Prepared to adapt to climate change?

The United States recently conducted its first nation-wide survey on the public’s preparedness for, and perception of, climate change. Turns out a majority of people don’t care to spend their tax dollars to rebuild and protect the shoreline homes of others. “Big surprise,” says no one.

The survey was conducted by Stanford University and found that only a third of people supported residential relocation away from hazardous beach areas or erecting walls to protect against flooding. The cost of such redevelopment is estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. (After the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, the state of New Jersey received a $10 billion bailout!)

According to Stanford political science professor and director of the survey, Jon Korsnick, his is the first nation-wide poll aimed at gauging public opinion on society’s readiness to adapt to global warming.

The survey was comprised of 1,174 people, and was conducted online by GFK Custom Research. 62% of people favored heightening building codes to make new developments stormproof. However, 60% believed those individuals living on the coast should be responsible for fitting the bill, as opposed to levying a nation-wide income tax. In terms of specific solutions, about 80% said disaster relief should come from local property taxes. 47% believed the government should ban people from rebuilding their damaged homes and should be forced to relocate.
 
“(This) reflects the public’s fatalistic sense that it’s more realistic to just give up the beach than to try to save it when other storms in the future will just wash it away again,” said Korsnick. Why build a wall when the warmer the planet gets, the higher the waves will crash?

There are three main ways to protect coastlines against today’s climate-induced super storms. You can ‘hold the line’ with physical barriers, replenish the beach and add sand dunes, or simply move away from the beach altogether. As previously mentioned, most people seem to prefer the latter option.

Trillions of tourist dollars are at stake. People’s coastal lives are at stake. Should the government be able to tell a person where to live? Or do we, as citizens of a collective, have a social obligation to do what’s best for everyone, and chose where we live responsibly?

Whether people will have to give up their beautiful beach-fronts or not remains to be seen. In the meantime, while we debate how to protect ourselves against the damage we’ve already done, an equally important debate should be waged on our plans for the future of energy.

NRGLab wants to be a large part of the discussion. Better yet, they want to be a part of the solution. By developing a system of low-cost, carbon-free electricity production, NRGLab hopes to free us from our dependency on dirty oil. Eliminating carbon emissions will diminish the threat of super storms. Taxpayers won’t be stuck with the bill, either. Learn how affordable it can be to own an SH-box at nrglab.asia.

To view the study conducted by Stanford, visit: http://stanford.io/16kTvK.