climate change resilience

Folks in my complex spent time this morning cleaning the neighborhood/forest and I got to talk to the folks with the Tesla and chandelier. The gentleman thought cars driving themselves would eventually be very popular when people realized they could work or watch movies while stuck in the car. It seems that several companies are working on this so there is a lot of money behind the conviction that this is what people will want. 


In the afternoon I went off to the beach and met a young woman who got into photography as a freshman in high school. She is now a freshman in college and got her first jab today. She had a drone and showed me how she flew it. The software warns her when she is running out of battery or close to an area where it isn't legal to fly. In fact, she said it will refuse to fly where it is illegal! 


Very cool.


Climate change has begun. It used to be that whenever some terrible weather event would happen, some people would ask if it was climate change and scientists would say that you can't attribute one weather event to climate change. For the first time in my awareness, this changed in 2012.


We have more frequent, fiercer storms, more heat waves, and a wobbly jet stream. Either climate change has begun or we are having a whole lot of bad weather luck. Either way, it is trashing our infrastructure and we can either keep having expensive disasters or we can make the infrastructure capable of regularly dealing with what used to be 100 year events. 


I could not find an article that gave a good explanation of what is planned for this in the infrastructure plan. Maybe it is not that interesting, or maybe it is because it is not well defined. 


$50 billion to help protect electric grids, food systems, hospitals, and roads. Without details, it is looking for "protection from extreme wildfires, coastal resilience to sea-level rise and hurricanes, support for agricultural resources management..., and the protection and restoration of major land and water resources like Florida’s Everglades and the Great Lakes....." 


In 2019 I wrote an article that I dramatically titled, "Your air conditioning will not save you" in which I explained that AC won't save us from climate change because AC requires electricity and in heat waves we'll lose electricity. I thought it was a good article. My company published it but they gave it a less exciting and definitely less memorable title.