may never be seen again in the history of civilization.”

Mr. Balog and the filmmakers are among the vast majority of world scientists who are convinced that the sudden warming of the world is caused by human burning of fossil fuels. Their graphs are pretty hard to argue with. Average world temperatures have risen in a parallel line with tonnage of burned fossil fuels since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

There are still a small number of scientists–hacks on the Koch brothers’ payroll or simply contrarian cranks—who argue that the historic melt underway is unrelated to fossil fuel burning. They’ve managed to portray climate change “believers” as tree-hugging outliers.

These so called “deniers” give just enough cover to the drill baby drill crowd on the right, but also allow our own progressive president to remain silent and to promote the continued extraction of these fuels from American soil.

The near-total silence from our leaders on this vital issue in the wake of the storm is truly scary. Gov. Cuomo mentioned climate change on WNYC Tuesday, but Chris Christie has so far only given it lip service without acting on his convictions. Last year, he said that “climate change is real” and “impacting our state” while pulling New Jersey out of a regional greenhouse gas initiative.

The fate of the planet is a political football. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 85 percent of Democrats believe there is evidence of global warming, while 48 percent of Republicans say the same. Some of them might be waking up. Monday night, while tidal storm surges were inundating the streets of America’s greatest city, Meghan McCain was tweeting, “So are we still going to go with climate change not being real, fellow Republicans?”

I hate to sound like a torture-loving W. administration lawyer, but maybe the “deniers” should be forced to watch Chasing Ice with their eyelids held open, like Alex in Clockwork Orange, until they get it. And then maybe someone can invent some spine juice for our leaders, so that they begin talking about making some hard changes in our habits.

In the meantime, what to tell the kids about the real-life geological bogeyman scientists are crediting with this awful storm?

Our own little darlings watched Sandy blow past with interest but strangely little alarm as lashes of wind, water and eerie electrical transformer explosions filled the night sky. They laughingly went along with packing the go-bag. This is their world: they’ve been waiting for the zombie apocalypse since they learned to read.

The dawn after the howling black night, we found ourselves among the fortunate high-ground survivors. But we’re still shell-shocked.

Halloween night, we’ll be hunkered down with the candy corn and a stiff drink, freaking ourselves out while watching the scariest movie ever, the original Swedish version of Let the Right One In, about a child vampire.

The great thing about it: it’s probably not real.

editorial@observer.com

Since 1985, the Gallup poll has asked survey respondents to trade off environmental protection against economic growth. This past spring, for the first time, more people chose economic growth than environmental protection. (See Gallup graph) The data is an accurate reflection of public opinion, and there is no question that conventional politics frames the environment as an impediment to economic growth. However, in my view, this survey question taps into opinion that is based on a false premise.  The survey question not only assumes that environment and economic growth are separate concepts, but also that by focusing on one you must sacrifice the other. During an economic downturn, many trade-off questions trading just about anything against economic growth will result in a preference for economic growth. Still, this question needs to be updated and asked in a different way. The problem with the existing survey question is that as long as we draw our wealth and sustenance from the natural environment (you know, things like food, air and water), economic growth will depend on environmental quality. While our political dialogue is often built around the assumption that we can trade off one against the other, we really can’t. No biosphere = no wealth.

It is true that businesses in China and other parts of the world have generated economic growth and short-run profits by disregarding development’s impact on the air, land and water.  As we discovered in the United States, this approach is a short-run strategy. Unfortunately, the costs of clean-up will eventually need to be paid. Every time you pay your water bill, you are paying for environmental clean up here in New York. While survey researchers love the longitudinal data they can obtain when they ask the same question every year, it is not clear that people are really responding to the same question today that they answered in 1985. The issue of economic sustainability and the green economy was not discussed or understood back in the mid 1980’s.  In 2009, companies as diverse as Wal-Mart and Apple Computer have integrated green principles into their business planning. The idea of sustainable business practice was virtually unknown in 1985. Gallup’s web site provides a clear picture of public response to this trade off question from 1985-2009 (See the graph in the slide show above). 
 
It would be interesting to see what might happen if Gallup’s survey asked respondents if they believed that economic growth and environmental quality were incompatible or interconnected. It would also be interesting to see what might happen if the response of “equal priority” was given as a potential response to Gallup’s survey question. Since 1985, this answer is only coded when volunteered by the respondent. Although the question is attempting to force respondents to choose between environmental protection and economic growth, there are clearly some people who do not accept the environment-growth trade-off.  Such forced trade-offs questions are a staple of survey research methodology, but the trade-off must be meaningful for the technique to be an effective measure of real public opinion. In this case, I am not sure we know what opinion we are measuring.

Perceptions of Global Warming

Another widely reported environmental opinion indicator is Gallup’s measure of perceptions of global warming. Gallup’s question measuring perceptions of global warming asks the public to judge news coverage of the issue. The question does not ask the respondent if they believe that global warming is a serious issue. Rather,  it asks them to do two things: First, think about climate coverage in the news media; Second, judge whether or not global warming’s seriousness has been exaggerated by media coverage. If I were being surveyed, I’m not sure what I would say. I think that global warming is a serious issue, but I believe that everything in the media is exaggerated. I think that exaggeration is the media’s middle name. So I might be seen as a “climate skeptic” in this survey, because I think that the seriousness of the issue of global warming is exaggerated by the media. Does the question asked by Gallup below, measure attitudes toward global warming, or attitudes toward the media?  

The data indicates a decline in the percentage of people who believe that the media reports on the seriousness of global warming are correct, and it points to an increase in the percentage of people who think that the seriousness of the issue is exaggerated in the media.

Gallup is, of course, quite expert in measuring public opinion, and the measures in their surveys are uniformly reliable and valid. However their environmental surveys seem to be almost routinely misinterpreted by the media. Gallup’s own analyses tend to be quite precise and accurate. For example, their analysis of the question on the seriousness of global warming focuses on news coverage of the issue, and they report that most Americans accept the facts of global warming. Unfortunately, there are less objective observers.  For example, on August 10th, The  Drudge Report provided the following interpretation in their teaser:
“GALLUP: Americans Growing More Skeptical Of Global Warming...” 

Public Support for Sustainable Development

In fact, the data indicates a fair amount of consistency in the structure of public opinion on environmental protection. While issues like global warming can be difficult for people to see and feel, the American public knows it’s a real issue and is concerned about it.  Concern for more visible pollution is even stronger, with over 80% of the American public routinely expressing concern about air, water and toxic pollution.  

The media seems to be entranced by the idea that the public’s support for environmental protection declines whenever the economy falters. Some parts of the media can’t seem to shed the idea that the environment is a John Kerry, wind-surf and brie effete liberal luxury item. The fact is that most polling, including Gallup’s own, reports consistent public support for environmental protection. We are also seeing growing signs that the public understands the connection between environmental protection and economic sustainability. President Obama has put this idea at the center of his plan to revitalize the national economy, and polling indicates widespread acceptance of the policy of “green economic growth”.

I am not arguing that every effort to protect the environment adds to our wealth and creates jobs. But the argument that one must always be prepared to trade off environment for growth is outmoded. Mayor Bloomberg’s PlanNYC 2030 considers clean air, water, energy efficiency and access to park land as preconditions for the city’s continued economic growth.  A clean city provides a high quality of life and attracts new economic activity. The Mayor’s plan for New York’s future rejects the old environment-growth trade off, and so should the rest of us.

•    Reductions in greenhouse gases by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050 through a cap-and-trade program.
•    Electric utilities to produce at least 12 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020.
•    Reductions in greenhouse gasses from new coal-fired power plants.
•    New buildings to be 30 percent more energy-efficient by 2012 and 50 percent more efficient by 2016.

The bill also authorizes $1 billion a year to develop carbon-capture and storage technologies.

The Republicans are ferociously propagandizing this bill as a job-killing tax that raises the cost of energy and will destroy the American economy. The close vote of 219 to 212 in the House indicates that a lot of people are buying this tired argument. In the interests of political cover, 40 Democrats in marginal districts were allowed to join with the all-but-nine Republicans who opposed this bill. My gut tells me that this inside-the-beltway mind-set is misreading American public opinion and that a "no" vote on this bill will eventually come to be a badge of dishonor, rather than the safe vote some representatives believe it to be.

The American public understands that global warming is a real problem and they also understand the need to develop sources of energy that do not require fossil fuels. They are correctly worried that we do not know how to build a green economy and that the high costs of shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energy will be difficult for our economy to handle. But the problem with the same old anti-tax mantra that is coming from the same old political dinosaurs is that it misses the point. People get the idea that we need to invest in new and cleaner forms of energy. The average person knows that we can’t maintain the status quo. They may not like it, but no one thinks the transition to a sustainable economy can be done for free. It will require investment.

We need to accelerate the pace of development of renewable energy. We need to force the development of the technology of carbon capture and storage. This can’t be done as long as fossil fuels are as inexpensive as they are today. If capital is to flow into these new technologies, government must help ensure that the full price of the use of the fuel is included in the price that people pay for energy. The environmental impact of fossil fuel use creates costs that all of us must pay. It costs money to remedy pollution, ecosystem destruction and global warming. The cap-and-trade regulatory scheme provides a way to create a dollar value to pay for these costs. A direct carbon tax is another, probably simpler way of doing the same thing. In any case, by raising the price of fossil fuels we make renewable energy more cost competitive.

In the long run, fossil fuel prices will rise. Fossil fuels are finite, and as they get scarce and harder to dig up, they will get more expensive. For all practical purposes, solar power is infinite. Eventually, as we get smarter about how we capture and store solar energy, it will come down in price. Unfortunately, eventually takes too long. We have lots of fossil fuels left on earth, and climate change is already under way.

Many people do not like this new law. Some environmentalists feel it does not go far enough. Some business lobbyists think it goes too far.  Like all legislation in the American political system it represents a compromise. To build support among moderates, some of the original provisions of the bill had to be watered down. This is typical lawmaking in our political process, and is of little concern. As I have written elsewhere, public policy does not attempt to solve problems, but to make them less bad. For example, homicide is down dramatically in New York City—from a high of over 2,000 per year in the 1990's to around 500 last year. The problem is less bad, but is far from "solved." The families of those murdered continue to suffer. Social security provides a second example: When the original Social Security Act was passed in the 1930s, many important provisions were omitted and then added in the next half-century or so. Lots of people were left out and lots of important benefits couldn’t generate a political majority at first. It took until the 1960s to add health care for seniors when Medicare was finally enacted. It took until the 21st century to add prescription drug coverage to Medicare. Environmental legislation typically follows the same incremental path. That is why it is so critical that we take the first step.

It is important to stand back and understand the importance of this step. In 2007, Senators Lieberman and McCain fell a few dozen votes short in their effort to enact national climate policy.  The recent vote in the House was close, and victory was far from automatic, but it was achieved. The difference was Democratic control of the Congress and the effective leadership of President Barack Obama. Obama, Representative Henry Waxman and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went all-out to secure this win. While the battle in the Senate will be equally difficult, a similar dynamic will be in place. The success of the president’s agenda depends on this win. The survival of Democratic majorities in Congress depends on the success of this agenda and the president, who is pushing it. If these senators and representatives hope to be returned to power in 2010 and 2012, they cannot afford for Obama to fail. Fortunately for them, Obama’s agenda is doing pretty well. When seen alongside victories on the stimulus bill and the budget, this climate and energy bill must be seen as another sign of a presidency that is beginning to show signs of success. In the era of the endless news cycle and infinite media sources, this is a small miracle.

Broder seems surprised that the Obama administration is moving carefully to build consensus behind new policies aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions. He identifies actions the administration has taken to move climate change forward and then seems perplexed when it pauses to reflect and build consensus. I’m not sure why anyone would expect President Obama to be aggressive and reckless when everything about him seems persistent and careful.

The transition to a “green” economy will take a long time, and it will require determined, constant and strategic effort. Rapid, risky and symbolic actions may make dramatic news stories, but they are not going to do much to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

The electricity that allows me to sit at my computer and write these words is wholly dependent on the fossil fuels that power New York City’s electrical grid. The still fragile economy, which saw the shedding of nearly 700,000 jobs in the United States last month, is fueled in the same way. It is clear to me and an increasing number of world leaders that this is not a sustainable energy future. What is less clear is how we get to one that is.

The policy prescription is obvious in general, but complex when you get to specifics. Think about congestion pricing. It is clear to many of us that when there are too many vehicles on the streets of lower Manhattan to move freely, someone needs to figure out a way to reduce traffic. But how do you do that without destroying the vibrancy of the local economy?

If you set a price on bringing a vehicle downtown, what is the correct price? In addition to policies that “push” cars off the street, you also want to make mass transit convenient and comfortable to “pull” people down underground as well. 

To make this real we need to answer specific questions. How much do we charge as a congestion fee? How much do we invest in new transit infrastructure and technology? No one really knows. We need specific answers, but do not have enough experience and hard data to do more than guess. The same is true of the transition to a fossil-fuel-free economy. What should it cost to emit carbon dioxide? How much should we invest in new energy technology? How do we push the economy off fossil fuels and pull it toward renewable energy?

There is no question that we need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. There is also no question that we will not do this quickly enough to stop global warming. So we will also need to sequester and store the carbon dioxide we have already emitted and will continue to emit. We will need both a regulation limiting carbon emissions as well as a tax on the carbon dioxide that is emitted.  But how quickly can we reduce emissions?  What is technologically and economically feasible? What are the positive economic impacts that will come from the technological development of alternative energy and increased energy efficiency? What are the negative economic impacts of the increased price of energy that will come from a tax on carbon and/or a cap on carbon dioxide emissions? The simple answer to both of these questions is that no one knows.

I have seen plenty of compelling analyses based on many sophisticated mathematical models of what this energy future should look like. While these models help us understand the complexity of the issue, none can predict the future. We are going to have to do this the old fashioned way – through trial and error.  We will end up formulating climate policy the same way we have developed all the other environmental policies we have set to date. We will start with less stringent standards than the ones we will eventually adopt.

As Broder’s piece indicates, The Waxman-Markey climate bill, which I wrote about in an earlier piece, provides an aggressive approach that changes the political equation and allows the Obama administration to play the role of climate moderate. We’ve seen this approach before. In building a consensus approach, the White House can point to the Waxman proposal and tell industry insiders that if they don’t play ball the law will end up even more extreme.

During the debate leading to the 1970 Clean Air Act, then-Senator Gaylord Nelson proposed banning the internal combustion engine. Suddenly the catalytic converter seemed a lot more technologically feasible to auto industry lobbyists.  The climate issue will follow the same well-worn path to environmental regulation we have seen before. It will be made more complicated by the international dimension of the issue, but the general pattern will look the same.

From my perspective, the key issue is to start this trial and error process as quickly as possible. Let’s avoid the symbolic debate over the level of reductions we will achieve in 2050. Let’s focus on what we can do by 2010 and 2012. Let’s get started.

Watching the Obama Administration’s “green team” in action is inspiring. In a very short period of time, these folks have revitalized our environmental agenda. They are doing it with words and with deeds. While there is plenty of rhetoric and lots of symbolic action, there is also significant and important activity underway at the ground level.  Taken together, we are seeing a rapid repudiation of the Bush environmental legacy, along with the reversal of many of the Bush era’s environmental policies. 

On March 10, 2009 EPA took an important positive step under the Clean Air Act to begin the regulation of greenhouse gasses. At long last the U.S. government proposed a national system for reporting emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses.  According to EPA estimates, about 13,000 large facilities produce over 80% of the nation’s greenhouse gasses and those facilities are covered by the proposed regulation. Most of the information we have about the concentration of greenhouse gasses are estimates based on computer models.  This new rule starts the process of collecting detailed information on emissions, measured at the actual source of those emissions.  In order to implement policies to control and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we need detailed information on who emits these gases and how much they generate.  We need to learn to collect, report, analyze and verify real data on actual emissions.

Lisa Jackson, EPA’s new Administrator, acknowledged the importance of this proposed  rule and observed that: “Our efforts to confront climate change must be guided by the best possible information. Through this new reporting, we will have comprehensive and accurate data about the production of greenhouse gases” 

The importance of this step cannot be minimized, and the absence of such a system made any discussion of reducing global warming little more than a symbolic exercise. The fact that EPA is getting serious about measuring the actual sources of greenhouse gas emissions tells you that they are finally serious about controlling them. A fundamental of management is that you can’t manage something unless you measure it. Measurement tells you if the actions taken by management are making things better or worse.  You can’t set a precise price on carbon unless you have real information on how much a source emits.

I know that some people find details like this boring and unexciting, but change in public policy always begins with ordinary, prosaic steps like this one. It’s important to understand that this is just a critical first step of a very long process. If EPA’s regulation survives the public comment period and is not delayed by the courts, the first reported data will not arrive until 2011. This means that regulations or carbon fees designed to reduce these emissions cannot be put into effect until these emission reports are submitted and verified.

While it will take a while to achieve reductions in greenhouse gasses, the first U.S. program to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act is now underway. While we  need a law that will focus specifically on global warming, and we also need an international agreement, this is a good place to start.  EPA often begins new areas of regulation by reinterpreting existing laws. Before there was a Federal Water Pollution Control Act in 1972, EPA began regulating water pollution through the creative use of the 1899 Rivers and Harbors Act.  Even though that law was designed to keep the ports clear for shipping, its language could also be used to regulate discharges of pollutants in waterways near major cities. (We’ll leave out the fact that the Republican Nixon Administration focused its early enforcement efforts on cities with Democratic Mayors!)

Solving the climate crisis will require a series of concerted actions on a variety of fronts: 

- We need to develop cost effective renewable energy technologies.

- We need to learn how to sequester and store the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere and the additional carbon to come. 

- Americans waste enormous amounts of energy-- so one of the easiest things we can do is become more efficient in our use of energy.

- The global warming now under way requires that here in New York City we adapt our infrastructure to minimize damage from flooding. 

- National and international law must be established to reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses.

- We need to learn how to set a price for carbon that reduces the use of fossil fuels and encourages renewable energy but does not stunt economic growth.

The idea that we should choose among these actions is absurd. We need to do all of it as soon as we can. However, in order to reduce global warming, we must develop an effective and accurate system for measuring this type of pollution. On March 10, 2009, the EPA took an important and long overdue first step in this process.  Elections really do have consequences. Fortunately.

Last week New York state began to back away from its important and historic participation in the agreement among the northeastern states to reduce greenhouse gasses. As New York Times' reporter Danny Hakim wrote March 5:

“At the urging of the energy industry, Gov. David A Paterson has agreed to reconsider a key rule New York adopted as part of a 10-state pact aimed at reducing the threat of global warming by cutting power plant emissions. Gov. David A. Paterson may alter regulations in which utilities buy or trade allowances to cover carbon dioxide emissions. Mr. Paterson appeared to overrule the State Department of Environmental Conservation in making the move, which would reopen state regulations to provide power plants leeway to release greater amounts of emissions at no additional cost. Administration officials said the governor was concerned the rule might unfairly burden the energy industry.”

While this is an absolutely inexplicable political move, it is also evidence of a poor understanding of the grave threat posed by global warming. It also means that unlike President Obama, Governor Paterson does not understand the connection of environmental protection to economic growth. Or perhaps he understands the connection, but like the most recent President Bush, has decided to pander to the energy industry for campaign contributions. Of course, the day after the Times' story, Erik Engquist reported in Craine’s New York Business that the Governor has made no decision on the issue. According to Engquist’s story: "On Friday his [Paterson’s] office sought to allay concerns. ‘We haven’t made any changes yet, and we haven’t even suggested any,’ said spokesman Morgan Hook. ‘The governor made a commitment to look at the regulations again if it’s determined that there’s a need to do so.’”

There is a disturbing pattern here in the clumsy way Governor Paterson approaches policy issues.  Perhaps his long years of service in the legislature has been poor preparation for the responsibilities of executive office. A state senator in the political minority can reconsider all the policy he wants to reconsider and it is no big deal. A governor has the power to rewrite the rules, and therefore when a governor says he is going to reconsider a rule, it is not a purely academic exercise—it means the policy might actually change.

Given the importance, visibility and symbolic nature of this issue, I truly cannot understand why the governor has re-opened it. Didn’t someone on his staff mention that he would expose himself to an onslaught of political attack from the environmental community? Didn’t anyone mention to him that the policy action on global warming has now shifted to Washington DC, where a national cap and trade system of carbon limits and fees (a form of carbon tax) has already been proposed by our new President? In all likelihood, New York’s rules will be supplanted by national policy.  This was not an issue Paterson needed to take on. Even if he was inclined to pander to the energy industry, he could have easily said he was waiting to see what the federal government would do.

As the most recent Marist poll reports, the broad public has lost confidence in the governor. Paterson’s approval rating of 26% is the lowest for any governor since the Marist poll began state-wide surveying almost 30 years ago.  

While elected officials often come back from poor poll results, the good will and political support that Governor Paterson brought with him into office has now evaporated. Given his approach to the global warming issue, and his handling of Caroline Kennedy’s halting Senate bid, it is easy to see why.  What I find so puzzling is that David Paterson is a bright, talented and dedicated public servant. The state and nation are in the midst of the deepest financial crisis of our lifetime. We need a governor capable of rising to the occasion. That is not what we are getting.

Visitors to the site can choose one of seven transportation options (bus, car, hybrid car, taxi, subway/train, bike, walk) and calculate the daily carbon emissions of their commute. According to the site, a 10-mile train ride emits 5 pounds of carbon dioxide, while a car commute of the same distance emits 24.4 pounds.

In addition to calculating daily emissions, the site also has a few transportation factoids (did you know that one out of four transit trips in the U.S. is made in New York City?) and a neat little feature that shows car, SUV, hybrid car and taxi commuters how many trees they would have to plant to counterbalance their yearly commuter emissions. An SUV driver with a 10-mile commute would have to plant 46 trees annually to offset their carbon production.

Better start repenting (and planting).

At the moment, neither Senator Obama nor Senator McCain are taking as aggressive a position as Gore is taking. The energy industry doesn't know how to deal with this newest energy crisis. At the heart of the discussion is the impact of our current energy practices on our economic well-being and on national security.

Even a casual examination of the data tells us that our current energy path is not sustainable. Global warming from the use of fossil fuels has already arrived. Fossil fuels damage our environment and require importation from some parts of the world we would like to be less dependent on. While there is lots of fossil fuel left, it is a finite resource that will eventually be depleted. This is the moment to begin to move our economy away from fossil fuels. While some fear the costs of this transfer, I believe it is an opportunity that could strengthen the American economy.

Last Friday, the Texas state government approved a nearly $5 billion dollar project to build electrical transmission lines that would bring wind power generated in the western part of the state to Dallas, Houston and other major Texas towns.

This past Saturday the New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera wrote a piece on the commercialization of the electric car. He posed the central question: Are these cars "costly toys or a new era for drivers"?

Interestingly, the original cars were in fact little more than expensive toys when they were first developed. Then a manufacturing genius named Henry Ford figured out how to mass produce a relatively affordable car called the Model T-and the rest, as they say, is history. Nocera reports that battery technology now allows electric cars to go 200 miles between charges. Most people drive less than 50 miles a day. With gasoline approaching $5 a gallon, and the possibility that we could charge our cars from fossil fuel free power plants, perhaps there is a way to kick our relentless addiction to the internal combustion engine and the oil that fuels it.

Energy is at the heart of the environmental problem. It is also at the center of our suddenly collapsing economy. While oil alone did not cause the war in Iraq, no one can deny the connection between energy and our Mid-East policy. The war in Iraq has caused deficits which weakened our economy. Our need for foreign oil has fueled our trade deficit (excuse the pun). Solve the energy crisis and we no longer need OPEC's oil. Then we can stop sending our soldiers and our dollars to the Mid-East.

Everyone worries that the capital costs of transferring our energy infrastructure from oil, gas and coal to solar, geothermal and wind will simply cost too much. While it will redistribute economic power from old companies to new ones, it will almost certainly ensure that energy will cost less in the future than it does today. Lower cost energy can make our economy more productive and more competitive. Chaper energy allows higher priced labor to compete with lower priced labor.

The factor left out of the cost equation we often see is technological innovation. Our current energy system is getting old in a hurry. We need to stimulate rapid technological change. Computing power provides a useful example of rapid technological change. Think of the laptop you owned three years ago. Your current computer is faster, does more, and is probably no more expensive then that one. The cost of communication and information continues to come down. With investment, focus and ingenuity, we can create a new energy industry that would help our economy, protect our environment and create an incredibly powerful export industry. What do we need to do?

• Invest in university-based basic energy science and engineering
• Provide tax incentives for the private sector to innovate in non-fossil, non-nuclear energy technology
• Re-open the nation to immigration of scientists, experts and skilled workers
• Provide a regulatory environment that encourages sustainable development and environmental protection. In other words, get serious once again about government protecting the environment.

Many of us have been calling for a "moon-shot" type project to develop non-fossil fuel technology. But none of us are Nobel Prize winning former Vice Presidents who received more popular votes for President than anyone else did in the 2000 election. Al Gore once again has demonstrated bold and visionary leadership and deserves our admiration for giving public voice and attention to this critical issue.

The only borough that’s on the mainland of the North American continent is the Bronx; all the rest are islands or parts of islands. As the region’s economy has been transformed from industrial to post-industrial, and as sewage treatment has ended the role of rivers as the repository for untreated sewage, residential, park and commercial development has gravitated to the shore line. In the old days, we avoided waterfronts. Why do you think that Riverside Drive is a quarter of a mile from the Hudson River? It’s not really by the “side” of the river because as recently as a few decades ago, we dumped raw sewage directly into the Hudson. No one in their right mind would want to get very close to the Hudson River on a hot summer day. One benefit of federal water pollution laws is that sewage is now treated before it is released into our waterways, and rivers like the Hudson are clean enough today to live next to. The bike path along the river is now one of the great cycle paths of the city.

It is difficult to project how much the sea level will rise, but it’s definitely heading upward. Writing over a decade ago, in a prescient 1996 article in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Professor Rae Zimmerman of New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service estimated that the sea might rise by a half a foot by 2030. However, she recognized that the world would probably last longer than that and cited projections of sea-level rise that ranged from two and a half to three feet by the end of the 21st century.

Of course, we don’t need to wait for the end of the century to know what flooding can do. We already know the impact of a storm surge on the subway and on roads like the Bronx River, Hutchinson and Saw Mill River parkways. They become submerged and are often impassable in heavy rain. Sea-level rise will make these storm surges worse and will increase wear and tear on infrastructure.

Even if storms do not grow in intensity, as many experts on global warming believe will happen, the impact of storms will increase.

Transportation, schooling and production will be disrupted. Some of this disruption will simply be accepted. When the subways and highways are flooded, we will close them and either figure out a way around them or simply close the region down for business until the water goes away. When a blizzard comes, we all stay home and watch the snow fall, so I suppose we can always do the same thing when it rains.

Unless the damage is permanent and wrecks our homes, roads and subways we may do nothing to adapt to the impact of climate change on our infrastructure. If New Orleans could ignore its levees, why can't New York simply turn its back to the sea and hope for the best?

This is not to say that New York is as vulnerable as New Orleans. But we are vulnerable. Some of our government agencies recognize this problem.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has responded to the impact of flooding from nor’easters and constructed a dike and levee system that surrounds La Guardia airport. They have also undertaken floodgate construction beneath the Hudson River’s PATH commuter train tunnel. Of the 648 miles of subway track in New York City, 411 miles are underground. As Professor Zimmerman wrote back in 1996, “The system operates 343 pumping stations which remove an average of 15 million gallons of water a day accumulating from rainwater, high water tables and water main breaks.”

In addition to the subways, Zimmerman discuses a wide range of vulnerable infrastructure including solid waste transfer stations and sewage treatment plants that are located by the water.

The New York City Department of Environmental Protection (D.E.P.) and PlaNYC 2030 have been working on adaptation to climate change for a few years. In 2004, DEP began a Climate Change Task Force to work on adaptation to climate change. This was in part a response to an important study of the impact of climate change in this region that was completed back in 2001 and co-led by my Earth Institute and NASA colleague, Cynthia Rosenzweig, along with Rutgers Professor William D. Solecki. In its first progress report, PlaNYC announced the formation of a citywide intergovernmental Climate Change Adaptation Task Force to work on protecting our infrastructure from the risks posed by climate change.

Are we capable of adapting to climate change and investing in the infrastructure we need to prevent catastrophe? Well, to quote at least 20 well-known politicians, yes, and no.

If a huge and damaging flood comes suddenly and destroys billions of dollars of infrastructure, we are probably (excuse the pun) sunk. On the other hand if we get a few small, but painful, visible and easily understood examples of what may come, we might very well develop the political will to invest scarce capital in major infrastructure that could resist damage.

At its peak in World War II, nearly half the Gross National Product was spent by the government on national defense. Most healthy people contributed to the war effort. Many people who didn’t serve in the military worked in defense factories. While the invasion never got any closer than Hawaii, everyone could see the threat.

We also know how to invest in the future. Currently, New York City is nearing the end of a multidecade, multibillion-dollar project to build a third water tunnel to carry water from upstate. It is not a project designed to deal with a crisis of the moment, but to prevent a crisis in the future.

Hopefully, when we figure out what we need to build to prevent damage from sea level rise, we will make the necessary investment. Climate change is real and will require investment and sacrifice if we are to successfully adapt.

The right political leadership will make the threats posed by climate change just as clear now, and help form the political will to do something about it despite the cost. Hopefully, we haven’t forgotten how to act as a community.

I am grateful for the research assistance of Drew Foxman, a graduate student in Comparative and International Education at Columbia’s Teachers College.