> The challenge we face as a society is to build the structures of popular power to decide collectively which burdens are worth their weight, and how to distribute them justly. These are not choices we should leave to politicians, or even engineers.

I understand the allure of creating a system that allows the "popular power" to make decisions, but that in itself is a difficult problem to solve.

We couldn't possibly crowd-source how to solve this flooding problem until the majority of that crowd has been educated on several aspects of the issue. Perhaps what the author is implying is that there needs to be a better interface between Politicians/Engineers and the people such that the P/Es say "hey here's our plan, find the flaws" and the people say "here are the flaws"

But there's the difficult problem. There will always be flaws and trade-offs, and this kind of interface eats up large amounts of time that may be better spent implementing a short-term solution to buy a few more years until a long-term solution is reached. It's a catch 22.

The decisions must eventually come down to the P/Es, but maybe we just need to add a few more feedback points into the decision-making system.