North Carolina floods despite new law
Hurricane Florence was still battering the coast of North Carolina when this issue went to press, with the worst "yet to come", according to Mitch Colvin, the mayor of Fayetteville.
By late evening on 16 September, 11 North Carolinians had been killed, more than 15,000 were living in temporary shelters, and around 760,000 were without power. The city of Wilmington and its 120,000 residents were cut off from the rest of the state. Rivers considered flooded with four metres of water were carrying twice that depth.
The economic costs will be immense. One early estimate puts it at $170,000 billion. Pig farmers are likely to bear much of the brunt. North Carolina is the second-largest pig-rearing state in the country, with more than three million animals, providing 15% of the US’s pork and bacon.
We will never know, of course, but might the state have been better prepared for Florence if its legislators had paid heed to a report six years ago by its Coastal Resources Commission that predicted sea-level rises of up to one metre over the next century?
North Carolina’s Republican-led general assembly, backed by a coastal economic real-estate development group, responded to the report by simply passing a law that banned policies based on such forecasts. Projected rates of sea-level rise were calculated instead on historical trends while looking no more than 30 years ahead. This provided a much more acceptable forecast — to the real-estate developers anyway — of around 200mm.
Making North Carolina’s property developers plan for a one-metre sea-level rise would undermine the coastal economy, raise insurance costs and turn thousands of square kilometres of coastal property into flood plans, they said.
Isn’t that exactly what’s happened?
Conceived and killed by force of nature
The world’s unluckiest wind turbine? According to the , this 600KW MHI turbine on Awaji island in Japan’s Hyogo prefecture, was felled by typhoon Cimaron in August. It was installed in 2002 in a memorial park that was created after a huge earthquake in the area in 1995. It was offline when blown down, still awaiting repairs after suffering a major lightning strike in May 2017.
Fossil-fuel divestment figures and facts
$6.2tn Funds now committed to fossil-fuel divestment, up from $5.2tn two years ago. Almost a thousand institutional investors have now pledged to divest from carbon fuels
$3tn The worth of coal, oil and gas investments now being sold-off by the global insurance industry
37 Number of countries that now support fossil-fuel divestment to some extent
160 Number of climate-change shareholder resolutions filed at 24 US oil and gas companies since 2012. None has been acted upon
Source: Arabella Advisors
Quote of the month
"We need to rapidly shift away from our dependence on fossil fuels. We need to replace them with clean energy from water, wind and sun. We must halt deforestation and change the way we farm"
Antonio Guterres, secretary general, United Nations
.png)
.png)
