Sea levels are surging around the city, screams the state Department of Environmental Conservation in a new study, by up to 13 inches in the 2030s, maybe nearly 10 feet by 2100! Please panic — and don’t ask questions.
Especially about what New Yorkers can or should do about it.
For starters, we’ll note that the 2022 technical assessment from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a host of other Biden agencies predicts a national rise of 10-12 inches by 2050, which strongly suggests DEC is overestimating the near-future threat — since these models all indicate the rise would accelerate over time.
However the DEC got its numbers, it seems likely that everyone responsible for producing them will be long gone before actual experience confirms or debunks them.
But common sense has a role: 2030 is just six years off; do you believe DEC’s suggestion that sea levels in the lower Hudson will rise a foot by then?
One more time: Climate change is real; human activity contributes to it. What exactly to do about it is far from obvious — but local “net-zero carbon emissions by 2050” plans, like New York’s, are not the way to go.
Because such plans would devastate our economy without doing much about climate change — not when China is building new coal plants on a mass scale, even as US carbon emissions are already dropping sharply.
We note the DEC insists it’s just offering a report it’s required by law to issue. Funny: Lots of state agencies are also supposed to issue reports on related issues — but fail, as the Empire Center’s Ken Girardin points out in a damning new report, “Green Guardrails,” on the state’s Climate Action Plan.
The state Energy Planning Board, for example, is supposed to report on the reliability of New York’s electric grid every four years; it hasn’t since 2012 — even as forced retirement of fossil-fuel (and nuclear) power plants has almost certainly undermined the grid’s resiliency.
Oh, and then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2017 ordered the DEC and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority to find “the most rapid, cost-effective, and responsible pathway to reach 100% renewable energy statewide”: They spent over $800,000 on a study — which never got released to the public, even though Cuomo rammed the Climate Action Plan into law in 2019.
Could it be these various studies don’t tell the Democrats what they want to hear?
No, better to throw out nightmare scenarios and start wars against gas stoves and existing AC and refrigeration systems. Oh, and let’s raise taxes for another green boondoggle.