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Comment by nickdothutton | Hacker News Reader

This is what surprises me. If we are indeed in for a prolonged period of man-made global warming, as politicians tell us (dramatic pause, earnest face, raised eyebrows) then where are the irrigation schemes, the river delta flood defences, the sea walls, the city relocations?

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Sorry you got downvoted but it’s a legitimate question. If we’re really on the road to “Manhattan is gonna be underwater” levels of climate change that we can’t prevent, only keep from being worse, then as you said, why aren’t things like seawalls being built _right now_ as a safeguard in case we don’t hit our targets?

The NYC mayor tried 10 years ago and was stopped by opposition politicians: https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/bloombergs-20b-plan-protec...

> The mayor proposed a series of strategic flood walls, surge barriers, dunes, tidal barriers, and bulkheads built around the coasts strategically, to insulate the coastal areas, as well as building codes to protect homes and businesses against flooding and infrastructure improvements to prevent power, fuel, and telecommunication outages.

Because that would require admitting we're screwed and cost a lot of money without any short term benefit. Both of those things aren't great ideas if you want to get elected.

I wouldnt consider myself a climate sceptic, but I do think we’ve learned something about the utility of governments (poor) when we see that on the one hand they swear “we’ll be swimming to work” while on the other doing nothing about… say… sea defences. This should inform us of their expected usefulness in other types of crisis.

nothing is being done, not because massive disruption isn't heading our way, but because adapting would in the very short term be more disruption to the status quo, also lobbies

Those would cost money, wouldn't they?

Politicians capable of getting such projects going might as well make changes at the source instead, and save us the need for the mitigations.

Democratic governments are inherently reactionary during times of crisis. There's never enough popular support until some kind of major event (oftentimes made up) kicks up the popular sentiment sufficiently for politicians to actually get off their butts to do something. And there really hasn't been that kind of event for climate change (yet) - at least something that was clear and compelling enough that it rises above the constant "the sky is falling" fray that we're fed on a daily basis

Pearl harbor --> WW2

10% inflation --> stopping quantitative easing (yes, this was still happening into early this year!!)

It seems you've got things backward: if politicians can't get people onboard to prevent a catastrophe, how do you think they can't get them to limit the consequences of such catastrophe? If they managed to act (or get people to), then they would have plan to mitigate. But in the US, we're still in the denial phase, so…

Governments can unilaterally embark upon large scale civil engineering projects. I’m thinking Hoover dam.

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