
Boston’s Seaport District may be a testing ground for climate change adaptation - oftenwrong
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-18/boston-built-a-new-waterfront-just-in-time-for-the-apocalypse
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jpm_sd
“We’re proposing infrastructure that we believe will protect the city,” says
Richard McGuinness, a senior planning official working on Boston’s response to
climate change. “How do you retreat from billions of dollars of assets? It’s
not practical.” [...] The city still needs to raise as much as $1 billion for
Seaport defenses.

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Having lived in the city during the Big Dig, I'd wager that's a lowball
estimate.

~~~
ptah
bureaucrats tend to underestimate costs and durations of projects

~~~
lkbm
Not just bureaucrats. People generally -- it's the Planning Fallacy.

If you ask someone how long something will take, they tend to give roughly the
same answer as if you asked how long it will take in the best case scenario.
Estimating project time is _hard_ , and people are bad at it in general.

The best method seems to be to instead ask "How long did the most similar
project you've done take?" but that does require the estimator to have done a
somewhat comparable project.

~~~
lancesells
I typically double my estimate for how long something will take me both in
personal and work-related projects. This allows for all manner of unknowns to
happen and seems to be more realistic.

~~~
Balgair
For me and with projects that I have worked on, I take the estimate, double
it, and then move it up a time unit. So 1 day becomes 2 weeks. 3 weeks becomes
6 months. 1 hour becomes 2 days. 1 year becomes 2 decades.

Is this overkill? Oh heck yes. But it seems to really put a fire into me to
make sure that these things run smoother.

~~~
brlewis
This is not always overkill. In fact it's sometimes insufficient. Breaking
down a project into tasks and doing the math is the only hope for any
semblance of accuracy, and even that doesn't always work.

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ilamont
I can't read the article, but last year I saw a presentation by a local Boston
architect demonstrating how her firm uses 3D modeling software to simulate
flooding scenarios not just for the client's building but the surrounding
neighborhood. I think that's typical for most projects near sea level
nowadays.

For photos and video of Seaport flooding:
[https://expo.masslive.com/erry-2018/06/b4cac6d9df3737/is_it_...](https://expo.masslive.com/erry-2018/06/b4cac6d9df3737/is_it_smart_to_invest_in_bosto.html)

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akshayB
With water levels going up and climate change patterns, I find it counter
intuitive that lot of luxury/premium properties are built close of water. This
not only results into higher insurance rates on these properties but in-case
of any natural disaster premiums of regular properties around the area would
also take a hit because someone decided to construct a fancy build right next
to waterfront.

~~~
bluGill
Luxury/premium properties make the most sense actually: they are not expected
to last. When someone spends 200k on a normal 4 bedroom house they expect to
live in that house more or less as is for a long time (they often move sooner
and may have plans for minor remodeling but no major changes are expected
because they can't be afforded). When someone spends $3 million on a large
mansion as soon as the ink is dry they call the bulldozer operator (who is
already parked outside) to start knocking it down so they can build the
mansion they want. In short they are buying location and the cost of the
building is a rounding error.

If the ocean goes up - well they just build higher, it isn't a significant
expense.

~~~
thehoff
Some of these luxury properties are condos in already very tall buildings (see
South Florida for this).

And what happens when the first floor of your building is now under water?
Sure your 30th floor condo is safe but is it really practical to live there at
that point?

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maxxxxx
Not an expert but I highly doubt they are building them so they can be used
with them first level underwater. I am pretty sure such a building is a
complete loss.

~~~
jpindar
In my neighborhood (New England coast) there are a number of buildings that
are built on pillars, with the area underneath used for parking. Sometimes
there are nonloadbearing wall panels installed around them to give some
weather protection, sometimes not. They're meant to survive storms, and I
think at least some of them could be used if the water was permanently at
today's storm surge levels.

Most of these buildings were built that way from the start, but at least one
on my street was raised on jacks while pillars were put underneath. I wish I'd
thought to take pictures of the process.

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adrianN
Perhaps these cities should raise money to convince the US government that
climate change is manmade and a real threat and urgent, massive action is
needed to prevent it from becoming even worse. A few billion here and there
for lobbying might in the end be cheaper than building ever higher berms.

~~~
AbrahamParangi
I suspect this is an unpopular opinion but I think the idea that we'll stop
climate change with global collective action is just wildly contrary to how
human beings work at that scale.

Unless we get lucky with some natural carbon negative feedback loop, we're
probably stuck engineering our way through it. Whether with climate
engineering (unlikely), or just muddling through (very likely).

~~~
adrianN
If, say, the US or the EU set up a proper carbon tax that is also levied on
imports, the rest of the world would probably follow suit.

~~~
ovi256
Broke: import tariffs motivated by short-termist trade war one-upmanship and
bigotism.

Woke: import tarrifs motivated by long-termist climate change reduction.

We swear they're not the same thing so they can't have similar effects! This
time it _will_ be different and those unenlightened non-Westerns will listen
to our thought leadership!

~~~
adrianN
When the US puts import tariffs on foreign cars for being foreign, there is
nothing the other party can do other than putting up their own tariffs in
retaliation. If the US puts import tariffs on the embodied carbon emissions of
foreign cars, the foreign party can join the carbon tax scheme to get around
the tariffs. That seems like an important difference to me, but I'm not an
economist. Better economists than me seem to also support a carbon tax or
other forms of carbon pricing like cap&trade.

~~~
mechagodzilla
Exactly - with a carbon tax, the importing country says "The carbon emissions
embodied in this product are going to be taxed, we can collect the money or
you can, it's up to you." Will that result in a general reduction in the
consumption of carbon-intense goods? Of course! They're now more expensive,
that's the whole point.

With an import tariff on foreign goods (for, as you described, being foreign),
it makes foreign goods more expensive (with nothing the other country can do
about it), so it will lead to a reduction in the consumption of foreign-
produced goods (whether or not that is a benefit to you as an American is
probably heavily dependent on what you consume and what you produce).

~~~
ovi256
For the imported good buyer, there's a price increase. It does not matter to
him who collects the tax that increased the price - an import tariff imposing
government or an enlightened carbon-scheme participating foreign government.
This will reduce demand like any other dead weight loss, and yes, depress
economic activity, employement and thus wages.

BTW, most countries already have carbon taxes on fossil fuels, they _just don
't bother calling them that_. They call them fuel excise taxes. Around 60% of
the price a consumer pays for fuel in the EU is fuel excise tax, in other
words, a 150% tax. In the US, it's only about 20%. Here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_tax#China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_tax#China)

What's your estimated impact of this already huge tax ? Think about the demand
elasticity of fuel and energy products.

~~~
adrianN
If you read the literature about carbon taxes, virtually everybody recommends
a scheme where the carbon tax is paid out again, so there is no effective
price increase for the consumer if they have an average carbon consumption,
but everybody still has an incentive to switch to less carbon intensive
alternatives.

~~~
ovi256
Right, that would be different, but I feel that's the kind of detail that gets
lost in translation when it becomes government policy. Given the average EU
government greatly enjoys the already 100%+ tax on fuel they have, why would
they bother with this complicated, not even revenue raising scheme ? They can
just crank that 100% lever to 200% or whatever.

Can any of the economists proposing this scheme ask for a guarantee of any
kind that if they help push this scheme, details like this one won't get left
out ? Of course not. They'll cheerlead it and then blame the government,
forgetting their complicity.

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rb808
These big cities will be fine. They can easily afford to protect from rising
flood waters. Its the smaller cities and towns all down the coasts that can't
afford to do anything or are literally built on sand. Cities in poor countries
are going to have trouble too, but that is a different issue.

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thrower123
Most of modern Boston is built on trash dumped into the harbor to make more
land, so I can imagine that they are going to have some issues with any sea
rises.

[https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/06/Boston-
landfill-...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/06/Boston-landfill-
maps-history/)

One side-effect of all this land-filling is that it is really difficult to get
a feel for what the place would have been like historically. For instance, the
campaigns of 1775 don't make a lot of sense if you are reading about them and
trying to look at a modern map.

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est31
An amazing talk by Bud Ris about the challenges Boston faces from climate
change:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MToNKd6RQhk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MToNKd6RQhk)

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r_klancer
Why does that video not have more views?

~~~
est31
Sad but popular != quality. I found the talk very informative.

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ptah
that's one way to fuel economic growth :)

