Romney paused for laughter when he said that "President Obama has promised to stop the rise of the oceans". Our knee jerk reaction is to point to recent storms as the consequences of letting fossil fuel energy companies and jobs for coal miners deregulate our environmental policies. While whatever politicians are not as yet feeding at the Koch brothers trough are starting to feel the heat and begining to flirt with the idea that we indeed must take action now to deal with Climate Change what is there we can do really?
Despite our best refocused efforts even if we do commit to "real change" immediately Katrina and Sandy suggest mother nature may have the last laugh. For those living in adjacency to the cities of Atlantis whose houses have "in a single day and night sunk beneath the waves" its too late already. Obama might take action which will pay off In the long term but right now no sea wall, levee, flood gate, barrier island sand dune or other mechanism can prevent the oceans from responding to the carbon we have already placed in the atmosphere.
What we see happening on Staten Island is about to become the new normal for coastal populations and most likely will get increasingly bad at a faster and faster rate. Its a fact that globally 90% of our urban areas are located at river mouths because until the automobile came along historically rivers have served as the world's highways.
Because of our approaches to transportation, suburbs, and other regional urban planning many or most coastal cities are no longer nodal points which might be protected from the inundating floods of besieging oceans with high walls but rather have become strip cities like the Bos-Wash corridor. To protect our homes from rising sea levels we may need to move to higher ground.
It won't be easy to relocate inland, but where architects have traditionally master planned at an urban and regional rather than national or global level its time for urban planners to think globally in order to deal with the necessity of moving our cities back from our coasts.
Looking at the process wherein in our first centuries of existence transportation has changed the urban landscape of the United States from the coastal beachheads of the industrial revolution connected across oceans by Yankee Clippers, to our modern global suburban sprawl of fast food franchises is it possible to imagine strip cities and suburbs moving inland replacing urban nodes at river mouths?
The rate at which we can move inland is critical. The first tentative moves up our rivers on barges and steamboats came even before we first blazed trails through the forests. We need to travel at that pace. We also need to be concerned that unless we plan for it when we do get to higher ground behind us on the coasts our great cities and their populations may simply lie abandoned in place.
While our expectations of rapid progress may have to increase at an increasing rate if we wish our children and grandchildren to have a future, we need to be careful what we wish for. Up to this moment saving the auto industry has seemed as critical to our economy as the New Deal, the WPA, WWII and Eisenhower's National Defense Highway System were to recovery from the Great Depression. Recognizing that vehicles powered by internal combustion engines have been tied to the consumption of fossil fuels for a century, and that much of the electricity for electric cars presently comes from burning fossil fuels.