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Comment by xienze | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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

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