How much truth can people take?

London book review:https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n04/meehan-crist/besides-ill-be-dead?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4004&utm_content=ukrw_subs

Besides, I’ll be dead
Meehan Crist

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and the Remaking of the Civilised World by Jeff Goodell

“….In 2017, a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), the pre-eminent climate science agency in the United States, revised estimates up dramatically, stating that by 2100 sea levels could rise by more than eight feet. Last year, a study estimated that if carbon emissions continue at present levels, by 2100 sea levels will have risen by as much as 11 feet…

…..Jeff Goodell, who has been reporting on climate change for years… travels from Norfolk, Virginia to the waterparks of Rotterdam, talking to scientists, politicians, architects, artists, refugees and people living at the waterline, where regular flooding is already a fact of life…. and Goodell finds people with visionary plans, dubious schemes and heads planted deep in shifting sands. Most of the time, he is an observer rather than a polemicist, but his profound concern resonates throughout, as when he asks Obama: ‘How do you gauge how much truth America can take? Because you know what’s coming.’….
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…Goodell paints a compelling portrait of a city paralysed by conflicting interests, greed and deep-seated denial. At one event he describes as speed-dating for ‘the sea-level rise intelligentsia’, a geologist from the University of Miami candidly explains to a table of Florida estate agents that the sea level may rise by 15 feet over the next eighty years. One ‘expensively dressed real estate broker’ at the table responds ‘like a six-year-old on the verge of a temper tantrum … “This can’t be a fear-fest … Why is everyone picking on Miami?”’ At an art opening (for Michele Oka Doner, whose work addresses climate change), Goodell manages to corner Jorge Pérez, the Miami real estate mogul and an influential Democratic Party donor. Asked if he’s worried that flooding will affect the value of his empire, Pérez replies: ‘No, I am not worried about that … I believe that in twenty or thirty years, someone is going to find a solution for this … Besides, by that time, I’ll be dead, so what does it matter?’ This devil-may-care response echoes a common sentiment: someone is going to save us. ‘In Miami,’ Goodell writes, ‘as in every other city in the world, there is hope that if sea levels rise slowly enough, it will erode the politics of denial and inspire innovation and creative thinking, and the whole crisis will be manageable.’….
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