It's always so illuminating when economists talk about climate collapse, in much the way it's really useful to get a hairdresser's opinion on how to choose the best possible choice of chemotherapy so as to minimize hair loss in the patient.
This article is not about solutions to climate collapse, it is about infrastructure I. General and how there are so many many many roadblocks to any new infrastructure, which the author show as important by using a climate related infra project as its subject. EIR as nimby-weapon is nothing new…
The argument here is that the climate crisis is bigger than a few endangered species. The other side of it, though, is that if you're destroying important chunks of the environment, how much of it are you really saving? There are other ways to do green power generation than this one hydro project. Maybe it's really not worth smashing though all these endangered species' habitats.
We aren't trying to prevent climate change to save the environment, we're doing it to save the buildings and infrastructure we've built along coastlines, to prevent dangerous impacts to global agricultural output, and to stop tropical diseases from spreading further from the tropics.
Plenty of wildlife will also benefit if we limit/stop anthropogenic climate change, but that's just an added bonus. The threat they face isn't what makes climate change a crisis.
I'd be concerned that a several degree change in ocean temperatures (especially in shallows) could have a significant impact on large parts of our ecosystem.
It's a worthwhile topic for discussion, and you got the point across succinctly, I feel like you'd be doing the author a solid if you did some copyediting
So many of todays’ issues like the housing crisis are directly caused by prevailing NIMBY attitudes e.g multi-family housing zoning laws. Unfortunately, the cruel irony is people who want real change often through their own cognitive dissonance vote or act against their best interests when the “M” in NIMBY turns out to be themselves.
> The US, and New York State in particular, are embarked on a decarbonization agenda. Canada has a lot of hydropower to spare, which emits on CO2. (Though large hydropower is rather hilariously not deemed "renewable" by California, among others.) All we need is a big extension cord from Canada down to NYC, and we can save the climate, right?
This reads like the disjointed stream of consciousness of a drunk person watching the evening news.
